Working/Broken
Welcome to Working/Broken with Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris. Every episode, we examine a trend, bias, or hot topic affecting business leaders and ask the question: Is it working? Or is it broken?
Much of what is broken in the world impacts our business and our leadership. We can’t fix all that, but we can learn to respond and lead differently. Business leaders have been hard-wired and trained to chase trends, follow conventional wisdom, and find any way possible to simplify the endless list of hard decisions they have to make.
So the ecosystem of “hacks” and “best practices” fills to overflowing, leaving you at a loss for a sorting mechanism: What applies to you? Where have bias or assumptions skewed the gurus? What actually applies to you?
The spectrum of what’s working and what’s broken isn’t fixed. It’s custom. To not just your situation, but you as a leader and what you’re bringing to the table. And while you try to follow the rules given to you, part of the magic of succeeding in leadership is knowing what’s for you and what isn’t.
So come join us. We’re gonna laugh. We’re gonna challenge. We’re gonna wrestle. Together.
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Nick Richtsmeier is a catalyst for change in organizations that rely on trust to deliver their services. If your advisory, education, or professional services firm needs to accelerate growth, visit CultureCraft.com to find out how he can craft a growth strategy that’s made for you.
Brad Farris coaches leaders of creative professional firms to become the people they need to be to lead the agency they aspire to grow. Find out more at AnchorAdvisors.com
You can find additional resources at WorkingBroken.com.
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Working/Broken
Measurement Mafia: Examining the Religion of ROI
In this episode of Working/Broken, Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris peel back the curtain on the wild world of marketing metrics. They dive into how even the biggest advertisers are left scratching their heads—overspending on TV ads that mysteriously boost sales, while 30-50% of online clicks turn out to be fraudulent. With plenty of humor and hot takes, the hosts break down insights from Lindsay Slaby—the “CMO Whisperer” at David Baker’s MYOB conference—and ponder if our obsession with precise ROI is just a modern-day myth. They question whether chasing data-driven attribution is really working, or if it's time for service firms to ditch the digital funnel and focus on building genuine trust instead. Tune in for a refreshingly candid discussion that challenges the status quo of digital marketing measurement.
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Join Nick and Brad as they unravel the complexities behind digital metrics and challenge you to rethink what really drives value in today’s marketing landscape.
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Transcripts are AI generated and likely contain errors.
Brad Welcome to Working Broken with Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris, where every week we take a deep dive into a trend, a bias, a hot topic affecting business leaders. And the question is, is it working or is it broken? Hey, Nick, how are you coming in today?
Nick No, I'm pretty good. I, I got some family coming into town this weekend, so that should be exciting.
Keep my sons entertained. Yeah. And, things have been going pretty well on the work side, so. But, I'm always looking forward to these conversations today. I know you haven't shared with our audience yet what the topic is.
Nick I'm sure they're waiting with bated breath. Obviously, they probably saw the title in the on their podcast, but I will tell you, I'm excited because I'm ready for some hot takes.
Brad All right.
Nick I'm ready for some hot takes. How about you?
Brad I'm coming in at about an 8.73 on a ten point scale. Oh, yeah. With my energy at 11.
Nick So what's the ROI on that, anyway? Ha ha ha. Oh, wait, I'm seeing myself.
Brad Much of what's broken in the world impacts our businesses and our leadership, and we can't fix
any of that. But we can learn to respond and lead differently in it. And so today, we're looking at measurement and ROI at all of the KPIs. And q r what was the other one? Okapis I don't know, whatever. All those things are the things that we're measuring every single thing in our lives and business to say, is the measurement working or is it broken?
Nick I'm really glad you ran out of acronyms, because every time you say one, my hot soul dies.
Oh God, the oh the okay or whatever it is, I always want it to be WKRp.
Nick Okay, I know that that'll date you. Okay. Yes.
Brad So this this topic came up for me. I was at, David Baker's MYOB conference a couple of months ago, and one of those speakers was this woman, Lindsay Slaby. She works with fortune 1000 CMOs. They call her the CMO Whisperer. And one of the thrusts of her talk is that even the biggest advertisers in the world can't figure out what's working at all.
Brad What she said is, I'm shocked. She said, first of all, we know we're overspending on TV ads, but when we run, TV sales go up and so we keep running TV said everything else. We have this huge piece of software that we spent a gazillion dollars for, and none of it works. And then on top of that, she and she said this with like, like it was a fact.
Brad We all know that 30 to 50% of all online advertising is fraudulent. Clicks. And so with that level of pollution in the data, there's no data that we can draw. So we know that we could be spending our money more intelligently, but we have no data to tell us what decision that would make. And we don't get fired if we run TV ads.
Brad So we keep running TV ads.
Nick I just want to we have so many, so many places to go in the country, but I do just for everybody in the back. I want to just pause there and repeat that for just one second, 30 to 50% of clicks on the internet are fraudulent. We are at the most advanced stage of the internet that has ever been.
Nick Hundreds of thousands of minds and billions of man hours have been put together to make an internet that will produce measurable marketing results, and 30 to 50% is bots. Just everybody. And if podcast were done.
Brad Well, first of all, Nick, when she said that, literally my jaw dropped. I can't believe that that is actually true. But it's for her. It's gospel truth. So it doesn't matter whether I believe it's true or not. So I believe I mean, you believe it's true. Yeah. That's crazy.
Nick Yeah, I'm I mean, I play my cards a little early in this conversation, but, like, I, I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, but I'm about across the threshold to the dead internet theory where this we think that there's something happening over here, but it's really just bots talking to bots talking to buyers, talking about. We'll link to that in a theory in the show notes.
Nick For those of you who have missed that beautiful little gem.
Yes.
Nick But I'm almost there. I'm almost there.
Brad So in addition to Lindsay's, statements, which the other thing that she said, which I just can't get out of my mind, is that it's cheaper for her to create a Netflix show, a branded Netflix show, than it is to create a TV commercial 32nd TV spot. Think about that for a minute. Like, what does that open up as possible?
Nick Having watched Netflix, I understand Hahahahahahahaha.
Brad Okay, so then on the other end of the spectrum, because most of us aren't working with fortune 100 fortune 1000 budgets. On the other end of the spectrum, we work with a lot of not for profits and the not for profits are getting these requests from their funders for these complex outcome measurements to prove to them that the money that they're investing in, the not for profit is producing the benefit that they expect.
Brad And when I look at these tiny two, three, $5 million not for profits, put together this huge technological infrastructure to try to produce reasonable data, most of which we know, like it's not click fraud, there's a human clicking it, but nobody cares about what they're clicking when they're clicking those things to produce a report for a funder, to make them feel all warm and fuzzy that their money is being used.
Brad Well, that to me also seems a little insane.
Nick We're not going to go into the deep details on this in terms of the scale of it and the investment and all that, but I think it's not difficult to understand that the amount of time, energy and resources that have gone into the attribution ecosystem to try to figure out what clicks produce, what things it's ungodly amounts of money and time.
Brad God, and not just money like, but like hours of people's lives trying to be able to track this stuff.
Nick Right? Yeah, I mean, I you were probably researching this. You messaged me the other day. You said the greatest minds of my generation are have been lost to trying to figure out who clicks what on the internet.
Brad That was a 26 year old Facebook employee who was an early Facebook employee. And when he exited, that was his goodbye to Facebook.
Nick Yeah. So we're not we don't go to the details of what attribution. And you know. Right. Oh, that's the whole point of this conversation. Is is that thing fundamentally working right. I think what I, what I react to from what you've shared, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit my mindset today is like, how exhausting.
Brad Oh yeah.
Nick And just the human capital cost and the futility of it. And I think I feel that because I've worked with
so many of these people and with so many people in my personal network that are marketers, that are I've tried to make digital marketing work that have bought into these narratives and have hung their careers on them. And they're scared.
Brad Yeah.
Nick Because the fundamental promise that they were promised, yeah, they have since then promised to their employers, to their clients, that fundamental promise is not what it should be. We'll just leave it at that for this moment.
Brad And we were promised flying cars and we ended up with Tesla.
Nick I know you're trying to bait me in on Elon Musk conversation. I'm not doing it today. I'm not doing it today. But I do.
Brad Think that's the point is that at the beginning of the internet, at the beginning of internet marketing, let's put it this way. Yeah, there was a promise of absolute attribution that we'd be able to track everything. And even in the cookie era, we couldn't track everything. And now that cookies are no longer. We really can't track anything.
Nick Yeah. I mean, all these sort of barriers now they're, you know, there's still cookies here and there. I mean, I'm preparing for all the cookie people responding. There's still cookies and Google delayed and we got it. Google's not deprecating cookies yet, but the reality is they're being blocked all over the internet. There's tons of, mitigations to block open rates on email and, and and not to mention all the AI overlays.
Nick Right. And here's the thing. Every single digital marketer knows this. But the incentives against talking about it.
Brad Yeah, their.
Nick Clients are so imbalanced they simply cannot have a fully transparent conversation with you because their livelihoods are on the line. That doesn't mean it's a grift. I want to say that really explicitly. That doesn't mean the whole thing's a grift, and that you should never buy ads and you should never do internet service. It doesn't mean that. It does mean that it's much more complex than you're being led to believe.
Brad That's right.
Nick And there's a and it's much more uncertain where you're being rightly.
Brad Here's where I want to start, Nick, because I think you and I are both kind of leaning way over on one side of this scam. So I want to talk about what is working in the ROI game. What is it about the ROI? Why? Why do we keep drinking this Kool-Aid? Yeah, what is it about the ROI game that's working?
Nick Absolutely.
Brad So the first thing that I thought of and this is sort of, damning with faint praise, we can't measure Google search position.
Brad If you buy SEO, they will be selling you Google search position, and they'll guarantee you that 80% of the search results go to the first, person on the list, and 50% of the second and 20% of the third, or whatever it is. And there you can, as you climb the Google search results, gain incremental advantage. However, there are fewer Google searches being made.
Brad There's less of the space that's organic results. You know, all of that stuff is also being eroded. But like that was the one thing that I can say, okay, this is a thing that we can measure and that can produce value.
Nick Wow. I mean, I this is this is a real meta moment for this podcast. It might be written by the editor, I don't know. But what I want to just say is you were like, hey, let's not dog on this thing. Let's try to say something positive and you're like, Google exists. You know how I am sorry. I just want to apologize on Brad.
Nick Nice behalf mostly for Brad, for all the ROI people out there. There are good things happening, that I
think go beyond just Google I existing and that you.
Brad Have more than one point in this section, but I.
Nick Just think it I just think maybe you might want to have lead with your.
Brad Best one. I just I thought that was my first one. Okay.
Nick Well we'll let you continue in trepidation.
Brad Well, if you want to add one in, I'll give you a turn. Nick. No.
Nick How dare I? Go ahead.
Brad So the second thing that we can measure is cost per click, right? We we know how many clicks we're getting. We know what the cost that we're spending per click. Although Lindsay tells us that 30 to 50% of that is fraud. So maybe we have to escalate that number. But if over time our cost per click is declining and we're still getting the conversions that we're looking for, there's something there that we can measure.
Nick Well, here's what I would say. And I mean this with all genuineness, particularly if you're willing to do this at a certain level of scale for both of your first two points, one of them is better than the other. I won't say which one. Well, what I would say is, if you accept the constraints and the premises of the platform, your use.
Nick That's right, the platforms. While more of a black box than they've ever been. Yes, will give you reasonable information to help you manipulate the black box.
Brad Yes.
Nick So there is data. And that data does represent reality of how to manipulate the black box.
Brad Yes, of.
Nick This is whether your Facebook ads are working, whether your Instagram ads are working. Well. Now the problem is that's almost never the question.
Brad I agree, I I'm glad you got there. That's exactly right.
Nick The question is should we do black box A versus black box B? And because they do metrics different because even how they establish cost per click is different. Now we're in a no man's land.
Brad And it's even worse if we're comparing online tactics to offline tactics. Should we go to this conference. Should we run webinars. Should we you know, should we sponsor a podcast? All of this starts to get very murky because we're really comparing apples to giraffes.
Nick Yeah. And I've worked in organizations that have a really complex multi-touch attribution system. And you to see what web page and then what email and blah, blah, blah. And, and there is data there. But here's, here's the crazy making thing and I've seen things just go absolutely right. The second one of those data sources is off. Or is using the data slightly differently than the others.
You are the whole system is overrun by false positives. I mean, I've seen whole years worth of yes, tens of thousands of dollars a month of, advertising budget have to get entirely reinterpreted because, oh, we thought the feed from XYZ source was feeding it to us ABC way. It's actually feeding it to us a different way. So our entire narrative that we've developed based on these numbers, not the right narrative.
Brad I'll give you another example that I this is a higher ed example. I had a friend who was working in admissions in higher ed and he was disturbed that he wasn't getting as many online applications as he thought he should. And so he went and filled out an online application and it went nowhere. It did not appear in any database.
Brad And so how long has that been happening? Who knows. Right. So all of the data from God knows when until the day that he locked it back up so that it was coming into the admissions office. Yeah.
Nick I mean, it's crazy making for CEO, CFO, CMO because let's just say you could get your handle around the data you are getting, which we're challenging that that is, yes, possible. What you absolutely cannot get your handle around is what data you're not getting, which is the point you did. The example you just raised is you have no idea what you don't know.
Nick Part of being a great strategist, which is what every C-suite person is responsible for doing. Part of me, great strategist, is being able to make decisions around knowing what you don't know.
Brad So if you thought my first two points were bad, here's my third point. I'm sitting here racking my brain. I'm thinking, well, what piece of data actually tells me if my online advertising is working? And I have an idea that I think no marketer would ever propose. But my idea is I can't wait. Turn them off and see what happens if nothing changes when you turn your ads off, you've got a lot of questions right?
Brad And I know that there are a lot of marketers will say, well, it's cumulative that we ran ads before. It takes a long time. Great. Yeah. Yeah, right. But nothing happened. Should we wait a couple of months?
Nick Yeah. That's the high wire risk of the whole thing. And the platforms have constructed this narrative of, hey, it's going to take us 30 days for an ad to even be functional.
Brad Yeah.
Nick We aren't. We are going to tell you what makes it functional. That's our secret magic formula. Right? But it's going to take 30 days for for an ad to be functional. And so if you turn it off, let's say you turn it off for a month, you've got another month before you even, you know, and and a lot of that's true.
Nick Right. And so businesses don't have the cash position to play this high wire game. I mean, I, I like it I think you'd, you think you'd learn a lot.
Brad I think you would, you would learn something. Let's put it that way.
Nick I feel like we got to put a few more things in the in the What's Working column.
Brad Okay.
Nick All right, I mean I which is again funny because I'm the first to like shoot down the measurement mafia. I think creative marketing when it's good is a massive ecosystem of trial and error.
Brad Yes, 100%.
Nick It's an.
Brad Experiment. Did your ads give you a lot of testing opportunity? You know, a lot of. But if the data is terrible, if 50% of it is flawed.
Nick But if the 50% that's flawed is relatively consistent.
Brad Well.
Nick There's a lot of ways that you can make better tactical decisions with the data you're getting.
Brad Yeah.
Nick If you just acknowledge that the strategic decisions are not going to be data driven, very limited in how data.
Brad You're going to make strategic decisions without complete data.
Nick Yeah, that anything that is at a high level.
Brad Yeah.
Is like any other yeah decision you're going to make. But at a certain layer, I mean I think about this in terms of like people who are running newsletters. Yeah. Like there's a, you know, the entire newsletter ecosystem. We know that some of those open rates in those newsletters and all that data, that Substack and whatever is feeding back to you or HubSpot or whatever they are for your newsletter, that some of that data is not particularly good.
Nick The open rates are a little flawed, Apple's blocking some of it, yada, yada, yada. But let's just assume which I think is a reasonable assumption that that flow is consistent throughout all your data. If you pay attention to what newsletters people are opening, which ones they reply back, you.
Brad Sure.
Nick You know? Did literally 40% of the people open your newsletter? No.
Brad Right.
Nick We don't really know.
Brad 60%. Open this 1 in 20 percent open the last one. Yeah, a lot.
Nick Of it's this relative comparison. And because the alternative and I think this is why people hold on to measurement, the alternative is to go back to mad Men. And we're just like invent an idea and go, well, must have worked.
Brad I'm glad that you went there, because the thing that I was thinking about as I was preparing and got to this point is a lot of what we just talked about is not super relevant to the B2B service firms that you and I work with. They're not. These giant online advertisers shouldn't.
Nick Be relevant, but a lot of them, they're trying to do this. I agree, for those of you that are listening that are B2B service firms, you are trying to make something that is not fit for you relevant. Our first premise is you should stop doing that. That being said, Brad, what were you going to say?
Brad So. So let me just be more specific about that. If you've installed HubSpot, the the measurement Mafia is is worming its way into your soul. Yes.
Nick Yeah.
Brad Okay. So when I think about B2B service brands, the only advertising platform that I see people
spending a lot of money on is LinkedIn. And the thing about LinkedIn is that the clicks are very expensive. I mean, you're getting $50 clicks all day long, and so using I have seen successful campaigns that use LinkedIn ads to run to a, downloadable lead magnet or to, to a, webinar or other kind of thought leadership piece.
Brad And that can be a valuable tactic. But the measurement on that is even worse, right? If someone comes to a webinar, when are they making a buying decision? Tomorrow or a year from now or ten years from now? Right. This is a effectively brand advertising. Yes. You're comparing that against whitepapers, webinars, podium opportunities where you have a chance to demonstrate your expertise as a service provider and build trust.
Brad And to me, any time I have a chance to have people experience my thinking in real time, that is much more likely to to lead to a transaction. Assuming that the people I'm talking to are people that are able to make a transaction. Most of this online advertising, you know, I would discourage any B2B service for marketer to ignore most of it.
Nick So, Brad, you, brought something into the conversation and I, assumption a foundational idea that I'm not sure everybody agrees with or has thought about, which is that the job of the marketing activity is to generate trust.
Brad Yeah.
Nick So you said, well, hey, is being on a platform or doing a podcast, where is that going to generate trust? I think one of the things that has sent this whole digital marketing thing skewing in a place beyond what its usefulness is, is a lot of it was built to hack, trust, not to produce trust.
Brad Yes.
Nick And once we're in the business of hacking trust, we've undermined the premise of our value proposition.
Brad Yes.
Nick And this is what I talk about with knowledge businesses and advisors and educators and service is guys, if you bring people into the business in this way, that requires zero trust. Guess what? You're starting a relationship with zero trust.
Brad Yes. Yes, exactly.
And now your entire value proposition is different. I mean, I again, I have experience working in organizations that are heavily digital marketing focused, 20, 25%, sometimes 30, 35% of their annual budget in digital ads. So big dollars. Yeah. And what happened was everything was a hard close. Every step of the way was a hard close. Another hard close and another.
Nick And they were a service provider, another hard close and another hard close. And then the back door on the back end. Because you never like, you never really connected with these. And there was always exceptions a good customer, good clients. Yeah. But the back door was much larger than you wanted it to be. Yeah. And the example I use this is as an additional marketing example.
Nick But I think it's germane here is, you know, back in the dark ages when I was first in financial services and I was training people to cold call and, you know, find clients and whatever, we would send advisors to the RV show to get people shopping for RVs to spend a winter play darts or whatever.
Brad Yes, yes.
Nick And then, oh, we can help you with your 401k. I mean, madness to think about now, but I will never forget one of those advisors came back and it was with a client that he'd known for 2 or 3 years and, and, and they were leaving. They're like, hey, I, we we're going to find a new advisor. And he did a good job.
Nick And he was like, why? You know, and she and the, the wife who I was the more vocal of the two of, she said, well, the reality is we're just embarrassed. We can't even tell our friends where our friend, our financial advisor, because we will always have to tell them that we met you at an RV show.
Brad Yeah.
Nick And these people had like half $1 million with him. I mean, it wasn't like a, you know, it wasn't like a $5,000 account.
Brad Right?
Nick And, and again, what we have to realize is that, hey, I clicked on a bunch of ads and took a quiz and did 27 other things. And that's how I found you.
Brad Yeah.
Nick It's it's like finding people at the RV show.
Brad That's right. Yeah, yeah. So it makes me think of this question that I've been asking, service for marketers for a while. And looking at it at the end of this episode, I'm wondering if I'm asking the wrong question. But one of the things that I say to service for marketers all the time is, how can you turn money into leads?
Brad Because the general service for a marketing program is to turn time into leads, right? We're writing, we're speaking, we're doing a lot of networking that has a limit that there's an asymptote to how much of that you can do. And so when that is successful now you have more money than time. How do you turn money into leads?
Brad And maybe a better question is how do you turn money into trust? But I don't know. I I'm, I'm interested to hear what you're thinking there.
Nick There's a lot of deconstruction that has to happen to do this a different way. I mean, that's the first thing I want to acknowledge is when we're dealing with this one on one, with real companies and real budgets and real whatever. A lot of times we're trying to support a slow dismantling of a digital marketing enterprise. It's not culture, right, because there's too much risk and it's too much whatever.
Nick I don't think you can leave your religion in a day. I think there's a deconstruction that has to happen. That said, the way I what we want to start with is if you're in a trust business, and what I think about as a trust business is you have a high dollar product or service. Yep. That is painfully expensive to the client if they really thought about what they were paying.
Nick Yeah, you have a long term engagement with them, so you expect them to be with you for months and years. And your value offering is conceptual and hard to explain in some way.
Brad I think about it in terms of they don't have the expertise to know whether you're doing a good job or not.
Nick That's where this comes in, right? It's another thing, as I call them, a bad buyer problem. They don't know how to be a good fire service. That's right. So if are those three things which are a lot of you and I, different client bases, but a lot of them have, then I wouldn't even think about leads because leads is not the right category.
Brad Yeah, yeah it's.
Nick Relationships.
Brad Communities. You have the community measure.
Nick Yeah. Is where are you building relationships.
Brad Yeah.
Nick How can those relationships be generative. And we can overlay a digital toolkit onto a relationship building machine. But yeah, first you have to abandon the lead funnel narrative. Yeah. This isn't about pumping people in the bottom of the funnel and trickling them down and narrowing all that funnel stuff. You got to let that go and start thinking about relationships.
Nick Go back to an old school map here of networking. Who knows who, how and how do we transfer credibility. And all of a sudden you're working in a much different environment because big fat top end funnels that then funnel down to a few clients at the end is a tech model that does not apply to trust businesses.
Brad 100%. So I feel like we bled into our second question without answering our first. What do we think is is the measurement mafia working or broken?
Nick Why is the measurement Mafia is 100% broken? I think I the whole time we were having this conversation, I'm literally imagining the comment stream that could come from it. And all the people who were like, you guys are so stupid. And here's an example of this. And here's the here's our complex attribution model, and we do multi-touch and blah blah.
Nick As if I've never been in those conversations.
Brad Yes.
Nick So just because we're not talking about the details of that ecosystem doesn't mean we don't understand it. Just FYI, for all those listening, the reason why I think the Measure Mafia is broken is because it's religious fanaticism.
Brad Yes.
Nick It's so bent on a particular way of viewing the world that you can't even think creatively about how to do measurement. That's right. Anti measurement. Right. We're doing a conversation with a CEO who says, I want you to explain to me the digital marketing lead funnel and how we're going to get qualified leads. And I have to explain to him that it's the wrong stupid question because he's been indoctrinated into a religion that he didn't know he was indoctrinated into.
Brad And that I would have to say that even if I could explain it to you in a way that would make sense. The data is really messy and ugly, and I really don't believe what it's telling me. So we can give you some indicators. Like you said, we know what the open rate is. We know what people are replying to.
Brad We know what you know when we do these things. There's more traffic on the site or there's more transactions or there's more conversions. But do we know exactly where that's coming from? No, there's no chance.
Nick And we're we're shooting at the wrong thing. Yeah. This is not a conversation for e-commerce. Businesses are selling 799 this and blah blah blah. Right. Those are different tools for different situations. Interact. If they're if you have some of these qualities around trust in your business, you're a creative firm, your advisory or whatever, then you accepting the digital funnel premise is the first problem.
Nick That's why for me is it's 100% broken. Yeah, because I you force me to accept a premise that I that is not accurate to the business model. Right?
Brad Honestly, is madness to me. Like like to believe that online clicks are going to produce six figures lifetime customer value in a service firm is you're applying the wrong tool to the wrong problem.
Nick And again there are ways to do this. Getting back to kind of how we like to finish these episodes,
which is what should I go do. There are ways to use these tools that feed a healthy relationship based growth model. We're doing it right now. You know, I said to a client this week, right, I was giving them some heat about how they were using their podcast and how much time and energy it was taking.
Nick I said, guys, I'm not anti podcast. I have a podcast. I it's it's not about that. It's about the way that you're overlaying these tactics and the assumptions that you're absorbing. So what I would say to people is not the most pragmatic thing in the world, but stop for a second and go, what am I assuming about the journey my best prospects take?
Brad
Nick And do I like those assumptions. Do they make sense. Do they map well to reality.
Brad Yeah.
Nick And I think you're gonna find that they don't.
Brad So my take on this I love yours but mine is a little bit different.
Nick Right.
Brad What I thought about as advice you know. So if it's broken then what. I fundamentally believe that for service firms your marketing needs to be useful, helpful. And of service if you serve your audience, if you create a community who's used to getting good things from you, things that are valuable and useful, timely and relevant, that is the kind of marketing that is going to create long term value around your business.
Brad And there's a reason for that. And part of the reason is that experts, experts have earned the right to be generous. Yes we have. We've climbed a mountain and we can be generous. We can offer generously to our community. And reciprocating generosity is just a something that's wired into us as humans. Yeah. And so if we're going out there and being generous, helping people, serving them, that's going to come back to us.
Brad There is no attribution measure that's going to measure that. But I know that it's true.
Nick Yeah. And I think I would caveat to yours is it's it'd be very easy to hear that through the lens of, oh, cool, we need to do more blogs or we need to do more content marketing, because that's how we are of service, is we put all this stuff out into the world. You got to slow that roll.
Nick And so is, is this really of service?
Brad Right.
Nick Like, is me doing one more blog about one more boilerplate topic that everybody else in my industry is? All right, that's not helping anybody that help already exists. Yeah, right. So to solve for what you're saying, you have to again break some of those preconceived notions because it's easy to hear that and go, oh, more content marketing. That's not going to solve it for you.
Brad So I did write one other thing, and I'm going to be embarrassed to say it. So you don't trust someone that you don't know. Right. And so we have to be willing to be known. And so that brings the embarrassing word authenticity to the table. Authenticity has been so overused, it's hard for me to even explain in the modern context what it means.
Brad But you we need content that only you could produce. Yeah, we need a point of view that has to come from you. That your competitors, it wouldn't be authentic coming out of their mouths. That's hard. That that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of insight. It takes slowing down to really come to the point where you say, this is the thing that I can say that nobody else could say.
Nick Yeah. And that that level of introspection is in many cases anathema from the measurement mafia, I don't think just do what the network is doing. The numbers tell you what you know.
Brad That's exactly right.
Nick So again, I hope people walk away from this conversation with a sense of like, oh, there's this appearance of science and data driven and really there's this sort of religious overlay. And maybe that's what we should start thinking about.
Brad Yeah, yeah. Well, Nick, I think it's time for us to wrap the show up. You can find all the resources we mentioned in today's show at Working broken.com. Nick is a catalyst for change and organizations that rely on trust to deliver their services. If you're advisory, education or professional services, firm needs to accelerate growth, visit Culture craft.com to find out how he can how he can craft a growth strategy that's made for you and all.
Brad I'll say there's some really interesting assessments that can help you to start to to figure out where you might want to get started there. I'm Brad, I coach leaders of creative professional firms to become the people that they need to be to lead the agency they aspire to grow. You can find out more at anchor visors.com. If you want to give us feedback, you can find us at our websites.
Brad We have contact forms there. If you know us well, send us an email. We're probably not going to be
on social media that much because it's a cesspool. If you like what you heard this week, you could do us a solid and a smash that subscribe button. I just love to say that because it's so anyway, hustle culture.
Brad Share this with friends. Because friends don't let friends work broken. And give us a five star review on wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for being with us.
