EP320 - From $300K Mistakes to Management Gold ft Greg Finn

 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, the podcast, formerly known as the PPC Chat roundup. My name is Anu, the founder of PPC Live, and if you're used to hearing advice from PPC experts about how to ensure that we are keeping up with the ever changing landscape, don't worry, you are still in the right place. But instead of relaying what the PPC experts are saying.

I'm going to be bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week. I'm gonna be speaking to a different PPC expert about their biggest F up. Also, how they have turned things around. We'll share what has been disappointing, what has been surprising, people have been supportive along the way, and what are our biggest takeaways from these kinds of mistakes.

This week, I had the immense delight of chatting to Greg Finn of Cypress North, who's a co-founder. Of c Cypress North and uh, yeah, we chat a lot, Greg and I, every day we do a show called it's near with Barry Schwartz and Morty Oberstein and, um, bring in the latest of the latest of the news, but instead of it being a 10 minute chat where each of us took for two or three minutes, yeah, Greg and I chatted for like close to 40 minutes.

It was hard to get him to reign things in, but I didn't want him to because he shared so many. Interesting insights about the mistake that he's experienced. He's overseen. He gave us several stories, a few stories of that, the importance of instilling open communications so that people are confident to speak to you about the mistake they've made.

And of course, we also cover a little bit about AI and the mistakes that people are making in that area as well. So I hope you enjoy, let's take it away to Greg.

  📍  📍 Hello everyone. I am so delighted. You have no idea how excited I'm, I can't contain myself to

I am more excited.

Oh my God. Like Greg. Hello Greg. Welcome to PPC Live The Podcast. yeah, I, you guys dunno how excited I am because Greg has been someone that, we've been like friends and PPC sparring partners, I would call it for years now.

I don't know what the thumbs up is there, whatever. These emojis, they just do whatever. And yeah Greg and I have known each other for years now. Since when? Pre COVID years even like we're talking.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, probably like 20 2016, 17, something like that. I'd assume. that's, can look it up if you want.

You're good at that. You're good at the research kind of thing. Always getting the details. Like back on Twitter, when Twitter was a thing, I wasn't a dumpster flyer of like nonsense. Yeah. And since then, I, and we're gonna meet in person next week at SMX Advanced, which is gonna be exciting.

So for those who haven't gotten your tickets, or if you're listening to this before the 11th of June, yeah, you still have a chance to come to SMX Advance. But anyway, without further ado, look. Greg is one of the co-founders of Cypress North, and I say co-founder, you're not gonna see it as a title on any of his profiles, but yes, Greg started with Matthew Mombrea.

Am I saying that correctly? You and

Yeah. Matt Mombrea. Yep.

Yeah, done amazing stuff there. And it's not just started the company with them. Also, created a different branch as well with you said 30 staff members and like that separate branch that you've got there. And it's not just paid search that Greg is like really good on.

It's also social media marketing, content marketing, organic, SEO, all the SEO stuff.

To be fair, I'm only good at Google Ads. We have other people who are very good at other things, so I need to give them credit.

Amazing. That's good. And he also co-hosts my second favorite marketing podcast, Marketing O'Clock, which I just find absolutely hilarious because all the rants and it's all the go at Google hard and I love it. No one does it like you guys and just literally going, what are you guys doing?

And also advertisers, when advertisers start talk nonsense about, a new update and start panicking, there's so much panic that people do in our industry. So yeah, I love the Greg Rage that comes through on the podcast. And you would've seen probably a lot of you listeners would've seen Greg at several conferences like SMX, e-summit PubCon and several others.

Is anything there I've missed Greg? No.

No, I mean, this is the best introduction I've ever had, and quite frankly, it's gone on too far too long. It's too much.

Sorry. The, no, it's good. It's good. there's a little bit more that we've got to actually mention. I don't think you would've realized, I even saw this Greg-isms, there's some Greg-isms on the Cypress North site which are - all conversations are not created equal. Do you remember saying

Conversions. Yeah. No. Oh, all conversions Should be.

Sorry. It's written there, I read it wrong. Build on your own real estate. I love that. The average position, sorry, where's, what's my screen doing here?

I don't even know what these are. Greg-isms, don't you know the Greg-isms Yeah, yeah. No, I'm,

Yeah. All conversions are not created equal

Average position doesn't lie, like Shakira says.

Like, See the thing is like we do training, we do a lot of training at our company and I just like spout off and try to make it fun because I feel like you don't really learn as much unless it's fun. So I don't know why I said that. Doesn't that, that doesn't lie like Shakira, but that sounds like something I could have said.

course. One I actually would love to talk about - all conversions are not created equal. So what do you mean by that? Can you dig deep into that one? What do you mean by Oh, conversions are not created equal. 

I think, I think it's one of the things that a lot of people get wrong, honestly, is when folks come to us, they have a website for a reason and it's, it's not just to do something, it's to get an outcome that they're looking for. So, you know, when we are auditing accounts and when we're looking at everything that's going on, you know, a lot of people are focusing on things that might not necessarily matter to the business.

But it's listed as a conversion. And when you are giving these platforms these signals, it's like you wanna give them the right ones, right? So are you looking for just leads? Probably not. You're probably looking for customers.

You know

and so like, how do you figure out, can we sync our CRM system up to Google Ads so that we're not just driving

leads, we're not just setting up a newsletter or something like that sign up, but really getting them to do the thing that they, that we want them to do.

You know, so like, obviously like a, a sales qualified lead is, is vastly more important than just a lead that came from a PMax app, you know, placement. So

I think that's one thing that honestly is the number one thing that people get wrong within

Advertising is they're optimizing towards things that aren't necessarily moving the needle on business.

You know, it's, it's, they're just hitting numbers and metrics, but not impacting business. I'd rather have one sales qualified lead a than a hundred junk leads from a display campaign.

Absolutely. It's all about the qualified leads. And Shep, your lovely co-host, I saw this great talk that she did at SMX London, where the talk was about, trying to optimize towards leads.

And she clarified it's about trying to optimize towards qualified leads, quality leads. It's not just any lead will do because that's when you know the guys at the customer service are getting so frustrated 'cause they're like, all of these leads are nonsense. Why are we not closing them? Why is the, lead to converting to a customer very bad because you're not, you're not optimizing towards a proper lead, would you say.

Yeah. And if you are one of those people that you were speaking to earlier about being at SMX, she's doing another presentation. I would say arguably better and you should check it out 'cause it would talk about that quite a bit in her presentation as well. In SMX Advanced in June.

Amazing. let's get to the meat of this episode. We are here to talk about f-ups that we've experienced, and the triumphs and the learnings and how we've turned it around and turned those, mistakes into winning clients. Take it away what f-up do you want to share with us today?

So this is kind of sad. I don't have crazy ones, but I'll go with one. When I first got into the industry that I experienced. It was for a Halloween costume company and this was like back in the day, I, I don't even think AdWords was, was launched yet, but it was using o Microsoft Overture, which is now Microsoft Advertising.

Wow.

And so, yeah, so it was crazy. But I came in as like a, a basically digital marketing support because we didn't have enough people at the time. And one of the managers for this Halloween costume company had spent the monthly budget as the daily budget.

God. And so instead of like $30,000 in a month, they spent like $300,000.

I was not high enough like up in the ranks to know exactly what happened with that. But I believe there was a whole lot of credit going out, I believe they had talked to Microsoft at the time and gotten some credits back, and then there was a whole lot of like future credit, like work that had to be done.

But that, that one like wasn't me. I was like so new. It was probably 2006 or so. But

but that, that was, that was probably the biggest one, so I just wanted to put that out there that some people have messed around and put like the monthly budget as like a daily budget. And that's, there's really like no coming back from that.

And it's also like when you do that, you are not paying attention to what's happening in the accounts. Like you are just and no offense to the person, very nice man who was doing this at the time, but like, you're just not paying attention. You know? Like I, I jumped in here, I'm like, well, this is like way more than we're supposed.

And he's like, they're like, yeah. So, God.

it was a whole lot of like future credit that had to be paid back and I think they got like 50% of the spend, like a race for some reason.

Oh wow. But the biggest.

The biggest mess up that I've had in, I'm, I'm calling it me because it, it's associated with me. We had a manager who was basically doing the Google to Microsoft export and import. When

when you do that, it's, it could be a little bit tricky and one of the uploads ended up getting into a different account. So it was putting in like landing pages and like final URLs, all that stuff. And somehow it made it into like the wrong stuff, made it into.

another advertiser's account, and it was probably on for like maybe

two or three days, I would say until it started like spending, and we, we caught it.

But that, that was a big deal because you know, you are taking a client that you have and it is sending to a completely different company and URL and everything like that because the export just didn't go into that account. And that's what ha it used to be hard back in the day.

So so this is probably like six years ago, I'd say. And so

yeah, so so we, we were trying to import into one account and somehow it made it into a different account and started spending on the advertiser's behalf on that account.

Oh Lord. But it, was it the, it was the same advertiser in both accounts, or was it like, but just a different,

No different. So it was a different advertiser's budget that was being spent for another account, but 

yeah, so we're, we're uploading into Microsoft and let's say it's company A, which is a sneaker company, and we are, and somehow, you know, company B a manager had put it in and let's say it's a concrete company. The concrete ads we're showing in the sneaker ads

no. Oh, no.

for the different URL. Okay. Yeah. So let's tease out that story. Who found the mistake?

Our, the manager did, who uploaded it Okay, time?

Yep. he caught it straight He caught it. Yep. And what did he do?

He was panicked and he came to me and he said, I made a mistake. This happened, and here's where it is. Everything's turned off, everything's paused. And it's totally my fault, which is my fault because I, you know, that's, you, you have to like, own everything, you know? And he just came to me and he, he let me know and was, was pretty pretty worried I would say.

no, of course. Because, yeah, what I watching these

that I really like to do for our listeners is, 'cause some of them might have gone through this, some of them may go through this 'cause life happens and stress happens and then that can feed into work and you make a mess up and the whole do's and don'ts of what to do and what not to do.

So in this kind of situation, it sounded like the manager who's found it did the right thing. 

Yeah. Is 

there anything you remember that you're like, he did well apart from the mistake itself, but now out in the process that you were like, you wouldn't have suggested, you wouldn't have advised that he did approach it that way? 

No. I, I mean, I think, I think he did everything you should do, right? Like,

We're humans, we make mistakes, and it was a mistake. So you know, he turned everything off, immediately, went through, got all the data as to how much was spent. It wasn't,

You know, absurd or anything like that, and brought everything to me and said, this is what happened.

This is what I did. And. It's off, but I want you to know that. So I, , mean, it was a, a 10 outta 10 response in my opinion.

Fantastic. That sounds great. Now then going back to, let's say the few hours before he started this, what would you say was like, 'cause something was missed in terms of the process of him doing the task that led to that mistake? What would you say was what would you say is the key thing that people should look out for to avoid making mistakes like this? Yeah,

Yeah, and I like, I, I just wanna make, make sure everybody understands - mistakes happen like that happens and that's, that is like totally fine. You know, like it, my biggest thing is if somebody's intent is good and they're trying to do the right thing, like everything else is, is is secondary, you know, the, the, the primary thing is

is your intent, are you trying, did you, did you set up an experiment? Did you set up a campaign that you think might actually help the client and did it not work? That's fine. The intent is great. You know, like, so I'm an intent person.

But I'm and I'm also like a what's the tangible takeaway or, or like key learning moment from it.

So we changed our, our Microsoft upload process. We built new elements to take from Google and upload to Microsoft from there.

right? Like that. I think that's another thing. When you make mistakes, and this is like, I have two 10-year-old kids. I'm like, you

guys, you need to make mistakes in life. It's fine.

I am like a soccer coach. It's like, you need to make mistakes. It's, it, it's part of it, but like what is

the key learning you take away from it? So we, we changed our Microsoft upload policy and we made a, a new like spreadsheet and we have like a new check boxes and things like that, that people need to do.

I, I mean, you could look at it as like it's earth shattering, but the person wasn't trying to do anything like with ill intent or anything like that. So,

no, absolutely. yeah. why, the name of this podcast is the, PPC Live, The Podcast, the f-ups that turned into triumphs because is what it's all about.

Mistakes can be rectified, mistakes, you learn from it. I think a previous episode, someone said something very important that. In fact, if you're like a seasoned digital marketer and you say that you've never made a mistake, you've probably actually not pushed the boundaries hard enough. You've not tested actually enough.

You might not actually have done enough because the testings and the things going wrong is where you get your biggest learnings is where you then realize what processes need to be in place. 'Cause

Yeah, and everybody makes mistakes. If you say you don't make mistakes, you're just a liar. I'm sorry. Like I make mistakes every day. Like not in accounts anymore, but like, no. I'm like, oh, I forgot a birthday party. It was this, you know, like people make mistakes is part of life.

absolutely no. I, and I hope that we don't even really need to reiterate to that, because that's why we're talking about it. That's why we hope that more people talk about it so that, you help others learn into what to put into place. But yeah. So I know you said several of these already.

What's one big takeaway from this story that you want people to take before we move on to another story? What's your biggest points take away.

Yeah, I mean, I think especially in like the agency realm, everybody's trying to be like perfect on things and, and just because you like, so, so for that example that I was talking about that manager went through, got every single cent that was spent. And it wasn't crazy. It might've been like a, I don't know, like $8,000 or something.

Because it was it was only on for a few days, And and so what we did

immediately is get every single element, made it it into a spreadsheet, showed

exactly what was happening, screenshots of like the account and everything, and said, "Hey, we're paying you back $8,000 to the cent and saying, and, and owning it, right? It is like, so in that case, yeah, it's a mistake, but we're getting out ahead of it and saying, this happened,

here's the refund back. We apologize. This was a, a mistake. There's nothing else. Everything else is still running fantastically. But we wanna be transparent with it. And, and that's something that I feel like a lot of people just like, like shove under the rug, you know what I mean? And they're like, oh, this, this, this happened.

I'm, we're just gonna hide it. And it's like, no, don't do that.

Yeah. And in this case, like, okay, here's the every cent you have back, we're learning you to this before you would ever even know of it. And

And you already have the money like back, which is a, a big deal. Like, you know, and it, yeah. I feel like so many people try to like, just hide things and it's, you just, it's not the right way to live.

I, in, in my opinion, it is like I mess up a lot and I tell people that, and again, not, not in ads, but general life, like doing things and it's like, you know, like. I feel like not hiding things is a big deal 'cause everybody's made mistakes. You might have like a keyword in there, or you might have optimized targeting turned on in a remarketing campaign.

It's not really remarketing. Which we've seen as well. One time we had a huge spend in optimized targeting and we looked at it, figured out what was actually remarketing, what's optimized targeting, let people know upfront

and then and then refund them. And that's like. that's a big deal and a lot of people just, and clients and companies are, are, just don't do that.

Which is, I think, a a learning thing, right? Like how do you gain more trust? How do you

build better relationships? And by trying to hide your mistakes no, you should own your mistakes.

Absolutely. I'm, you even answered a question that was about, I was about to ask next and we can tease out this answer a bit more in terms of whether in our industry you actually see, 'cause you are, you're on the social media and seeing like people talk about their accounts and everything.

Do we talk about our failings, our mistakes enough? say

No, we don't. Everything that we have, it's like social media., It's you look at some of these people and everybody's absolutely perfect. Everybody's the best in the absolute world.

Nobody's ever, you know, slipped, done anything wrong. I don't know if you wanna like amplify that stuff, but I do think it's good to like, like really like ask questions, talk about things, engage in things, and not. I think

I think it's a big problem where a lot of people think that like the way to win, I guess is like, is being like some super smart, super slick, like, Hey, I'm like a God type thing. And it's, if you listen to our podcast, you know that's not the way that we are and honestly like, we, we probably talk more on Marketing O'clock about other people and doing really good stuff.

Like every now and then we'll talk about ourselves, but it's rare.

And that that was sort of like our thought processes. Let's find people who are doing good work. Let's

amplify those companies that, that do good work and that are good agencies that people might want to hire or good marketers and just like bring them up.

I feel like it's, it's a big thing where everybody out there is presenting themselves as you know, flawless and nobody is.

No. Is it, do you think or is there something like management can do to encourage that? Because I do feel like sometimes, you're working in a company and from the higher ups they're only talking about the good that you know we're doing, and they're always shouted about, make sure we shout about the good. What can managers do to actually encourage, mistakes to be shared. 'cause clearly that manager that made that mistake felt comfortable and confident enough to come to you and say that, Hey Greg, I've made this error. And that's not something that is a mistake

i'm sure that's something you've nurtured. So what's your advice to like, managers to get their staff to be, more confident to talk about where they've messed up so that they can turn it around? Yeah.

that's a good question. I mean, I think it comes from sort of the top, you know, like I know that people make mistakes and I tell everybody all the time, like, whatever your intent is, is what matters. It's not

anything outside of intent. If you're trying to do something

that, is negative, like if you're you're trying something and it doesn't work, that's fine.

And it's really hard because for me it's nice because

I don't necessarily care as much about, like the bottom line is about doing the right thing. You know what I mean? So

if that manager had done that and hidden it and not shown me and then the client came, I probably would've fired that manager.

Yeah. Right and I think that's like the thought process is like you need to let people know that you're in like a place of growth and Learning and all that.

And obviously like I was like very happy that this person brought it to me. 'cause we could just fix it like instantly and be like off you know, on the, on the way.

We had another example I would say that smaller, we just, we made a few changes. We were trying to go after volume, and when you're doing a lot of like B2B, like

Lead gen stuff, you kind of have to either choose like volume or efficiency and you kind of, it's like a teeter-totter in a way. And the, we kind of went a little bit more towards volume because it was a big push towards it instead of efficiency.

And like the client reached out and I'm like, yeah, you know what? We probably, I know this is the direction we're going,

but we probably went a little bit more towards volume and got it, but it wasn't as efficient as we probably could have.

I'm gonna refund your money and like did it for that month and like,

yeah I understand what you're saying like that that makes sense, but it's hard when people are like beholden to like the dollar and, you know, everything like that. So it, nice to be able to be in that position where you can kind of make the call. But I would just say like

for us, our biggest thing is like education. not only only for our our employees, but for our customers, right?

They need to know, like we can't just be like, oh, there's AI Max. We have to like explain it. Like this is the key wordless feature. And if you look at the results with broad match and broad match is working really, really well now that we're optimizing towards SQLs and we would like to try this for AI Max, what it's gonna do is it's gonna

operate similar to like a performance max, which is also working well.

So I think a lot of this open communication, I would say is the biggest thing.

Absolutely. So open communication from leadership to your team and well leadership to clients, to everybody.

But how about leaders, leadership specifically to your employees to encourage them to talk more. What is the key thing that [you] think that they should do? That's

a super hard question because you, it's like I, some people that get in leadership positions think that they're like, you know.

King and Queens out there, and I, I just, to me, that's not the way that we operate, you know? Our philosophy is we bring a lot of people in that are sort of new and we train 'em in the way that we want them to.

And that, that's really helped because it's, there's no like, kind of like infighting between anything. You know, it's like everybody's working in the same direction, the same purpose, to do the best possible work that's available. And I feel like if you have that mentality as like a leader, everybody's going to the same destination, which is being the best.

And I think it's like that mindset, you know, where it's, if you can say, "Hey, we care about the final product, we care about everybody's happiness here, we care about everybody's learning and progression and growth." That works. I also understand we're, like a unique company where like literally the only thing I care about is people growing, getting better, sticking around and doing well.

But. yeah

I just think it's like that mentality of, of really being a team. I loved team sports as a kid. It really helped me out a lot and I kind of like just look at that within

you know, our day-to-day work and it's like, yeah, this is my teammate. This isn't somebody I'm competing with. This isn't somebody I'm trying to best, isn't somebody I'm trying to like, knock out of a promotion.

It's like, no, they're, they're good. They'll, they'll get paid kind of thing.

This really should be the blueprint for how really most agencies should work. It should this shouldn't sound like rocket science. This shouldn't sound oh my God, I can't believe we can do it that way. Or we should do it that way and we'll still succeed 'cause you guys are succeeding with this mindset, with this culture that you guys have built in the company.

I'd say for Yeah, we're doing great. We're doing great. We've got one of the strongest teams that we've had in a long time. That one company I alluded to first,

I was probably 21, 22 maybe when I was there in like 20, in 2005.

And we had the best team. We had the best team ever. And we had like Jean and Chris, all these people that were like amazing

and they treated everybody so badly at this company. I'm like, why aren't you keeping, like, you've got this like Avengers team here and like they kind of just like let everybody go and then did, they were just not being, and I'm like,

What if if you just like leaned in to these amazing people that are, it's like, it's not the name the

you know, on the sign outside it's the people you know. And so like, I've been sort of obsessed with that and like finding all these like, you know, Shep and Jess and Maggie and all these people and like Julia, all the,

Yeah.

We've just got so many amazing people and it's like, I feel like that's something that I don't know.

It's hard for companies to like look at that, you know? I don't know why.

As you were saying that sentence, even my brain did not see. It was a bit of those who are gonna listen to this episode that, and look at the video of it. You'll see how my facial expression really switched when you were like, oh, we had these good people and they were treated so badly and my brain just almost melted.

I was like, wait, what do you mean? They had really good people and you treat the really good people badly.

Yeah. That doesn't make sense to it me.

Mind-boggling. It's like, it it, and that's one thing to your, to your point, like how do managers like, or how do companies like instill that is it's, it is not just like a revenue generating, like you can't just look at people like that. You know, it's something that we take a ton of pride in.

A lot of, most of our people start and then like, move up the ladder. You know, like Shep is probably one of the best Demand Gen, Lead gen, B2B people that I know. She was selling like promotional items before and has been with us for like six plus years and it is like you can't stop that person.

And it's like, okay, how do you just feed that person and keep, them going, you know, and, and hitting their goals, and hitting their needs and all that instead of like,

oh,

they're the, they have X experience and it's not as much. It's like, no, no, that's not it. It's, it's way different than what you think it is.

Just looking at a piece of paper. It's, you can't judge anything like that.

no. Absolutely. I love that we could talk about that for ages, but yeah, we, I like making this episode, short and sweet so that people excited for the next one.

So

Oh, sorry. You can't make one short and sweet with me. I'm sorry.

It's fine. We'll love it. We'll love that. We'll do little to no editing for this one. But I do want to let's do a little bit of a tangent too. We're still talking about mistakes and still talking about f-ups that you see. And I want to get into, to, it's, we can never over talk about Ai.

It keeps rolling with all the new updates, especially after GML (Google Marketing Live) and i'd like to hear what f-up you've seen of how clients, or maybe a brand or maybe another agency are using AI as the solution and you're literally going, that is not what AI is for.

  📍 I think AI is great. Maybe not for human civilization, let's say, but great for getting things done, obviously. But I also think like at this point in time, you can really tell what AI is. Like you can see a lot of these images that people are making. A lot of these long LinkedIn posts that are out there, that are essays that you've never seen people like write before.

I skip right past those. Yeah. I look at some of those. The images that again, they're may be like a four out of 10. Yeah. And they're terrible. And I skip past those. And I think, when you have a paragraph and every word in the paragraph is bold, then nothing is bold. Yeah. And so I think that's a opportunity not will AI get better?

Yes. ChatGPTs image creation tools is very good. I don't think it's great, but it's very good. And, we have a designer on staff, we're hiring another one we're interviewing and looking for that because AI can help assist on a lot of things, but I feel like people that are just using it to be the end all like product you're just not gonna stand out.

Yeah. So I think that's something where when everybody's like zigging in one direction, how do you zag? And really try to make sure that you, your stuff looks the best. Absolutely. Do you think anyone is using Ai [well]? What's your examples of times you've gone, oh, I know this is Ai, but that's been done good.

Yeah, I think when it's not the entire meal, right? If you have an element where it's okay, I'm gonna create Barry Schwartz, him has had something like that, and then I'm gonna make this kind of weird thing and then send it to our designer and have it like actually look good.

I think that, that's awesome. I think on the tech side of things, people just see it as being easy and that's the thing that scares me the most. Yeah. Like when I make LinkedIn posts, sometimes I misspell one of the first words in there. Yeah. Because I want people to know it's not Ai.

When I write a blog post, there is absolutely just zero AI that goes into it. I just write and I think I try to bring my tone out and everything like that. And really represent that even with any LinkedIn posts. Like I just don't use AI for that stuff because to me that's my voice.

Yeah. And it's, okay, what is it gonna do? Save me two minutes? All right i'll just type it out. I think it's when it's like an assist is when it works really well. When you're saying, oh, what is this framework that I need to go for? We just hired another content writer too. I can't think of a worse world where all we're doing is reading what computers are typing to each other. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like I feel like that's, it's a unique time to make sure your brand has a voice that you know you're catering to the customer. And I know like people are like, Duolingo just fired, like their whole social team that, that helped turn them into the most popular app and everybody's like revolting against it. We can use Ai. It's like - oh that's not how you got here. Yes. You got to the top by having a creative staff and now you just think you can just

run everything through a prompt and still have the same results. It's like that could happen. That's probably five years away. Yeah, maybe four years away. Yeah, no. Amazing. I love that you brought that Duolingo case study. 'cause that is some, a story people are gonna look at and, to use to in terms of how to do things and yeah, I think they got that wrong as well.

I think I've got that really wrong and I've listened to other podcasts. I've mentioned it and gone "How can you say you want to be AI first? [Is] that's what your customers want to hear? You are just saying that you're planning on to go and buy things the cheapest way and that'll be cheap for you.

And that's not what your customers want to hear. Actually, your customers want to hear that you are putting as much effort into making a good solution for them, not just what's gonna be easy for them. So yeah, and it's just just to save a few bucks and honestly that is what your app is too

Duolingo. Like you're supposed to have this thing that's better than anything else and you're just gonna be like, oh, we're all, we're outsourcing all of our creative to AI and everything that's got us here. Okay. Is your app Yeah. Should that, should I replace that by learning, Mandarin over on ChatGPT, like I, I don't know. Exactly.

Exactly. On that fantastic note yeah, we've given people a lot to talk about. I, Greg, we'll get you back on the podcast at some point in the future. If I'm ever stuck for guests, but you know what, you're the person I'm gonna call on, so you can expect that.

I guarantee I'm gonna make some mistakes here soon, so I'll have plenty of content. Absolutely. We'll get through the 2025 mistakes that we made for early next year. Oh, that'll be great. Before you go, I have this fun question I like asking all guests. If your career was a movie, what would be the title?

That's a great question. I probably should have thought ahead of time about this, but I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna say I wanna go Die Hard. Oh, I've never even seen the movie, but I feel like that title, I've never seen it. You have never? I've seen parts of it. I've seen Hans Gruber, I've seen some parts I've seen crawling through the thing.

I just think like that's a great way to really try to like have that mindset of every single day we get different challenges and different, obstacles and things that we've never seen. We'll get new bidding types and all of that stuff. And I think it's just one of those things where you can look at it and see all these changes in a really negative

light. But it's also reality. Yeah. And if you look at that and say, alright, I've got this challenge. I'm gonna go through it and I'm gonna make it out to the end and I'm gonna figure these things out. Like whether it's Chat GPT ads next year. Like I'm actually really excited for that.

And it's, I'm not just going to roll over and be like, oh, I'm just good at Google Ads. It's no, I'm gonna be really good at ChatGPT ads and I'm excited and you're not going to I'm not just gonna roll over. Yeah. So I'll go Die Hard or maybe Dumb and Dumber. You ruined it. You should have left you with Die Hard, honestly, Greg.

No, I'm just joking. I was just joking. We'll leave it with Die Hard. Greg, where can people find you? We have a podcast where we recap the news every week. It comes out on Monday now. It's called Marketing O'Clock. Try to put in some humor - edutainment. I feel like that's like a core here at Cypress North.

Sure. Is always just having fun and I feel like things stick with you longer and you are more apt. So you take on different things. So we try to have a good time, also give tangible takeaways while like covering the news. And we also cover some things like things we learned and what was working well and what wasn't on the show.

Really proud of the show. It's a, it's ton of work, but it's a great time. Amazing. And you can find all of Greg's mistake-full LinkedIn posts where he, there's lots of errors and grammar errors on LinkedIn as well. You find him there. People read it. Read it. I love it. Thank you so much for joining PPC Live The Podcast and yeah.

Bye for now. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure.

 Thank you so much, Greg, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience, and it's just so insightful to see how some companies are willing to just get away with treating their employees so badly. Sometimes you hear agencies have such a high turnover and you're like, oh, what's going on? And yeah, it could really be as simple as the employees are being treated badly and they want something better.

Um, so yeah. That was be such a great insight to have and remember. So remember, it's really important that you treat your employees properly. It's really important that we're open in terms of communicating about issues that have gone wrong, and yeah, everyone makes mistakes. As Greg said there multiple times, everyone makes mistakes, so don't be afraid to speak about it so that you learn from it and do better for the future In terms of processes and how to just do things in generally.

For all the information and the full transcript of that fantastic chat. Just go to podcast, PPC Live. Um, and yeah, an update about PPC Live as well. Not only do we have the leads event happening in June, on June the 26th, I've also released some pre-event details 'cause we've not really quite, um, hunkered down on our location or the speakers for PPC Live 18 that's happening in London, but tickets are live.

And because we don't have all the details yet. The takeouts are only 10 pounds. For only 10 pounds. That is close to like, I mean, I don't even think you'll be able to pay for two beers that amount of money in London, but you are going to get three speakers for sure. You're gonna get amazing networking and because it's our third anniversary, you're also gonna get some amazing red velvet cake, which is my favorite flavor.

Uh, so yeah, I hope you can, um, yeah, you know, meet us there. Just go to BIT ly. Slash PPC live JUL 25. Again, that's BIT LY slash PPC live J 25, and you can get your 10 pound tickets. For this event, prices are gonna go up to all the way up to about 50 pounds, so this is the cheapest that you'll get it, and if any of the details changes or the circumstances changes as we get closer to the date, as long as you ask for a refund two weeks beforehand, you'll be able to claim a refund for it.

Before I leave you, I'd also like to mention that I'm, um, allowing myself to be booked a few hours of my time to be booked at an hourly rate of about 250 pounds. To do some coaching, paid search coaching, just so that you can really get ignited again about your position as a paid search expert or just your direction that you know that your career is going.

Or if you feel like you are the only paid search in your company and you're a brand or you're looking for advice, um, as an in-house on how to manage an agency. I've got years of experience of that. I've got like close to 20 years of experience in the industry working at old sides agencies, brands. Et cetera.

So I'd love to share that expertise with you. If you go to the marketing annual.com, you'll be able to get all the details for that. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed that show and I look forward to bringing you more paid. Search Fops and Triumphs next week. Bye.