John Readman | Ask BOSCO & Modo25
For brands engaged in advertising campaigns across multiple channels, what’s the easiest way to know where to focus spend?
On this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Modo25 and Ask BOSCO founder John Readman talks about how leading ecommerce brands are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize their paid ads funnels and drive bettter business results.
Check out the full episode to hear what John had to say.
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John and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Readman, who is the founder of Modo25 and Ask BOSCO. Welcome to the podcast, John. Happy new year.
John (00:29):
Happy new year. And thank you very much, Kathleen, for having me.
Kathleen (00:32):
Yeah. I'm excited to chat with you. And we're gonna talk about how marketers can really know where they should be spending their marketing dollars, but before we get into that, can you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and then also what Modo25 and Ask BOSCO are?
John (00:52):
Yeah, so John Readman, I'm, I'm from the UK, live in the north of the UK. My whole career, I got into the sort of many, many moons ago and a lot of my friends, I think thought I was crazy right back in 1996, 7 or whatever it was. And I've spent my whole life either in agency land or software marketing software land, and I've grown and exited a couple of different agencies. And that's predominantly from the commercial sales side. Although I'm a, what's the right word. I'm an inquisitive techie. I'm not quite good enough, but I know what I know what I think could be capable. And I've always had a passion for trying to work out what is the, the actual best solution for the client. And I think a lot of, of the problems we have nowadays, everybody defaults to one particular platform, which is the biggest or the flavor of the month or, or the one, you know, the best.
John (01:54):
So, and then the other big thing that I think is a trend or is, is an inevitable, I suppose, Kathleen is over time I think people are gonna want to learn how to do it, to learn how to fish, rather than just eating the fish. And, and I think people are gonna want to move in house everything. And in my previous agencies, when, when the client used to phone up and go, we're gonna in house, everybody would have like a meltdown and a panic. And, and then I thought, well, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could build a business that actually is designed to have help people over time in house. And then could we build some agency, enterprise level technology that could also support these businesses and give them some of that agency level, insight and support, but automatically, so they're not paying these huge retainers. So, so that was my sort of vision a few years ago. And I, to that vision with a, a friend of mine on, on a, on a charity bike ride for I'm, I'm currently cycling from the UK to Australia to raise money for an orphanage in, in Uganda.
Kathleen (02:56):
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're cycling from the UK to Australia?
John (02:59):
Yeah, yeah.
Kathleen (03:00):
And you're doing that right now?
John (03:02):
Well, no, I'm not physically doing it. I'm talking to you, but yeah, no, well, I mean like...
Kathleen (03:05):
You're in the middle of this journey.
John (03:06):
Yeah. So every year, apart from the COVID years we go and we cycle 500 miles and we set off over four or five days cycle, 500 miles, then fly home and then fly back to where we set off. We're currently nine years into this and it's gonna take us 25 years and hopefully we'll raise two or 3 million pounds for this.
Kathleen (03:25):
So you're, you're cycling 500 miles in five days?
John (03:27):
Four or five days. Yeah.
Kathleen (03:30):
Wow. Where are you right now?
John (03:31):
So we are just east of Ankara in Turkey and we're nearly into sort of Georgia. And then we'll get the, and it gets a little bit interesting with sort of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran.
Kathleen (03:43):
Yeah. How are you gonna do that?
John (03:45):
<Laugh> well, that that's that's to be, to be decided depending on what's going on at the time we might, oh my gosh. We might have to miss out Pakistan, but I think we'll be all right with Iran. Although I might never be able to come back to America if I cycle across Iran.
Kathleen (04:00):
I'm like fascinated by this. I, I wanna have a whole nother conversation about this bike trip.
John (04:05):
But also what's interesting is I met my current business partner on the charity bike ride. So I absolutely recommend anybody to get involved in crazy charity things cuz you meet the most interesting people. So interesting. Yeah. So I was cycling along with the, at the time, I didn't know this, but he's the founder of sky scanner and we became great friends. So the flight booking app sky scanner anyway, we became great friends and we were on another trip. And I was telling him about my vision of what I wanted to do. And I just was on an earn out from my previous agency. And, and I said, I'm gonna set up this in housing business. We're gonna help people in house. I'm gonna then squiggle away some money and then we're gonna build this technology. And he was like, well, why don't you just build a technology?
John (04:47):
I'll invest. It sounds like a really good idea. So I was very fortunate when we set up Modo25 that Vaughn Grims the founder, invested a seven figure amount to get us off the ground. And, and he was obvious he built technology that works on an algorithm to predict the cheapest flights. What we want to do is build some technology that predicts the cheapest media channel. So there was some similarities and he sort of keeps a lot of our developers and technical guys, honest as well and, and ask them all the hard questions that I don't know how to ask. So yeah, so we set up Modo25, 2 and a half years ago with the vision of helping brands and DTC companies take control of their digital marketing learn what was being going on in that black box in the agency and ask, ultimately have some tools in Ask BOSCO to predict where they should invest their money.
John (05:40):
So, and, and the other bit of this story, which I sort of need to, I always forget to tell people, and then I, after the call, after the podcast, oh, I forgot to mention that is Modo is actually the name of one of the children at an orphanage in Uganda that we raise money for. So when we were coming up with a name for the business, we were like coming up with all those sort of cliche agency names like certainty or probable or tr all these sort of things. And I said, why don't we just name it after cuz we are going to, a lot of our team donate some of their salary to the kids. We raise loads of money for the kids and we're gonna give some of our profit each year to the kids in the orphanage. And so we've named the company. Modo is the name of the, one of the children. One of the girls there, we couldn't get Modo.com. And the thing that bonds me and our, my co-founder together is the charity bike ride, which is right 25 to Australia. So we call it Modo25.
Kathleen (06:31):
Oh, I love that story. That's so great.
John (06:34):
Then our software, which is called Bosco, which is why is it called Bosco. Bosco's the name of the man who runs the charity? So he provides the clarity, vision and direction for Modo. So that's sort of, he provides the clarity, vision and direction for our clients within his software. So we're sort of more than just a digital tech business. Hopefully we can make a small difference to the world as well. So that that's sort of our, our story. We're now 45 people in five countries headed, headquartered out the UK, we've got a Toronto office, we've got a sales presence in Dallas. And our developers are over in Prague and our data science team is over in Australia. So, and they'll be clapping me in when I, when I get there in, in another 15 years. So yeah, so that, that says our, our main customers are retailers who want to make better decisions. And our, we also provide a white label solution for agencies who want to use our tools and tech to speed up efficiency for their clients and also save time. So, so that's us, sorry if that was a long answer.
Kathleen (07:39):
No, that was so interesting. I just think the story of the, the role that this bike ride has played in the founding of your company and just, you know, the, all of the aspects of the culture of it and, and the name of it. It's really interesting. And, and I, I love your kind of what you set out to solve for. I used to own an agency. So, you know, I definitely can appreciate the challenge that you're trying to solve. Now you mentioned specifically like DTC brands, why that focus?
John (08:11):
I think the DTC brands often under utilize all the channels in, in my opinion, I think a lot of the time everybody's sort of addicted to Google shopping and we get in this sort of, I've got my site set up, I've got my feed going to Google shopping. I'm just gonna optimize my Google shopping. And, and also I think people when a lot of DTC vans are relatively new, not necessarily new or new to in the digital marketing, maybe some of the, so if you are a, a brand, maybe it was the, the I know the department store that started selling your stuff online, or somebody else starts selling it on Amazon. And then you sort of thought, well, I on, I better take control of this. And then your first protocol is normally, well, we don't know what we're doing.
John (08:56):
We'll go get an agency to do it. And actually you get addicted to this sort of situation where you don't know what you don't know. So you start believing, or as people say, you start drinking the Google Kool-Aid and you start believing what everybody's telling you, that you don't know what you, you couldn't possibly do this yourself really complicated, hard. And I've been in the agency, land and technology world now for long enough to go. It, it's not, it's not easy, but it's also genuinely not rocket signs. And now I'm really reasonably comfortable that the Internet's not a ad and it's, it's here to stay. And I think some of this skillset, you need to have inhouse and you need to have that enterprise level agency level technology to support you. But I don't think Google or Amazon or Facebook are gonna build a piece of software to tell you to spend money in other channels. Right. So if you go to Google, they'll say spend more money with Google.
Kathleen (09:50):
Yeah. Now, is there anything so specific about this, that, about what you're, you're doing that means it wouldn't apply to like a B2B company that's doing a lot of advertising across channels.
John (10:02):
I think that you, you hit the nail on the head. There need to be doing a lot of advertising in more than one channel and it will absolutely work. So we do a lot of work with lead gen companies. So we work with and you wouldn't think it was B2B. We work with a lot of expensive vacation companies, so ski vacations, or we also work with companies selling expensive cars online, and actually that, that normally finishes and closes with a phone call. Yeah. Right. Which is then tracked in Salesforce or HubSpot or something. So that's very much someone fills in a form. Then somebody answers picks a of a phone and starts, or it starts on a live chat. So that whole, if we can put a value against a conversion, we can then optimize a channel and our optimizer will work as long as there is significant enough volume from more than two data. So it's only two media sources. If they're only in one media source, it's not, it's not great. Ideally more than two media sources gives us the, gives us more data to play with and we'll have a more statistically significant outcome for, for the end client. It, it was built for retail first and, and, and sort of people doing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Google, Bing.
Kathleen (11:17):
Does it pipe in LinkedIn advertising?
John (11:19):
Yeah. It can. Anything we can get.
Kathleen (11:21):
But I feel like a lot of B2B companies are doing LinkedIn plus either Google or Facebook or Twitter, you know? So, so that's really interesting.
John (11:29):
And, and we were one of the first people in Europe to partner with TikTok and we've got the TikTok integration. So, and we've talked companies all the time about, it's not for us. And we like, yeah, we said that, we said that to the shoe company that sells shoes to people who are over 60 and they're selling a lot of shoes on TikTok cuz the demographic isn't just kids. So yeah, so it works as long as we can get the data in and out, it also works for your email or your affiliates. So it gives you a complete view, all your data in one place. So if you are the CEO, you don't have to get six spreadsheets. Yeah. Or you don't have to ask someone to suck everything out in different spreadsheets. You can just look on your phone and go, oh, that's what's happening. And also if you are the head of marketing, you can feel comfortable with the F with the VP of finance or the CEO like the CEO or whoever looking at it and knowing they can't break it because it's read only, right. So they can't press the buttons to break it.
Kathleen (12:27):
Let's just back up for a second. Why, like, I think a lot of my listeners are, they definitely are doing and paid advertising and a lot of them are doing it on more than one channel. It could be Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, you know, all the kind of most common ones. Why do you think it is so hard right now for them? You know, and many of them have even like full-time paid ads, people on their teams, like why is it so hard to understand <affirmative> where to put your money across these channels? What, what is the problem with the data?
John (12:58):
Well, the problem, the data there, isn't a problem with the data. The problem is the data, right? There's the volume of the data, right? So just the sheer volume of information to process is so the only, we've only recently been at able to work this out with a significant amount of data science, but also speed of computing, right? Cause with the amount of data, you have to process both historical performance data, but also demand data across multiple channels to then quickly make a, a statistically significant prediction to go this week. You should move your money from Google and you should stick it in LinkedIn or actually this month this month or next month you should do this. So the, the issue is, I suppose if you were, I dunno, publicists or Mediacom, and you were maybe, I don't know, Walmart, you've probably been doing this for a while and you've probably had access to some economic modeling and so, and teams of data scientists and that's cuz you've got the budgets. Whereas what we wanna do is take that sort of enterprise level thinking and technology and make it available to every retailer, right?
Kathleen (14:07):
Like democratize it. Yeah.
John (14:09):
We wanna democratize the power of your data and, and give everybody access to these tools rather than having to have the privilege of going to a, a big five agency, spend a load of money and then have to have in-house data people. So it's going to hopefully level the playing field. I, I believe and the problem is we, we go with what's working and it's sort of, and, and also it's, it's like Google is not broken. It's sort of working, but, and if you are the FD, finance director or VP of finance, you'll start there. Go. Yeah. But should we really be spending $200,000 a month with Google? Could we be spending it elsewhere? Or how much should we be spending?
Kathleen (14:49):
I wanna stop you for a second. Cuz you said, you go with what's working and there are different schools of thought on this within the world of paid advertising, certainly within the eCommerce world in terms of like, what is the central KPI that you should use to determine what is working? And so I'm assuming the software has to be optimizing for something. So what is the KPI that you've landed on as the single source of truth as to whether something is working?
John (15:19):
So we let clients choose from three different KPIs, but we can build it to be bespoke if they've got the data. So we've got one client where we've got margin data at, at product level across and we can track every click and it's, we've got this really complicated and we're optimizing to profit at a product level, right? That's slightly unusual. Most clients we're looking at either a ROAS or we're looking at a cost of sale or we're looking at a cost per acquisition. And then we're looking at what is an acceptable target within that? What is an acceptable budget and what is an average order value? And then we can go through and we've already got then the conversion. Well actually we don't need them to put the average order value and we can pull that in from the data. And then once we know what they're optimizing to, we can then run the optimizer.
John (16:08):
But also you can run different simulations. You can change your target. So one month you might say, I want maximum volume or I want of clicks. You might say, and it'll run the thing and say, actually, if you want traffic, you should, your medium, it should look like this. If you want conversions and sales, it should look like this. If you want profit, it should look like that. Cuz again, there might be different things you're trying to do. You might be trying to get visitors to the site. So you could then retarget to them in a different channel, right. Or you might be trying to shift units and actually cuz you've got a warehouse full of product that you can't sell.
Kathleen (16:40):
If you're optimizing for profit I assume that means you need like cost of good sold data. And, and, and you're doing this cross, cross advertising channel. Now what happens if somebody is selling their product because obviously in e-commerce there's DTC, different channels, and then there's like marketplaces. So can, so can you solve for just, I know you can DTC but can you solve for somebody who's selling their product through various different channels?
John (17:17):
Yeah. Yeah. So we're taking the Amazon API, we're taking the Ebay API and we, so we can, so we can give you like a dashboard that says everything across every channel and then it will go actually, if you are, and, and we know the margin you're making on Amazon versus the margin you're making on your direct channel for your products, because we are pulling all that data. We so I'll take a step back, Kathleen. So I went straight to the sort, the answer. <Laugh> the first thing, the first thing we have to do, which actually I, I really underplay and I've clearly underplayed it here too. And my team get really, my I've got this team of data engineers and I no, actually the secret source here, John, isn't the algorithm, which is what our double PhD, Dr. James invented. They're like, they actually the complicate, but it's connecting all this data.
John (17:58):
Right? Cause all, everything comes out of all the different channels and different platforms in different columns. What we've then gotta do is match all those columns up so we can have a single view of everything. And that in itself is quite complex. But I, I sort of brush over that again. Well, we had to do that in order to do the predicting bit. But so the first thing we do is we connect all the retailers channels or the clients channels or the brand channels. So we connect the LinkedIn, the Facebook, the Twitter, the Instagram being Google shopping, Google AdWords. And we pull all the data in, we also then connect their e-commerce platform and get all the sales in. We might connect with their affiliates, their email and everything that goes into the Google Big Query. We then organize and sort all that data out in, within our BOSCO system.
John (18:43):
And then that spits out your dashboard. And then behind the dashboard runs our algorithm, which we call the optimizer budget planner. And then it gives you different scenarios. And then you can go into the scenario planner and say, well, what if we did this? Or what if we did that? Or what about if I had another $20,000? Where should I spend it? Or what if I want to increase traffic? So it's a tool to allow, I suppose, planning and prediction against your given metrics that you are trying to optimize to. So, and yeah, so that, that's, that's what it does. And yeah, it's a, and, and it works for both agencies with multiple clients or it works for individual brands the other bit, which we've just, and we're gonna continually grow this out. So the next thing I want to, which I think is a massively, and if you've been in the agency DTC world, a massively underutilized areas, SEO, I think people under invest in SEO, SEO used to be this black art and we're all buying links and we're doing this and we do that.
John (19:43):
Oh no, we weren't. But we were. But which page has the most values? If we could look at your data and go, well, you are spending this my on this keyword, but actually you rank on page two of Google for that keyword. If you were to rank on page one, you could not only reduce your page, but it could be worth this. Right. And we could just run that and surface that data to push of a button. Mm. Interesting. And, and that then gives you a, if you are marketing person trying to get budget from the FD to spend on SEO, you can go, well, look, if we sorted out our SEO, it's we, we could use our spend on paid and we could get this. And then the other one, which I also think is, is everybody's buying traffic, buy more traffic, buy more traffic, but everybody sort of overlooks that conversion rate optimization and testing.
John (20:28):
Right? No, not many of the brands we start working with big, big mobile brands. Oh, well, yeah. We're gonna get round to conversion rate automation, but can you get us more traffic from Google shopping? Right. But if only we move the needle slightly on the conversion rate, that means the traffic you're getting is gonna spend more. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, and that's the biggest lever you can pull. So we are now building a dashboard within BOSCO to go, right. Your conversion rate on your homepage, your conversion rate on your category, page, your conversion rate on your product page benchmarks against all our other customers. Right. So how are you good, bad. And what do you need to do about it, but in a sort of dashboard way. So you can look at it straight away. And hopefully we then go make some decisions. So the, the idea of it is to help people make better decisions and ask smarter and better questions of each other. Cuz I think historically all this data's been the luxury of a big agency or the digital marketing team. I don't think the people running the business have had access to a loss of this data. So
Kathleen (21:26):
With, with this data, obviously it's one thing to have the data it's another to like do something with it. Right. how often, you know, you're working with different customers, how often are you seeing the best in class teams changing up their strategies based on the data?
John (21:42):
We, so we provide insights currently on a, a weekly and daily basis if there's enough volume. So our system provides currently six different types of insights. Proactively says, this campaign here, you should in Facebook consider spending more money on and it will result in there. So it's not just saying go up in Facebook. It's saying this particular campaign in Facebook, you need to spend more money on. And if you do it, we'll result in this with this level of confidence. So it's, it's almost giving whoever is doing the work in the morning, a list of activities in priority order of where they should start their work. So most people probably have their daily routine where they'll come in and go, I'll check Google shopping first and I'll tweak some things and I'll do that and I'll do that. But actually they, they might you an opportunity in Facebook or in TikTok that you haven't got round to.
John (22:32):
And actually you get round to TikTok at the end of the day. And going back to your prob your question right at the beginning, that the problem is just the volume of data. Yeah. And the amounts of decisions we've got to make. And it it's almost beyond the human to do all of this on their own. So what BOSCO as a, a machine learning a AI tool does is it just surfaces the biggest opportunities to the top and that's what it's doing and yeah, we've got, and again, we have customers who choose not to implement the insight. They'll say, well, I don't want, I don't, I don't agree with it.
Kathleen (23:03):
<Laugh> I'm smarter than this artificial intelligence.
John (23:07):
Because we've also got an agency, we have our own account managers who go, I'm not sure, but then there's also things, the computer can't do everything. So it doesn't know what the level of stock is. It does know the weather, but it doesn't know the stock. And it doesn't know if you are in sale or what your competitors are doing. Right. It does know seasonality. And it does know a lot of external other data sources, but it's a, it designed as giving you more insight to make a better decision. And I suppose also designed to help senior people ask better questions of teams or agencies so that we're looking at the same data. Cause I think you've probably been in these meetings, Kathleen, where you're going to a meeting and you're saying, oh, this is what's happening. And they're going well, that's not the data I've got.
John (23:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm all looking at the same thing, but different views of different data. And then you spend the whole meeting just talking about, well, what's the single version of the truths. And I suppose my, my big vision, my big vision for the future is we want BOSCO to almost become like the trip advisor for marketing data. Right? So it's the trusted third party. So if you are an agency pitching, you go look, you can trust us. We use the BOSCO dashboard data. Right? Interesting. And, and a and a retailer will go, well, we'll work with you, Mr. Or Mrs. Agency. But we want you to use the BOSCO dashboard. Cause we trust the numbers. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> right. Cause that's where the disconnect often happens between a brand and the agency where they can't, they don't know what's happening with the data. They don't know what's actually happening. They can't get the visibility or access they want, but I think it actually BOSCO should help agencies retain more clients because it'll help their clients have more visibility and BOSCO will help brands make better decisions. Yeah. So that's what we're trying to do anyway.
Kathleen (24:40):
Love it. Well, so now I would love to, to have you talk a little bit about out, like how does it move the needle? So you're working with different companies that are using this platform and they're getting this information and I I'm assuming that they're making decisions and changing their strategy as a result of it. Do you have any stories about like what outcomes has that led to in terms of either improved ROAS or profit or sales?
John (25:07):
I, I've got lots of different. I think the, the biggest ones are when people have got best sellers, we can very quickly identify quicker often than is like, what is the trend or what is happening quickly and highlight what you need to put more budget on this. And if I think the best clients we work with are the clients who understand and work to a cost of sale and will keep spending the ones where BOSCO's probably less relevant for you. Someone goes, I've just got a hundred thousand dollars and once we've spent were spent, right. I often think they're the people who don't really understand the game sometimes.
Kathleen (25:44):
It's working and you're gonna stop doing it.
John (25:47):
Yeah. No, but I, but I suppose the other thing BOSCO could do is if you only have a hundred thousand pounds, we can tell you the best places to split that, which is another, another hard question agencies often get asked is where should I put my money? No. So we've had one client, a big global beauty client. And they were like, can you identify the, where else we could go in terms of, of channels. And they weren't in YouTube and very quickly looking at all their data. We, we said to them, right. If you spend exactly this amount of money in YouTube in exactly this way, we think this is gonna happen. And it did within 95% confidence. So, and sales went up like by 20% and it then impacted. Then the other thing you can start seeing is the impact of that higher level display on the rest of the channels.
John (26:31):
So that was one big success with a, a, well like Cult Beauty. We've got permission to talk about it. So they have a big sort of global beauty brand multi brand reseller. And then the other ones are really nice little examples of where somebody's sort of thinking, well, Google, shopping's just ticking along nicely here. And actually goo being our, our platform will say, well, actually, no, you need to spend more in Google shopping and take some outta text ads or the other way around. And it will give you the specific campaigns and say, well, take out of that campaign and move into that campaign. We've got, clients said, no, well we've done that before it doesn't work. Or agencies say, we did that before. And we're like, yeah, that might have happened. Be the situation before, but just because it was right then doesn't mean it's now wrong, still wrong today or right today.
John (27:17):
So, and we've got examples of like literally same budget improving ROAS by three of times, it's a, it's not like 2% change. It can be 20% change, 30% change. And it's I'm sort of, what's the I word so far. We haven't had anybody. It hasn't worked for, which sounds ridiculous. And but when I speak to Dr. James, our data science professor level person, he goes, well, of course, of course, that's right. Cuz that's what it was built to do. <Laugh> of course. Yeah. It's like we, we said, we're gonna land on the moon and that's what we're doing. So I'm still waiting for the client who, who goes actually, John, this doesn't work. And, and I think there will be clients where they don't have enough data or they're not in enough channels or they don't ever implement the cause. It's a bit like it's a bit like buying an expensive sat nav, and then deciding to follow your own directions and arriving late.
Kathleen (28:12):
So you talked about the different ways that brands can, like the different KPIs that can use to measure success. If you had to advise a brand whether it's B2B or DTC on what they should be using to measure success, what would your advice be?
John (28:30):
I, I, this, this sounds like very political. It depends what they're trying to do. So we've got a very big brand that we're working with. That's launching globally, that's got a huge amount of venture capital money and they're all about at the moment traffic and visibility and their, their metrics are, they're not really focused. They should focused on sales, revenue and units sold. And they're not really focusing on profit. And I think there's two camps. I, I would say it's the ones who wanna focus on the top line, growth and revenue. And then we we'd look at ROAS or it's people who are looking at say a profit. And then we can start looking at customer lifetime value or profit metrics. And I think one thing in all of this, which is a bit which is still the Niana that everybody wants to get to is proper attribution. I, I think everybody says, oh yeah, we understand our marketing makes we understand this. Oh, how, how are you measuring it? Oh, well it's last click or it's last oh,
Kathleen (29:26):
Last click is the worst. Yeah.
John (29:28):
And then you started. Yeah. And so the one thing again, and this, we don't put much value on this, which we probably should is once you've got all your data in the same place, it's actually relatively, only a medium step away to get, understand your attribution. And the challenge now comes with the way Facebook's giving you data, right. That now has to be seen as a display channel. Right. We got Facebook used to be a display channel. Then we started getting all this tracking. So it became more like page search. And now we've gotta take the step back the other way and go, well, Facebook's just a display channel, right? That's the way you've gotta look at it.
Kathleen (30:02):
Explain that a little bit more. What do you mean by that?
John (30:04):
Well, with all the iOS tracking and everything, if you are tracking your Facebook success in Google Analytics, you won't have, you'll just stop spending on Facebook because you won't be able to see the sales coming through. So you have to start trusting the Facebook numbers, but the Facebook will frame glory for anything it's touched. So you'll end up with some sort of double counting. Okay. So if you've got manually obsessed with being last click, your Facebook numbers are gonna be overstated and you're gonna be overstated the success of the channel. So there needs to be some sort of, I suppose, incrementality thing or some sort of understanding of what is or isn't going on. And I, we've been, we've been debating this with many other agencies and many other retailers over the last six, 12 months around what's the impact of all this change on Facebook. But I think the easiest way to explain it is, well, you've got to the same way you would look at display is really the same way you should really now be looking at Facebook in terms of visibility and eyeballs.
Kathleen (31:05):
So meaning you're really looking at it as more of a brand awareness play than...
John (31:09):
Well, it is, you need to start building audiences again, whereas before you could plug stuff into Facebook and you get really granular but when this whole tracking problem happened there, algorithm in my opinions not working well, we know it's not working to do.
Kathleen (31:23):
I track a lot of the, the e-commerce kind of PPC chatter on Twitter and everybody is saying that their CAC has gone way up. Oh yeah.
John (31:34):
So what we've been suggesting to people is we almost need to, and now this sounds crazy, but you need to take a really targeted piece of content or video, stick it into Facebook with a reasonable budget and let Facebook audience decide who's interested in that case. Right?
Kathleen (31:49):
Like no targeting, right?
John (31:50):
Yeah, no, literally like no targeting go, but the, the targeting is in, within with the messaging of the content. Right. So if you are a 15 year old, you're not gonna be interested in suede boots for 60 year olds. Yeah. So hopefully the, the tar the content filter, then we can interact after that with a, a, a further audience that we build off that piece of content. So, so we're almost priming the pump in a completely different way. But yeah, and we've had some success with that. And I think, I think the other thing with all of this, and this will get me back onto my hobby horse about creative is we've got into a world where, because everything has been data driven and still data driven, and we've built a data driven platform still you've you shouldn't take your eye off your proposition or your promotion and your creative, right.
John (32:36):
Because, and I think a lot of people have reduced their creative capabilities. Right. And I, and I think you only have to look at companies like Jim shark, who've grown globally in the sportswear and they didn't read the, I've gotta spend all my money on Google shopping manual. Right. They just didn't do that. They created a brand and they created a load of influencers and followers. And then they have, whenever they open a new store, bricks and mortar they're people queuing around the block. Yeah. so they didn't, they, nobody told them that they had to go and spend it all on Google.
Kathleen (33:05):
That's like MadeIn Cookware. I, I have followed their story. And they've similarly built a really strong brand with a very cult like following.
John (33:15):
And, and I think over the last 15 years, because it's been with all been fighting over that last click in the funnel, people have invested less in the brand. Yeah. So everybody's fighting over the end of the funnel to get the sale rather than educating the consumer. Right. Well, why, why should I buy into your brand? And then when I do need cookware when I do need gym gear, I'm just gonna go straight to you.
Kathleen (33:39):
This is the same thing in B2B. And I've talked about this a lot. You know, when I, I, when I had my agency back in the day, we were really a B2B demand gen agency. And, and people were telling, we're always saying that like, if somebody, if your customer has a problem or a challenge, the first thing they're gonna do is go to Google and search for an answer. And I think that was true for a time, but it's not true anymore. The first thing the B2B buyer does now is they to their slack community or their LinkedIn, and they ask their peer set, Hey, you know, I need a, I need a, a advertising performance analysis software. What are you using? And what should I look for? And they get their short list of three from their peer set, and then they go to Google, but they're not searching. What's the best software. They're going straight to the website of those three companies to say, like, do these really do what I need? And so it's, it's completely changed the game. These like dark social has, has changed everything.
John (34:30):
And I think also the power of like trusted reviews as well. So I, the story I often share when I speak at conferences and this and the other is I, I will travel a lot on business and I will go to some, I'm both fortunate. I'll stay in an amazing hotel and I'll get home and say to my wife, Nikki, I stayed in this amazing hotel. We should go there. What's the first thing she does. She goes on trip advisor. And she says, well, trip advisor scores it three. And this lady who I've never met on the other side of the world said the bathroom's dirty. We aren't going
Kathleen (34:58):
Right. But side note to that. So this is actually really interesting for if I don't know if anybody listening is familiar with the Baymard Institute. So they do really advanced, like UX, UI testing, particularly in the e-commerce side. And they just came out with research saying that consumers actually don't trust reviews when they are on a DTC website. And the reason is that they-
John (35:21):
They trust when they're on somewhere else.
Kathleen (35:23):
Exactly. Because they're like, they know that that DTC brand has the power to manipulate which reviews they show and which they don't. And they don't. So they don't trust the ones there. They like it's. And there's a lot of, there's been research on this dating back years with Yelp and restaurants, where, where people actually trust restaurants more. If they have some bad reviews than if they have all good reviews.
John (35:46):
It needs to be balanced. Yeah. Cause if somebody didn't have a bad meal, well, that's not
Kathleen (35:50):
Really, it's like, are all your reviews from your cousin and you know, your employee's husband,
John (35:55):
Well, this is, it's like Amazon used to let you have a review of a product, even if you hadn't bought it. Right. That was exactly. And there was call centers of people all over the world, just putting reviews on.
Kathleen (36:05):
So, so it is I, but I agree with you, reviews are critical and really play into that purchase decision making.
John (36:12):
No, I, I, yeah, so, but I, I do think the challenge with, and where we'll get in with the sort of data and everything is, we've all just got obsessed with this last click. And I, and I think as and, and I do think much as people think they're doing attribution and understanding the whole funnel. I also think the biggest challenge with attribution. I dunno if you've seen this within your business and both need to see I and B2B and, and is senior people don't really understand it. No, they don't understand the impact and it's, well, if you can't track it, how do we know? And you're like, well, there's other ways we can measure it. And everybody's got know, because Google, you put $10,000 in and you get a hundred thousand dollars out out. Right. If somebody says, well, we're gonna put some money on, on, on a billboard on the side of a bus, or we're gonna do this. Everybody's like, well, how do we know if it's gonna work? Right. So I, yeah.
Kathleen (37:07):
Well, and I've, I mean, in my communities that I'm a part of, there's a lot of discussion around how really the best brands have some percentage of their marketing spend set aside to and brand. And there is an agreement within the leadership or executive team that we're not gonna try to measure it, like call it 20% of our spend is gonna go into pure brand plays. And we're not even gonna try to find a metric for it. We're just gonna acknowledge that
John (37:32):
What feels right.
Kathleen (37:34):
Right. Like, and if we did try to find a metric, it would be BS. So let's not play that game. Let's just recognize that brand is important and let's put some money behind it.
John (37:43):
But I think going back to your point about how people go to trusted advisors, what good companies could do and should be doing is enabling their employees and their teams to become spokespeople or to become experts in their, in their subsequent audiences and communities. Right. But most companies like to control the narrative too much and wouldn't, and, and are nervous about letting everybody have a voice. And I think they're missing an opportunity. What you actually need is to get the right people on the team. Yeah. And then everybody trust them. And most people will do a good job.
Kathleen (38:17):
Amen. All right. Well, we're gonna shift gears because I feel like you and I could just banter forever. <Laugh> I think we share some of the same strong feelings about the way to, to, and not to do attribution and measurement and all of that. But we're gonna run outta time. So two questions, I always ask all of my guests at the end of their interviews. The first one is so many of the marketers, I talk to say one of their biggest pain points is just keeping up with all of the stuff that's changing in the world of digital marketing. And you're in the advertising world. And, you know, like there are so many algorithm changes and platform changes. You were talking about the iOS to, and what, how that's impacting things. So are, how do you personally stay up to date? Like, do you have certain sources that you rely on to keep yourself educated and on the cutting edge?
John (39:05):
Yeah, I, that's a good question. So I have a few go to newsletters and I would say in a broader marketing sense, I'm a big fan of the drum, which is a UK title, but I think he's now in the us as well. And that's sort of a broader, wider marketing, and that covers everything from TV to, but also has, has a big focus on digital. I'm then a, at the other end of the sort of geeky end of the scale is the MarTech Alliance where everybody's talking about what's the latest SaaS people are building, what's the latest tools and, and all those. And I, and I think the guys at the MarTech Alliance and, and what they're sort of talking about now is how brands are actually building their own MarTech. So it's not about what MarTech you can buy it's about what MarTech should you build.
John (39:50):
So I'd highly recommend following those guys. And then I, I, I listen to a lot of podcasts as well across eCommerce and across both I I've got this thing at the moment about just trying to not listen to too much work stuff. So I, listen, I listen to this one which is called the high performance podcast. It's where the interview sports people and business people, but then they try and relate. So we're not all gonna be, I don't know an NFL player, right. That we're not gonna be, but what have they learned in their life that we could relate to a normal life? And they're very good at interviewing people and they have this psychologist and then they have this sports journalist and that that's something I, I listen to in the car that, that inspires me on a, on a regular basis.
John (40:40):
But, and then I, I think I rely on my team and I think we, we, as a leadership team and as a business, everybody, we do lots of lunch and learns and there's different topics. And we get the team cause it is so hard to keep up. So we will say, right, what, what do we think we need to learn about? Right. So one, we did recently on the changes of the iOS 14, what that means for attribution, what that means for our clients. But we got the guy who runs the data attribution team to distill all his reading and knowledge into a 20 minute presentation. Everybody gathered round the table and had their lunch or joined on zoom because well, a lot of people are working from home. So I think it's, I, I have to rely on the team to also keep me up to date of what's going on. And then I suppose that influences the people we need in the team. Yeah. Cause as change we need different levels of different practitioners.
Kathleen (41:31):
Yeah. Now you mentioned newsletters. Are there any in particular that you find really valuable?
John (41:37):
So the MarTech Alliance newsletter is, is a good one. The Drum do a, do a great newsletter. I've got my newsletter folder. I, I will, I can share some of them afterwards and if you wanna put them in the show notes, so we, we can do that. Yeah. And then I suppose things like Retail Week, which is a UK specific one, but then there's yeah, there's lots of, I suppose, European and retail specific, and then there's a few DTC ones as well. But the problem I have is there's just too much content and there's a lot. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. One called, this is good, TDLR, which is T L D R - too long, didn't read <laugh> and a newsletter called that. Right. And they summarize all the top tech and marketing news.
Kathleen (42:25):
That sounds like a good one.
John (42:26):
And that's, let me find the name of that one for you. But that, that's a good one. And that summarizes <affirmative> and actually it's just called TLDR newsletter.com. Yeah. And you put it in the things you're interested in, they summarize it, they give you the salient points. And then if you actually do want to read that, that I get lows from that. And then also I use that to dispute distribute to my team and say, right, go dig into that, go dig, go find about, so I'm sort of like a conduit in that scenario.
Kathleen (42:57):
Oh, I'll have to check that out. I like it. Alright. Second question. This podcast is obviously all about inbound marketing, which I feel like the definition of that has evolved over the years and how I define it is anything that naturally attracts the right audience to your business. And so who do you think, is there a company or individual that today is really like setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?
John (43:24):
So let me, I would say I, and it, I, I would say HubSpot, but everybody probably says that.
Kathleen (43:34):
Yeah, you can't say HubSpot. I feel like I have to put that disclaimer out.
John (43:38):
Cause the other newsletter I get a lot is the chief MarTech from Scott Brinker. I dunno if you know Scott. Yep. He's, he's, he's a big into this, but I also think the funny thing about, about HubSpot, I dunno if you've read Dan Lloyd's book about HubSpot is they've still got the biggest sales boiler room in the world, right. So the company that does inbound marketing has the most direct outbound cold calling sales people. Right, right. So right. I find that sort of a bit of an oxymoron. So I, I think I think MailChimp does a very good job. I was talking about MailChimp the other day on a different per podcast. And I, I, I sort of sit down with our product designers and our product team. And I say, I just want to be as good as MailChimp.
John (44:22):
I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in my career with MailChimp and I've never spoken to anybody. Wow. But the software, it works. It's a, it is got really good content and it's, it's just there and they've got the knowledge and they've got, and I think it's, as you were saying before, if you can answer the questions people are asking and your brand is at the forefront of that. Both within communities. Yeah. But also within search. Cause I think it's now a lot about communities. And then there's another, which you may or may not have heard of, which is sort of, they've just got I don't know, 40 million plus in funding, they're called Guild. And they're trying to create this platform for communities, which is all about inbound marketing really. That sits somewhere between WhatsApp and LinkedIn and that quite interesting. So it's called Guild and he might have actually firm, it might be an interesting person to get on about how he sees B2B marketing communities and, and things. And if you need an introduction, I'll happily introduce you. I
Kathleen (45:18):
Would love to talk to him. Community is something I'm very passionate about.
John (45:23):
So, and I suppose he was saying, well, LinkedIn's sort of become a bit spammy and his broken and WhatsApp, isn't really a secure way to run everything because you can't also go back can't control things. So he's, he's invented this thing in between. Yeah. So I'd say those guys and they, they do their own obviously content marketing very well because that's what they're talking about and that, and they, the guys who run that used to be the guys behind E consultancy, which was the digital marketing content platform. So yeah, they're very good at that.
Kathleen (45:51):
Oh, well, lots of good stuff there to check out if you're listening. All right. Last question is if somebody is interested in learning more about Modo25 or Ask BOSCO, or just wants to reach out and connect with you and ask a question, what is the best way for them to do that?
John (46:07):
So they could just email me direct at john@Modo25.com that's Modo25.com or have a look at Modo25.com's Website, or Ask BOSCO A S K B O S C O IO. And we actually have a free part of the software where if you type in your URL and your budget, it will tell you roughly how BOSCO thinks you should be splitting your budget.
Kathleen (46:34):
Oh, interesting.
John (46:35):
Free to use tool. And it will also benchmark you against your closest three competitors and give your a score. So yeah, lots of people end up wasting a lot of time checking out DTC retailers on there. But but it's, it's it just highlights people that we believe the maths works.
Kathleen (46:51):
Yeah. Oh, cool. I'm gonna go check, check that tool, check that tool out on your website. So definitely reach out to John. If you have questions, I will also put those links that he mentioned in the show notes. So head to Kathleen booth.com, if you wanna see those or connect with John. And in the meantime, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode as always, I would very much appreciate it if you would head to apple podcast and leave the show a review so that others can find it. And of course, if you know anyone else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, John.
John (47:32):
This was a ton of fun. So thank you very much for having me.
