The Digital Marketing Rennaissance

Transcript

Hello, I'm Kerry guard and Welcome to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders.

Kerry Guard: Welcome back to the show for those joining us live. Please, please, please comment. I can't see you unless I see you. So we are here and paying attention to the comments. And we want to know who you are and where you're from. And then your questions most importantly, because that's the beauty of being live, is we get to have a conversation in real time. And one and I are here for it. So let's go. Let's go Good morning one. It's very morning. Certainly he's

Juan Mendoza: Very morning. Yes, I am currently dialling in from Melbourne, Australia at 6:03am. And I'm excited I've woken up. I've already had my morning coffee. So I'm ready to jump into the show.

Kerry Guard:  Well, it is 904 My time we are literally halfway around the world from each other. I am in the UK and one where specifically are you.

Juan Mendoza: So I'm based out in Melbourne, Australia. So that's the southern part of Australia. It's like probably the furthest away from everywhere else in the world, apart from say Tasmania, which is a small island, just off the southern coast of Australia. So I'm down here striping. I've been here for about 10 years now. And we love it. It's a beautiful place to live. But it's a very small population, it's only the population of Australia is only half the size of California. So being a marketer, I guess and doing marketing down here is very different compared to places like Europe or in the UK where you are carry or even in the United States as well.

Kerry Guard: I actually think I have, you may be a little beat. So I'm on an island in the channel between England and France, we have about 60,000 people in this little nook of the world. But I love what you're talking about in terms of marketing being so different. What's different for you, I'm sorry, we're jumping the gun, y'all I'm all over the place, because I just too good to pass up what's different for you in terms of being in a smaller population and being part of marketing?

Juan Mendoza: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I guess in my own journey with the MATEC, weekly, and we'll get into what that isn't in a minute. So because we have a smaller population in from a marketing technology perspective, like doing digital marketing, it really benefits from scale from having a lot of people. I mean, you know, if anything, if anything, the internet allowed marketers to do things with millions, billions of people at scale. When you're looking at by regional marketing and marketing and brands that are distinctly Australian, we have less customers. So we actually have to sweat all of our other our capabilities to actually convert those customers get more value out of them to serve them well. And so what I see down in Australia is this really unique maturity around marketing technology, from everything from personalization, to AV testing, to ad tech, and, and, and optimising ads all the way through to save and just email marketing and CRM, what I see is increasing maturity, and compared to other parts of the world, because we just need to get more dollar out of that customers down here. That's just the stock reality. So we work much harder to really make the experiences great for customers, because we know there's only so many of them. So I think that's one thing. The other thing is that I call Australia, kind of the land of duopoly. I mean, we've kind of got two airlines, and we've got, you know, sort of three or four banks, like we only have, we only have so many companies that can be big enough to substantiate like big budgets and marketing. Because our population so small. And so I think that like with that, and in conjunction with like, we're having to work harder and sweat, your technologies as a market are harder. It means that there's like, there's a very small community of people here that like really elite that really get this stuff done, and, and almost, I think, show the future of what you can do with some of these marketing technologies. And then there's kind of everyone else, you know, there's the tiny mom and pop businesses and the corner shop around the around the corner, you know, and that kind of thing. And so, so and I probably should mention one last thing, which is probably the most exciting is that I'm seeing increasingly in Australia, the breakout brands in Australia tend to be global first. So we have companies here like Canva you know, everyone knows what Canva is right? It's incredible. Yeah. And I was travelling to San Francisco just three or four months ago. And when I arrived at the airport, every single ad on the billboards in the airport, were kind of ads And that's a target market, digital people are working in San Francisco. But it's Australian bread. It's based and founded and still operated out of Sydney. And we have Atlassian, which is behind Jira, and confluence, you know, and we have other companies like Link tree, which is actually just down the road from me, which is a breakout, you know, more than billion dollar plus valued company. And so, those, we found that, and even with myself with my tech weekly, we found that there's not enough people here. So we actually have to be global. First, we have to participate in global economy if we ever want to make a big a big business, because there's just not enough people here, very different attitudes to say, the United States where there's more than 300 million people. So you can well and truly make, you know, a multi multiple billions dollar value business just by focusing on that single market. So I think I'll just sort of the main three things, it's it's fascinating place to live in work. It's very remote. I mean, I guess we're in the southern hemisphere, and down in the surrounded by water, a bit of a fortress down here. But yeah, I love it. It's such a fascinating place to be doing marketing right now.

Kerry Guard: I have seen the ad. But before I get there, what's the weather like? Are you in winter right now?

Juan Mendoza: Yeah, we're actually just coming out of winter, we're in spring, so. So where we have like three months of winter, and then and then we have a long spring. And so that runs us right through to like December, and then it gets really hot. So it's warming up, which is great, because my goodness, like the winters down here are pretty brutal. You know, it can be very, very cold. So I'm looking forward to some more days outside and more pool parties and hanging out to the sun.

Kerry Guard: So while it's so the opposite, we're having a brutal summer in the US. I'm actually you know, in the UK, it's been a really weird, grey, rainy summer. I'm actually missing the sun desperately. And I don't think we're going to get any this year. But it hasn't been cold. It's been weird. But it's always really fun. Like to hear that your summer starts in December, January. It's just, it's so opposite. So wild. This sucks. I love this. The other thing I'm gonna say about local marketing in I'm having sort of the opposite reaction where I live, and that they aren't thinking because we're we are connected to the UK and we are connected to Europe and there is a bit of the US that isn't too far away. The marketing here is actually very interesting and very local. So one of the interesting local elements I've seen that I wish I could find a way to like bring to the back to us, I guess in a in a niche sort of way is they do car like they do car wrappers or like logos on the side of their cars all the time. Because what do you do more often hear as you drive or you're walking or you're riding your bike and you're looking at cars, and so like the local plumber or the construction worker or the window cleaners, right? They all have marketing on the side of their vans and it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous, gorgeous marketing with like the catchiest you know, taglines because they also can get away with so much more like leaning into the Marvel and Avengers are not getting in trouble. So it's a very interesting little vocal wheel weird part of the world in the opposite sort of way that you're thinking. So I love that I could talk about this all day long. And this is exciting. A little bit about Juan Mendoza is that he has been working on supplying vital sign insights into the mahr tech industry since 2020. As an industry analyst, intersectional keynote speaker and the author of the MAR tech weekly to help senior leaders work out exactly how the market tech industry is changing. And why today his free Sunday newsletter go subscribe and premium newsletter product T MW Pro and their inaugural international awards event T FW 100 reaches more than a million marketers across 65 countries to your point being global look at that. manages tn w is online community of regular podcast called Making Sense of martec and frequently collaborates with other publications such as I want to say W AR C but maybe work is another way Yes.

Juan Mendoza: You pronounce that like spot on most people can't do it. It's like work work. But you got it spot. Okay, Carrie, good job. You played the Brits.

Kerry Guard: Yeah. And you're the bread. I stagers Chief martec and the MAR tech podcast man you are everywhere. Everywhere. I mean, a lot for one person to like have all their like counsellor hands. And so that's sort of a recap of what you wrote on LinkedIn. But tell us your story. Like this is what You do, but how did you get there? And how did you get your hands on all of these things? And why is that valuable to you?

Juan Mendoza: Yeah, that's a great question, Kerry. And, and thanks for the kind of generous introduction. They I mean, I guess I would say one thing as a as a soundbite, and then I'll explain it. So I think curiosity is probably one of the most powerful forces in your own career, your personal career, I am a wonderful believer in that, like, if you're, if you're a curious person, if you're exploring the unknown, if you're trying to understand things, and you have that passion, truly, just to under credit knowledge, I think you're gonna go far. That's my first point. Let me explain that, I guess with my own story. So I originally, I wasn't working as a marketer, obviously, I'm a founder, CEO of a media business now. But I was never working as a marketer, I've only been working in marketing for about seven years, I actually started my career as a chef. And then I did a bunch of nonprofit work for a long time. And then I kind of got this job out of nowhere from a friend that made an introduction with this music tech company. And he said, Oh, you know, they're looking for somebody, they're starting up, you know, really interesting music product, they're trying to do something new. And I got into the job as a customer service rep. And it was two days a week. And I was like, you know, whoa, this is cool. Because I'm used to running around a hot kitchen, you know, opening ovens and, you know, cooking stuff, and grills and things like that. And I was like, Well, this is kind of cool that like, I can sit here on a computer and get paid to do that. And this was like, when I was like, you know, what, in my early 20s, so. So I basically got into this job. And then it kind of grew because I was just super curious. I was like, well, there's all these interesting technologies, wanting to launch an E commerce. So we set up Shopify, where they needed a process for like all of their logistics, and all of the sort of CRM interactions and email notifications. So I set that up with Salesforce, you know, and we started working with agencies to get the word out and SEO and digital agencies with advertising. And I just was like, I kind of fell in love with digital marketing, also, who is amazing tools. And I can reach people from all over the world. And we can convert them, we can make money, and we can grow a business. But more importantly, like we can actually define a customer experience on here for specific customers and make it personal to them. And so the role kind of grew from like a two day a week customer service role. And then I went to five days. And then from there, I went and worked in conversion rate optimization, which is a be testing personalization for a number of like retail brands. And then from there, I worked at the luminary which I've just finished up recently for four or five years. And really the luminary is like a enterprise marketing technology business. So what they do is they help large enterprise companies with their marketing tech strategy. So I was doing a lot of the strategy work, like how do you meet customer experiences customer needs, with marketing technologies? How do you deliver on your outcomes, things like that. And I've worked with banks, telecommunications, airlines, nonprofits, you know, all kinds of companies from all over medical, all kinds of companies from all over the place, and some international, some mostly local in Australia. And I think during that time, I just set off this fire of curiosity. I mean, I was just so fascinated by like, all these amazing technologies that you can use, and literally you can go and learn how to use them. And then it could mean the difference, like with some of the companies we're working with, just the right execution of some of these marketing tech platforms, was meeting additional three, four or $5 million a year in revenue, you know, and it's completely life changing for the digital marketing teams, and when they use these technologies well, and so I found that it was just absolutely fascinating. And then during that period, and this was through COVID, I found that every man, woman and child and their dog had some form of newsletter, right? Because everyone was shifted online. I mean, you know, like, if you think about it, most of marketing technologies are bought and sold. In person. It's a very heavily heavily self reliant process. A lot of people in sales in the boardrooms meeting with people at the cocktail parties at the conferences, speaking this stuff and, and managing leads can't do that anymore. So what do you do? Everyone starts podcast, everyone gets a newsletter up on gardening, everyone gets on social media starts posting a lot, you know, maybe you do a lot of webinars, and I found that like, just through COVID, it was just a deluge of information. And here I am trying to, you know, advise executives on what's their five year strategy and say, like retailing, and how they're gonna use marketing tech, and it's like, how it's very hard to figure out what's the signal in this right? Like, there's so many different technologies and so much change that like, Okay, well, where do we even start with planning for the future where technologies are taking marketing? And so that's what kind of led me to the MATEC Wakelee and, and then I've been building it ever since it's literally started as a Friday LinkedIn post saying, hey, you know, this, the interest things are interesting this week. These are the things I think what mattered martech the stories the news, the acquisitions, the legislation, change the new new tech that came out, I just started posting and then over three months I reached 30,000 people and then And after that I started the actual newsletter proper because people were asking me, Hey, where can I start with email address? Okay, let's start that up. And then I've been working on it as a side gig. So I've been working full time and doing it every Sunday for about three years, and I've just gone full time about four or five months ago. And it's been a wonderful journey of exploration. I mean, more than anything, like building a business and building an audience, as you probably will truly know, Carrie, it's those things are wonderful and have a following is like, is really interesting. But like, the most rewarding thing is actually the intellectual pursuit. It's the creation of knowledge. It's the learning about these amazing technologies and helping others understand what's going on in such an amazing dynamic space at the moment. So so that's a bit of a long winded story. If I go back to the top, I would say again, Curiosity is probably the main the through line there with like, like, learn about the things that you're genuinely passionate about. And for me, it's martec.

Kerry Guard: Follow The Rabbit Hole. Oh, yeah. martech is certainly a rabbit hole. And we're going to unpack that in a second in terms of some of the trends you're seeing and what we should do about them. Before we get there. Tell me about a challenge you're currently facing you got are used completely shifted to being an entrepreneur where you were you working full time for a company, and now you're entrepreneur like, what, what's that leap you've made? And then within, you know, with where you are now, what's the challenge you're facing?

Juan Mendoza: That's a great question, Kerry. I think so I've been about five months in now. And I kind of towards the end of last year, I shifted into working about half my week on my tech weekly as I started to grow, but we launched a pro subscription, as you mentioned earlier, which is a paid subscription is 399. And, and basically the the subscription itself is our main driver. So our customers are our readers, they pay for our premium content, and we want to deliver for them every single week. And I found that literally coming out of a business being an employee to being an entrepreneur, company owner, you've got like unlimited options, right? Like, you could literally do whatever you want, you know, you don't have a manager that's giving you progress updates, or, you know, telling you how you're doing, you kind of have this vast sea of indifference. You know, and I think if you're wanting to be an entrepreneur, the thing that you have to be prepared for the most. And something that I definitely wasn't prepared for was that most people do not care. Like literally, if your marketer it same same deal applies most most of your customers just do not care is a vast sea of a difference, they won't give you feedback, they won't coach you they won't, you know, give you the insights that you need maybe to make critical changes. There may be a small group of people that really passionately care, but most people don't. And, and I find that, I'll find that actually, obviously, you know, it's not not fun, but it's also incredibly freeing, because they don't get so mad, you can do stuff and they still okay, but but I think that I think that there's there's a couple of layers to this. Because the first thing is that when you do something and launch something, and you put you create something you like, for example, for us with the martec, weekly 100. It's an awards event tracking from first place to hold your place the most innovative marketing tech companies, when you put something out in the world, you know, maybe your mom will text you and say congratulations, you know. And it's one of those things that like as an entrepreneur, you have to be extremely patient. Because in when you're doing media and you're doing content, it's one of those things where in five years from now, people will care. But most people don't care when you're starting out. And so you have to be prepared for like, the vast cycle of the vast sea of indifference like people, most people won't care or might care. And that's one way is like you might get you'll get a lot of crickets. The second one is your best followers will not be your best customers. And this is a really interesting learning like, so I had, you know, a bunch of people that would give me feedback every week, they're emailing me about our newsletters and the content of our podcast as well. You know, supporters sharing it, you know, just incredible encouragers when I launched the pro subscription, those people weren't buying. They were the ones buying subscriptions. It was actually the people we had no idea about people in Europe, people we've never met before, and had no idea but they've obviously been following along there, the folks that are buying. And so you can have your cheer squad, and you can have your customers, which choose which one you want to pick, you know, and I would say you want to focus on your customers, because those are the people that are transacting with you. But your cheer squad is not necessarily going to be your customers. And I thought that Did you know awesome following great group of people that really support me, but none of them are pulling their wallets out, you know? And I thought that was like whoa, a big realisation for me that well as a business owner, actually your customer who can be so different from the people that are actually really highly active with your products.

Kerry Guard: I will say in my own experience, something that I learned a little late O'Shea figured out sooner or had been paying attention to sooner is that you're right there's a difference between your cheer squad outside of you Parents we're not talking about our parents are always concerned. And, and the people who are going to pay and pull up their wallets. In my experience, you need both. Peter Wheeler, who's been on my show before and who now I'm good friends with talks about this as being like a referral friend. Right? Those people that you come to really know and get along with who aren't necessarily going to be your customers who but you build trust with to the point where when they hear about a problem that you can solve, they need to say, Oh, you need to go talk to one Mendoza, you need to go talk to Kerry guard like, it doesn't even it. They don't even question who you should go talk about to go solve that problem, because they know you so well, where the folks are in charge, don't. And so I would encourage people to in my, in my experience to not lean into one or the other, I would say you need you need both. It is a bit time consuming to try and build that audience. And if you do lean one way or the other, you do get colo caught off guard, like how do I have this big audience of folks who like I love talking to, like, I'm getting nowhere with sales, and then you you have this wonderful customer base, but then you like plateau at some point. And you're like, This is great. But like, I'm not growing past this, and what's happening. And so, you know, like I said, it's nice to have, it's nice to have both that if you can, if you can build it simultaneously. And I'm not saying that's easy, it definitely takes energy. Content is a great way to do both what's in your experience? You said you have those cheerleaders and you have those customers? Is the content leading you to both of those? Or is one meeting or one side than the other? What's been your experience in that?

Juan Mendoza: No, it's that's, I think it's like a really great topic to actually unpack. Because if you're creating content, you're trying to build an audience, there's two things that can happen that I think what I would call like an anti pattern, things that we probably don't want to fall into. The first one is parallel socialism. And the second one is audience capture. So para socialism is this idea. And it's, it's been around for a long time. But it's this concept of like, when you have people following you, and listening to your voice on podcasts and reading to reading your content, or your blogs, and maybe they're seeing you on live shows like this one. Those people that follow you feel like they know you. But me personally, I don't know them. So there's an imbalance or an inverse in relationships between the people that follow you and the pit and the people that you personally actually know. And so when I go say, you know, there was a little while ago, I went to a went to a conference, it was an Australian conference and did a talk. And I found that it was extremely exhausting, because like, all these people wanted to talk with me. And after I did a keynote, I spent like 45 minutes talking to several seminary, different groups of people. But they all came up to me wanting to have a conversation or a coffee chat or whatever. Because I feel like they know me, but I actually don't know them at all. And that that creates a very weird, very, I think unhealthy dynamic, you know, and so you have to balance that, right? Because when people are listening to you, and you know, they're engaging and consuming your content, they get a sense and that's the power aspect of the power of socialism is that they feel like they know you but but in reality, they don't they don't actually know you, you know, what I've craved for my content moment, personal life, my best friends, my my family, very separated from my media business, you know, so that's the first challenge, right? There's like, Okay, well, how do you deal with that? I think that's an interesting aspect. Because you don't want to be friends with everyone, you just come on, right? Like you got, you've got to prioritise the relationships, in business and in life. So you can't be a friend to everyone. You can't say yes to all of those invitations for a coffee cup catch up, unfortunately. But you know, when it makes commercial sense, and when it's good for your business, then great, you know, if it's good for your research, awesome. So the first one, the second one is this, this, this audience capture aspect. And you find this, particularly with people that do a lot of content for like the consumer side, not for business, where you have people that create content, and then particular on YouTube, it's got this really interesting algorithmic dynamic, where a lot of people will that are building YouTube audiences, they end up looking like Mr. Beast, you know, and if you know who Mr. Beast is, he is the like, the algorithmic optimizer in chief like he's learned the YouTube algorithm at like, inside and out. And what what's really interesting is that that audience captures this idea of you, okay, you're getting good feedback, good traction, customers, audience sponsors, and you're growing this, this content channel, but you can increasingly do what the audience wants you to do. You know, you're engaged and then there was this one, sir, I had can't remember the fellow's name, but he does. Mukbang which is this? It's an Asian YouTube content genre, which is basically like eating food in front of a camera. And he is guys based in the US. And you know, it's really popular. It's a really interesting, weird niche, but he started eating food in front of a camera is a skinny guy. And then five years later, he's eating trays of McDonald's, and he is like, huge, you're extremely unhealthy. And that is probably the most extreme edge of like audience capture, which is, basically this guys realise, okay, if I continue to eat like these crazy unhealthy foods and huge portions, in constantly in front of the YouTube, I'm going to drive a huge audience and the audience is going to want more of that. And so like the audience capture a bit is really interesting. For me personally, again, it goes back to like, what are you here for, for me, it's to explore the unknown and magic, right like is to actually understand that, but as you get feedback from algorithms, from your newsletters, from your podcasts of what engages, and what doesn't, it's very easy to fall into that trap of audience capture, which is creating for the audience's that what they want, not necessarily what you think they should have. So I think there's just two things, right. Like, I've been talking for days about this topic, because it's fascinating. The imbalances in the, I guess, the misalignment between audiences and the content creators and how they actually work, how those things work together, and all the anti patterns and traps that you could potentially fall into.

Kerry Guard: Yes, that is a whole other podcast. Yeah, I am here for and also terrified to unpack given that one person who gained all that weight. Um, I personally love doing these shows, because it feeds my own curiosity, because I am like you, I like to go down the rabbit hole and, and unpack these topics that I don't yet know about. And then I get to learn about them. And then I ended up going on my own fact finding missions, and lose days in the realm of Google and chat. JpT. So I, I'm with you in what it serves. For me personally, I don't maybe it's a blessing and a curse. And maybe you I haven't really grown my audience, I sort of like peaked at the 4500s. LinkedIn. And you know, maybe I'll crest into the the five to 10. And I hope to do that. But that isn't what it's, that's not what it's there. For me. I'm there to make connections and relationships, like with people like yourself, and the audience numbers are a byproduct of that, right? So I love having these interesting conversations, I think it's more valuable to have them not in a bubble where people can't hear them, because they're always so interesting that I wish I was recording. Right. So that's why I do them. And I think it's really important. I love what you're saying. And I I'm harping and I'm doubling down on it, because I think it's important for people to decide to do something like this in terms of creating content or building an audience with purpose, and remembering what that purpose is, so that you don't get caught up in the fame of it, the power socialism, or the audience capture of doing what your audience thinks they want you to do, versus what you want to be there for known for such a good point.

Juan Mendoza: It's like in our world, I'll just I want to add one more comment here, because it is important is that in in the world of business, particularly in b2b content, because that's our world, right? Like in marketing, our audiences are, of course, people who who come to us because of business reasons, you know, they want to grow their career, or they want to, you know, do better what they're doing with their job and their companies. But what I found is that a lot of people will want to outsource their opinions to you. And it's, again, another fascinating aspect of building an audience online, is that people will take your content and use it as their own opinions. Because a lot of and like, and it's totally normal, I've done it, I often do it. Very normal. And, and it's and again, it's another scientific word, which is mimetics, right? Like we want to, and it's like the construct of mimetics is memes, right? We want to copy each other, right, and copy each other's opinions and views and evidence and arguments and all of those things. But it's actually really valuable. So when you think about creating content, what you're doing is you're giving people opinions they can use, they can with their boss, with their team, with their own thinking. And people want to outsource those opinions to you, right? And so when you have people that have a conflict with that, right, when they don't have those opinions, you get a lot of negative feedback, because they're like, oh, that totally disagrees with my view, or my opinions, but a lot of people I think most people in business are more than happy to outsource their opinions to others. I think the vast majority of people working in marketing are happy to outsource their opinions, and they get their opinions from somewhere else instead of actually thinking critically for themselves. And that's the difference between I think, a good a good contract contract. Great. A great one is that they're free thinkers. I think they These are people that they are happy to explore and think and criticise themselves and criticise other other ideas and concepts, because they want to think clearly and think freely. And one of the best ways to do that is to create content, because content is just thinking like writing is thinking podcasting is just thinking, right, all of it is just thinking on a page or thinking on on a stream. So I think that's another aspect, which is, again, it's quite fascinating is that people would want to alter our thoughts, opinions, so you're doing them a favour, because they may not have an opinion on something until they listen to you or read you.

Kerry Guard: Because I want to get on my high horse, like real bad, and talk about this. So let's spend not even five minutes, because we will, we will lose our hour and this for sure. I think the challenge I'm having with that it's totally happening. It's completely happening. And then change them having with that is that it's creating a dichotomy of people who want to put out very clear opinions, advice, call them advice, monsters, around what people should do, because I'm telling you to do it. And it's not rooted in any experience. There's no context to it. It's just I just saw Chris Walker, do this around SEO and how 3% of your SEO should go towards pipeline, because it's really coming from word of mouth. Branded? Seo? Yes. Right. People are hearing it through the grapevine they're understanding that that might be the come from company for me, and they type in your company name, click on the top result that has your company name in it, and then gets to your website. And then that's being attributed to SEO, totally agree, right? When he's blatantly saying SEO is getting 75% of your revenue when it's only should be 3%. It's like, there's so much nuance in there. So can we stop like, it's so link, like, I just want the link bait, so I'm going to make this blatant comment. And, and people listen to him. He's got a huge following what he says matters. And he's, I think he should be taking more responsibility for that. And I think more people in his, in his I think David Gearheart does a little bit better job of taking responsibility and talking about his experience. And when he's doing it, exit five, at exit five, here's the experience we're having with this thing that we're doing. And he's taking responsibility for that. And I think we could all do a better job of storytelling and ruining it in our own personal experiences than saying, This is what you should do. And here's why. For no other reason, that'd be telling you to do.

Juan Mendoza: I want to ask you a question. Carrie, if you don't mind, I know you're interviewing me. But I'd love to ask you a question. What did you study at university? Did you study marketing? Well, there we go. What's your photography? For the study photography? Okay, so it might be a bit different, because I guess, from when I did my university, I did it in theology and philosophy. So it was majority was essay writing, actually, it was like, right? Well, you know, what they teach your university is that you get a bad grade, if you have a singular opinion, you have to actually discuss and have a discussion with the evidence, you have to wade through evidence. Yeah, yes, you have to go, you know, his evidence for his evidence against your thesis or your proposition. And your argument, right? What we see on again, is in and on Twitter, as well, and for a lot of b2b in Florida is the complete opposite of that, you know, we actually, the algorithms actually incentivize the worst, at worst into intellectual behaviour. Because what we actually taught in universities and what a professional would learn it, particularly in academia would be you have to, you have to weigh the evidence for and against, you know, you have to show your thinking for, for and against, and when we see this culture of hot takes of contextless advice, as you mentioned, with Chris Walker, what we're seeing there is no folks that are thinking rigorously or intellectually about these topics, but folks that are captured by the algorithm, you know, I mentioned audience earlier that audience capture is also an algorithm catcher as well, like, you know, the algorithms or social feeds, the things that are optimising that go oh, you know, if we do a hot hot take you know, for example, Scott Galloway is a good example of this right you're right you're right, you're right uh, in his no mercy, no malice newsletter, or his podcast, you'll have hot takes about all kinds of things and it's one sided opinions is not very, you know, nonverbal adept there in terms of the arguments, but a lot of nuance because people don't want nuance people just want a hot take in an opinion. And that's a really great way to grow an audience fast. But you know, what, the audience amount does not matter, compared to its quality by the who, who is actually listening And reading to you, reading your stuff is actually way more important than the volume right? And so what you find with b2b influences with large LinkedIn followings is that they'll try to do these like very inspirational, almost self help type stuff like Simon Sinek. Like he's the worst culprit of this stuff, right? Like he is the guy that's like, start with why, you know, he has these very funny two minute clips about leadership. And it really he's just leveraging other people's insecurity, like, that's what he's doing. It's not very rigorous, again, intellectually, but like, and then you have the guys that are like advice givers that is very one one sided one point of view, and not very, like reasons. And so I think for us with martec Wakelee, the audience where we recap we, that we engage with the most I Pepperwood, senior leadership that have that need that to actually discuss and to explore some of the evidence on both sides. Like most of my essays are not like one hot tech, it's like this is for this is against, and these are the sort of arguments for age, and kind of this is where we sit on this topic, you know, for example, is the metaverse dead. Well, there's arguments for against there's still some big deals and some big venture funding happening in the metaverse right now. But it's also you know, the amount of people on matters, Horizon world, which is as like, you know, the landmark martec product is abysmal, right? There's no customers in there, right? And but then you have like, free this is one. So this is not just individual content, content creators. This is like massive firms as well, right. So McKinsey, as an example, put out a report two years ago, saying that the metaverse is going to be worth $5 billion by 2030. You know, and it wasn't just it wasn't just McKinsey, it was Accenture. It was a hotbed it was Bain. It was all the big, big consultancies. They're all saying these huge forecasts, right, because they're 5 billion in 2020 2030 is a really cool headline right now catches attention. It's a hot take low nuance what happened. The metaverse? Well, it's in the bin. And so and so when I see like, I was at a conference in Las Vegas just a couple of weeks ago. And, and I was at the conference, and there was a guy that was coming to speak, I'll follow his newsletter. And I was sitting with the editor in chief of the like the media company that owns the conference. And I'll say what you should probably watch out for this guy, because he doesn't he only does one sided points of view, he doesn't look at the evidence. And as he was speaking, I was just sort of talking with her at the same time. And I was like, as you can see, this argument here that he makes about like, tech is dead and whatever. You know, he made a point about layoffs, I think and you know how big tech has done a lot of layoffs. But I also said, Well, if you look at the research, big Tex actually hired more people than they've laid off in the past three years, you know, and so, so when I was kind of going through his arguments, as he was speaking, I say, you know, this, this is not wrong, but he hasn't added this nuance to his arguments, but he's got a big following. And he has a very aggressive, very angry heartaches. But again, it's like if you want to live in a world of heartaches, you know, that's a place for imbeciles. Like, that's my view, right? That's a place that you're not going to learn you're not going to grow because heartaches get you nowhere, right? What you said before is spot on, like learning from others experience and how they wrestled with things is fantastic. But taking your opinions from heartaches is probably a road to nowhere. That's my view.

Kerry Guard: The last thing I'll say about it, and then I want to move on, because I'm excited about our conversation. But I do think this is a really important moment for folks, I hope they're leaning in and paying attention to this idea of steering clear of hot takes, or, or at least like leading with a hot take. But then balancing that I think is really important. Because one of the challenges I'm having with LinkedIn in particular right now. And, and X threads, whatever is that it's creating a diet, it's creating polarisation. And it's us versus them. And your idea versus money, yes, and not giving us space to live in the middle and in the grey. And then the EQ of like, what the reality is which it which is data, which is martech, which is the the customer journey in this messy middle like our clients and founders wanting, we're putting $10 And where's our 100 back, and it's like, let's unpack the nuance of this. And let's talk about the timing of when these things are going to happen. And let's talk about learning through your customer journey because every customer journey is different and what optimizations like it is no longer linear and trying to put us in these boxes of yes, no. And forgetting the end is really dangerous on so many levels and as I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but it is one of the reasons why the left and right have gotten so left in so right like we need to go back to Senator y'all. And part of that is looking at both sides of any argument. Yeah, and not just relying on the hot take. So yes to that one. I'm here for you All right. Let's talk about one of the one of your hot quote unquote hot topics that we're going to unpack and give a lot of context to. Hopefully yes is around what's happening in the market in regards to how it's changing in a way that's going to sort of throw us back to the future. There. Talk to me a little bit about how what the changes have been in the market that you've seen, and what opportunities reside with those changes.

Juan Mendoza: So I mean, I think right now is one of the most fascinating times to be working in digital marketing, full stop, I just think that there's so much change, you know, we had a once in a lifetime event, which is COVID-19. And at the centre of COVID-19, was, of course, a pandemic, which was just horrible, and impacted. So many millions of people, and so many people pass away, we're the centre of that we had the internet. I mean, last time we had a major outbreak of a pathogen was the Spanish Flu back in the I think it was 1904. Very, very early in the 20th century. And so they didn't have the technology to facilitate relationships and communication at scale, like we do now. So if we look at ourselves, historically, over a period of 100, and 150 years, we've had all these things line up for digital marketers that we've never had before, we've had the internet become mature enough that marketers can use it, you know, like, if you go back to, like the 90s, or the early 2000s, very hard to do marketing online purely because there was a world of developers and by the foundations weren't being built, the internet wasn't fast enough, it wasn't in your pocket with your smartphone. So So we're so we reached a point of maturity and Apex point of maturity, with how marketers can actually use data and content and experiences online. And then we had COVID-19, which shuffled all the commerce online for a short period of time. And then we've come out of that into this really unusual malaise, right? Like we're in this period of high inflation. Here in Australia, I think most parts of the world, inflation is like crazy. Interest rates are crazy, economic crunches here. And what this has done is created all of these second order effects. Now, I think the first thing to think about is well, when I was working consulting, when we no middle of COVID-19, there were companies that unlocked magically millions of dollars in budget for marketing technologies. There was like crap, we've been sleeping on this where we don't personalise anything for our customers, our app is like has been feels like it's been built by a teenager in a bedroom. And it looks like as an escape as escape 2005. You know, our our analytics and our ad tech, when the only way we can find customers right now, because people aren't actually walking by stores is Yeah, we don't have that data, we don't have that access, right. And so all of these companies spent millions and millions of dollars and in through that period from 2020 to 2021. We saw some of the biggest acquisitions in martec. We saw, you know, Salesforce acquire navigator, which is a CDP and you know, they've repackaged it into their own customer data platform, which is a way to manage your customer data, they made that acquisition you had up every optimal episode require Optimizely which is epi servers. It was like a CMS platform, they're quite Optimizely to enable personalization A B testing within their own suite of products. We had into it into it the folks behind table TurboTax acquire MailChimp, MailChimp of all things, right MailChimp, unbelievable success story, definitely look it up. But MailChimp was a they're a small to medium business email marketing tool it's been around forever and into it's like, no, we're going to acquire this business because companies will need to interact digitally with their customers. Small businesses will need to do that. And they're creating our portfolio. So you had all these acquisitions, but it's actually driven by like really cheap capital, a lot of venture funds going into Mar tech, a lot of funding, a lot of acquisitions. But underpinning that was just a lot of big enterprise companies. And a lot of small businesses were needing to use these tools. So we saw these two periods from 2020 to 2022. Midway, early 2022. We saw this period of extreme growth, and then we got and then we get into into this, what I call this period of fantasy, right? So we had like the metaverse, you remember Mark Zuckerberg, he did this fantastic video and the metaverse is future, right. Because, like from from Mark Zuckerberg, from Toby from Shopify, through to, you know, Sundar Pichai, from Google. Like all of these guys. They had this extreme optimism that the way that consumed was a bathing now during COVID is going to be mostly retained after COVID. And that hasn't been the case. And so we had all these fanciful, crazy ideas like the metaverse was so vaguely defined as a 3d worlds as the NFT is as crypto is a web three, you know, and we were captured by hype, a lot of that was just hype. And then now we're moving into post COVID, where it's all of this is actually even such the turbo charged with things like generative AI large language models, and that's the hot thing at the moment. But what what is done is actually just creating accelerated the hype cycles for a lot of these technologies. So what I when I talk to marketers, right, that one of the challenges one of the problems right now the changes, is just dealing with the hype, like what's hype and what's real, you know, should we use generative AI in our business? Well, these markers are asking the same question for the metaverse. Oh, should we have a Metaverse strategy? This is back in 2020 2021. You know, and so a lot of marketers need to explore these things that experiment, of course, but there's so much hype fueling this backdrop of, of new technologies, or new technologies and new ideas, that marketers are just completely confused by it. You know, I saw one job ad I saw one person on his LinkedIn profile. They went from the I think they're working at Coca Cola, or at a consultancy, but they were like the chief Metaverse, officer. And then there were the then they took the job as the head of web three technologies. And then now they're their head of generative AI, right, this guy's just made a career of like jumping from one hype cycle to the next. And like, you know, that's a really cool illustration of like, you know, right now, like COVID, has created this crazy expectation that like, most consumers want online experiences, and most consumers want, you know, these fanciful ideas, like the metaverse and NF T's, and even generative AI and all those things were actually there's some really great arguments against those things. And so I feel like going back to our original points about, you know, just earlier was like, I feel like we've marketers have lost a bit of their capacity for like, really being critical and critically thinking about the technologies they buy. I mean, even a latest research report from a centre this year say that, I think that more than 50% of marketers use less than half of that existing marketing technology stack. So the existing tech that they've already bought, they're using less than half of it. That's about 50%, of marketers. And I look at that, and I'm like, Yeah, because we're in this sort of hangover, right? Like, we bought a lot of stuff in cash totally. And a lot of marketers don't like any amount of brands I've worked with in the past that they bought, they spend upwards of half a million dollars on these tools. And it's literally on the shelf, because they bought it with some expectation and they never put process and people around it, never string their stuff never actually worked out the use cases to actually implement the technologies. And so I think if I could say anything, just off the back of that a monologue around all these changes is that I think we're heading into this period of like, I would call of extreme pragmatism, right? Because a lot of the ideas during COVID Failed. A lot of the ideas kind of demand peter out. A lot of people were left wanting. And then even with the marketing technologies, they bought a lot of them being underutilised. And so I think we're in a good two or three year cycle now of extreme pragmatism, cutting the budgets, you know, using tech last tip, you have, yeah, I was sweating, the stuff that you have at the moment instead of exploring new ideas, but And that's not just the tech cycle, but it's also the economic cycle. I'm in my cmo budgets are being slashed everywhere right now. It's really hard to get that to get that budget for tech anyway, right and explore those new ideas. So I think that's sort of the main thing is like, we're in this COVID-19 malaise. We're in this period. It's very tough to do marketing. And a lot of the technologies are not really petering out. But But that's my view.

Kerry Guard: I loved how you called it a hangover, it totally is one of the things that I also feel like it's changed in, in this shift from all this testing. Is the audience like the how we have changed as consumers, both on the b2b and the b2c side. And I don't think we're in a place where we want the cold calls where we want to engage with sales folks where we want, we feel like we've sort of gotten in through using a lot of this tech and realising they sold us. Here's a great example. So I'm not going to name names because they are a wonderful company, and we've been with them forever. But I think they got a little I think they lost sight of like what they were trying to do. And so we we've been using this technology for a long time. And we're sort of ingrained with them and we pushed really hard to like figure it out. But now we were like it's bigger than what we like we've lost sight of like what it is we're really trying to accomplish. Yes, because we I'm trying to make this technology work for us. And we need to get back to basics. And so it's caused us to just take a step back to say, what is it? What is it we're trying to deliver for our customers? In relation to what it is we do at our core? And is that is this technology serving that? And if it's if it is, then how do we make it work for us with the processes and systems you're talking about? And if it's not, I think we need to cut it loose, and get back to something more simple that can do it for us and much in a more financially stable way. And so I know that I'm asking these questions. I know, I'm not the only one. I do think there's going to be a tech renaissance of like, being really critical of this is the problem I'm having, and you say you can solve it. Can.

Juan Mendoza: Yeah. Well, it's, if you're right now, if you're working in a marketing technology vendor, and you're doing sales, it is hard, right? You're sweating? It's a tough job. Because, you know, I think, I think that there was just a concept of like a zero interest rate phenomenon, right? For example, with capitals cheap, right? If it's easy to raise funds, and a lot of investors have capital deploy, they'll tend to just deploy it on the craziest ideas, right? Because in venture capital, it's like, you get one winner out of, say, 1000 Losers, you know, and it's very similar to like gambling in that way, right? You pick one winner, and they'll get an entire return on your investment. The others won't. But that's like a zero interest rate phenomenon, right? When the capital is cheap, right? Like in a lot of businesses run on financing. When the capital is cheap, they can splash it around and explore these ideas and not have a real excuse me, concrete purpose. You know, like, Why get into NF T's if you're a company, like an airline, like walnuts, right? Like, why would you do that? Oh, like, like the one of the example I use a lot, which is, it's funny, but it's also extremely sad. Is this Walmart, Walmart launched a Roblox digital world, right? And like, so it's like a Metaverse world. And it was like, unusual, right? It was like this 3d world you can use in VR or use on your laptop, you can go and explore. And one guy on Twitter joined the live stream like virtual event where the CMO gets on the stage and talks about the Walmart experience. And he gets on stage and there's like no other advertisers in the crowd, right? There's, there's no one there. This is like early 2022. And you could say that they are exploring these ideas, and who knows how many millions and they've invested whatever into that kind of project. The European Union also had a similar like Metaverse party where there was like a couple 100 People that turned out, you know, it wasn't very popular at all. And like, I liked that, because the failure rate is good. Like, we should be failing at things quite a bit, you know, because there may be opportunities there. However, you're talking about people's jobs, and you're also talking about the capital, the financial resources to make these things happen. And I just think that Mark is going to be way more pragmatic. I mean, I think that right now, and you know, we haven't touched on a lot of other aspects, which is like privacy, it's changing the tech industry quite a bit, because you can't use less data to use so there's less opportunities with your data. So you have to be far more pragmatic and more privacy conscious about what you're doing. So that's one major change. But like, I feel like right now, it's, it's like, you got to be pragmatic, you have to spend your budgets wisely, this zero interest rate phenomenon is kind of over. And you know, what these things happen in cycles, you know, give us two years, let's get to 2025 2026. And we'll probably have another zero rate interest phenomenon, again, where you have a lot of capital, a lot of spending a lot of crazy ideas that never will work. And I don't want to come off as pessimistic either. I think that these ideas, even though a lot of them have failed, it's kind of still worth trying, right? Because you got to try you got to throw the spaghetti at the wall sometimes and figure out which ones will work and which ones won't. But when you see this, like extreme, like, I really broke my heart when I saw for example, Shopify and meta make huge amounts of layoffs, you know, because they're their ambitions in workout or their expectation of COVID continuing like the dynamics of COVID, continuing, didn't peter out, like, there is a way of going about these new ideas and trying stuff, which isn't like literally risking livelihoods of hundreds or even 1000s of people, you know. And so as a CMO, if you're a marketing leader, if you're a person that's actually got a team, you have to think so seriously, because one bad investment could mean that half your team are going next day, you know, you have to let them go because you just can't substantiate them being around. And that really breaks my heart. We're talking about people's careers and livelihoods here. It's not just ideas and concepts. It's actually people working to make this stuff happen with passion and grit and determination. So I think that's So one of the one of the things to perhaps look out for is if you are a CMO right now being pragmatic is probably a good season to do that. But just because, you know, it is a very tough time right now to actually make a lot of these ideas work.

Kerry Guard: What are some ways that we can be pragmatic, right, so we throw a lot of spaghetti up against the wall, we try to see what would stick we got, we got, we got caught up in the hype of it all, we're getting caught up in the hype of AI, whether it's hype or not, is TBD. But in the moment of it being really new, and us figuring it out. It's currently hype, I think we can all agree to that it's probably being a bit overblown than what it'll peter out to be. It's definitely going to change the landscape. But to the degree we think it will, I don't know, time will tell. We do still need to pay attention to and not lose sight of what has worked in the past, or what used to work that we've forgotten about. In your experience, what are some of those things that maybe we need to dust off and back and say it used to work, and it can work again? And let's, let's go back to I don't wanna say basics, I think he's really there's definitely stuff out there. That's not basic, but that we sort of lost sight of.

Juan Mendoza: Yeah, I, this is a fantastic topic. I mean, I wish we had a little bit more time to talk about it, because it's, it's right now, one of our themes in Malta in the Baltic weekly is this Back to the Future, which is, we're returning back to some of the foundations of what made marketing really great because of this pragmatism just because of this growing disillusionment with these tech trends and these hype cycles that are happening, but there are other shifts as well. I think, right now, that we're seeing, obviously, a lot of companies that were very focused on digital ad spend, actually returned back to brand brand advertising, like out of home, you know, TV sees, you know, the mass market approach to marketing, and actually allocate their leadership and their budget to that. One really good example recently is Airbnb that were very heavy on performance marketing for a long, long time, but they've actually just shifted over the past six months into a very, very much focused on, on brand marketing on on actually getting their brand out there. And I think that's a really interesting one, because, you know, the divide between brand marketing and out of home and above the line, if you want to say that, and then, you know, then all the digital activities like digital, the advantage of digital is you can measure things, right, you can do performance marketing, you can incrementally, you know, change things and get higher numbers with a brand marketing, you're kind of, you know, experimenting a lot more, it's a lot more freeform, you know, and you know, get those tangible metrics that you might like and attribution. So I think that's one area, which I think is worth exploring is like, Okay, well, how can you go back and get your brand out there and not necessarily do this hyper targeted marketing, etc, with the performance digital advertising folks? So that's one thing. The other thing is that I think that right now, where we're looking at options, particularly in the privacy challenges right now, so, you know, right now we have the GDPR, we have the CCPA, which are all these acronyms, basically different regulatory body bodies down here in Australia, we have all these new regulations coming out, massive shifts in tech. And what's happening is that that's actually creating this pressure on the industry, where privacy and data security becoming more important. And we're seeing with like unilateral moves from Google, removing third party cookies, and Apple, with Apple tracking, transparency, and all of that privacy changes across the devices. And the ecosystem like that is actually causing so much change, it's actually really hard to do mobile targeted ads. Now, because of Apple's changes, third party cookies will make like, I think martec.org say that, from their recent survey, they said that 70% of marketers are still heavily relying on third party cookies. And so this world of like free feted on unlimited access to customers data is coming to an end, right, we're waiting to the end of that chapter on the internet, which is crazy, right? Like we've had, like, I remember, I worked with some insurance brands years and years ago, and I won't name them. But I worked with his brand. And I was working on the email marketing, and I literally download a CSV or Excel sheet onto my computer. And it had the personal details, their location, their insurance products, their names, you know, their email addresses, and have like, literally millions of customers just sitting there, right? In a file. And I'm like, and that won't happen anymore, right? Those things where you can just, it was valuable. I wasn't gonna use it, but it was it was valuable because we can mined that data for insights and then target people segment them right. But like, we're seeing, we're coming to an end of those days, right? Which means that we're going to embrace old ideas. Like one example is contextual advertising. I wrote a piece on the motsek weekly called the contextual Renaissance, which is this idea of targeting users with ads and experiences based on the immediate context of that page, so not tracking them for a website or website or Accumulo. citing data or creating a profile, but what are they viewing right now? And what can we infer about that and then serve them an ad, it was really popular at the same time, third parties came out in the late 90s. And early 2000s, it was the same, it was like two horses in the race. It's contextual advertising. And then third party cookies. And both of them if you look at Google Trends, both of them are extremely possible. Popular back that back in those days, but third party cookies became the superior technology because of its efficiency and targeting. And contextual wasn't there because it was just not, it wasn't smart enough, it wasn't smart enough to infer the context of real time, the data wasn't there, it was just wasn't that it's also more expensive, because you were because it was limited space. So because the space was more limited, it was more expensive than just following your audience around to wherever they were, and then paying lower CPCs. So the, you know, the dollar one essentially, exactly right, it became more expensive. It's hard. It's more siloed. But like, but we're seeing a renaissance of that now. Like, there's some fantastic stuff like gum gum and C tag, they've just done a fresh round of funding both of them this year. I mean, those folks are fascinating, just because they're bringing AI into this picture generative AI, and we didn't have this technology before. And so now you can actually scale and get much cheaper, you know, CPC CPMs, just off the back of contextual advertising. And so we're seeing this interesting Renaissance. And you know, what's great about contextual, is that it doesn't require you to do this extensive data tracking on people. So it's actually proposed privacy positive privacy safe. And so that's, I'm looking at that as like an underdog, you know, that were really popular back in the day, and they're coming back and you're like, oh, maybe you know, it's like two horses in a race, right? You're at the, you're at The Great Race, where the horse races, you're like, oh, maybe they're gonna come back on the inside track and you know, win the day, you don't know. But what I'm saying is that, in this context, in this context of like, of an increasingly private web, we have to look at alternatives like that. And contextual has just been around. And there's been some fantastic new companies working on the new on, on solving that problem and unique ways. So I think that's probably what I'd mentioned, your turn to Brandon, and looking at old technologies coming to you, again, will probably be my main tool at the moment.

Kerry Guard: We could talk about this for days, I have a gazillion questions around the brand piece, I am a believer, I think that demand gen is going to be split into two in terms of going after brand and then capturing that on the lead side, I believe the privacy is having a huge impact on how we're we are now leaning more into contextual site direct buys community and creating our own first party instances where we can capture an audience and cultivate that in the long run is all coming out of the fact that third party cookies are going to be dead essentially. And we need to get back to that first party insight in a whole bunch of different ways. So if you want to learn more about Back to the Future and the renaissance of these technologies, please subscribe to one's newsletter, it is the which one is you have a couple So which ones this one in particular?

Juan Mendoza:  Oh, so So the newsletter is demotic weekly, here thematic weekly.com. And that's how you get a free Sunday newsletter with our sad dives. And and then there's our pro subscription, which is our Wednesday, which is a recap of everything that happened in the weekend magic.

Kerry Guard: Because it's great. I'm about to, it's gonna be one I know we're over time. But I do want people to know that you're more than a marketer. So can you tell us in the days of COVID I know it was now three years ago, but it has changed more than just our professional lives. It's certainly impacted our personal lives. Is there any new hobbies that either you picked up or you brought back to life? Given that you had maybe a little bit more time on your hands during those locked down days?

Juan Mendoza: Yeah, I think one thing I actually picked up, which was such a an incredible, I've got two young kids. So I've got a five year old and a three year old. So being at home with family was just incredible. I mean, it really rocked my world in terms of living and working and how that should be done. I worked in an office five days a week and so I never saw my kids when they're very young. But now I'm at home by five days a week and I love it. But what's giving me extra time for is actually music. So, you know, I produce music on the side. It's like a personal hobby I really enjoy. I've actually just started learning piano piano properly, but I think I've created about like 120 song ideas in different stages, you know, some complete some of sketches, you know, and and so it's like digital producing, you know, sampling and things like that. So, that's a hobby I definitely picked up and I love it. I just, it's such a great relaxing way to spend time and be creative in different ways. I mean, BMW is a very creative business, like we're constantly writing and creating, you know, doing all kinds of stuff. So I like to creative in a different format, which is music. So yeah, that's something that I've always, you know, done bits and pieces, but I never really actually got into a proper until COVID-19. It gave me that opportunity. So it's great question. Thanks for asking.

Kerry Guard: If you need a viola player, I mean, if someone I'm kidding, half kidding. Yeah, no, I, I played the viola for a long time, for 1515 20 years. And then I put it down. And then when I moved to this island, I ran into someone who was music teacher, and I was like, Can I see my fingers? So work? And she was like, Sure. So 15 years later, I picked it up. And then muscle memory is there. And wow, it's been brought back to my life. So I love yes to music, right? Like just a creative outlet of that. I also find this a great brain break. I can't think about anything else when I'm playing.

Juan Mendoza: Yes. Which is so important, like, you know, for intellectual work. It's not people think they're resting when they're sitting on the couch watching Netflix, and actually, no, that's not rest. Rest is actually using your brain in a different part of your intellectual life. You know, that's what I find the grip, the most refreshing part of it is, it's a totally different workout for your brain. But you come back refreshed, because you take that time away, it actually forces you to not think about, you know, the day to day work of what we're doing podcasting strip, you know, content and media and also marketing as well. So, it's a great point. You're right.

Kerry Guard: Wonderful one, this was an hugely important conversation I hope people are leaning in. If you haven't had a chance to listen to it. You listen to this in the recording, please drop us your questions, we will answer them we promise. And yes, thank you so much. If you want to learn more about Juan Mendoza and TMW Awards and the martech weekly, please head on over to his LinkedIn profile and subscribe to all the things. Please do that.