#19 - Are You Marketing for Today…or Tomorrow?

In this deep-dive episode of Over the Bull, we tackle two emerging threats in digital marketing that may be quietly undermining your brand:

1. Landing Page Pitfalls
Are you driving ad traffic to low-quality pages? Optimized landing pages now convert at up to 55%, while average rates sit at 2–5%—a staggering gap between real strategy and wasted ad dollars. Companies using 40+ tailored pages generate 500% more leads than those relying on fewer than ten.

Sources:

• Analytify – How Landing Pages Affect Ad Conversion Rate (2025):
https://analytify.io/how-landing-pages-affect-ad-conversion-rate/

• SalesGenie – 14 Essential Landing Page Statistics for 2025
https://www.salesgenie.com/blog/landing-page-statistics/

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2. Brand Blur from DIY Tools
Tempted by tools like Canva? You’re not alone—but overuse can dilute your distinct voice. “Thousands of businesses using the same fonts, layouts, and color palettes” risk fading into “a sea of sameness.” In fact, using these platforms for real brand identity can be like “trying to build a high-rise with Legos.”

Sources:

• LinkedIn – The Canva Conundrum: Brand Sameness in the Age of Templates
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blah-blanding-grindstonecollaboration-ppkrf

• EnvisionaryDesign – Canva Isn’t a Brand Tool. It’s a Delay Button.
https://envisionarydesign.com/canva-logo-design-brand-damage/

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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Welcome back to Over the Bull. The artificial intelligence train is coming. Are you ready for it? Many of you are not. So this episode, we're going to be talking about a lot of subjects, not least of which is a client that we had to let go last week. And, you know, sometimes you just have to do it. You know, if you see people making a bad move and you can make money off of it, you know, ethics has to take the front seat. And sometimes we just have to make decisions that are ethical decisions rather than those that are necessarily financial. Now, here's something I want to share with you. So A lot of you, I understand, are using practices that feel good to you. And you probably are getting a lot of stories and you're probably juggling a lot of things is where I'm going with this. So what I want to do is I want to start off with something this week called a normalcy bias. Now, if we pull up the definition of a normalcy bias here, It's also known as a normality bias. It's a cognitive bias that causes people to underestimate the likelihood or impact of a potential disaster or crisis, meaning that it's kind of like it's always been that way. It's always going to be this way. And because you get caught in this kind of normalcy situation, you don't see the train that's coming to you because you just simply don't believe it's going to hit you. And this is a known effect. And what I'm going to argue is that many businesses on the Internet today or that are marketing on the Internet today, you know, everything from electricians to e-commerce to whatever, I'm going to argue that a lot of them are going through a normalcy bias. And the idea is that if you can't get out of that, then you're going to be caught up in something that you may not be able to pull out of. Now, the problem is that once tried and true ideas, you know, 20 years ago, I think it's 20, maybe a little bit longer now, you know, the yellow pages was a big deal. You know, the bigger the ad you would get, the more color you would splash on. And it meant a lot of business back in today. Well, where are those yellow pages today? And what are the yellow pages of today that are going to go away that people trusted before? just a few years ago. Because if you look at the internet, it moves at such a speed right now that things are changing with incredible complexity and with unimaginable speed. And so as we go through this and we start thinking about these concepts, we want to start thinking about things you may be clinging on to that you shouldn't be clinging on to. Now, that was a situation with what we had to do last week. And anyway, so as we move forward, one of those things, obviously, that I've been talking about for some time, which will transition us into the first article that I want to pull some quotes from. And by the way, let's get the... the laundry taken out here real quick. And that is these articles that I will be using are not our articles. I don't claim to have written these articles. I just think they're fantastic. And what they're doing is giving you confidence in what I'm telling you, that what I'm saying has a strong likelihood that it's coming and coming quick. And if you rest on your normalcy bias that the things you've done are always going to work, then I think you're in trouble. If you're trusting certain concepts, I think you're in trouble. And that's why I talk about this idea of landing pages. So, as you know, one practice that I've talked about quite a bit lately, because I see so many people doing this, where these Google ad agencies, basically, what they're doing is they are building these little microsites. So the idea is if your business is called Acme Business, they'll spin up another site called acmebusinessservices.com or whatever. So it's not your main website. And then they build these ads. And then what they do is they send the traffic from those ads to that offshoot website. Now, just like some other practices that are going the way of the dinosaur, this is going the way of the dinosaur. Now, it's not landing pages. It's not building something custom for Google Ads in general. It's the strategy of building these little island websites that have no credibility, and all that traffic is being sent to those low-credible websites, and you're not getting the full benefit of what you're spending money to do. Now, This is the crux of why we had to let go of a client last week. They can't let go of it. They don't want to go through the growing pains and what they're doing feels so good and they just want to stick with it. And you know what? I understand where they're coming from as a business. But when you see, you know, short-term gain for long-term failure, it just really bothers me. So we had to step away. We could have made the exact same amount of money as an agency doing a fraction of the work, and it just didn't make sense. It didn't feel ethical. So we had to kind of pull the plug. It was amicable, and it was a good conversation, but obviously not in a sandbox we would want to play in because I like going to bed at night. So let's look at this idea of landing pages. So idea number one, obviously, was Google Ads to them building a page and then doing it. Now, one of the things that these guys do, and I can't quite figure out what statistic or what number they're trying to manipulate, but a lot of times in your Google Business account, they're going to put a link to that kind of scrape low-ranking website in your Google Business profile too, which is a huge mistake. Okay, in a world where the internet is all about credibility, and authority, and you're going to create confusion by introducing that little microsite into the mix, even if it's converting great right now, you really, really need to start thinking about the big picture here. And yes, it's going to be painful. 100% it's going to be painful. But that system is not going to make it in a world of credibility. Now, Let's talk about landing pages in general. So first, what is a landing page, right? Well, it's a page where people land on. I know it sounds a little bit basic there, but that's exactly what it is. Typically, these are highly optimized pages to meet a certain goal, and you run ads to those pages. Now, that's perfectly acceptable. Matter of fact, I want to give you some quotes to show you it's more than acceptable. So part of the situation last week was like a classic bait and switch. And it was where this idea of using this Google Ads practice and then bundling it in with creating highly optimized landing pages in the right way was being intermixed. And it created some client confusion because you can make a great argument And it's really not debatable that these landing pages can be incredibly beneficial and they can do a lot for you. But if they're using the wrong context, they can't. And so this bait and switch of justifying landing pages versus building out these little micro subsites that do nothing other than feel good for the day, That's huge, and that's really a whole separate issue that we're talking about here. So landing pages are good in the right way. Landing pages are bad in the wrong way. And so what I'm going to do is talk to you about how to do it the right way, but let's talk about a quote or two here first. So if we look at this, what we're going to do is we're going to look at a– This website is called Analytify. Tell me that's not hard to pronounce. But it's how landing pages affect ad conversion rates. So this is a really interesting quote. Businesses with optimized landing pages see conversion rates of up to 55% compared to the average conversion rate of 2% to 5%. Now, Keep in mind, okay, let's break this down a little bit because, you know, we have probably some new listeners. We want to break down some terminology. So landing pages, optimized, basically means you really try to get the language, the image, the flow of the page. You try to get all the things right on that page to where basically it's optimized to perform that, get that action when someone visits that page. That's what optimized is. Okay. you know, load times and all those things can play into it. But, you know, if you run across somebody and they're hyper-focused on load times, then that's all they're going to talk about. It's normal because that's just what those people know. But optimized landing pages are good. And conversion rates. So what is a conversion rate? Conversion rates are meaningful actions. Okay, when you're running something like Google Ads, you want to... optimize them for meaningful actions, not rudimentary actions like clicking on a button. If it doesn't have true meaning in what matters to your business, optimizing Google's machine learning to optimize for that action would be a mistake because that's really not what your ultimate conversion is. And I often see people who just really just smother their, if that's even a word, smother, but basically chalk up a bunch of conversions that are meaningless in their Google ads or you know, in matter or wherever they're running their ads. And they're meaningless actions. And what they're doing is teaching machine learning to optimize for all those actions, which some of them are really meaningless. They were just kind of padding the stats. And so when we look at conversion rates, just think meaningful actions. And then you see the average conversion rate. So the idea is how often do people make that action? And the article, it says, you know, with the proper page, it can be up to 55% compared to the average conversion rate of only two to 5%. So basically the more conversions you get at a lower cost per conversion is good. And so it's not the cost per click, guys. I mean, that is an indicator, right? But it's not the goal. And so the idea is if you're spending a dollar a click, but it costs 1,000 clicks to make one conversion, then that conversion or phone call costs you$1,000. And so the idea is you want to look at what the cost per conversion is, and you can also look at the cost per click, but don't let the conversation stop there. And as I mentioned last week, if conversions are not part of your discussion with your– paid ads guy, then you need to have a serious discussion on why that's not the case. I can't think of one reason you would run Google Ads without setting up conversions in a meaningful way. Yeah, there's nothing coming to mind. Maybe when I go off the show, maybe I'll think of some reason, but I very seriously doubt it. So what this is saying is, yeah, you should optimize your landing pages. 100% optimize those landing pages. But they need to fit into the scheme of your overall credibility. You see, the idea is, and I shared this analogy prior to, but people now, they're using artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to quickly go from a question to making a purchase. And if your credibility is not where it should be, then these AI models are not going to refer to your business. And if you create confusion by having a bunch of microsites pointing here and there, then that's also creating confusion. You see, the problem is clarity. The problem is clean. And that's what you want to do as much as you can. So build those landing pages on your main website. Build them in places where it's going to contribute to the overall plan. And don't waste all the credibility and traffic and everything that's going to go to these little dinky microsites that feel good for the day. Don't be susceptible to this thing. cognitive normalcy bias that's going to likely bite you if you keep running down the road. So the other thing is, is don't fall for a bait and switch, okay? Don't let your Google Ads guy tell you that building a whole separate website with a low domain authority is the same as an optimized landing page. And that they are both landing pages, meaning it's a place that people land on, right? They're not constructed in the same way. So it's like taking a hammer and saying a hammer's a great tool, but not when you're banging on glass, you see. So you want to be careful about that. And this article is a great point in that landing pages are very, very important. But what else does this say about a landing page? So what happens? When someone goes to, let's assume that you've got your Google Ads campaign set up, and you send them to a landing page, you have to meet the demand of what that person wants. And so your price has to be there. You have to be able to do things that show the benefit of using you versus someone else. And you should never stop at the price. I mean, that's probably the most common mistake. I met a guy years ago. He's a pretty smart business guy, and one thing he said is there's always going to be somebody willing to sell something for less money to go out of business quicker than you do. And so the idea is to build a value proposition. And so part of the idea of optimizing Google Ads is to also optimize everything from the moment that they see your ad to what they read on the ad to the page they go to to the message they see, the price they see, and everything that they see, make sure all that's competitive, and then optimize that for conversion actions. And the most minor things can make the biggest difference when it comes to that. So what's the missing element? Time is the missing element. And time is making adjustments, changing things around, having real discussions and not just masking the idea that, you know, you're getting so much traffic, which goes back to another strategy that I typically see with these these paid ad guys. And that's them putting those little low ranking pages in their Google business profile of their clients, because, again, as far as I know, they're just trying to stack the numbers to make themselves look good. I could be way wrong about that, but I've been digging and trying to figure out exactly why in the world they're doing it. But to me, it's kind of like, you know, the old quarterbacks in the 80s, you know, throw in the flats and let's get our numbers up. Okay, so let's move on to a little company called Sales Genie. Of course, I'm being a little bit facetious. 14 essential landing page statistics from 2025. So check this out. Businesses with more than 40 landing pages, that's a lot of landing pages, generate over 500% more leads compared to those with fewer than 10 landing pages. Now, if you're in a small business, you probably couldn't even think about 40 landing pages if you're offering a professional service. But you could definitely break things out. You can subcategorize things. such as different styles of services if you're a plumber. Break those out because it's like this. If I'm looking for someone to repair a sink and I have to weed through hot water heaters and all this other stuff, it takes time for me to do it. And I may get tired. I may just get frustrated and leave. Well, if I had a highly optimized page for repairs and an easy call to action to get that leaky sink fixed ASAP, then I may be more likely to use that service. And so the idea is basically you do want to optimize landing pages for each service, but then here's kind of the catch, right? You also have to build out different ad campaigns for those specific needs. So there's a term you may not be aware of. It's called a SCAG, S-K-A-G, single keyword ad group. And what that strategy is, is you focus an ad group on very specific keyword or very tightly knitted keywords in some cases, and you send them to a very specific landing page. And so that's a pretty good idea of how those things work in conjunction. But if you think that someone's going to start you up Google ads and then tomorrow the rain's going to fall and the floods are going to be great and all that, um, It's not going to get you over the goal long term because you should be massaging that content and looking at it. And be prepared for the ripples in the lake, meaning that it's not always going to go smooth. A lot of times you have to fight through things. And every location, every business is different. I know you've heard that, but it's true. You can market the exact same thing in two different locations and have two different results using the same methodology. So working through it takes time. And, you know, it's more than two or three weeks. If you go back and listen to the last podcast, you'll see credible resources saying it takes time, you know. And so let's move on here. So the idea, what's our lesson learned? Our lesson learned is, one, that if you're not careful, bait and switch can be used to justify anything, you know. You take one sentence out of the Bible, you can make it say anything. But within context, it's a little bit different. The problem with online marketing today is that it's all about pulling the one sentence out that makes somebody sound better than they are. And unfortunately, with how complicated the language has become, that it's easier than ever to do those things. And as an owner of a business... You just want the phone to ring, right? You just want good things to happen with the money you're spending, grow your business, and go home and not worry about the phone calls. Well, the idea is that's what every business wants. The question is, are you willing to put in the effort, and are you working with the right people that have your business as their top priority and not the idea of trying to defend what they're doing or defending their own income, which is a challenge. It's kind of a conflict of interest. So bait and switch is one of those. The other lesson is landing page is good. Little microsites that have poor authority are bad. Okay. Now, they have always worked. Traditionally, that has been a strategy that does work. But it's going away because credibility is important. All right. Done rambling. Let's move on. So the next thing is... I want to jump way, way into left field here. So we're going to go from marketing to design concepts. And, you know, one of the big kind of do-it-yourself design platforms out there is something called Canva. And, you know, it's really kind of a neat platform. And it does have a place in the world, in my opinion. But The question is, is when do you use it? When do you not use it? Should I use it? And I'm even seeing like people that are claiming to be professionals that are using it in ways where they probably shouldn't be using it. Now, I've touched on this issue with clip art and these kind of let me design it myself and save myself some money kind of strategies. And the idea is, should you be doing that? And what's the harm in doing that? And what are you doing when you choose these things? So for my analogy, I've always used it because there are some brilliant tools. I mean, Adobe Creative Suite's been a staple forever. I started off on an early version of Photoshop and those tools, and luckily I was able to pick it up a little bit as I go. It's a fairly complicated tool. And it takes a lot of time. I remember going to Vegas to get my Adobe certifications back when, gosh, 2009, 2010. And I was literally sitting in there with a contractor for NASA. And she was afraid to take the exam. you know, for her certification because she was worried that NASA would find out if she didn't pass. So that gives you an idea how complicated these tools are. Now, if you compare that with something like Canva, you can jump in, get an account, pick a template, and go with it. From my standpoint, I go it's kind of like using very basic tools. And so as a professional, I have question marks. I'm not saying that it's good, bad, or indifferent. I lean toward it's showing that you're not that serious about your craft if this is what you do. And you're more concerned about whipping things out to make more money quicker with less overhead. But I could be wrong. I could be 100% wrong on that. That's just my opinion. So let's talk about LinkedIn with Grindstone collaboration. And here is the title of the article, The Canva Conundrum. how blending is diluting brand identity. So here's the quote. When thousands of businesses use the same fonts, layouts, and color palettes, branding starts to blur into a sea of sameness. You see, let's talk about this just a little bit. Let's go back and let's think about how a business owner probably sees this. Pretty template. my logo goes on the template, I add my copy, I put in my pictures, and it's branded. Absolutely wrong answer. When you're developing a brand, it's everything has to be consistent. And so, you know, if your business is using linear frames, which are just Think about a picture and the container of it, and you're using linear rectangular frames, and you pick a template that circles, and it's got maybe some big borders around those circles, and it just looks nice, and then you throw your logo on it. Well, you're creating some brand continuity issues when you do that because it's everything. It's the tone of your business. It's the colors that you use. It's the positioning of certain elements. It's the kind of ways that you use those elements. It's not just as simple as plopping a logo onto a layout. Now, if your face is turning red, don't worry about it because this happens a lot, okay? And you're not the only person to do that. And as a matter of fact, if there are well-meaning designers who are doing it and not trying to cut corners, they're doing it. So you would see where it goes. Now, the question is, is, Another problem with humankind is what we call the herd mentality. Well, if it works for them, it's got to work for me, right? I mean, how many do-it-yourself website builders are making tons of money because people say, well, hundreds of thousands of people use them, so it must be okay. I should use it too. That's the herd mentality. However, the herd, a lot of times when it comes to the Internet, is absolutely not where you want to live. And so when you're looking at this kind of, you know, this thing, it's tough because you you're probably thinking, I want to save money and it looks good. And there are people that I trust that are using it. But here's the thing. If you look at some of the people on our team and they go to different locations, they can point out a can of a piece usually pretty well is the way they tell me. And the reason being is it all still kind of has the same thing to it, so to speak. And so they can pull it out. Just like, for example, if you're driving down the road and you see a billboard and it's an artificial intelligence-driven image, your mind's starting to pick up on that, isn't it? You're starting to clue in that that's not a real image. Even though it looks really good, you know something's not quite right. You see... Christopher Hitchens, I used to listen to a lot of theological debates, and one thing that Hitchens would say is that we're pattern-seeking mammals. Now, he was an atheist, a very entertaining atheist, by the way. I enjoyed listening to his debates, although I didn't agree with him theologically or philosophically. But there's something about the human condition where we do look at that, where we look into the clouds and we see An elephant or a bird, we're making sense of our surroundings and there's something there that we do. And so when you're looking at some of these other things, you're starting to see that the human mind is starting to discern, right? And so anyway, as we move through this, there's this idea that the more that this stuff does, the more being unique and staying true to your brand to a fault is going to help you stand out, right? and do less of this blending. But for a designer who's trying to make a buck, it's much easier to jump into Canva, pick a template, throw some stuff on it, and call it job well done and mark it up significantly. You see the difference there. Let's talk about this other one from Envisionary Design. Canva isn't a brand tool. It's a delay button. That's an interesting subject. So the quote is, Canva, when it comes to brand identity, using Canva to design your logo is like trying to build a high-rise with Legos. Oh my gosh, is that not ever resonating with me right now. I mean, it's insane how much I just resonated. So the idea is when you take these tools, it's like you're trying to build something that really shouldn't be used for. And you're really reaching outside the scope, you know. So if we go back to, like, Jurassic Park, and I forget the guy's– the guy quote, you know, he's talking about the dinosaurs. And he goes, something like you ask if you could do it, but you never really thought if you should do it. Something like– he just paraphrased sloppily, but you kind of get the point. It's like just because you can do it, should you do it? Because I still run into businesses today that have used clip art for logos. You're going to have trademark issues, all kinds of issues with that stuff. So you want to be careful because it's easy. Also, I found a lot of these freelance websites that do logos real cheap and things like that. You can kind of backwards look some of that stuff up. I ran a test on several of these just to see what they would come up with. And so I was throwing out this concept for a logo. And I could backtrack it to clip art that was just modified. Because the idea is you think about it, if you're paying someone$100 to compete to create a logo, and it's a contest, and they're only getting$100 or$200 or$300, think about how much time they could realistically put into that to still make money in the end. It doesn't make a lot of sense at a certain point, right? Okay, so here's where we are with design. You know, this idea that AI is going to take over the world or that you can use these tools and do things yourself, build your own website, do your own design work, save money because you're a lot smarter than those crazy people who are paying professionals to do it. There's a reason they're paying the professionals to do it, and there's a reason they're not using do-it-yourselfers and perhaps tools like Canva. And that's what these articles are coming out and saying is that they do have a place, but it's not there. And so the question is, is where do you use it? How do you use it? What kind of filler pieces can you use it for like realistically? And should you even use it in your business? And what I think is going on, just like I'm seeing this with the Google Ads thing and just like I'm seeing it with the creative stuff, is I'm seeing this mishmash of not understanding it, trying to cut corners, and thinking that somehow that's going to work as good as developing a real plan with real goals. Now, that's simply not true. That's fantasy. And if you think you're smarter than the next guy because you're bypassing that by having a college kid do something or or whatever it may be, you're hurting yourself in the end. And the deal is, is that brand tone, gosh, websites, content, social media, frequency to do it, advertising, fine-tuning it. doing the right things and understanding it, it's like you're building an ATM machine is the way I put it. And it doesn't happen overnight. And if it was as easy as going and throwing a bunch of disjointed tools together and grabbing a bunch of things and putting it on the internet or whatever, then everyone would do that. You see, they're preying, in a lot of these cases, I'm not saying any specific brand, but a lot of times they're preying on your your psyche. What they're doing is saying, hey, you're smarter than this. You don't want to spend more money, so why do it? Use these tools, use these processes, and come along with it. So when you look at the Google Ads guy, he has a model that works, and he has a model people trust. And to shift gears on that model, and then have to understand that search engine optimization is coming back in a real way. Now, not your dad's search engine optimization, and I'm 52, so you can see here I'm poking at myself a little bit because I've had to change as it changed. It's not the SEO of 2009, 2010. It's a whole new world of search engine optimization with a whole new series of tools Different things you look at, such as GAIO, Google Artificial Intelligence Overview, or some call it AIO. Now we're not playing bingo. You know, there was a farmer. Okay, I digress. But it's not that. But what it is is looking at these metrics that are meaningful and then putting it all together in a way that's going to build you a successful plan. And that takes time. It's not something you glue together or put together with duct tape. I'm from the South. We love our duct tape, but that's not what we're talking about here. Okay, so those are the articles I wanted to touch base on today. We'll put the links to those articles in the footnote of the show notes. And what I want to do now is move on to the client that we had to part paths with last week. Now, What's really interesting is our first podcast, it was a client we had to fire. Now, in that case, it was, we got to let you go. You know, we can't. In this case, it was softer. It was like, hey, I see where you're going. I understand why you're doing it. But, you know, we can't play in that sandbox because it's against our philosophy. And we're just going to be collecting a paycheck to hurt your business long term. And I don't feel that that would be ethical for our organization to do that. And so we had the conversation. And so basically what happened is they use a Google Ads guy out of Canada, I think, and he has some success. Now, he had success with them. I can also tell you that other people that swim in the same waters with the same product are have had a miserable experience with the same guy. And so the idea that, you know, this guy spends gold is strictly in the mind of this one client. Well, they signed up with us through one of our partners, and we started working on their project, but their Google Ads wasn't going as quick as they wanted it to. And they started to get nervous. And they started to feel that pull back to the previous guy. And they also knew we were doing a lot of good things. But they also had that ticking in the back of their head that, boy, those leads felt really good and the growing pains aren't feeling that great. And when they talked to him, he would give them arguments that were half-truths. They weren't legitimate in context. You remember our Bible analogy. And so what happened was they wanted to go to him for that one thing, and they wanted to keep us for all the other things that we're doing because they said we do wonderful work, our creative's really good, they liked everything that we were doing, our SEO work, our social media work, our content marketing work, all that stuff was really positive for them, and our infrastructure. That one thing they didn't want to do. Well, It came where I was debating if I wanted to compromise or not. But then I saw like a slide, you know, where, yeah, but he's also got to go to our Google business profile. And yeah, he's going to be doing some stuff in there. And yeah, he's got to do that. So I felt like I was basically giving up way too much ground and not able to help the client. And so at that point, I said, you know, I've just got to opt out. And one of the questions they asked me was, well, I know also he's been saying things technically that are 100% incorrect. And one of the things that he had told them, which is so crazy when you think about this, but one of the things that he had told them was, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a second. It was about Google business. So this is a Google ads guy who says he's a specialist in Google ads. And then he does this little zoom or go to webinar or something like that. And he pulls all these franchisees in and he's like talking about the great trick that he's come up with. Now, keep in mind, tricking search engines is a bad word. It may feel good for the day, but not long term. And what he said to do was put the keyword that you're targeting in the name area of the Google business profile section. So let's get this out of the way real quick. Google frowns upon that. Google really, really frowns upon that. And it was one of the strategies that he had said for them to do. And he acted like he struck gold. Like, man, this one thing is just going to push you over the top and and all this other stuff. So when he got access back to it, I knew the same old game was going to start being played. Well, maybe not this one anymore. But what's really funny is everybody was there, but now he's in strict denial that that's what he said. However, it's recorded. And so the idea is to see those kind of practices going into a campaign and then knowing that They could have their account go through a re-verification process, maybe even a suspension process, which is not very fun. And then being caught in the mix of that, to me, that also just simply wasn't worth it, which is why we kind of had to draw the line and say, hey, good luck. But at the same time, I could fully understand where they're at. Now, we were very clear when we first started out that this is something we've got to relearn because You know, he had parts of that already in his kind of canned system that's not really the way you should do things. And so we were very clear about that, but they just got anxious. And I don't blame them, and I told them that. You know, it's like it's okay. You know, I get where you're coming from. I don't agree with why you're doing it, but I also understand why you're doing it, right? So anyway, the lesson that you have there, and it's a very valuable lesson, is, you know, the deer that gets hits, the one that sits in the middle of the road, right? It's not the deer that makes a decision. It's the one that stands there. And the idea is that, you know, they staggered. And they were about a quarter, maybe a little bit further across the street. Now, they didn't have some of their stuff. They just started a new division also. And so they didn't quite have that figured out. But the idea is that we were working with them to try to figure that out. But they were already, you know, almost there. But it's like they hesitated. And now they're back to the old games. Right. So we're back to the normalcy bias. Right. We're back to the idea that, man, that felt good. It's going to be all right. We got to go back. We got to go back. And they're going to, I fear for them long term. But again, when it feels like a he said, she said, those kind of things do pop up. By the way, as a side note, there are certain things that we've learned not to do as an agency. And one of those is to collaborate with people that are not partners with us. And the reason that we do that is because a lot of times you find yourself kind of caught in this mix of education and this muddiness. And also, it can become a finger-pointing situation, you know, just this constant struggle to try to move the needle. And so if you run into a marketing agency that is a little bit resistant to partnering up with people on a whim— There may be good reason for that. So just a side note, a lot of times it's not just because they think they're a certain thing and the other people are not. It's mainly because you have too many cooks. You don't really know what's going on. Then you've got to collaborate. Then you've got to see if they're following best practices. And then you've got to see if they're holding up their end. And that's why, as our agency, a boutique agency business, In Asheville, you know, we do a large gamut, invest heavily into certifications and equipment to be able to handle a diverse amount of needs and build custom plans for people and be able to fully execute it. Because a lot of times the noise in trying to coordinate isn't worth it. And so for our standpoint, it just feels better to be able to do it that way. We have a lot more success with it. So patience is one of those things, guys. You know, as business owners and, you know, you're watching cash flow and stuff like that and you're used to hanging on to something that's working or you're happy with the guy that's doing it and the language is confusing and you're being reassured that what's going on is going to be okay, you need to be careful about that. You know, I had an analogy here. And it's one I'm sure you've heard of. I'm going to turn my head so the speaker may get a little bit funky here. But it says, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. And so when you go through this and you start looking at what's going on in the world of the web, a lot of people are so hyper-focused within a niche, or niche, however you want to say that, that They kind of see everything as that nail. And so if they're hyper-focused on artificial intelligence and they're building blog articles without any human intervention and then saying, hey, great, look at all these articles that I built. And then they start building a model and selling that more and more. There comes a point, regardless of what the signal is, they're going to push that. And they're going to keep pushing it because it's a means of what they do. It's their hammer. So, if working through designs quickly by pulling templates is their hammer, they're going to push the hammer. If it's running Google Ads in an improper way, it's the hammer, you see, and they're going to hammer it and hammer it and do whatever they can to justify that. It doesn't matter if they're banging it against glass, wood, nails, the ground, whatever. They're going to push that. So, you kind of want to be careful about making sure that the people you work with do have a good grasp. And sometimes when people collaborate on things, it's kind of like they're all feeding off the same thing. And sometimes I think it's not a good sign when you see these different companies collaborating in certain ways. I very seldom have actually seen that pulled off really successfully. I've seen it where it gets so fuzzy that you really don't know if it's working or not, but you see so many people telling you it's great that you really don't know what to do. Again, I could be way wrong on that. Okay, so let's recap on some things that you need to be doing. Number one, of course, never, never, ever answer cold emails. Okay, I've said this time and time again. Cold emails, when it comes to marketing and design, say one thing about the person that sends those emails. They don't know how to market their own company ethically. And if they don't, how are they going to market your company ethically? It's a big deal. And here's the other thing, too. When you do respond to it, you're actually contributing to the problem. And that is you're telling spammers that when they send unsolicited emails to your email address and you respond to it, you're saying that works. And so it's one of my things I recommend all the time. Block them. You only have so much time in a day. You only have so many hours in your life. Don't waste it on things that are just going to be a distraction. Don't fall for the sales pitches. And so I think that's the big one I want to leave you on today. All right. Well, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I hope that this does help you out. I hope that it gives you food for thought. And I hope that it helps you move the needle for your business and gives you insight in ways that help you understand that This web is changing. This Internet is changing. You know, moving from eight tracks to digital downloads and skipping cassettes and CDs is, I think, what we're in the middle of getting ready to see in a major way. And that's going to rock a lot of boats. And, you know, stay true and make sure you're following best practices. And you know what? If you have somebody recommending something, ask them to show you. If it's the best practice or not the best practice, ask a ton of questions. We always enjoy that. Okay, I'm done rambling for this podcast episode. Until we meet again, this is Ken with Over the Bull, talking to you from the Integris Design headquarters out of Asheville, North Carolina.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.