as of this recording August 5th the stock market had its worst date in 2 years there was a wipe out of roughly a little bit more than a trillion dollars of value from the stock market the US Stock Market mainly from large Mega tech stocks the the Magnificent 7 magnificent 7 or 20 or whatever you want to end up calling it was just large Tech socks it was more than just the seven that was Mega cap yeah it was Mega cap and it's it's funny when you think about the stock market most people are like oh that's Financial that's nothing to do with marketing it actually creates a huge marketing opportunity I don't know what you've seen Eric but typically when times get bad and we saw this at our agency over the last few years because there's been a lot of bad periods a lot of these publicly traded companies pull back and what they are whether you're working with these large publicly traded companies or not they're some of the biggest Spenders on Google Google Facebook Tik Tok Instagram LinkedIn the list continues on and on and when things just get really bad with their stock price and they're losing billions in market cap the first thing they try to do is cut marketing marketing and it's the easiest thing to cut you want to cut people you got it's harder it's harder to cut people you know there's emotions and everything Severance yeah SE Severance cost a lot of money you don't want a a a bunch of backlash to happen it's just easier to cut marketing and then when things get really good what's the first thing they add back marketing yeah cuz it takes a while to hire people and ramp back up but not necessarily with marketing and what we find is in a bad economy even though you're hurting more ads tend to get cheaper uh you can end up acquiring more customers and taking up more of the market share you know while it lasts and then when the stock market starts going up big corporations start spending more which makes it harder for SBS to spend and keep up and get the line of the traffic yeah so I mean look I think right now we we've seen crypto's dropped a lot um Bitcoin dropped under 50 grand um to 49 or so and eth dropped like 20% in in one day um really Qui question for you sorry to cut you off you know people told me Bitcoin dropped to like 49 grand 50 I thought it was in the 50,000 range for a while now it went to 72 last week it was like 6068 or so oh yeah you're right dude I'm looking at the chart it went from like 60 something high 60s to all of a sudden like 49,000 in less than seven days a lot of the drop came in few days yeah but I mean the stock market crash is interesting because it it it it triggered from Asia first right like it's uh you know Japan was I think they were they're borrowing US dollars or whatever and then they use that money to go buy stocks like US stocks and then they basically had to unwind um this trade um and so you know the chickens are I guess they coming to roost in Japan and um you know how the the the Yen was really weak against the dollar now it's like strengthening now right and so Neil and I by the way we're not econ economists but we're just reading about this stuff um so I think you know the and by the way related to this Warren Buffett unloaded he's he's unloaded half of his Apple shares I believe um or was it all of it uh no 50% and he own 3% of uh he owns wait does he own 3% of the treasury bonds out there 4% some yeah and then he has he has 277 billion or something like that in in cash um so he's just it's treasuries I think it's Treasures yes yes yes so he's he's ready to buy right um and so like he knows something obviously he talks to a lot of people he knows a lot of things that we don't know and so you know I think the key thing to understand too for for everyone here yes it's it's a it's a marking opportunity it's it's a time you know if your marking is going well there's there's a time to double down because a lot of people pull back we've talked about that quite a bit um but also for for you personally when the market crashes instead of panicking this is where you get a chance to be greedy when others are fearful so we're not necessarily panicking right now and I don't think this is the end of it I think this is the potentially the beginning um and I think the FED is having an emergency meeting as well on this stuff um and maybe there might be emergency rate cut like who knows I don't think that's likely but it might happen is it the fed's having emergency meeting on this I didn't see that I think they are yeah I I I heard the FED saying you know if things get bad they're they're open to reacting but it didn't seem like they gave any signal yeah but I I agree they need to do something about the interest rates you know people always talk about business and how one president or another president is going to have a big impact on our economy what's really going to have a big impact on our economy more than anything else is rate Cuts yeah and the rate cuts are supposed to happen starting next month which is September um it might happen a little sooner but um by the way you know what happens when when rate Cuts happen people start spending more recession it's when the recess it's when the rate Cuts actually happen that's when the recession happens and when the you know the yield curve right when that un inverts that's when the because it's inverted right now um and basically when that un inverts the the recession happens so we can get ready for for for that potentially it it's funny because when we deal with global 5,000 companies or even more specifically if when we deal with us large corporations and their marketing spend what we find is in most us corporations that we deal with there's actually negative job growth and there's positive job growth though in the government sector which is what's propping up the market um and that's why we're still seeing a lot of companies struggle with their marketing they're still seeing people pulling back on spend um but we we're starting to see slow signals of the marketing industry pick back up minus this hiccup here but this hiccup could turn things around if the government you know if it continues and the government doesn't do anything you mean turn things around in the wrong way exactly because when we look at last year versus this year from a marketing standpoint last year was bad this year it's better it's bad but yes it's gotten better and we're seeing we're getting more inquiries from larger corporations and we and we're signing more contracts and and they sign faster too exactly right it used to be where last year the time for cont yeah our contract length for the contract hour pitched to a close almost doubled in time length and this year it hasn't gone back down to normal but we saved another month compared to last year so it's slowly getting better yeah for us It sped up a lot it was taking five six months and now it's probably taking us two to three months um in a lot of cases and people are just way more excited but now with this who knows what's going to happen but the FED does need to react um I don't think a my guess still because we've been talking about this for years I don't think a soft Landing is going to happen um I think there's going to be some type of recession maybe that's a good thing right but someone Alex Becker you know Alex Becker right he wrote he wrote a tweet um do you know who that is uh I I've heard he's a marketer hyros um he had is he the marketer or no he's a marketer yeah so he he wrote something he's like the um and I tend to agree with this it's an election year the fed's not going to let the economy go into recession and so what's going to happen then the money printer needs to turn on the money printer needs to turn on the rate Cuts need to happen right and maybe to Kick the Can down the road but I do believe and Brian hallan from from HubSpot tweeted this today that recessions are a good thing cuz it cleans out the gunk and I think it's a natural thing that we've been put putting off for a long time I'd rather just get it over with but um I think we're going to be kicking the count down the road a little longer I got to take a minute to tell you about the agency Owners Association this is a pure group for agency owners think YPO or EO but for agency owners and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials so this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her what do you like most about the group she said having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas the leads are great too yes we share leads in this group as well this one from Alan he says the ability to really post what whatever I want and need and the group responds great experienced members getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric getting advice from others as well and so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so just go to marketing school. i/ agency this is a group that both Neil and I created and our hope here is to create a Vibrant Community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future so again marketing school. agency and we'll see you inside because we're talking about election year I added this um last minute but um maybe we should talk about the marketing differences between Donald Trump's marketing and kamla Harris's marketing because KLA Harris is the new um Democratic nominee and obviously you know Trump is Trump is Trump so have you seen some of their different styles I I can go in first I have not seen much of the different styles in marketing other than a lot of the Harris is doing tons of reputation management scrubbing the web and uh showcasing different results I don't know if Trump's team's doing that either I'm assuming both of them have stuff online that they don't want to see that's the only thing I know and funny enough I won't mention who but we got H up by someone who works with one of the candidates that's saying can you actually help with some of the results on Google yeah well I have a sense of who that is but I I we ignored it yeah because I don't want to divide our company and work with one side or another yeah yeah yeah yeah becomes a whole thing for your company cuses more damage inside of your company yeah and you're making sure maybe you get a multi-million dollar contract that's for a few months but it causes more damages in the longer I don't want to deal with this 10x at multiple on that yeah and I don't want to play favoritism I think people should do whatever they want on thetical side um okay so let's think about KLA Harris for for at least right now as of this recording we're you know in in August of 2024 so I think her strategy more so her team strategy is to stay silent and kind of just observe and see how things play out right now because she doesn't need to say much she's a democratic nominee um but you and I like we haven't seen her out there talking about what she stands for um versus like Trump we know what his policies are we know what he stands for right right now I think she's kind of just playing it out and and and seeing what will happen I think they were supposed to debate but then she pulled out of the debate or whatever so that's that's a strategy right to wait and see but you can't you can't do that for too long otherwise you're going to become irrelevant um whereas Trump is like constantly walking into the lions then like the first interview um that he had someone else someone was like um you know basically saying like I'm not going to put words into his mouth but it was a very hostile environment and he he took it really well and he's down to debate and he's like doing all these rallies and things like that right um so I think Trump is very much in your face and the thing with Trump is um and Scott Adams the creator of dillbert wrote about this he's very good at at at labeling people so he it calls KLA Harris crazy KLA Harris right or he calls uh Joe Biden sleepy Joe right or like you know Neil like you know negative Neil or something like that right so it's like he's got a lot of names for people that are very cachy in remembrance right um and then there's like he's got the the Maga hats right like love him or hate him he's he's got something that he stands for and then you also have um when he was doing a talk um and Neil and I by the way we're not saying we support either side but we observe these things it's like you hear the the crowd chanting save our kids save our kids so there's like there's so many slogans that he has I think KLA Harris she's GNA need to stand for a she's gonna need to figure out what she stands for and then she's going to need to have some catchy slogans that people remember cuz when people REM they they repeat these things each one's like an impression it's like an ad right that's happening over and over so um who knows what's going to happen I I I think Trump is probably in the lead when it comes to marketing right now just because he's out there so we'll continue to report on this because it's an election year and we only get to do this every four years or so but um I think it's it's fascinating and we'll see what happens I think it's going to be it's going to be a close race I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency so NP digital so Neil Hotel digital what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are Global they're worldwide they have SMB Services as well they have midmarket to Enterprise Services as well they cover the entire gamma so you can just go to MPD digital.com to learn more about it and now back to the episode if you guys are spending your marketing dollars on social media right now you just need to be really careful on who you're targeting uh and how your ad dollars are being spent because these politicians are raising so much money they're burning a lot of it on ads and it's just going to jack up the cost for you to acquire a customer you could be like well I'm only targeting so and so type of customer well they're targeting anyone who's 18 years and older and who can vote pretty much right y uh maybe they're very specific in states that they're trying to win or you know showcase or focusing their dollars on specific areas to get the votes but either way you know this is going to increase your ad cost and you just need to be really careful because as we get closer and closer to election you're going to start seeing more and more money spent um sometimes what we recommend to small and medium businesses who aren't maximizing their spend and they have a lot of room to spend more save some of your dry Powder And Delay the spend to after the election and it'll help reduce your cost to acquire customer but don't do it too much further because what's going to end up happening is you're going to run into uh Black Friday and Cyber Monday um but right after that period you can usually see another dip in CPA did you see the graph the the bar charts that show how much each candidate raises has raised over the last I know the last five or six elections I have not it's always the Democrats are probably raising like two to 3x the Republicans um so it's like 800 million or 1.2 million or whatever and then you know um the Republicans are raising like 400 to 500 billion or sorry million or so um so it's a lot of money that they're dumping into these these platforms and it's it's hard to compete with that um so the Neil's point you know just be vigilant yeah and you may think well Google does over $200 billion in asend a year 1 billion is a drop in the bucket what you have to realize is they're bidding for Impressions and they're spending it during a such short concise period of time it's not that they're taking up all the inventory they're jacking up the cost per impression or the cost per click which is causing you to have to spend more money that's actually the real issue makes sense all right guys so that's it for today's episode marketing school. i/ agency if you want to grow your faster that's our little Community um in fact Neil do you want to come to the next session next week um are you in town next week depending what time I'm driving home but yeah all right we'll figure it out so this is when Neil and I will jump in every now and then um um every month or so and we'll have guest speakers and all that and you have an entire community of people all trying to grow we're talking um we're talking seven eight figure agency owners um six figures as well and uh yeah that is it for today please don't forget to rate VI subscribe and we will catch at you tomorrow [Music]