Hello, everyone, and welcome to This Week in Hospitality Marketing. Well, I’m sure number two hundred and seventy one with me is the esteemed, the one and only the totally capable in the world of metasearch. The man that. Well, actually, no, you’re not basecamp meta or metasearch marketing. You are Dean from Scout Troop. What is it again this week?

[00:00:39.180] – Dean

I am Dean from Boy Scout Troop one twenty to buy popcorn, buy popcorn.

[00:00:47.700] – Loren

We’re going to be sharing a link today to help Dean and his his son sell more popcorn than anybody else in the entire universe.

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No, for a Boy Scouts. Mr. Stuart Butler, sir, if you’ll travel, how are you this I heard someone was selling food, so I figured.

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Excellent choice.

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Dean is Mr. Popcorn. He is from from the Boy Scout troop. And I’m not going remember this stuff all day long anyway.

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I’m twenty two and you just finally get to marketing a base camp down. We’ll get I’ll cut you some slack. Hey, it takes me only spot.

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Stuart, how long did I start calling you Bob. Six months. It took a while and I still occasionally get called Scott for some reason. I don’t know why.

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Yeah that’s true. Yeah. So someone spell some. A shout out to Mr. Robert Cole, who is not joining us today, but as he does get us the list just down to the wire.

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We obviously did not read him today. So we’ll find out. I have not looked at this list. I was going to peek at it. I had a couple of Shantelle things I definitely want to bring into the conversation because I’m kind of in the middle of the dialogue about it. And I would definitely appreciate any advice or insights or whether you think it’s cool or not.

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But besides from that, let’s see who else is sitting around.

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We got to go out prediction what your idea is going to be. Yeah, well, what do you think Mind is going to be? I think it’s going to be super fringy, really brilliant. But only Lauren could execute it.

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And I think this might be a little bit more mainstream, slightly closer to center. And that is CCTV excuse me. And the use of. More affordably than they have been in times past, where you for me, being a cord cutter at home, TVEyes, AT&T, TV, now sleeping, all this stuff.

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Oh my God, look at the man with the beard grafted on.

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You are you look like a mountain man, dude.

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I call on a don’t want.

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You know, Dean, I’m sorry. Since all this time is going on, I don’t know whether, you know, Dean Schmidt.

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I think crinoline together before. I think it was like a bigger group that didn’t really get to really me. But pleasure.

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Well, good. And thank you for popping in that you did warn us that you were going to have a slightly rustic look to you.

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Exactly. Well, okay. Now you add in Colorado influentially together, and this is kind of the product of good reason.

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I say man or something.

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The reason I shaved my beard, I just I just couldn’t compete, like in the beard. That’s right. You had that going on for a bit. And it gave me the. Was an error, I had the issue today that Bitly was down or something was really weird, but that wasn’t working weird because.

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Let me just say it didn’t work. Was it a picnic problem, Lauren? Problem in computer, it was user error, I think was between the keyboard and the floor.

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Anyway, I was bringing up the fact that with the new online channels, like on AT&T, now Slingbox, some of the other ones that are out there, Hulu, obviously, and then you look at some of these other channels that are going to have a lot more ad space. And you can be very geo targeted to these things now.

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And there are platforms now that you can. Has there been a ruling right now that you can get into it and you can be very targeted demographically by Showtime, obviously, and time of day and also the geography? And so I’m trying to develop a program.

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Some places are still really pricey, like the one in 13, 15, eighteen thousand to get in, but they’re giving you prime slots and high frequency usage. And it’s for thirteen thousand if you’re getting a potential seven or eight to one.

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OK, you know, maybe that ain’t a bad world, but anyway, I just would love your thoughts as to whether that’s crazy talk right now. We should let it settle down to something different or what?

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Well, I stand corrected, Laurin. It’s not a crazy idea.

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For once, I impressed Stuart. Sure. I think we’ve all got to adjust, right.

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I mean, I don’t think many individual properties have really been on, you know, in the TV advertising for a while. And I think it’s something that’s kind of decreased in value, increased in price over the years. And I have an inside kind of knowledge of the industry. I don’t know if one knows this or not, but if your sister company, who I manage as well, is it runs cable advertising for a local telephone co-op. So it’s been really interesting.

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When I started with the company almost 20 years ago, the owners at that point was saying, you know, I don’t think we’ve got many more years left of running TV ads. I think it’s a dying industry and this Internet thing’s going to replace it. And, you know, five years after that, they said the same and five years after that they said the same. And twenty nineteen was the most revenue we’ve ever gotten from TV advertising. Twenty twenty is going to be twenty nineteen.

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So it’s not something that’s gone away. But I would say that viewership has decreased. So where are people going? Where’s media consumption. Obviously it’s digital TV. It’s and the beauty of that is twofold. One, to Lauren’s point, you can really get targeted. You can not just target based on show, but you can target based on individuals interest as well. Whereas regular TV, it’s kind of a spray and pray mentality. You can go target, but that’s really about it.

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So with IPTV, I really like the fact you can get a little more granular. But the other thing right now is, yes, there’s a barrier to entry. They do a lot of them have minimum buys. But you can go up there and depend on who your agency is. They can place you with multiple, multiple clients on a single ad buy. But there’s there’s this phenomenon that always happens in advertising. Always, always, always. Every new media channel that comes out, whether that was Facebook, whether it’s through ads, whether it’s now IPTV, there’s always some arbitrage that happens if the price is lower at the beginning in early adopters benefit from that tremendously, something Gary Vaynerchuk talks about all the time.

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So IPTV targeting is very cheap right now and very effective. But make sure you’re doing it right. Make sure it’s the right message and make sure you’re testing and make sure you’re tracking. Most importantly.

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Yes, Stuart, I remember you bring that up in the early covid days. You said the TV was going bonkers for a lot of your clients. Was that in the cable sat on the OTTI or IPTV?

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So I know that was traditional. That was TV advertising. You know, the other thing that’s going really, really well right now is radio advertising in digital radio advertising, including podcast advertising that that seems to be going really well.

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But my dream was today I was going to give it out of the thunder.

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So great.

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Yeah, no, I agree with you on that. But here’s my my interest with with the videography is a lot of hotels are just not built with with the the collateral, the content to do. I mean, that’s that’s the first wall is OK, that’s great. We want to do this. But who has a video ad in their pocket, you know, that’s of a caliber quality. It’s one thing to get away with prosumer level fun stuff on social, but if you’re going to drop it on TV, it’s going to have a little bit more polished to it, I would think.

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And Stewart says you’re doing this, which I did not know until just now. Thank you.

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You know what level of production it has to be required of this, that you don’t keep bouncing back with that they kick it back, say that’s not good, we’re not gonna put that on or this is an issue.

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Yeah, I haven’t seen any any pushback related to the quality. So I don’t think that the the the channels themselves, the publishers are really monitoring it that closely. But, yeah, I think you’ve got to you know, it’s not YouTube, right. It has to have a slightly different Polish. I think a lot of people are used to the quality of YouTube being a little more hammy and you can get away with a little more rough. But a commercial doesn’t have to be, you know, a fifty thousand dollar investment.

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You can I mean, we produce TV commercials for local. Spots for like four or five hundred dollars, so it’s not it’s not like it’s a massive investment and one of the things you can do is leverage other assets you already have and B, roll it might exist at your demo level, the Dmoz in your area, and likely have a lot of Berro footage of your area that they will give you for free if you’re a member. So you can leverage Berro, put in some stills, you know, moving some stills of the if you’ve already got some great photography and just you can get a broader service done for 50 bucks.

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So it doesn’t have to be a big production right there with your demo space.

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I think that’s something that a lot of hotels don’t take full advantage of those connections that they have that they pay into. And you can pair that up with some stock video as well and splice that together. It’ll look pretty nice and really taken into account, obviously, above YouTube. Right? YouTube can be a little bit Kampia.

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But and I’ll tell you what to you can you can get students to edit video today. Almost every teenager is this generation Z. The Zumiez that are growing up right now are our job to protect that.

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And they can really, really edit a video like my my 14 year old does all the editing for my wife’s preschool, and he’s way better video editing than I am. And he’s been doing it for a couple of years now. But you can get local students to, hey, make me a commercial. Here’s what I want and it can come out pretty well.

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So you can do it on the cheap shots you just put in that house. The hospitality market itself does not endorse child labor, and it’s just students who age you can pay for your work.

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I’m glad you brought that up because you’ve got rolled in with the fact that he is representing Boy Scout troop no in the e-mail.

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Yes. And that’s the amazing thing with all these fundraisers, is they’re basically child labor that’s been legalized. But question really, it’s the parents then going into their office and pitching that stuff to all their office mates. When you don’t have an office and you can’t go door to door to the covid, you can’t stand in front of a store due to covid. What do you do?

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Well, you come on to Lawrenceville and say, hey, let’s a popcorn man all the way. This is Battle of the Beards. I’ve already lost this. You know, I’m not even putting myself in the contest.

[00:12:02.280]

Griffin, I don’t know whether you met Tristan before addressing the Atlantic.

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And now we get a little battle of the beer going. So we’re good with that. I’d say Griffin Griffin’s is already growing like three inches to our conversation.

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But but but what about video? It’s kind of funny. Whenever I used to do back in 2004 through six or was it five to seven? Terror video, TV spots and radio spots, and so I jumped all over that and I was doing videos for the hotels, you know, with a handheld camera and all this other stuff, too.

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And I went back and was still in my YouTube files for it, these videos that I did. But, you know, again, this goes back to like radio. At the time, we were buying remnants when I was trying to I was going to advertise when the pictures were first coming to the Super Bowl, there was a huge loyal following in Florida where there were Patriots fans. I was going to advertise in the Boston. And they’re like, oh, prime time is fifteen thousand or whatever was this back in twenty five, blah, blah, blah, 30 second ago on Google I paid like two hundred dollars and was drop it in the same time slots and it’s like I felt like I was stealing know the time slots.

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But you know, Google slowly over time that newspaper ads. I was doing a lot of newspaper ads with the Google stuff too. They were, they were buying a lot of new slots and stuff for traditional media and they just got out of almost all of that now. But they still mess with the radio. I think I still think that you can do some radio.

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You know what’s really interesting? I think a lot of people we talk about TV ads and myself included, up until a couple of years ago, if you told me TV, TV ads, I would’ve been thinking cable or my broadcast TV, ABC, NBC, you know, those types of things. And while I was working with Windom, actually, I learned a lot about terrestrial and non terrestrial radio and TV ads and what that all means. And there are a lot of channels out there that you’d never even thought about.

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If anybody has a Roku, go onto your Roku and you get your usual suspects, your Netflix or Disney plus and all that stuff, because, well, there’s a whole bunch of other channels out there.

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A lot of those other channels aren’t supported by monthly fees. Instead, they’re supported by ads that they drop into your whatever program you’re watching. And so there’s a lot of content out there. I was playing Candy Crush the other day, actually, and the little thing came up. You want to get a free life? Watch this video. So it was actually a commercial for a local college that’s inserted an edit, a brilliant I thought it was a little bit, but it was brilliant.

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So there are places that you’d be playing.

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Candy Crush is kind of dated college, mobile. That’s what you should be on day college.

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I got I got to get the new book. I’m on level five thousand. Something of Candy Crush. Come on.

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I know, but I’m impressed that we can send the young kids the saying with Flex. But OK.

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And technicalities. We have a Facebook channel that you can get on that Facebook app on your smart TV. You just have to go through an app to get to it, know exactly what you’re looking for to find it. So it’s not exactly highly productive that we actually have this broadcast on there. But back when the first was made available, I’m like, oh yeah, let’s try it, you know? And it’s like, yeah, after three thousand clicks through, you finally find the show.

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It’s not really nice. I’ve got a weird idea. Haven’t tried this, but it’s something I’ve been noodling and something Lauren, right now I’m throwing out that fringe thing that is probably a little crazy and no one’s really going to do it. But you can submit your own content to Amazon Prime video.

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You can make documentaries, right. So as a hotel, you could technically shoot anything you want and call it a documentary and publish it on Amazon Prime.

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Yeah, well, it me of the podcast over to to Amazon audio. You can now have access to Amazon music now. The podcast just debate, not debate, it’s past debate. Now, I was on the beat. Now it’s now it’s full time where you can submit your podcast to the audio and get it on Amazon now.

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Beat us taking over the world.

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My girl plays this podcast now, but put your point about podcast.

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Adding to is like even the platform I use podcast doco just added to their functionality the pre or post ad spots that you can create either for yourself or allow somebody else to buy into if you want to monetize it.

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More and more of the podcast platforms, even SoundCloud is and others are at that of do you want to drop in ad space pre post or in middle? You can do you can do a mid drop submission for ads if you want to from from that, because there is more and more people. Podcasts are a more acceptable stream of conversation. Now, for most people, it’s not a there’s no hurdles for it.

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So that’s why Stewart’s podcast is so popular, because it’s award winning, because it’s always on the the rebels. That’s what it is.

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Every George Foreman, if it’s on that, it’s just got Stewart playing in the news then. And I’ve I’ve heard a whisper on the grapevine from a very, very reliable source that that Google are opening up better to organic. It’s in beta right now. Yeah, I know. It’s it’s on again. Off again. It’s on again. Off again. But I’ve actually had the screenshot sent to me. I don’t have a great deal of information on it, but I believe that and Google are going to be opening up the data, which kind of makes sense because they’ve been playing around with metter quite a bit.

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June covid offering the commission and the, you know, the different booking models and opening that up to everybody other than just Mariotte. So now organic, I still don’t have enough details on what it’s going to look like and how that’s going to work and whether organic is going to show above the fold. We’ve got click a button and drop it down or whether you’ve got to drop it down, it’s all the way at the bottom. Who knows? But it would I just thought I’d bring that one up for my show and tell and get that in early because it could be interesting.

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So how are you a little tell you some stories about that? Actually, about a month ago, as you said, this has been an on again off again thing or so about a month ago that I first caught wind of it and saw it in the wild, if you will. And there were two tech vendors in the space that released press releases about it. And I have a contact at Google that I’ve talked with on an on again, off again, actually, about, of course, what Google’s doing.

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And before I saw that release, I had gone to them and said, hey, I’ve heard rumors of this happening. And he was like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no such thing. It’s not happens. Kind of like the first rule of fight club. There was no fight club. And and so then all of these press releases came out with the images and everything. And I forwarded one to him and said, hey, what’s what’s this?

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This is what I was talking about. And he was like, oh, no, that doesn’t exist. And the next day, those press releases had to be retracted. Why shouldn’t they retract? It had to be removed from both of those tech vendors that have published them that they don’t they’re not there anymore. They got taken down since then. If you particularly in Europe, your neck of the woods there, Treston, is that you’ve seen it pop up a couple of times again.

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And so I think they’re dabbling with it and certainly an advantage. I think it’s really advantageous to smaller hotels. Oh, yeah, we have a marketing budget. You see, all they’ve got to do is get connectivity. And by the way, there’s ways of doing that. If you’re not familiar with that, reach out to me. I’ll talk more about that. But they don’t have to have a marketing budget now. Is a Marriott hotel in New York City going to get that organic listing in top spot?

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No, no chance, because that that’s paid territory, right. And there’s no way Google’s going to let that infringe on there. But if you didn’t have something in there competing for that PPC. Yeah, sure. Why not? That just helps Google.

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Well, we’ve seen some really cool results with like like brands or brand new hotels when they’ve not gone out and put their their inventory on booking our Expedia. And literally that the only one a Oh yeah. So it’s like shooting fish in a barrel with dynamite. It’s just we have no competition in an option. All right. I’m going to bid, I’m going to be a dollar, but I am going to pay it because there’s no one else bidding against me.

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It’s amazing. Imagine then if if you’re doing that, you never will even need to pay for it because you have essentially you could just go for the organic stuff. You know, if there’s nobody else in the auction is absolutely fantastic. So it’s an opportunity for, say, for three brands and a new hotels being built. And I imagine, given the current climate, there’s going to be a lot of hotels changing names, changing hands, doing all kinds.

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Wonderful deals, you know, as as we move in at twenty twenty one, things are not going to stay the same. We’re already seeing it. So it could be an interesting opportunity where we’re going.

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Is that so you start off? Is that small property, right? Rebrand a small bed and breakfast, whatever it may be, and great. You can get in there on an organic listing. But the problem is nobody’s seeing you, right, because you’re still that small little property. And when I search for hotels in Texas and Dallas, you’ve got no chance. You’ve got zero chance of coming up on that. Right. Unless you start getting into one of their Googles promoted properties programs.

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And now all of a sudden what you’re doing is you’re paying for non branded search terms to get up on that market ranking. And so you’ve got all this because if you didn’t have a listing there, if you didn’t have a link for booking, there was no point in you paying for that. But now you at least have a link for booking. Now, Google can go back to you and say, hey, how about getting some more visibility here?

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And there aren’t that ranking. And so I think that one contributes to the other.

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Yeah. And I think we’re going to be a little cautious here because being tested now and ultimately Google’s not going to do anything that makes them less money at the end of the day. Right. So we’re going to pay for it one way or the other. Some folks are speculating that maybe this, quote unquote, organic listing is still going to be conditional. So they’re going to somehow get the revenue. What I think is happening and it makes sense to commit a lot of people calling covid and accelerate it for a lot of things that we’re inevitably going to happen.

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But it’s just sped it up. Right now. The OTAs are on their knees. They have no deep pockets right now. They can’t spend their way out of this like they think they built themselves in twenty one and then twenty eight. Right. They really built themselves by advertising the heck out of their brands and stealing share away from direct booking by betting on brands and doing all this unscrupulous stuff. They know how to do that as aggressively this time.

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So Google sees this as wait and game has always been to this yachties. It’s always been what we’ve wanted to do. If we can get as many properties as we can on a commission basis and then just highlight them, show them all our revenue is going to start coming directly from hotels. We’re going to squeeze out the OTUS a lot faster than it would have been before because the Dodgers aren’t spending nearly as much as they were today as they were a year ago.

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So, yeah, I think we’re going to have we’re going to be driving one master for another, unfortunately.

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And it’s probably I think. Yeah, like I agree with Google at a much, much higher level that they’re looking to do that. That’s that’s different. Different plane of reality where, you know, those those types of decisions are being made as to what we do against booking dotcom. Google got the power to do something about it. I think bringing it down a couple of levels. I know Google have always had problems actually getting hotels on better because the barrier to entry to better has always been the tech fees, the cost to actually cook your inventory your ass right up into the Google Hotel.

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That’s hence the reason why they did the integration with Google ads in the first place. It took so long and all kinds of problems, but then eventually got there. They still haven’t rectified that issue of how do I get the information out for press, ACARS or anywhere else and get that into Google. But Google itself doesn’t. I think if they’ve tried different things because that’s the certain programs that may or may not exist, I may have signed an NDA about an Alpha, but I can’t talk about that.

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They’ve tried to solve those solutions, but obviously I never said that. But even they’ve been kybosh. I’ve just got I’ve just been I got notification this week that’s been kiboshed that that that that route that they were looking to go down there to try and get people direct has been kybosh, whether I don’t know the reason for it or whatever. So they’ve still got fundamental issues of getting hotels from. You know, the data from where they need to be getting them onto and onto that set and I think organic would make sense because it reduces the burden of financial pressure.

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You know, if you only pay for a taxi and then you can just organically at least, then you don’t pay for a taxi and spend on top of it, you might suspect, you know, it may it may well be 20 percent. Right. That just in a power grab. And I’m talking up my ass. But you know what?

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There’s no way they’ll do it for free in the long run.

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No, you’re right. You’re right. And it may well be that this is the way to get the ball in that grab market share and then slowly keep turning the tide in the of every Google is the biggest threat to this industry.

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But I don’t think people realize this and talked about it navigate right before the pandemic hit. And then that was what everyone’s focused on. But once we’re through this pandemic, Google is going to come out much, much stronger than they were in twenty nineteen. We’re all going to wake up one day and be like, oh crap. I went from having a duopoly. So to a monopoly in terms of who’s I guess a monopsony to a waps.

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And they don’t even know that, you know, monopsony is when they control the supply.

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So South Africa would have more, you know, stars coming over my head right now.

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Regardless, we’re going to try to massively to scale one massive Google and Google for what’s the difference. There are those that the OTAs are all about booking through the OTAs. They don’t give a crap about your brand. They care about the Ottey Google, at the very least, not doing no misunderstanding.

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Google cares about Google, but Google is going to drive traffic to your Web site as opposed to going somewhere else where they might charge a little more for who knows, they might have once they have complete control, they’re going to control the pricing and we’re all going to be beholden to them when she is in.

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Godfather coming out at some point about that as well.

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There’s something on the day of my daughter’s wedding, but they’ll have to find new ways to capture new business.

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Right, because they’ve already got all the the Mariusz, the Hiltons, the Wyndham’s, they all the big brands, they’re lock and step and they got programs. They’re running. So, yeah, of course, you want to grow that business with covid. You’re certainly not growing that say anything is going the other direction. So where do you find new business from? Well, you’ve got to figure out how to work with these small players out there down to that ten room bed and breakfast.

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And Lauren likes everybody on this call. We’ve talked about how I’m very passionate about getting those connected into Google matter. And there are challenges to a connectivity, the technology being one of it. But the marketing budget being in the campaign, my optimization being the other part of it. So if they can eliminate that part of the equation now, you can just put that money somewhere else.

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And believe me, Google will give you other places to spend it with high tech virtual coming up. And I know store, you’re already participating into that. You guys go in that way. Are you staying out of high tech this year? What do you what are you guys planning on doing?

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Yeah, we’ll probably probably attend, but I mean, no kind of involvement or anything.

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Yeah. Because it brings up a fundamental question. What you’re talking about. We’re talking about in general, the technology landscape of what it has done as you as an accelerant to process that probably would have taken a span of years for us to realize we have to make these changes. And now it’s a matter of months that we having to really make these changes. And a lot of companies are going out of business, one just from an operational expense. They can’t maintain and promote second side of things.

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They’re not investing in technology, but that literally the turning of the coin right now where these hotels have to evolve their technology presence or technology connectivity to fundamentally continue to do business on the new ways that it’s being presented.

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Yeah, can I can I make a shameless plug for high tech? Yeah, so yeah, we toyed with the idea of whether or not to be an exhibit of this year or not. We don’t really feel like it was going to be a lot of. Of excitement for, you know, a lot of people have budgets, but and I’d say our position has evolved as we talk to a lot of folks and seen some data.

[00:29:54.570]

So the conversations I’m having, there’s a lot of people that have never been to a high tech before because of the logistics and the expense of attending various flights and hotels and stuff. So a lot of smaller properties that typically have boxed out of high tech actually going to attend this year to see what all the fuss is about and really talk to some vendors that they don’t usually talk to. But we as a exhibitor, we can give out free passes to a database of people as long as that hotel’s right.

[00:30:26.580]

So you guys get a free pass and any hotels that want to attend, we can give out free, free tickets. And so we send an email to our database earlier in the week. And it’s the most engaged email we’ve ever sent. We had so many people requesting the free tickets that would free me.

[00:30:49.580]

Probably it was just a genuine demand for it. So if you’re anyone listening is a hotelier and not not a vendor that wants to get free show tickets to high tech, you just go to fuel travel dot com slash high tech, and that’ll redirect you to a form that you can fill out and get free tickets.

[00:31:08.480]

Again, it doesn’t work with suppliers. So you guys are out of luck with your hotelier and you want to go to high tech and you don’t want to spend any money going.

[00:31:17.470]

People travel on good news. We all like I don’t see, I can say free tickets coming to hotels just in Hollywood to say that the service is terrible.

[00:31:30.860]

But what about what about Chris? He broke out, I want you to run a small little back up part of the house. What about that dress? Yeah, yeah, the hotel that’s in the next day, Mohannad BMB. That an actual hotel close enough.

[00:31:54.630]

But that’s the same difference. Same difference. But but to your point, I mean, I’ll be very fascinated to find out from what ADTECH is doing to when you’re there as to how much gets presented into the new world order of stuff. I mean, people are becoming more educated things, people like Dean and so forth, about what metasearch technology is needed and what needs to be facilitated. And more and more hotels are realizing that this is a underutilized channel for them, that they never thought they could get into a step into.

[00:32:23.220]

But there’s others, too, that they’re also waking up to that. And this is up from brand hotels. But more more specifically, the independents, their CRM, their their actual databases. I’m proud to say that a lot of hotels are realizing the true value proposition of all that information that they never truly, I would say, exploited but utilized to a better potential than they’ve had up until this point because they realized the futility. But sometimes the high spend to be in the space, for PPC to be in the space for paid social.

[00:32:53.850]

And they’re really just. A core business of people that have already touched their product and can be identified in a better way.

[00:33:03.370]

So, yeah, I don’t know about you guys, have you seen this? But our clients that are really heavily used utilizing this CRM this year, their own database is getting phenomenal results. We’ve had a few people do like preview sales for their Black Friday deals or stuff like that, because everyone starting earlier this year. But we we had a property. It’s it’s about a 400 unit property beach destination. That is the first time we’ve ever broken one hundred thousand dollars in revenue from a single email.

[00:33:33.180]

This so that Myrtle Beach for twenty twenty one bookings. So it’s like getting a ton on the books, getting the deposits in. Now people people are really ready to travel when they can.

[00:33:46.180]

What’s the cancellation policy like on that, given the current covid situation?

[00:33:49.330]

Yeah, I mean most it, most of them are pretty lax. So these guys that have up to I think it’s 40, 48 hours. No, no hassle cancellation. And so they’ll probably see some attrition. But, you know, a lot of these bookings are for June, July of next year and very good.

[00:34:05.770]

You know, very good rate. You bring up a good point that I threw into the topic or the title of today’s show to some degree, and that is second wave and adaptive changes and so forth, because we are going through the second or third wave. Chris, you guys are getting hit hard. We’re getting hit hard again. And it’s not just, oh, this city here or this region here, it’s going back up everywhere again. You didn’t hear the president say that the coronaviruses over Dependent’s.

[00:34:32.490]

Oh, yeah.

[00:34:33.080]

Well, and he’s immune and we shouldn’t be worried about that. And it’s all. Yeah, it’s all good. It’s all good.

[00:34:39.000]

Immune from a lot of things. Is that one the truth being one of them. But yeah, let’s all go to the Ukraine at least that we know where the news is coming from.

[00:34:54.780]

But the idea of it is, is that what you just.

[00:35:00.170]

Happening in our society right now, people that may have been considering a holiday travel, yeah, I what I mean, are they are they reconsidering it? Are they we’re being told in regular media that it’s not so much big gatherings which are bad enough. But now going up to Grandpa’s house is not a good deal because Grandpa may have been hanging around some other people or whatever.

[00:35:21.030]

And, you know, that’s been a problem for a long time.

[00:35:24.050]

But Grandpa is right and just seen the vast difference between the US and the UK and the amount of people that are willing to take a holiday vacation. I think us the last poll I saw was it was like 78 percent of people were were willing to travel for vacation, whereas in the UK is like one in ten. So maybe find a happy medium between reality and perception, too. But we do have to consider the fact that what we’re being told in the US is very different.

[00:35:54.860]

And I think the data point, you need to be careful how you compare those, because I think the one in 10 UK was a trip abroad, a vacation abroad, because most Brits travel to France or Spain or Florida. Right. So I think I think the one in 10 was that. But you’re right that Americans and I lost sentiment. So it was like eighty five percent of people said that they would consider a trip in the next 12 months and nothing was stopping them from traveling.

[00:36:22.250]

But we also see in the US the fifty three percent of people have already traveled since March 15, which blows my mind. But I mean, I would assume everyone on this is at least the majority of people on this dais or travel. I know I have learned has. Sure.

[00:36:40.580]

And we all look at this week right there was showing how few people have been infected from flights. I don’t want you know, I like having the news out there. I like amping travel where we can at the same time. I want to see you paid for that study.

[00:36:53.030]

And I was just going to say wait for that study because that’s the first. And I thought that rising. Yeah. Doesn’t sound butches.

[00:37:02.630]

I really love air travel to commit to this only because it may be personally, but it looks like you are saying there about people travel in the UK yet that we have seen a lot of staycation travel.

[00:37:16.940]

So because I stay in a I think it’s like the second largest tourist destination in the UK and up in the Lake District outside of London, and you can’t go into the lakes for falling over just tourists. It’s just a weekend to just stay away.

[00:37:34.160]

Just won’t go anywhere near it then, because I don’t let people know I’m joking to work in hospitality.

[00:37:44.360]

But look at the text that I’m follow now.

[00:37:48.470]

But similarly, we’ve got we’ve got hotels that we manage maxin off in the US, we’ve got the UK. And it’s interesting because we can see different trends. So the US has been slowly going up and up and up. And now at the point where we’re over 50 percent occupancy levels for the first time, only the second time in however long UK since the and the new notifications, we’ve just been on a bit of a nosedive here. It’s we you know, we’ve we’ve got one property where as soon as there was any kind of any kind of thought or hinted that they’re going to potentially break for the lock down cancellation, it just went up.

[00:38:27.440]

You could just like, well, I can’t travel. We also work with a car rental company, a global car rental company. And it’s slightly not hospitality, but it’s close enough to to say and we can see the same they’re in. And because there’s different countries, you can see what’s going on. America is still doing really well with car rentals, especially in Florida and places like this UK.

[00:38:49.880]

We can’t give it away. Honestly, we can’t give the vehicles away because what’s the point? No, what no one’s going to no one’s going to commit an earlier in the summer, we have seen that car rentals were actually going up. The UK was the second highest behind and behind like France and in Europe. I think that was because we were coming out of the lockdown’s and everyone’s like, well, I’m not flying abroad. My old banger outside is going to fall apart.

[00:39:17.600]

The car is going to fall apart, are going higher. Accountability on the side of the country. That’s that’s our our assumption and what was happening there. So we say but as soon as the restrictions that it’s like us, it’s just it’s like nosedived drive by. This doesn’t affect the drive by marketing of Stewart’s home of his little home that people drive by to say, this is the home store butler. Right. The people stupid.

[00:39:41.120]

Yeah, well, we’re not covering in Papua New Guinea, so I’m sorry.

[00:39:47.300]

Can I go on saying Roe as a raging debate in our office. This is bad as GIF. This is Jeff in our office, but it’s very divided into. Roizen is definitely realize it’s just quick essay for us.

[00:40:04.440]

I’m all about the efficiency, I say our assets are split across state roads and the creator writer Jeff, I say Jeff even came out and said that it is Jeff, but it is always the next.

[00:40:22.680]

Next you can ask me whether it’s me or maybe I mean, come on, the purple.

[00:40:27.180]

Is the dress purple or is it black? Maybe.

[00:40:33.720]

So the thing the thing for me is another thing for me with Rose is not so much the pronunciation is is it Rabois or is it a return on investment or why. Which are to borrow it to write the book The Times to become what people make. Still joke between Rosio Roessel wrote wrote Why am I making you stay?

[00:40:57.630]

Is you going to say Roy right.

[00:41:02.450]

You said yes or whatever you want to say it.

[00:41:06.090]

I don’t even like using it as a measuring metric anymore because it’s it’s sincerely within the marketing spectrum. It’s not within the actual goal setting, KPI sharing with other departments. You know, and I say this in particular, where if revenue management need to garner another hundred thousand dollars in sales and I did a some sort of targeted campaign that I had a twenty to one US process and I made five thousand dollars in revenue for what I spent beating my chest like a gorilla, thinking that I succeeded when in fact I didn’t hit close to the goal that really needed to be done, which was how much total revenue was contributed to what was the goal of this entire project.

[00:41:42.990]

Not because I did some small, singular return on what I spent, but what did I contribute towards the goal, the KPI that we were measuring.

[00:41:50.910]

That’s why I’d be part of setting a digital marketing campaign. Is your goal a return on Atzmon is you’ve got to have a twenty to one. Well, OK, we can do that. Is your goal to hit one hundred thousand dollars? You need the volume. Oh OK. Well we can do that too, but it may not have 20 to one. Right.

[00:42:05.820]

And so where’s, where’s the happy medium and where do your priorities lie for the best and attribution models. Oh no, no, no, no, no.

[00:42:24.690]

That was way.

[00:42:25.620]

Eventually I brought up attribution right of the dinner table.

[00:42:33.600]

Don’t forget up during Thanksgiving party politics, religion and attribution model.

[00:42:41.550]

Do not bring it up.

[00:42:43.530]

When I’d even say politics and religion were on the table, I shouldn’t here.

[00:42:52.770]

But but to that end, I tend to when I do the conversation, I tend to talk about what is the basement of of conversion or cost return. It’s a couple of my metasearch campaigns for a couple of hotels dropped down to two to one, that’s that’s well below the threshold that we said.

[00:43:08.820]

By the way, I want to look at that. If you sent me a list of those hotels there, it’s it’s it’s a bit of a fluke because they’re branded hotels.

[00:43:16.740]

So they’re all on the same platform. And the other branded hotels that are in the same parking lot are tend to want this brand of hotel drop to two to one, same rates. Different brand, send me that list of hotels when you have a chance, sometimes there is this I’m looking at going how is it this is 10 to one right across the parking lot, but it’s a different flag compared to this one.

[00:43:40.630]

I’m like, OK, so we’re going to go back to Google here with that one. And the presuming you’re talking about Google. Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:49.180]

Pretty much from the Google started because we’ve been talking about this internally quite a bit for the last 18 months. Google have been banging the drum about their automated processes, A.I. machine learning price at the end, whatever B.S. that they’re going to say it’s linked to. But they’re really heavily, heavily pushing their own internal moneymaking machine because that’s what it is. It’s a massive moneymaking machine for them. But I actually think they’ve gone even more nefarious now. It was then that they brought this up.

[00:44:20.020]

When we were doing testing, we were testing different building models for really big account that we had because we’ve seen the manual CPC that we had in place, the the investment, the returns, whether it was revenue growth, as I wrote yesterday when you were call it, they will go now. What what the hell’s going on here? What’s changed? Nothing that’s changed doesn’t make any sense. And then kind of say, well, let’s throw in some of Google’s automated bidding strategies here and just see what happens.

[00:44:50.680]

Lo and behold, the returns that’s been shot right up we have any change would not change. There is a fundamental change to the business. There wasn’t a change in what we’d be doing in the previous history. It couldn’t be would eliminate all of the other possibilities. And so we’re now we’re now at the point we’re saying, well, I Google actually tinkering with their own products that they don’t want you to use and favouring their own products. That may not necessarily be great for you, but they’re actually making them slightly better.

[00:45:20.260]

So they’re not to the detriment to to force everybody off Manual Pétain or any kind of manual process and get them onto their own automated platform.

[00:45:31.090]

I’m sorry.

[00:45:32.680]

You know, I got a comment on that.

[00:45:36.340]

So actually, when I was working with Windom, actually, this goes back to the it was the fall of twenty eighteen.

[00:45:43.210]

And I had several other brands that we were running on Google Medda, and I was using the Google algorithms. I was actually managing it through the Google partner front end. But at the time, which, by the way, I don’t recommend anybody doing, but that’s another story.

[00:46:00.100]

So Google’s algorithms were the ones that were driving the results off of it. And we were getting pretty good results. Right. Fast forward then to the spring of twenty nineteen, and we switched over to using one of the tech vendors. I won’t name the tech vendor and it could end. This is nothing against the tech vendor. But now we were using the tech vendors are wise and their models and everything and suddenly my my return on ad spend a lot of my numbers were not as efficient as they were when I was using the ones directly through Google.

[00:46:32.950]

One of the things you’ve got to remember is that any tech vendor out there and there will all talk about their blackbox, about how good their machine learning is, their algorithms are in all that kind of stuff, and that’s great. But they have one thing that the Google black, one thing that Google has. Google is always touching the data. Google is right there and right there present. So if one of the tech vendors is updating their bid twice a day, hey, congratulations.

[00:46:58.570]

Guess what? Google doing it live.

[00:47:01.210]

Google’s doing it every second and their algorithms are constantly touching that data. So, yes, they’re going to be more efficient.

[00:47:08.640]

So and and they’re doing it using data that you don’t have access to. Exactly. You have proprietary data, for example, one of them machine learning indicators that they use this propensity to book. So they know based on the searches you just made, how likely you are to book in the next day, three days, seven days, thirty days.

[00:47:30.160]

So. Right. So you don’t have access to that. So they can adjust the bid to make sure you get that person that’s ready and ready to book.

[00:47:38.560]

So the example I gave that I was mix and match, like my platform said that was actually with PPC, just search rather than actual metasearch. I completely agree with what you say that they and to send a message with within PPC, because we’ve obviously managed other industry sectors before as well. Google, whenever it’s very similar to SEO, whenever they make an algorithm update to the ratio, it’s one of this fallout from it. And, you know, business have been affected will say, oh, we ran the numbers and it’s something like one percent of people will be affected by the loss, hundreds of thousands of businesses, because Google is the world living on the world.

[00:48:22.750]

You know, obviously Yandex and and they do it a China. But you know what I mean? It’s it’s that big. It affects so many different websites out there, the same goes with any algorithm that they update, there’s always a follow. It’s never there. Very rarely are you going to make a change that is going to make it a hundred percent of every business out there. Absolutely perfect. It’s just not it’s just not going to happen.

[00:48:46.620]

An add to that a little bit is that we deal with progression conditions in our logic strings and any vendor that we’re out there with our conditional logic strings if the windows and doors. But Google is dealing with a single step, multi-dimensional view, they’re looking at every first step as it correlates with every other first step to know what the second step is. That’s in essence, an AI version, which is learning what it knows, what the data that it’s being given, not following a progression of decision processes like a logic tree.

[00:49:21.060]

And that’s where some of the distinctions are between, you know, if you just think your budget size and bid are the influencers on your metasearch, it’s that’s like saying you’re. But it’s not doing what you need to do. Oh, that was such a great analogy that you broke just as you I said that’s like what was it I really need to know?

[00:49:44.940]

Oh, it was like driving a spaceship with a lever and a button. There’s a little bit more to it than just the two functions. Sorry.

[00:49:51.200]

You know, that’s kind of what we’re learning has a button that mutes himself when he sounds really smart but doesn’t have something to say.

[00:50:00.530]

I must have been really good, but I just didn’t hear.

[00:50:04.330]

You just want to say it was a good one, though.

[00:50:10.910]

Definitely. Anyway, so.

[00:50:12.520]

Yeah, it did. It is. It is to that to that effect forward. But I think the ultimate baseline is not being in there is like saying with the lottery, if you, if you can’t, if you don’t play, you can’t got to win it.

[00:50:25.030]

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:25.960]

So I need to point out that obviously I’ve just criticized Google. I take it all back because again, they’re probably listening and I feel welcome.

[00:50:35.620]

By the way, you might want to, but not ruling the world for while, ruling the universe, using the universe.

[00:50:43.830]

Yeah, I’m pretty certain you guys ever heard the thought experiment about the great basilisk? You’ve heard of this? No. No. So this is a genuine disclaimer.

[00:50:55.480]

If you’re easily scared by stuff like this, this is knowledge that you have and could literally mess with your head. So I’m serious in all seriousness.

[00:51:06.820]

I mean that not just about if psychology can really mess with you to turn this off for the next couple of minutes. So the theory is the great basilisk is that at some point in the future, an A.I. is going to be created. Right. That is so powerful and knows everything. And we as humans are going to be enslaved by this A.I. And everything we do has to be to serve the great guy, the great basilisk. Right. So the argument is, if that ever exists and we know that it can potentially exist us now, not doing everything we can to create it is not serving it.

[00:51:48.610]

So we will be punished in the future for not creating the great basilisk in the present.

[00:51:53.890]

So the fact that free passes could exist and you’re not doing everything to create it, you could be damned to all eternity because by the great A.I. that is going to have.

[00:52:03.520]

So what you’re saying is the atheist pissed at us because we’re slackers. We have a common future biology into this, but there already is the best.

[00:52:13.000]

Listen, anyway, it’s what’s called a knowledge has it, but knowing it could create turmoil within you.

[00:52:22.000]

So, yeah, I guess I am definitely a hazard with knowledge. So I did have a I did for other show and tell. Not that I have to do at this moment if somebody else has something immediate to it. And we also have Robert’s list that we have now and many of us looked at because he dumped it on nine minutes before the show started. You haven’t read it all in nine minutes.

[00:52:46.960]

I’ll just read the headlines like everyone does for the meaning of Ederson. I did have a pause, doesn’t it? That’s a really great piece of information for the crowd.

[00:53:04.200]

This this is this one sorry about the long string. I should clean it off before I dropped it. And I was actually impressed with that article because it had some. Again, going to the theme I throw into the title of the show today about second waves at adaptions and so forth, I guess I’m getting a on the link. It’s coming up that we finally get far on that one.

[00:53:22.480]

I always say. Who what the hell’s that? Can get rid of the percentage at the end? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Anything for the percentage I want you to get rid of.

[00:53:37.830]

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Sorry. Because it broke. It’s some neat.

[00:53:46.850]

Ways that hotels have been doing creative things that they’re finding like water through stone, ways to get somewhere with some of the stuff, and I thought it was fascinating to to some of the creativeness that they had come up with on more taken by the title, Why Tom Cruise is living on a cruise ship.

[00:54:06.020]

I mean, wow.

[00:54:06.980]

Why did you go to Stuart’s point earlier that he made talking about working with the Dmoz? I want to kind of circle back to that, actually, because that that is so important. And you might think about what destination marketing that that’s not me. I’m an airport hotel. But guess right? What right now it is about getting people to your destination. I don’t care who you are if because if they’re not traveling there, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to get the people coming there first.

[00:54:38.400]

Yes. You absolutely ought to be working with your demo. And they have so many resources that you may not they may be out to get you in some very cost effective co-ops with other members. They’ve got data that you certainly don’t have an insider. You certainly don’t have a lot of resources. And we talked earlier about Berro video. They probably got a ton of photography. So you can really leverage a lot of this and save a ton of time and money and asking them on a regular basis, you know, what markets are we seeing that people coming from at the top of the funnel and you can adjust your advertising targeting to focus on those markets, really.

[00:55:17.560]

And one thing that I think we all have realized in our earlier conversations to people want to travel right now. People are almost desperate to travel right now. They just can’t buy.

[00:55:28.910]

Fifty three percent of people have travel. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Reality, you know, and it’s it’s short duration. You know, it’s two to three nights at most. Yeah. They’re doing it repeatedly. So there’s a massive opportunity. If you can get someone to come stay with you once, you might get them to stay with you two or three times before the end of the year because they’re making frequent short trips in the local schools.

[00:55:51.630]

You’ve got to get them to go somewhere. I got to get them to go to Omaha, Nebraska, or whatever it may be. So once you get in, they have to go there.

[00:55:59.520]

Then it’s about, OK, now get them to come to me, make sure that they have a good time when they come to you, and then get them to tell all their friends that they had a great time. It’s there’s that secret recipe, but it’s really easy, totally.

[00:56:11.460]

There’s that heavy layer of chance that we’re all taking and traveling these days. If you can find something that’s consistent in something that will give you that comfort, you go back there a lot easier than you would have back in the day. Yeah.

[00:56:22.680]

And so, I mean, a marketing really try to stand out and focus on reassuring people that have fears. Right. And again, we know that the biggest fear is a fear of other guests and fear of common spaces. So implementing something like a mobile app, self-serving, but also doing things like saying in your in your marketing materials with deep cleaning the rooms seems to have a massive impact, regardless of what deep cleaning means to you, it means to them.

[00:56:48.060]

It doesn’t matter the psychology of saying, oh, we’re doing extra cleaning. The psychology of saying we’re taking these steps to protect you has a big impact. And it’s just like I’ve said this so many times on the show, but it’s worth repeating. The first time you go to a grocery store, you’re freaked out during the pandemic, the second time less so, the third time less so. If we can get people to travel once they’re going to travel again and again and again and again, we just got to get them to open up their mind to say responsible travel is safe.

[00:57:17.340]

This is the safest place for me to go. As long as I’m right, not reckless, I’m going to be fine, just as safe as I am at home. If you can get them to do that once, you can get them to do it again and make sure you leverage them as your marketing for other people, showing people that people are traveling, that’s social proof aspect of other people are doing it. You can do is really, really powerful psychology.

[00:57:43.200]

I don’t disagree.

[00:57:44.400]

I also say that we have new things that are influencing some of that, and that is we have become into a pattern of being fearful of some things that we’re never fearful of before. Groups are coming across, people that are coming up to you like just point to be taking.

[00:58:01.630]

Walking my dog, I’m like, yeah, sure. Now it’s like. By the way, you know, it’s we have different things that we have to kind of get past our phobics or our phobias to do some of this stuff.

[00:58:15.870]

To your point, yes. As people do this and I think from the holiday perspective, people will be more motivated to be mindful. Now’s the time to seize the day. Carpe diem, all this stuff. I’m going to go see my family. With that said, I think there’s modifier. Breaking up Florida at the worst time on Earth. Sorry we lost, the caveat is that there’s modifiers to this and that is that we just launched a program with some hotels we’re going to visit family doesn’t mean staying with them this year, staying in a hotel, having dinner with the family or having time with the family, but making it a controlled time for whatever, but not staying at the family house to do this, you know, staying at a hotel instead.

[00:59:03.140]

To do that, I want to make sure my wires are OK.

[00:59:04.850]

That’s that’s a that’s a big thing over here in the U.K. because obviously we get dangerously close to Christmas and wet. We’re just entering a tiered system of lockdown. What are you going from, like, very high to danger? You all of these different restrictions. It’s this there’s been a lot written, but it’s quite confusing. What can I do in this in this year? What can I do in that tier? What’s here? Am I actually in all of that stuff?

[00:59:36.110]

It’s it’s been quite confusing. But the worry is, if this continues until Christmas, what’s going to happen then? Because obviously, you know, that’s the whole family time. That’s when that’s what we all get together and have a good Christmas dinner, man.

[00:59:52.820]

Got to sit down and have a big roasting and within the family. Yeah, yeah.

[00:59:56.360]

Completely. I you know, I had that conversation with my wife today, like, know, we’re going to have, you know, her parents of mine and they all want to come here.

[01:00:06.640]

We have extended family coverage as well. On top of that Boxing Day, we go to another family members and I have a second Christmas dinner, which is fantastic because I get two Christmases now.

[01:00:18.760]

Now, you know, it’s like, can we even plan for it? What side of Turkey do we buy?

[01:00:25.250]

It’s crazy.

[01:00:28.520]

Can you imagine New York City, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, ball drop with nobody there.

[01:00:35.810]

Sounds great, actually, I. Yeah, that’s actually where I want to be, but yeah, they’re they’re canceling the event they’re right now.

[01:00:47.720]

They are not having or planning for a New Year’s Eve event down down in Times Square, not one that can be. They have an audience. They might have entertainment that they broadcast or drop. Yeah.

[01:00:59.780]

And those to do the functionality, but they’re not going to have the crowd that they had before. But this from an impact to us and adds effects to things like one thing that we’re also considering for hotels that are by shopping places or in metros and we’re marketing to a rural community, is it’s already being discussed that the the burden of online purchases are going to be bigger than they ever have been. More people are going to be doing what they said.

[01:01:26.390]

Fifty seven percent or more people are going to be buying online than they would be. There’s no Black Friday rush to the door. And the idea is that it’s better to purchase and pick it up and it is to buy it and wait for it to be delivered because there may be logistics issues as to the timeliness of this. They’re saying don’t wait by now, whatever. But we’re actually putting we have put packages together that are featuring order your stuff at stores that are by us and then come and stay and go get all this.

[01:01:59.570]

Now, that’s pretty small, little things like that. It’s not it’s not going to solve the world. It’s not going to be up overpays, it’s just going to give you some business.

[01:02:07.880]

Yeah. The other thing I’d say about this Cyber Monday in general this year, because you’re right, I think it’s going to shift more to cyber. A lot of retail stores have already said they’re not doing in-store Black Friday deals. It’s only online, I think Walmart or even saying that, which is crazy. They’re going to go all November.

[01:02:23.630]

There’s going to be, I think, even have a name for such and such days. So that’s the thing mean it’s all starting earlier.

[01:02:30.320]

So you can’t wait. Like if you’ve done cyber deals every year for the last five years, like a lot of hotels have and they work phenomenally. If you’re not doing it, you absolutely should. But if you wait and try to deploy the same approach that you took last year, it’s not going to work because so many people are going to get out. We see the next episode of our podcast that we recorded yesterday will probably go live this afternoon is all about how to tackle Cyber Monday and what to do this year.

[01:02:58.310]

That’s differently than in previous years and how to maximize your opportunity. But because people are so primed to travel and I’m going to use the phrase that Ben is not here to say that he would say revenge travel. So, I mean, people want to travel and want to get it on the books and look forward to it. Cyber Monday is going to be Ben Bernanke’s this year.

[01:03:18.050]

It’s benign and that’s a good word. I used to know because I like that and I like that word. But I think Wal-Mart is not allowing in person for for Black Friday this year.

[01:03:29.600]

Think one big event. They’re doing lots of little things every week. They’re doing a series of sales as they got in health care.

[01:03:36.920]

I’m surprised they aren’t just opening that up to go beyond what.

[01:03:42.020]

And this obviously opens up a whole new world of targeting as well, is you can begin to target people that follow or work with the delivery portions of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, you know.

[01:03:58.910]

That comes away from not shopping, and that is you don’t get to browse. I know that from we do the pick up delivery services at Wal-Mart, they throw in so much stuff now, samples of stuff, because I’m not browsing the store anymore.

[01:04:14.270]

I’m pulling up pop in the trunk, waiting for them to throw the bags and then I’m out of there.

[01:04:18.220]

So it’s there’s no benefit comes from browsing. You spend spend more money than you planned on benefits.

[01:04:26.600]

You know, for the store, though, it’s a lot bigger from a military perspective.

[01:04:33.100]

I’m a cabinet cooker when it comes to this. I’ll go through the aisles of groceries and will grab some. My wife’s like, well, why do you need that? I don’t know. I just don’t have it, you know? But then they’re going to go to go cook.

[01:04:44.900]

It’s the same. You never, ever, ever go shopping at Walmart or anywhere like that when you’re hungry. So I think I did it the other day. Spent so much money where originally from these days, is that what you’re doing?

[01:05:00.470]

Which will kill me is I needed twenty four Kiwis. I’m going to eat those in a week.

[01:05:07.750]

Everybody loves Kiwi come we with a kilo of avocados. I mean come on, it’s a kilo.

[01:05:14.390]

It’s on sale. Yeah. Don’t get me started on Costco. I leave always going. How the hell did I spend that much money.

[01:05:21.110]

What am I looking at. Three watches. Yeah. We’re going to Costco now. Learn to avoid the impulse buys.

[01:05:29.000]

But I when I used to shop a car to ride around and having somebody follow me so I could they could just load the basket for me, it’s like, well, welcome back.

[01:05:38.360]

We’ll pick them up like you do at Walmart. Now, Costco is great.

[01:05:41.450]

Yes. But the idea is that from our perspective, if people are looking for gift buying, they’re not browsing as much and they may not be thinking about gift ideas. We can interject ourselves in those conversations a little bit better now because we can target those people that are following these types of mediums and say, hey, look.

[01:05:59.920]

Gift for Uncle Fred here, because you don’t know exactly what he wants, but maybe he wants to go to our hotel, you know, as of whatever you want to do, you want to bring up gift cards and you’ve had a lot of success with those in the past, with some you gift cards have been fun.

[01:06:14.150]

Actually, a lot of what we’re doing right now, a campaign with one hotel that has been very successful where we’re giving the 50 percent add on value that you can either keep or give.

[01:06:22.910]

It’s being kept more than it’s been given. But, you know, for every 50 bucks, they’re getting 20. But honest to gosh, people are dropping five eight hundred thousand dollars on these things. You know, it’s like not going to tell you the meaning of life right now.

[01:06:43.290]

And that’s not you know, this is my technology, you know what I realized, though, other than the time when he’s about to say something really profound, 90 percent of the time you can miss 10 seconds in the middle of the curve again and think of it back up.

[01:07:05.550]

OK, gift cards. We’re offering 50 percent benefit, even as low as 50 dollars. So for 50 bucks, they get twenty five free. They can keep it or give it. They’re usually keeping it. There’s no cap limit to it. And people are dropping five hundred to a thousand dollars to buy these things because they’re getting 50 percent extra by doing it.

[01:07:26.790]

And it’s all future tense stuff.

[01:07:28.870]

There’s a Cyber Monday for free gift cards that’ll be given. It’ll be interesting because, Stuart, you mentioned about everything to Cyber Monday. I was.

[01:07:39.570]

I was I was actually searching for the weapons that I am and I won’t say what’s his name again case.

[01:07:50.100]

I get Beetlejuice gone. But to Stuart’s point, when they talk about Cyber Monday being a big I was actually looking for that for the ads, but I just found it was only recently Amazon Prime Day. Was it was it yesterday that fall?

[01:08:10.320]

No, they they’re saying that third party sells in the marketplace have increased by 60 percent from three point five billion during this year’s prime day for slightly longer than they did.

[01:08:25.470]

Promoted as much this year. And it was later. Right. So, yeah, it’s going to be anonymous and telling it. I totally agree.

[01:08:34.140]

I think I think Cyber Monday, if you get your rights and if you try something inventive and try something different and the trick is it has to be enough consciously, I’ll give you five percent of the state income to work.

[01:08:46.080]

It’s got to be compelling to be of value add, but it definitely has to be enticing, whatever the offer is.

[01:08:54.420]

Yeah, I mean, I offer a generic you know, you actually value the discount, whatever it needs to be. It just needs to be so thick in there that it’s going to say, if I do this now, am I going to resolve that fútbol?

[01:09:08.100]

We’re actually trying to put together another package where we’re reaching out to the local restaurants and retailers to offer us an actual value as a part of a package of staying and having like this will get you dinner or this will get you a fifty dollar credit in the store or whatever to put together a whole reason to be.

[01:09:31.530]

But this is also a vendor because the first person we reached out to was actually an apple orchard that does these really cool things from mazes to all this other stuff. And and they’re going to give you a bushel of apples and you’re going to do this, this and this. And it’s all part of the when you stay with us, you get this as a part of what you just bought. And it’s not a package at the hotel Persay. It’s a package that we’re wanting to sell kind of in the medium that we’re talking about right now.

[01:09:55.620]

We’re just saying, hey, look, this is a gift.

[01:09:58.590]

Yeah. A great value. And it shows the community, the immigrant community.

[01:10:05.310]

This is this is my Segway. I got to leave this community for the day. That’s the best we can do. The best I can do.

[01:10:12.090]

But I’m not in some other community. Yes. Are you going to another community? Should we be jealous now?

[01:10:21.750]

I’m not a community. This is the Gmail community. It’s not that fun.

[01:10:28.370]

I can take care of my Friday, but it’s really good being here. That won’t again. And to have you back at my.

[01:10:37.860]

No, no, go ahead, I want to say people want to find you obviously know more about screen power and all the stuff on the website and their three screen power dotcom digital marketing agency for hotels. At any point, it seems kind of conversations that we like to have their clients do everything from that we discussed today to the fringe conversations. Honestly, the whole Amazon documentary thing is something I’m telling a member of the team and we’re never going to do.

[01:11:02.610]

But I really like the idea. It was the stations that I think we all have with our own internal teams to be able to connect with. So always awesome to be here. And I’ll be back and I’ll talk to someone else on the team next time to bring some people.

[01:11:20.160]

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for making the time. It’s good to see you again.

[01:11:24.060]

Likewise. Take care one way, by the way.

[01:11:27.390]

And by the way, Griffin was patient zero because he was the first person I know in the industry that got it.

[01:11:34.140]

So he was for us when he said he went through the whole ICU and everything.

[01:11:39.340]

I was the first person I know who had it. Full stop.

[01:11:42.120]

Yeah. Mm hmm. When did we get it?

[01:11:46.110]

It was like he got it last year. It was two thousand ninety one. I know. It was allegedly I think was April, wasn’t it, in March.

[01:11:55.470]

Right.

[01:11:55.620]

But he was one of the early on getting. I know a guy in Barcelona who got it in March. Barcelona. Barcelona. We need Griffen to come back on and tell us where to go and find out what the date is for, but basically they’re going through us. He was for that.

[01:12:15.030]

But and that’s the other part two are there are people that have gone through this that are definitely on the carpe diem phase of I am going to go somewhere, I’m going to go travel. I’m not going to go over and ignore nothing or do something.

[01:12:30.030]

I’ve heard it referred to, you know, how people have a bucket list. If you replace the first letter B with the letter F, you have a different kind of list. A lot of people are saying that their effort list is what they’re going to focus on in the rest of twenty twenty because they say, screw it, I’m just going to do what I’ve always wanted to do.

[01:12:46.950]

So it’s not a bucket list, it’s a G pronounce that word. Is it like the real was our last conversation.

[01:12:56.020]

Just curious if we weren’t in polite society right now, I’d be saying the full the full phrase. Yes, indeed.

[01:13:04.050]

That seems ironic that we’re having polite society and Trista’s with us audience know not just oh ok.

[01:13:12.740]

OK, OK. So I mean we can pick something. What I want to share with you guys when we find out, OK, I want I want you to see this was a study recently commissioned and let me see if. You guys can figure out who commissioned the study and see if this is the increasing importance of water travel as an economic recovery. Let me go. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’s the one that you jump to and before.

[01:13:45.690]

Let me guess and put it in there or know you did.

[01:13:50.100]

I was I was looking at this.

[01:13:52.290]

So who who could have commissioned a study that illustrates that, okay, travel is more valuable and important.

[01:14:01.350]

They are more with Expedia or Hotels.com.

[01:14:13.850]

It’s the most self-serving study I’ve ever seen since the airline when we talked about earlier. But, yeah, it’s just it’s funny because people read headlines and don’t really scrutinize.

[01:14:23.370]

I saw I saw a survey that nine out of 10 people enjoyed the podcast from Fuel Travel.

[01:14:30.570]

I was going to mention about self-serving cables and people. I didn’t want to go that way.

[01:14:36.320]

I I’m first to be so sorry. I’ve got to call. This is Cattleya Black. Yeah.

[01:14:44.370]

OK, which your popcorn yet. And that tenth employee is no longer an employee.

[01:14:56.340]

Now nine out of nine people on the phone.

[01:15:01.440]

They will get reviews and there will five out of five. Yea.

[01:15:05.880]

I’ve made sure I actually went through and put a review in because I’m beginning to see how they do affect how you get shown up. Yeah. We put out, we really got aggressive on the show, looked about three or four weeks ago. We started just being stupid how we like to be stupid about reviews. And there was one episode where literally every couple of minutes we did really review. We just we were not just about it like we like to be.

[01:15:27.660]

And we end up getting like five reviews in the next couple of weeks. And we’ve seen a marked improvement in downloads. And I don’t know if it’s just because of that. But it’s been interesting, at least anecdotally, that seems to be a correlation. I’m trying to get this link cleaned up, I was going to go over and share from good because I actually had a question about dynamic ad placement. That was in the recent ad manager blog from Google ads.

[01:15:57.080]

And I had some questions about because I didn’t quite understand. Some of what it was saying we’re now capable of doing and I was thinking that it’s to their interest to, is that if you had some sense of what it did here, let me I’m going to clean up the mess.

[01:16:13.680]

All right.

[01:16:16.330]

That’s why you don’t understand what it does, because you don’t want me to understand what you don’t need to understand.

[01:16:22.510]

Just give us money. We’ll take care of it. It was talking about. And ad manager, a dynamic ad insertions. And I’m not familiar with that person, I’m familiar with YouTube and pre and post and Interment and Gateway and Legion, but that but I didn’t understand about this this ability to be dynamically dropping in on things that you didn’t specifically designate. You know, it just was. I don’t know part of it, so I thought I’d go and throw that up and ask what that was.

[01:17:05.360]

It is in for. What’s that they talk about in the display that, again, for me, I didn’t know what this was actually referring to, I I was looking at I was like, OK, what really was this?

[01:17:21.280]

Is this is this just the display at this is this is the video insertion of this into or.

[01:17:29.010]

I was talking about I’m like, OK. You I need to read through it, really? Yeah, I mean, just happen to be, I believe just it was one of those ones. It’s like, OK, this is interesting, different.

[01:17:41.640]

I’m not different because this this this looks different from what I thought you were talking about with dynamic search ads because. Yeah, because they’ve got they’ve got a DSA in place that’s designed more for large scale use. Lots, lots of e-commerce products. The idea being that you couldn’t build an entire ad campaign for every single product you’ve got, so you’d build it for your core products. Then you can build the dynamic aspect that plugs the gaps. And we’ve said it, we’ve tried it.

[01:18:18.450]

We’ve used it with it with a couple of different things. And yet it’s been all right. It’s not certainly nothing to shout about or write home about. I think if you’ve got if you’ve got a big enough digital marketing campaign that would require that, then you’re probably better off putting the time and effort into building a campaign out yourself and you can kind of control it. I think the idea is it’s meant to be more if you’ve got an internal digital marketing team and it might be like one guy, a girl that’s running it, then that’s what these type of products really, really well.

[01:18:52.020]

But this this is something this is something very different from what I thought.

[01:18:56.120]

It just popped up this week and I was like I was going to ask about it because it was just something that didn’t strike me as being familiar and or the same as what I understood it to be. So sorry.

[01:19:06.420]

It was just one of those old questions, a part of me that didn’t quite understand going through. So I’ll probably bug you guys more about it later. And also, as I read more or they share more, I guess, as to about it. But anyhow, and that’s that’s the key.

[01:19:20.340]

If you can get if you can dynamically insert relevant and even better personalised information into ads at the right time, that that is absolutely fundamental. In fact, that’s one of the products that we’re very, very close to. Where to put it out to to launch is a dynamic insertion of sort of dynamically inserting live prices into into adverts, you know, to get that in for the relevant person at an earlier point in the in the booking cycle so that they thought would it’s very, very shortly, but not follow on that one when we’re ready.

[01:19:59.970]

Well, you know, I’m first in line to go and cash my ticket on that one. Absolutely. No, no bother.

[01:20:05.070]

No bother to shamelessly plug plug in a product in the service. Yeah, I know. I know. I’m just it’s the Brits.

[01:20:12.960]

It’s the problem is that, you know, while I blame Liley, honestly, I never know shameless plugs on the show until he joined.

[01:20:22.170]

And Lily has told us that she is so busy up and through the election, I guess, you know, she’s helping to. Now, she said it had nothing to related to, but she’s just so busy right now. She’s going to join us. She asked if you could join us on a regular basis. Make sure she likes us.

[01:20:39.050]

We might see Amy come in from Geico and then more often than on what really was so busy with she basically manipulating Facebook likes to swing political influence. Is that what you were saying?

[01:20:52.100]

I think so. I think she’s she’s gone to the dark side and she’s doing well. Guys, here’s a question I’ve got for you. And I don’t know how much Facebook advertising you do and do it.

[01:21:03.350]

Maybe you might have a lot on your team, but we’ve been seeing huge evidence of Facebook arbitrarily banning accounts and individuals left, right and center. It’s like the lunatics have taken over the asylum. And that’s what I don’t know if you guys are seeing the same.

[01:21:22.130]

Yeah, we have it on our accounts, but I’ve heard the same from my sister company. And, you know, it just seems like they’re being very heavy handed trying to prevent the type stuff Lawrence talking about, and they’re just overreaching with that.

[01:21:34.610]

I don’t even think Heavyhanded comes into it. We we had and I’ve seen evidence of one ad that was for insurance in Canada and it got banned for political reasons. Political political motivations are like, yeah, but you’ve got to think there’s one or two things is happening.

[01:21:50.780]

Right? It’s it’s probably algorithmic. It was a glitch in the Matrix. Or if you look at the folks that are manually doing approvals and disapprovals, I mean, they literally have a second to look at something to make a decision.

[01:22:04.340]

It’s it’s an error component is massive because the issue you’ve got as well is that the rules of the guidance by both Google and Facebook are so subjective. It’s like you’re not allowed to advertise this. And what this is, is very, very loose because we get this quite a lot. You know, you can often you can put one out, especially on Facebook. You put another out and they’ll say, no, did I breach policy? You’ll then go back in and appeal it and just say it.

[01:22:34.880]

You know, it doesn’t because of this and this and. Oh, yeah, no problem. Then you’ll go create the same app again, maybe do it in a different geographical location. They’ll get through it, you’ll do it again in a third geographical location or get denied again. It’s just crazy all over the place.

[01:22:49.460]

My own personal account got locked and I got my purse and I mean I’ve had a Facebook account for four years actually.

[01:22:58.370]

Yes, I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, and they’ve blocked me for no reason whatsoever. There was just they couldn’t they could not give me a reason at all.

[01:23:08.850]

I am like, OK, I have reported I may have dropped some photos on your page that you weren’t there.

[01:23:22.970]

But the problem with any type of censorship, and that is who makes the choices, who makes the decisions and how are they made. And it doesn’t matter what level. There are things that should obviously be censored, totally get that. But somebody still has to make those decisions and and put rules to that. I remember back when I was a big anti censorship guy back in college, actually as a political science class. And I was doing this this piece about Wal-Mart censoring the music that was going to be sold in their store.

[01:23:51.080]

And one of the albums that they told that they chose to censor was Frank Zappa’s Jazz from Hell. And they said that they were going to not sell it due to explicit lyrics.

[01:24:02.900]

Well, which you need to understand is that that album is entirely instrumental, by the way.

[01:24:09.260]

It’s horrible. I had to actually I then was on a mission to go out and find it and buy it just because I had to see what was this all about. And it’s horrible. But Wal-Mart was censoring it just because of that.

[01:24:20.150]

Can’t sell on ourselves. So who makes those choices?

[01:24:23.450]

I’m still fighting with this book right now. I think to mention a few weeks back that our business manager, Conca. How does it go? That’s what he said when he does to come out acting as a business manager, Count went. It got hacked, it got hacked, and then they went over and started blowing up ads on our client accounts, spending their credit card because they kicked us out of the financial control and admin access and we finally got it cleared up.

[01:24:57.660]

So we thought they stopped him and so forth, but they shut down our ad manager capabilities. So I’ve been going back and forth with Facebook and then they shut down their chat because it was so busy with what we just talked about, that they shut that down, finally open it back up again on the other day. I was over four hours on this with their concierge service, only to find out that he couldn’t fix it and has to forward it over because it’s not an ad manager account.

[01:25:21.840]

It’s still the business manager has something wrong and they got to fix it. But now they fired me over to it. I got to still wait for somebody to eventually get back with me about. You can have as a partnership, so it didn’t hurt anything, we were able to continue on from being something else, but it’s just it’s annoying because this is when you really realize you’re playing in somebody else’s sandbox.

[01:25:45.910]

You do not control the moral to the story isn’t right. Don’t have your password set to IHOP.

[01:25:54.470]

That’s what I still. Still. I got one.

[01:26:00.730]

So I always think about this as well, that the decision makers behind Facebook, I’ve just got this mental image. It’s every decision just goes to Zuckerberg and he’s just not there like that.

[01:26:10.730]

Well, no. Yes, no. Yeah.

[01:26:13.600]

He’s just one guy in of a lot of these departments that are closed off to other departments. Facebook is very deliberate.

[01:26:21.580]

If if you if you really dig into that, the whole team that deals with this, because it’s you would think it’s simple, it’s black and white, but it really gets nuanced in terms of what you can show, what is news versus what is not. There was a massive debate a couple of years ago about breastfeeding images on Facebook. So they have very well documented criteria for what gets blocked, what doesn’t, how how it gets blocked, why it is blocked.

[01:26:48.850]

But the thing is, they’re not the policy is we’re going to keep it all internal. We’re not going to let people know why we’re doing things and what we’re doing it for. So that that’s where the challenge comes. The very, very deliberate about it internally.

[01:27:01.350]

It’s they’ve got a whole department that just actually looks as if anything gets flagged that they’re literally watching 24/7. This department is watching what would essentially be censored videos being uploaded on Facebook.

[01:27:16.930]

The burnout rate in that job as well is really high because you think about the stuff that they’re censoring. I mean, it’s horrendous.

[01:27:25.810]

There’s murders. There’s all kinds of stuff that people try to post to the network and someone physically has to look at it. Now, a lot of it is I driven now, but there’s still that human component. And they say it’s really disturbing.

[01:27:39.580]

But that’s the problem. This is not a level where it can distinguish between an image of two. You can feel a very, very easily because it’s not sophisticated.

[01:27:49.960]

It’s not the basileus yet. It’s not that a great and powerful basilisk. Exactly.

[01:27:57.540]

It is not at that level. And as you know, because this is we talk about the buzz words about machine learning and A.I. and that that arbitrarily thrown out quite by lots of businesses that say that they’re using when the reality of it is what they’re actually using isn’t quite really that easy, because it’s just not it’s not good enough to do everything that we were led to believe in some cases.

[01:28:21.760]

And look at it. I mean, I’m only going off all day. I could be wrong. Google is moving that that breakneck speed. You never know what we’re capable of doing, but I’d be very surprised, very surprised.

[01:28:32.990]

And I think I think we should not have killed Vicki. I think she should have let Vicki live.

[01:28:37.810]

I’m just telling you.

[01:28:39.700]

No, I wrote on my head I robot I robot lived. Let the robots control our safety. I’m good.

[01:28:52.540]

Which actually brings up an interesting question I’ve been meaning to ask you guys. So you have a robotic arm? Yes, I would, yes.

[01:28:59.350]

OK, so I’ve got a YouTube channel, right. So best camera has a YouTube channel. I’ve got some content on there and I’ve got a confession to make. I have a problem. I go to YouTube to manage my videos on there and I’ve got a serious poor squirrel disorders thing going on because I’m there to manage my videos and listen to a new trailer for the next Spider-Man movie. Yes.

[01:29:18.880]

And the next thing you know, I flip between ten of these things and it’s an hour later. I’m like, OK, crap, I don’t get all the YouTube. Holy crap.

[01:29:27.610]

It’s called the YouTube poll. You can literally just fall in a YouTube hole and then three hours it’s gone.

[01:29:33.370]

Yeah. And if you watch the social dilemma on Netflix, I haven’t yet. I know what it is. I don’t watch it.

[01:29:40.030]

And you’ll understand why that happens because they really know why it happened. Very, very deliberate.

[01:29:44.960]

They understand what dopamine does to the brain and they understand how to make you specifically get a dopamine hit after every one of those videos and knowing that the next video is going to do the same again. It’s it’s the science.

[01:29:57.710]

I mean, it’s the are the ones that I’m a sucker for.

[01:30:01.420]

I mean, I know everything about you. They know everything that’s going to pull the trigger. And they learn every time you don’t do it, they’ll learn from that and be smarter about it the next time.

[01:30:11.380]

It’s, by the way, or what Stuart’s saying this probably connected to your Facebook blocking, because if you look at the videos, it’ll probably bump up my favorite skater while you’re Facebook as well.

[01:30:23.890]

That’s that’s the thing.

[01:30:24.760]

What I like to do when I go to Facebook is arbitrarily search for something very random and then just just be super eclectic. Just just a. Through with that work, no, no. The police, when they came round and ask you why you were searching for that.

[01:30:42.820]

Yes. Here are a couple of random stuff you’re on.

[01:30:47.760]

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[01:30:50.650]

No, I avoid I mean, it kind goes back to the beginning conversation we had at the beginning of the show about the CTV and so forth and so on. You know, I look at these things because I use like HDTV now and so forth. So everything’s on my rocker. You cut out what we had broken.

[01:31:08.730]

I don’t have a used Roku, I have broken, I use Roku, I used Roku, which is just flip flop. I do. I have Roku. I don’t have cable.

[01:31:23.120]

It has Roku, I have Roku anyways. And that’s where I see all these ad spaces do.

[01:31:31.080]

Now, Google just came up with their Google TV, but it did it plugged it in and I got this.

[01:31:39.420]

Yeah, Apple has theirs and they’re, they’re consolidating all their Apple services together. By the way, for those Apple people, I ordered my phone today.

[01:31:48.570]

Why is Apple in the house?

[01:31:54.570]

I mean, I use the Apple devices, but there’s no value proposition to me to get the iPhone is for me.

[01:32:01.250]

My, my, my, my ten. I have to replace playing right now. I have to keep it tethered to a power or because Apple has shut off my battery.

[01:32:11.420]

Because it’s telling me I got to buy the new phone, so shut off my battery, but I usually do it in a couple, two to three year cycles because do this religiously, but they just haven’t innovated for this one.

[01:32:24.990]

I’ll tell you why I got the 12 pro is because the Lydda, I’ll be honest with you, you know, I’m an air freak and to have a leader. And what’s going to come with the Lydda in the E.R.?

[01:32:34.880]

I want I want I want the phone to have a light on it because I won’t be able to see what it can do because I don’t know what is that light emitting anyway?

[01:32:44.420]

It checks the spatial relationship by seeing how fast light bounces back to the phone so it can focus at any dimension in the room.

[01:32:52.940]

So when R is going to be used by the phone, which more and more.

[01:32:58.560]

I am in the physical dimensions of the space that you’re in so you can put a pot of flowers on the table or you can put a chair in the corner correctly sized to the dimensions of the room that I actually used for the first time in a practical experience recently.

[01:33:16.500]

Now, if you’ve seen this one on Amazon, on the mobile app, now certain products at their home furnishings, you can you can if you’re scrolling through the photos of the product, you can go to an aerial view and actually show the product in your home where it belongs to. The same 30 stores do this before, but we just bought a new house and we were looking for trash cans and we were going to get one that was like a double recycling and regular trash can.

[01:33:42.720]

And I just didn’t know that measured and knew it would fit. But also, I wonder what it will look like right here in this spot. And then I found the same thing and I held it up. And then I got my wife to come give it the thumbs up. And as soon as she gave the thumbs up, then we bought it.

[01:33:56.940]

Because the other tool, like on Amazon is the iris one that you can look at an item in a store. Obviously, I’m not using it as much as I used to. And just look at it with the Amazon and see what the item is and see if it’s for sale, what it would be for sale for on Amazon compared to the store that you’re in at the time was another one that I used, but. Yeah. Oh, by the way.

[01:34:16.890]

So every time I see the Geico commercial, what they do goes up to the attic of his new house and sees a sort of, you know.

[01:34:25.860]

Yeah.

[01:34:27.960]

So it may not have the returns. They the guy goes up to his attic, to his new home and they say, well they left a lot of stuff.

[01:34:37.650]

He turns the lights on and it’s got this freaky Halloween display of mannequins sitting around a table like they’re having tea. And it’s like he’s like, no, no, no, nothing.

[01:34:48.740]

That’s like Stewart.

[01:34:49.440]

So the secret room in his old house is like somebody walked in.

[01:34:52.140]

They’re going to look it up that I’m just telling. I’m just selling a house right now. I should go and do that and just leave that in the attic.

[01:35:01.710]

You know, just just leave the mannequins in the attic and see what happens to anybody else. I mean, Occulus is coming up with their new version.

[01:35:09.800]

Doesn’t have a cap that doesn’t get tethered to the computer, although you can if you want to, for the more enhanced games. Anybody else interested in it or is it just I think VR is always going to be fringe, I don’t think until until it’s implanted in the eye somewhere, why it’s not strapping on a device. VR is not going to take off mainstream. It will be used a lot, but it’s not going to be like my my parents are never going to use it.

[01:35:34.090]

Right.

[01:35:35.170]

I actually the reverse of that, I think your parents will end up using it. And I say this because of a little bit what Amazon’s doing right now. I mean, there’s a question come up with a new adventure thing.

[01:35:43.810]

They will be all they want. I don’t know.

[01:35:47.220]

But it’s a fringe group of people use that Amazon outlet.

[01:35:50.770]

Let me take up a little, because, you know, when the 360 camera fan for a while is if grandpa can’t travel anymore. But you would love to have Grandpa enjoy Barcelona, OK? What’s to say you can’t do VR, OK, and let him go down?

[01:36:13.540]

This is a really cool place. I’ve just just walked in the media.

[01:36:18.760]

I know I know a chap who works there. They’re doing some really, really cool stuff there. Actually, it’s more holographic holographic programatic, shall I say. And then they are all kind of loosely the same. But that the quality that they’ve got with it, with their video presence is just unreal. What do you stand in one of their booths? A basically. Three 360 maps here, and it can drop you like real time anywhere on this planet.

[01:36:54.000]

Star Wars nerd in me is getting major excited about it is really what they do in Star Wars. Yes.

[01:37:01.140]

So exactly that way it pops up and you do the live thing. This is all life. It’s all is amazing. They’ve done it before. It’s like up on stage where they’ll have somebody walk out on stage and they’ll talk to you. And that person is three thousand miles away in a different country.

[01:37:16.110]

You’re right on the Drew show, the Drew Barrymore show, where they did the whole projection onto the same screen. So you can see both people’s if they’re in the same room, there is new technologies like that that I think are going to be interesting as to what they used for this.

[01:37:34.210]

This is I mean, this stuff here that if they’d had that, if people have been more switched on, this is the stuff that you could have and that would help because don’t, like, be beamed into different places.

[01:37:46.860]

And I’m going to go get my sit rather than go.

[01:37:49.440]

So I’m talking to my friends and we were talking about earlier about touring Barcelona. There’s actually on the Oculus quest. There is an app. Remember that there’s that movie free solo, the guy that does the mountain climbing thing. Yeah, a short version of that you can do on the quest. And they use a combination of drones and everything to get all the footage. And I kid you not you feel like you are climbing up that mountain. I mean, the visuals.

[01:38:15.630]

I mean it is intense. It’s frightening. Amazing. If you look at the studies, it shows that the brain, the memories it creates in the brain and the way your brain interacts is just the same as real life. If you’re watching a screen like a video game, it it uses different parts of the brain and the memories are stored differently. But VR is actually stored just like real life things. You’re seeing things in real life.

[01:38:40.200]

I’m not sure on that one because I’ve been playing college immobile far too much. And I’ll keep in the crosshairs right now. And it’s like, OK, yeah, I need to stop playing that game.

[01:38:49.990]

But a friend of mine just sent and looking for the link. I can’t find it to share, but I put it in the show notes if I do is.

[01:39:02.340]

What about again?

[01:39:05.720]

This is what it is, it’s a haptic chair, it’s a chair that has the haptic sensors in it so that you feel the vibrations in the movement. Plus, it’s a three sixty swivel that the occulus plugs into. And so you have the foot pedal control so you can actually walk or control spin around like you’re in the car and so forth, and it will move.

[01:39:25.980]

And so it’s a it’s a more engaging really play it one ready player, one not with the other.

[01:39:37.230]

Yeah.

[01:39:37.740]

But the idea of it is, you know, I go back to this to where you said, no, I don’t think my parents would do it. I think the more sedentary people eventually become, the more than one of the things people call it on something. The Mac Starcraft dropped in on LinkedIn from hospitality. That about is Amazon trying to get back into the travel space with this new virtual and interesting that they’re doing. And I commented about the fact that I think what they’re doing is that they have this medium of opportunity with Prime and everything else, that this might be something for maybe fringe at this point.

[01:40:11.130]

But eventually Grandpaw can’t get around anymore. But we can bring them on the family vacation or or we can bring them to a place in the world that he wants to go back to.

[01:40:19.050]

Or better yet, with the cameras that are available, recording things that he can go back and relive again in first person context, especially with a taxi, because there’s certain dates that I would like to go back and we do OK.

[01:40:35.700]

Now we know why Facebook was cut off for you now.

[01:40:39.960]

And you have to take you know, that’s going to be the biggest thing that’s going to come in, just knowing who I am and who’s going to bring it to you first. Right. I can tell you that a company that am investing heavily in the way the money is that you’re investing in don’t count towards that.

[01:41:05.580]

Is that the you referred to it.

[01:41:10.560]

But like the usage of this on tour, guides are now doing this thing where you can buy a tour, a guided tour. And basically what you’re doing is you’re reserving time with this tour guide. You’re sitting in your home, putting on your VR headset. They’re going and walking around, pick your favorite tourist attraction, whatever, and they’ve got a 360 camera on there. But then they’re talking to you as they’re doing it. And so you get your guided tour without ever having to leave your house.

[01:41:37.820]

Which, if Stewart remembers, is fine for some people, man, but it will never be mainstream, never be made.

[01:41:43.370]

No, no, but from a perspective of for those who can’t.

[01:41:48.410]

Yeah, I can’t climb a mountain, OK? I can’t I can’t I can’t go down that special ladder that gets me to this one. So one one, one, one, one call out, yeah, yeah, it’s also the old having, you know, like I say, you know, I have a daughter with physical disabilities, so she’ll never be able to do a great deal of the things that people take naturally for granted. So I can see the benefits of this for her would just be huge.

[01:42:23.810]

It opens up a whole new world that would have been completely unavailable. She can’t ride a bike, you know, she’d never ride a bike. She would never, ever have a mountain bike climbing.

[01:42:36.170]

It’s not like I said, you know, people are amazing where there’s a will. There’s always a way. You’ll always look with a lot of help and ingenuity. Yes, we can probably do this. This brings something to life.

[01:42:49.280]

I can see the benefits of it from from that point of view, I think, and also to the people experience vacations or destinations differently because of their physical capabilities. Honestly, I’m not going to be able to do a lot of the things that it’s somebody younger and in better physical abuse you can do. Yet I can maybe virtually experience them vicariously by doing that.

[01:43:14.060]

And, you know, the months or years ago I was talking about we’re going to stick a 360 camera in a conference and people are going to watch sporting events and everything else that’s actually been accelerated with covid. That’s a part of the variations.

[01:43:27.250]

Now, the people are saying, like stick a 360 camera in and. You know.

[01:43:36.090]

Well, it’s got a camera, and we didn’t say in what at a conference, at a conference with a camera, 360 degree camera is with my audio today.

[01:43:51.880]

I think it’s the video as well. Everything is free. Is free. Yes, I think yeah. It’s like I said, I’m sorry.

[01:43:59.670]

I look normal for what I’m doing, but apparently it’s yeah, it’s actually so I could also put in context normal for me.

[01:44:12.420]

What’s normal.

[01:44:14.700]

There is no normal. No, no, not really for it but. Yeah, but I think that there is maybe not a big segment but I think a growing segment that this will eventually cater to a guest.

[01:44:29.190]

I agree. OK. You told me there’s a market for it, but don’t jump into this before you do your fundamentals.

[01:44:37.160]

Do all the thing in your strategy right now. It’s not.

[01:44:43.070]

Well, we’re playing with it’s called my virtual tours. And what’s cool about it is it uses the platform I’ve always been telling you about Google Street View, where you do your own three sixties and then you put it in and you put your all your own hot spots as to what you want to say.

[01:44:59.220]

It could be Legion called action menu. It’s pretty cool. And you can make it go from room to room. So you could actually do a tour. Plus you can do a live video, you know, like zoom in the corner and do what Chris says, that you can actually guide them through the process and show them what you want to show them virtually in 360 or in flat view. So I’m playing with that right now for introducing people to the hotel and the location around it so I can see CRM squared away.

[01:45:28.250]

You’ve got some great content to search.

[01:45:30.230]

Your ads are running really well with profit margins to do all that first search for Lancelin before you point the shiny objects, each one of them things.

[01:45:43.640]

It’s almost like a one and done thing, isn’t it? You know, because once you do that, that type of video, you don’t need to do it again. Not unless you have a major referred to law and then you like to think unless you like stinkier. But, you know, I can see how as far as the future doesn’t belong, I just look at my case now. They don’t watch television. They don’t they don’t watch. They don’t watch satellite.

[01:46:08.420]

They watch YouTube. That is all they watch. Occasionally I can drag my old enough to watch Netflix and watch other 14 and nine. Yeah, 40. I was 13, so 13 and so tick tick tock.

[01:46:25.320]

The other one that my oh goodness.

[01:46:27.760]

Try to get my 13 year old daughter have a conversation. You sit there and all I can do is just arms moving. All of that I’m putting I’m still the worst thing is tomorrow I coach her soccer team so I will have 30 of them tomorrow as I’m trying to give instructions about what the next drill is going to be. All the variations of the same ticktock at different points in the well.

[01:46:54.200]

It’s like trying to play folk and stuff.

[01:46:57.920]

So yeah. Yeah. I coached my kid’s soccer team right when a fortnight broke out really big and everyone was flossing. Remember the floss. And I had it. It was a I think I guess they were ten years old. Yeah. Trying to get people to do drills when they’re all trying to floss simultaneously. Yeah.

[01:47:15.790]

I had the first as well. Yeah. That was, that was, that was the whole. Yeah. It’s like a fanatic football and it’s like well italia’s in digital marketing.

[01:47:26.510]

You’ve got nothing compared to this little league thing to stop them doing anything in their tracks that annoys you. So you know how they all used to say and it’s kind of died down a bit and they always used to say, OK, Boomer. Right. That was the kind of when dad did and then it was lame old OK, Boomer. Right. Who go to them because now generation see a lot of people begin consuming. So you can just go to them when they do something tick tourky or something that normal people don’t do.

[01:47:59.600]

How many kids do you just go OK, Zouma, it infuriates them on the track.

[01:48:06.950]

So we’re going to tell you I don’t think the fan came over here. I don’t I didn’t know it.

[01:48:13.590]

That’s that’s really annoying because then I’ll just, like, look like the geriatric. Forty three year old is like, what’s he talking about.

[01:48:19.710]

Yeah, right. Because now you’re doing it ironically enough.

[01:48:25.880]

So, you know, I find the the coaching method I developed was just to yell at them and make them run to the ball, which is like half a mile away back.

[01:48:34.570]

And they’ve gone fast.

[01:48:38.490]

And yeah, I do I do want to point out something that we definitely highlight, the fact that hospitality has suffered. We in some ways, we think the worst out of all what’s happened with covid because of the numbers of people employed by hospitality and the loss and the hotels closing and so forth. But I’d like to bring out something that friends of mine in the. Well, friends of mine in the entertainment industry were back on that stage.

[01:49:10.030]

Yes, they’ve suffered in some ways worse than we have right now because we’re at least we’re trying to struggle to do business in some capacity.

[01:49:20.860]

A lot of them are simply out. Yeah, Broadway is closed until potentially June next year. Cirque du Soleil is bankrupt and closed. To cover for what are gone, what’s good for that group, people are gone, huh? What was gone? We missed the first gone. Oh, that’s the small the smaller venues, the small events, the musicians, the travel around and go to events and so forth. They don’t have any business orchestras, philharmonics that don’t have anything to do to shut down.

[01:49:56.190]

They’re not having any performances.

[01:49:58.470]

We’ve the same office a I’ve got a close friend of mine. She’s she’s running her own business for 11 years, built up a very, very successful events business in the UK. Talking to her today, she’s down to one percent of her turnover compared to this time last year. And she’s moving into or off now. She’s missed her entire season. This the time because obviously in the UK, whether it’s very much outdoors team building, and she does a lot of mindfulness and wellbeing things for team and team culture, all of that.

[01:50:33.480]

Yeah, just totally gone. It’s devastated. We’re actually working with that to try and see how we can help move it potentially from what it once was and bring it more virtual. But again, it’s the point that you’re making sure, you know, how do you do the team building activity virtually when normally you’d be on a lake and kayaking or canoeing or building a raft or whatever it would be.

[01:50:56.670]

It’s it’s it’s just not quite the same. The things you can still do, the team building exercises, they’re just not the same as they once were. And it’s trying to get people to invest in that, especially now when everybody’s kind of working from home. You’ve got all of the mental health wellness issues that potentially come with that, trying to get companies to invest in, you know, investing that people still during that period of time that their wellbeing is going to be your wellbeing in the long term.

[01:51:28.740]

And the same goes with hotels, you know, making sure that you are looking after the staff. And some hotels are doing really, really well. Others are just they’re just completely missing the mark. And we’re definitely seeing that. Tough times, tough times.

[01:51:44.790]

And as we pointed out earlier, there’s a lot of hotels that are just going to change those things. And they’re just the names are changing. Ownership is changing. We’ve seen it with Marriott. They’ve lost I mean, hotels, what, one hundred and two hotels last week that. Thirty five, poof, you know, you got to get along.

[01:52:06.780]

Yeah, I’m going I’m going to tell last week that you to change grand they lost and no longer Mariotte I’m twenty twenty thirty five contracts are gone. Poof. They’re not brand anymore.

[01:52:22.190]

They’re just building. Yeah, well, with that, since I keep cutting out, is we’re close to the two hour mark and off and on again.

[01:52:34.640]

That usually fixes it. Yeah, well, we’re about to point out where it’s like, OK, all right. Start cutting in and out the game.

[01:52:43.830]

It just make up what you said in between this gap, the trend, the transcripts are going to be interesting, that’s for sure.

[01:52:53.640]

Lauren, say something with a great laugh at them again.

[01:53:02.460]

But with that said, I guess, Mr. Stewart. Yes, sir. But you your new podcast is rolling out today. People want to hear your phenomenal award winning podcast. Where is it that they can go? Yeah, if your travel dot com slash podcast. So we were doing an episode this week. We already recorded it yesterday because folks are out today, including Pete, who may or may not have covered weather. I’m sure he’s getting tested today.

[01:53:27.840]

But we do it. We do it on Cyber Monday. So if you if you’re planning for Cyber Monday campaigns this year and it’s a good app. So just to refresh it for the things you need to make sure you include when you’re doing your Monday deals this year, and then don’t forget to that we’re going to be exhibiting at high tech. We’re going to be showing off our super mobile friendly booking engine, which is kicks the ass of all the other guys.

[01:53:49.590]

I can say that now just because yours seems pretty good until it got bought and now it’s me.

[01:53:55.230]

But our booking will increase your conversion rate, a mobile app for contactless check in, which isn’t a brand new app. It’s been around for about four years. So we’ve got a lot of data that shows you how to use it properly in the massively awesome CRM, which is apower. And we’ll be showing all those high tech. If you want a free ticket to high tech this year, you’ll travel dot coms last high tech. If you’re a hotel, you can get into high tech for free.

[01:54:21.000]

No cost. You don’t even have to come to my booth. I don’t care. But next time I see you in real life, buy me a beer. We’ll call it quits.

[01:54:29.070]

Our dot com slash high tech of your travel dot com slash podcast. Perfect interest, three and six as you take over the world from the small island in the Atlantic yesterday. So, you know, if you want to get in contact with me, it’s Trista Hayward at three and six, the agency. That’s all words no nos at all. Or you can hit me up on LinkedIn, Tracinda, Hayward. Hayward is hitching a double what we do all things digital marketing fall for hotels.

[01:55:00.260]

I just got.

[01:55:04.100]

You know, can say that I’m sorry that we broke and has a slogan for you guys, digital marketing without the yet digital without dishonesty.

[01:55:14.180]

That is that is our slogan. Yes. Quite enjoying. Quite enjoying that.

[01:55:20.360]

I’m beginning to think you have been our Superman and Clark Kent. Just, you know, or Michael Jackson and Janet.

[01:55:27.360]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if that if that was the case, he’s definitely setting up a more health.

[01:55:34.880]

Well, you never go with him. You never know. For God’s sake, don’t let him stand up on that, OK?

[01:55:44.300]

Well, you’re the one that got blocked from Facebook, to be fair, is for those images.

[01:55:53.090]

And yes, I have I you know, I wrote a strongly worded letter to Mark Zuckerberg and he’s all realized, yes, I remember the dean other than being Dean from Boy Scout troop number on to try to tell truth, if I was caught stealing show popcorn.

[01:56:19.580]

Other than that, what is your alter egos? What are the companies that you are alter ego controlling?

[01:56:24.020]

Yeah, so for my day job, I do all things metasearch, actually. So we’ve got Basecamp, Šemeta finding your way. That’s all about the educational process. So digital agencies that have been tasked with doing metasearch are they’re not quite sure what they’re doing with that. Go to Base Camp MEDCOM. We can help you bring yourself up to speed and then metasearch marketing dot com where we’re working with those little guys that are trying to figure out, hey, how can I do MIDA?

[01:56:47.910]

Yes, we can get you connected. Yes, we can run a campaign in there. We’ve got some very plug and play ways of doing that.

[01:56:53.870]

Even if you’re not going to believe this, even if you don’t have your own website, I can get you into Google Medda. How about that? And by the way, if you don’t have your own website, we should have you over here talking to Stewart or Tristes and those guys and getting one. But that’s another story. So any RPM’s system, we’ve got ways of working around it and getting you live on Google. Mitta And as we were talking earlier, it’s really cheap right now.

[01:57:17.630]

So great time to do it. He’s like the Wizard of Oz, Verm.

[01:57:23.270]

There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home, even working with. This episode we go, our previous 70 episodes of the hospital marketing lab show you can go to hospitality, digital marketing, dot com forward slash live look for show number two hundred seventy one for those show notes. And of course, the podcast at Hospitality Digital Marketing dot com for such live and as a precursor announcement. If you are interested in enjoying the hospitality marketing club that’s rolling out, you can go to that website as well and get signed up.

[01:57:58.490]

Preliminary for our launch coming up soon with. I want to be part of that club. I was already part of it already. Already. Already. Bolland told you.

[01:58:09.180]

Yeah, but how would you get in touch with you personally and how how can I possibly do that?

[01:58:16.690]

Oh, well, don’t go on Instagram or tock because we look for Lauren Grey. There is a much more attractive female singer that has millions of followers. That’s not me.

[01:58:31.990]

Is that why you haven’t been contacting me back up and get in touch with her? Yeah, I.

[01:58:36.860]

I get I get hate mail from her loyal. Following that. I should be surrendering both of my Twitter handle at Lauren Grey and anything else related to the name Lauren Grey should be hers because she has millions of followers. She’s I think she’s up to 40 million at this point, some staggering stupid amount. I was born before I registered Twitter, my Twitter handle before she was born. I did, actually. I did. I registered Twitter before she was born.

[01:59:02.260]

Ships older than you love.

[01:59:06.100]

Oh, that’s one item of my clothing. And probably older. Yes. Yeah. But anyways.

[01:59:12.040]

Yes, but you can find me on LinkedIn, obviously, as well as laundry, anything. I actually was early adopter for most stuff. Go figure. So my name is floating around as Lauren Grey. So anyways, gentlemen, thank you very much. Griffeth, thank you for joining us for if you listen back to the notes led to this point.

[01:59:33.630]

Later in the show, we talk to you all later, trust with you. Yes, yeah. I like it, but I.

Loren Gray

Founder / CEO of Hospitality Digital Marketing

aahoa, ahla, hospitality, hospitalitybroadcast, hospitalitymarketing, hsmai

About us and this blog

We are a digital marketing company with a focus on helping our customers achieve great results across several key areas.