Flip the Switch Episode 42: Facebook CPM

SOPHIA: Today on Flip the Switch. Facial recognition makes its way to the hotel industry as Alibaba and Marriott team up in China. Apple discontinues the 2015 MacBook Pro, which marks the end of its most popular model. Though YouTube TV has grown in viewership, the platform struggles to stream the World Cup as the feed goes down in crucial moments.

Greg and Sophia (that’s me) join us to discuss Facebook ads costing more and how to be most efficient with your spend. We finish with “A Minute with Musk.”

Let’s get into it.

01:02 AUSTIN: Welcome to Flip the Switch presented by Power Digital Marketing. This is episode number 42. Our Jackie Robinson episode.

01:09 JOHN: Huh. That’s a good throwback.

01:10 AUSTIN: I thought so to. One of the most famous athletes of all time.

01:13 JOE: And he played for the Dodgers…

01:15 AUSTIN: And he played for the Dodgers who are a team in California, but as always welcome to our show. Welcome to summer. We’re very excited to be bringing you a summery show. We’ve got a lot of energy. I know you can feel it. Joe is super-excited. John is super-excited.

We’re missing Pat today because he’s out in Thailand, which is awesome. He’ll be out for the next 2 weeks.

01:33 JOHN: Tons of good content coming from Pat though.

01:34 AUSTIN: Yeah. Tons of good content from Pat. Check out his social handle if you’re looking for some cute elephant pictures. Or some turquoise water.

But without further ado, let’s get into our news and trends. First up, we are talking about Alibaba and Marriott. So the largest–one of the largest retailers in China is teaming up with a American chain of hotels, Marriott.

And what are they doing is facial recognition. So they’re going to be rolling out facial recognition in Chinese hotels. Chinese Marriotts that is. So they can start working on integrating that into society pretty much in China.

And there’s a couple different angles here. One is the business side of it, or what they say is this is going to be better for customers. So it’s going to speed up the time that they wait in line. It’s going to cut down on that. And then, of course, they can dispense keys as well. So they don’t necessarily need a concierge as much or a receptionist to get people what they need. They’ll just be able to do it through the machine.

So kind of the way this is going to work is guests will of course, go in and they’ll scan their IDs. They’ll take a photo. They’ll input contact information into the automated machine. And then from there the device will dispense the key cards for them. And they can start going to their room

After they’re in the system, they can start doing this at the other hotels as well. So they can come back, maybe if they want to go to another chain location then they’ll be able to do that right away.

But I think the real thing here, is what China is doing, is they want to keep tabs on the people in their society. Closer look at them.

A lot of this has to do with them rolling out the new program where they’re scoring their people. The citizens of China. It’s starting to be more of a scoring system. You get a social score based on the way you interact with one another. What your job is. What you’re doing on social media.

John’s giving me a look like I’m crazy, but I swear this is actually rolling out. And so a lot of people are saying that this is a big part of that. Is they’re going to start integrating facial recognition into society so that they can start to have everyone’s data. And start to track their location a bit better.

03:38 JOHN: That’s insane. I mean, it sounds like the Black Mirror episode when everybody is living their lives based off of the likes that people give them. As you walk by, you know?

03:46 AUSTIN: Yeah, it’s actually just like that. Because that would be a thing. Let’s say you liked a post on a social media platform that maybe is against the Chinese government or maybe slightly out of touch with what they would want. Then that would reflect poorly on you. That’s going to go on your social score. And then that might inhibit you from eventually getting maybe the job you want. Maybe of getting a hotel price that you want.

These type of things will be the outcome of any sort of negative interaction in society. But obviously for Marriott and Alibaba it’s a very interesting time for them to try out a new technology. And start to integrate that into society, but…

04:25 JOHN: You think this has a link to that same program that they’re rolling out?

04:31 AUSTIN: I do. And I’m reading this on Reuters right now. They’re kind of in the same boat as me here talking about this could be part of that system. So there is a growing domestic surveillance system that has raised a lot of fear amongst Human Rights activists. That’s a direct quote from the article. And then of course, privacy being invaded. And that’s what we’re seeing with this, I think.

What really is the point of cutting down the time you wait in line from 3 to 1 minutes? Cause that’s the average time that you wait in line at a hotel. Is 3 minutes.

So they’re saying, “Oh, we can get you down to 1 minute.” But how does that change your life at all? You’re still going to go to the hotel, right? You have to stay in the hotel.

So I think the angle here is…China’s going, “What can we do to start keeping better tabs on what people are doing in our country?” And facial recognition’s going to be a big part of that.

05:20

All righty. Transitioning into Apple. This one’s a little bit more fun. We can talk about the 2015 MacBook Pro. So this was their most popular model that they ever produced for a lot of reasons. Most consumers say it was the most durable. They really enjoyed the keyboard. It also had a lot of ports. Meaning they had HDMI, USB-A… they had a full-sized SD card slot. These are things that are actually no longer in the products that they offer. so If you were to buy a 2018 MacBook Pro, you would not have any of that beside just a USB-C port… just one single port that you would have to buy a dongle connector to integrate HDMI, your charger and so on and so forth.

So I think this is a new time for consumers in that Apple is becoming more minimal. And they’re starting to really get away from offering you a lot of things.

I think this is a business move.

06:16 JOHN: Yeah. They’ve been trying to force this on people… I mean, they have forced it on people for a few years now. This is kind of saying, “Okay, no more. We’re done with that version of it.”

So to me it’s kind of disappointing because I don’t think that the feedback on the USB-C port has been the best in terms of people not being able to… you have to buy an adapter to plug anything into your computer with the MacBook and it’s really, really annoying. I have to carry around adapters with me just to use anything

06:49 AUSTIN: Yeah. You should see our office. It’s just this constant struggle to find a connector to plug into the TV so that you can show your client the deck that you produced. And that’s… it’s a really give and take with Apple right? Because the MacBook that they produce is great for what we do. It can do a lot with just a little.

So it’s lightweight. The battery lasts long. You can have a lot of different tabs open. I know I do. You can integrate all of your software in there if you’re using design like Joe and John do, then it’s really good for that.

So it’s a give and take type of situation, but just as we’re going to talk about a little bit later with Facebook, Apple has all the leverage. They get to dictate what people do. And what’s best for them is what comes first. And of course, there’s so many of us that are loyal to their products. Everyone has an iPhone. We all have iPhones and MacBooks sitting in this room right now, so we’re their demographic. And I know that I’m going to continue to buy their products and integrate my life with what they want as we move forward because of the big part that it plays in my life.

07:49 JOHN: Yeah, it’s just a frustrating transition I think. I see where they’re going and I bet you it’s going to be really awesome once it’s all flesh. But right now, it’s just frustrating.

07:58 JOE: I don’t know. Cause they’ve had some pretty bad releases in the last couple years. I know their last MacBook they released was the lowest it’s ever been. The iPhone X…

08:09 JOHN: Yeah, the new MacBook sucks…

08:10 JOE: So I’m very curious to see… cause I did get an email yesterday about how the new MacBook Pro is here and all these things. And I initially was like, “Ooh, is it time for me to get a new laptop? Do I need to get pushed in the water again?”

And so, you know, I was looking at it but I don’t think I’m too enticed after their last couple releases they’ve had…

08:30 AUSTIN: For a little context, Joe got shoved in the ocean at a work event.

08:34 JOE: Allegedly.

08:36 AUSTIN: Allegedly got shoved in the bay. Excuse me. After we got off of a boat.

And he had to get a new MacBook. Just want to share that with you all.

Yeah, so the big change here is why people have been frustrated is a lot of people like the traditional keyboard. The newer one… I really enjoy it but there’s been a lot of issues. Reliability troubles of it breaking and sticking. I have a little bit of that.

So people just were liking the more reliable keyboard beforehand. But anyways… like we said, we’re all going to change over. It’s a big part of our lives. So very interested to see where Apple goes with this. But expect us to continue to buy their stuff.

All right. Final piece of news today. We’re talking YouTube TV, so we’ve brought in our expert Joe Hollerup since he does have YouTube TV. We want to talk a little bit about it. There’s been a lot of backlash against them for dropping two major moments in the World Cup. 2 separate games where viewership was at its highest–and this just happened this past week in the semi-final game if I’m correct–where they’re dropping the stream. So what’s going on there?

09:42 JOE: I don’t know. I was trying to watch it at work while I was getting 100 other things done at the same time. I wasn’t slacking or anything.

09:49 AUSTIN: Now this is the 21st century. We can do both.

09:51 JOE: But I don’t know. Every time you tried to put it on, it would just crash. And then crash. And then crash your browser. And then… I don’t know… they couldn’t handle it. That’s the first kind of chink in their armor that I’ve seen so far. Because otherwise the service is great.

It’s going to be one of those things that I think is going to take cable down. You can get an account of YouTube TV, which we do, for $40 a month. And you can put up to 5 accounts on that. Which we do. So you pay $8 a month for cable and you can stream it anywhere. You can put it on unlimited devices.

So, I mean, despite this little hiccup, it’s not going to deter me and I don’t think it should deter anyone else from using the service. Because I literally had it signed in to probably 15 different devices. Whether it’s my TVs, my phone, my computer. My friend’s TVs. It’s everywhere, and I never get flagged for it. So I’m pretty much paying $8…

10:42 AUSTIN: I see this as almost a good thing for them because that just means that viewership was spiking during those times. We know that these are 2 big events, and it’s been worldwide… YouTube has probably seen that increase very sharply in the viewership on their app at that time.

So, yes, in the short-term that’s not a good look. But if you’re YouTube you look at this and go, “All right. We need to scale a little bit, right? Scale our bandwidth. Because we’re having more people than maybe we expected.” Great problem to have in your business as long as it doesn’t drive customers away long-term. Maybe in the short-term they’re frustrated, but as you said, the stream did go back up very shortly after. So obviously they sorted it out and yeah… this is a diamond in the rough I think, for Google right now.

So YouTube is of course, part of Google. The 3rd largest search engine behind Amazon. And they’re starting to roll-out this integration of TV. And this is the way that things are going. And I talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think at some point everyone will be paying for TV through subscriptions, just as much as they were paying before to cable providers. So how much you were paying AT&T for U-Verse, someday you might be paying Disney and Netflix. And YouTube TV. Just as much, maybe more, than you were paying your cable provider.

So these companies that are providing you media, they’re still going to make just as much money off you, it’s going to look a little bit different. So that’s what YouTube is doing right now.

12:04

With us today we have two of our senior strategists from the social ads department–so we’re talking Facebook today and Instagram. And we’re going to be discussing Facebook’s CPM–that’s cost per thousand impressions in the ad world.

And the frequency that it’s showing up on people’s news feed. So recently Facebook did change the way that ads show up in a newsfeed. They wanted to go more focused on friends and family. So they wanted to get away from advertising on Facebook. They’re using Instagram for that.

But a lot has changed because of that. Ads have become more expensive. Because there’s less impressions to be seen, you’re not seeing it as much. And that’s leading to a lot of things.

So I’d to thank you both Sophia and Greg for coming on the show today.

12:46 SOPHIA: Yeah, thanks Austin. We’re super-excited to talk about some of the things that Greg has been noticing. We both work on several different ad accounts, and one thing that we’ve been noticing across the board is that our CPMs are going up quite a bit.

And if you spend any time on Facebook, online, Hulu… whatever. You’re probably seeing that commercial where Facebook talks about how they are going to start emphasizing friends, family content and human connection over branded content. So Greg kind of has a theory that they are no longer serving our ads as much, and that’s why costs are going up.

So Greg, do you wanna give kind of a high-level understanding of what you’re seeing and what led you to believe that costs are going up?

13:26 GREG: Yeah, Sophia, I think as you explained earlier I think it’s pretty interesting yow Facebook is showing ads to users about how they’re going to prioritize content from friends and family. And then us, we have Facebook reps internally that tell us that the amount of inventory that’s out there, the ability to… the opportunities to have an impression hasn’t gone down.

However, we run ads every day, and we keep a close pulse on our campaigns. And so basically I’ve been running a campaign on cold traffic, so people that haven’t been to the site before. Since February.

So February to May. And the CPM there–so cost per thousand impressions–was about $7. And I had to duplicate that campaign, because I ran out of ads. I had too many ads in my ad sets.

So since then, that campaign is called “June” so it started in June. The CPM on that campaign is 15 bucks, so two times higher. Which is a big hike in CPMs. And this is something that’s been happening from the beginning. Facebook’s CPMs typically increase about 100% year over year. And that’s kind of something we have to accept and kind of adjust.

But this year it’s been external factors. There was that whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, and so they had to do things to reassure people that their data was being secure. And at the same time, they had to tell people “Facebook is about connecting with people’ and so they’re saying something to users and then saying something different to us advertisers.

14:59 AUSTIN: Right so just dissecting that a little bit. That’s was a lot of information, but the point is is that Facebook is saying something different than the truth. Of what we’re actually seeing from data and real analysis of the numbers. And what we’re spending. So this is a situation that’s putting advertisers in a difficult position where Facebook may not be telling the truth, and you’re not totally sure what to do about it. Have you tried contacting Facebook reps, or putting this to light? What’s your situation and how are you going to resolve it?

15:27 GREG: Yeah, so the Facebook rep that we talked to explained that there are certain factors that are going to help your boosted posts show up higher on people’s newsfeeds. So engagement rate, number of shares, number of comments. A boosted post is technically just an organic post that you push. You maybe put $300 total budget on it.

But really an ad is just another boosted post, and it’s the same thing, basically. Once you run Facebook for a while, you kind of realize that every post on Facebook has an ID. So any post that you put in an ad campaign–whether it’s boosted or through a regular ad campaign–it’s the same thing. So that’s what kind of tells us if by having an organic presence with a high engagement rate you can kind of try to decrease you CPM that way. Cause Facebook looks at your engagement rate and says, “Okay, this Facebook page–people are liking the content, engaging with it,” and so they’ll reward you with a cheaper CPM.

Another example is I have someone–a client–that I’m auditing right now. I’m working with him. And his CPM has tripled over the last 3 to 4 months.

And so he’s actually had to decrease spend from about 15k a week to 3k a week.

16:46 AUSTIN: Wow.

16:47 GREG: Yeah. So it’s been hurting him. And he’s just going to increase the price of his product from $1000 to $3000. But he’s like a perfect example of what might happen in the long-run. We might see an initial increase in CPM. Some advertisers are going to get squeezed out, cause they’re just not going to be making money anymore.

It’s not going to be profitable for them anymore.

And Facebook is slowly kind of trying to squeeze out those people using their own way of doing which is an algorithm that looks at engagement rate.

17:16 AUSTIN: From a business perspective, this is how Facebook generates revenue for their company. So it seems very strange or confusing why they would want to push out people from spending money on their platform.

And especially for smaller businesses maybe that have to bring down their spend that’s going to make them not seem so friendly with everyone.

So what do you think their angle is here? Do they have an end-game? Are they simply testing?

17:40 GREG: What do you think, Sophia?

17:42 SOPHIA: I think that there’s a couple of factors at play. I mean, obviously we’ve seen a ton about fake news and these smaller, maybe unheard of, businesses and brands that are on Facebook advertising. Things that might not be 100% accurate. And maybe their spend isn’t as high as a big name, household brand.

And so I think part of it is this might be Facebook’s way of trying to squeeze out people who are kind of false advertising on the platform. Because if their budgets are smaller, they don’t necessarily need them to drive revenue. They can get their bigger accounts to spend more money.

But at the same time, I think it’s also them trying to tell brands that they’re really serious about getting engagement up from an organic perspective. So you can’t just throw money at Facebook and immediately get returns. You need to kind of have the whole package. You’ve got to have a good social presence. You need to be communicating with your followers–so another thing that they take into account is if you’re responding to comments or messages or things like that. So I think you can look at it from a couple different sides. It could be that kind of side that they’re greedy and looking for more money.

Or it could be them trying to emphasize the importance of the whole picture of your social presence. So it kind of depends.

18:55 AUSTIN: I think you made a really good point there about social advertising is not your normal advertising. It’s completely different even from Google ads, because of the engagement side of this. Your ads can still get comments, likes, communication… that sort of thing. Just like a normal post that maybe you and I would do.

And that puts Facebook in a really unique position knowing that there’s nowhere else to get this type of advertising, right? So they’re allowed to do what they want so to speak. People will still advertise on their platform, even if they have to pay more. Just because of its unique ability to get to the audience that they want and to talk directly to their audience. It’s the only major ad platform that does that.

And to the degree of just getting the volume of amount of people. Plus, audience building is so precise. You can drill into what people like. You can think about what… who their friends are. All these things. Geographical location of course. To the point where you can basically get down to their name of who they are and what they’re going to get served.

So I definitely get your point and agree with you there. They’re holding all the leverage here. And as advertisers, we pretty much just have to go with what they say, and come up with ways to do that. So Greg, transitioning out of the problem and the fact that maybe things aren’t as they used to be, what’s your solution to this? How are you going to capitalize on maybe the more expensive ads? How are you going to get more economical, or efficient with your ad spend?

20:16 GREG: So they have something… Facebook has been rolling out more and more placements. So places where your ad will show. And some of these placements in the past haven’t worked so well, but recently it’s been a little bit better. And it’s a matter of opting-in towards auto-placements. Facebook has a setting at the ad-set level where you can basically say, “Okay, I give you the ability to serve the ad wherever it fits.” And that gives Facebook the ability to look at the CPM pre placement and you can get a lot more clicks that way. Your CPM for the audience network for example is around $2, and the average CPM for Facebook newsfeed is around 12 bucks. So big difference there. And it’s all about leveraging the auto-placement, and then the auto-bidding feature as well.

21:06 SOHPIA: Yeah, so just to jump in there Greg, for maybe some of the people who aren’t as technical with Facebook. I know we spend all day in there, so it’s easy for us to get caught up in the weeds with the jargon and stuff. Because a lot of people don’t understand exactly what we do.

Could you explain a little bit more? So auto-placement basically means you’re going to end up in all the different places that Facebook serves ads. So when we say Facebook, we’re also talking about Instagram, Instagram Feed, Instagram stories… obviously the audience network. I think there’s some video placements.

But what is your recommendation? I know in the past we saw that audience network didn’t work that well, so how do you kind of mitigate those less quality users that are coming? How do you either nurture them into quality users, or mitigate the bad traffic that’s going to your site?

21:55 GREG: Right. So 2 things. First thing is you try to find the target audience that has the highest return on ad spend, and generates the highest quality leads. Typically that’s a look-alike audience, and so once you find that audience, and you trust that audience, if you apply auto-placements to that audience, you’ll most likely get clicks for cheap for an audience that has shown quality in the past.

What we’ve seen with auto-placements… especially the audience network… which is a lot of times a lot of apps. Where there’s little ads the pop up and people click them not on purpose. The engagement rate on site is typically around 11 seconds. On the page. Which isn’t huge.

But you’re getting a first click for 25% the cost of a regular newsfeed ad, and so if you set up an auto-placement campaign driving quality traffic to a page, even if they just spend 11 seconds, then you have that cookie. That audience that you can then retarget and then if you have a second touch campaign that is also auto-placements, you’re have a pre-filtered audience who clicked your first ad, so they showed intent. That click-through rate’s about 2% so 2% of that quality audience has clicked. That shows already that that 2% is high -quality. And then you target that audience on the second click and then drive them to a page where there’s more engagement. And that second click you can play around with using auto-placements, or only using the newsfeed.

23:22 SOPHIA: Awesome. Yeah, so another question I have about the auto-placements is do you believe–just in your experience, and what you’ve seen–that when you select auto-placements, you start to get a little bit more priority even in the actual feed itself? So I know that’s one of the placements. But do you think that Facebook kind of likes that you’re sticking to what their recommendation is, and letting them kind of optimize? So do you think then that you kind of get more real estate in the feed as a result of that?

23:49 GREG: Yes. I think you do. Facebook keeps pushing auto-placements. They’ve been pushing it on us for the last 2 years. And basically when Facebook tells you to do something, typically they reward you with responding to what they want you to do.

And also another thing that happens is even if you’re excluding website visitors. Which some people do on your cold acquisition campaigns. A lot of times these clicks don’t end up triggering sessions. So the cookie wasn’t placed. But they still clicked your ad and Facebook sees that.

So if they click your ad on the audience network and just, by mistake, clicked it–when they go on their Facebook regular newsfeed, Facebook will have seen that they clicked on this piece of content, and there’ll be a higher chance that your ad will show in their newsfeed. And because they clicked, Facebook will reward you with a higher relevance score and they see that engagement rate. And your CPM is typically lower when someone is engaged with your content.

24:48 SOPHIA: Just to go back to kind of what we started this whole conversation with. CPMs being the main topic of discussion. What in your experience is kind of the typical benchmark CPM, and then about how much have they increased since then? Just for people who aren’t as used to advertising on Facebook.

25:07 GREG: Yup. So I’ve been running Facebook ads for about 5 years now. At the beginning it was really cheap–the CPM was 3 to 5 dollars. So it was a lot easier to get as much traffic as possible to the site. These days, year over year, we can see about 100% increases in CPM and if you look at specifically the newsfeed CPM, that one has gone up the most. And Facebook counteracts that by adding more and more placements to the audience network. So the audience network CPM will decrease over time. But the Facebook newsfeed CPM keeps on increasing. So adstage.io is a blog that kind of tracks that CPM over time and they have benchmarks. Their analysis is that Q1 CPM in 2018 over Q1 CPM in 2017 is up 91%. So that’s what happens year over year.

And then month to month, it typically varies as well. The beginning of the year tends to be cheaper, and as we get into Q4 where it’s the holiday season, that’s when the CPM skyrockets the most.

26:11 AUSTIN: That’s a pretty astronomical jump year over year. Especially with what you’re saying is impression share is down. So we’re really driving the point home here that it’s just more expensive and harder to advertise on Facebook now. That’s just where we’re at. So you pretty much need to be a strategist, looking at this every single day. And really getting in the weeds.

And then also, if you are working with someone that’s doing social advertising, you need to be asking them these questions of what your CPM is and then really driving into the engagement of this to try to understand are you still reaching your audience? And how much more is it costing you? And is it even worth it?

At this point, is it worth it for your business, in your industry to still be advertising on Facebook? So really start to understand that. Ask those questions.

26:56 SOPHIA: Yeah, and I think another really big thing to call out that our Facebook rep has been talking to us a lot. As we kind of lose a little bit of our targeting capabilities in terms of 3rd party data. Or even certain interests, behaviors, demographic information is no longer available to us.

It’s really, really extremely important to have really high quality creative. Because you might not be able to get as targeted as exactly the person of like, let’s say like and Austin, who’s interested in X, Y and Z. And makes this much money, and lives in this area. And drives this kind of car. Things like that.

So what you have to do instead is create creative that’s going to make people want to click. It has to be super-engaging. It has to be… you can’t just throw something together with a little text and call it a day. You really have to think about your brand, your messaging–what values you want to stand for. And then also how are you going to get people who might not always fit the persona of your audience to actually click.

One of the ways that we’re doing that on our team is by creating video content. That’s a huge, huge win for any Facebook advertiser. Any brand that’s really trying to get more traction through Facebook.

Additionally, you can retarget based on video viewers. That gives you more opportunity to create retargeting audiences, look-alike audiences. And then Facebook also is going to serve better creative ahead of some of the lower quality stuff because it all goes back to your relevance score as well.

28:25 AUSTIN: Right. Yeah, that’s really interesting that you bring that up. And I think that’s becoming a really big part of everyone’s strategy now, is the video assets. And that constant creative.

How unique does the person’s interaction with your brand need to be? Meaning how many different ads, or how many different videos would you need someone to be served for them to feel your brand is refreshing? Or maybe get them to go and buy something?

28:48 GREG: So that question is… it really depends on the service and the kind of brand that you have. If it’s an easy to figure out… say it’s just e-commerce. Probably one or two videos.

But if it’s a pretty complicated service, probably 3, 4. You want to show testimonials that’ll help. And then to Sophia’s point, I think having engaging creative is something that works. And there’s workarounds to kind of show Facebook that your ad can get that much engagement.

So what I’ve seen work in the past is actually run a engagement campaign to build up social proof on an ad. And so I’ll try to get about 2 to 3,000 likes on an ad. And then with that ad, I’ll take the post ID and then dark-post it in a regular campaign.

And if you guys need explanations on dark-posting, it’s kind of technical. You can reach out to us, and we’ll explain it.

29:44 SOPHIA: Yeah, I think we have a really awesome blog post as well on the Power Digital blog. Kind of running you through how to do a dark-post. That’s a strategy that a lot of advertisers aren’t taking advantage of. And it basically allows you to keep that social proof on an ad and then run it to new audiences, in short, basically.

But again there’s kind of how to on our blog. So definitely check that out, and that’s…

30:03 AUSTIN: We’ll see if we can maybe link this in the description after the show. If anybody’d be interested in looking that up and then potentially dropping the episode on that blog post to could be good too. Do a little bit of our own advertising, there, right?

30:13 SOPHIA: Yeah. A little self-promotion. A little humble-brag. We like to get traffic to our site.

30:17 AUSTIN: Yeah, we like to practice what we preach around here. That’s how we keep on top of our game, right?

All right, thank you to Sophia and Greg for coming in and talking social ads. Like they said, if you have any questions, please reach out to us. They’re on top of it. They’re testing and testing and testing. All day, every single day. All day. Every week. Just to make sure that our clients are efficient and spend money correctly, so thank you both.

30:40 SOPHIA: Yeah, thank you.

30:41 GREG: Thank you, Austin.

30:43 AUSTIN: Thanks again to Greg and Sophia. That was a super-awesome interview.

All right. Let’s close it down with a little bit of fun. We’re doing a minute with Musk. We’re talking about our good friend Elon Musk and let me tell you, he has been up to something. So I’m sure that a lot of you saw this, but the Thai youth soccer team, they got stuck in a cave. They were stuck in the cave for 12 days. They all got out, incredible. Incredible.

And Elon Musk decided “Hey. I wanna get in on this action. I’m a guy, got a lot of tech. What can I do?”

So this is what he did. He sent a mini-submarine to save the Thai children.

Yes, you heard that correctly. A child-sized submarine…

31:25 JOHN: Did he send it in time?

31:26 AUSTIN: Yeah…

31:28 JOHN: Did he just show up after everyone was rescued, or…?

31:29 AUSTIN: My understanding… the tech billionaire has designed a miniature submarine built with rocket parts to help save the children that were in the flooded cave. It was not needed, though.

So built by engineers from his company. They travelled to the remote area and then I believe they either built it there or brought the parts to build it there.

Anyways, they assembled the mini-submarine. Let them have it. And they were like, “What are we supposed to do with this? It’s a mini-submarine. There’s no way we can actually use this.”

So yeah, Elon Musk was as per usual… his head was in the clouds. You could even say his head was not on earth. And came up with some obscene idea that he could use a mini-submarine to get children out of a cave. Which is very wild.

But anyways, I think the intentions were great for Elon, per usual. Which is also a big thing with Elon. Intentions. Always there. The idea–maybe not so plausible.

32:25 JOE: Yeah, I think that this was something where people finally kind of took a step back and said, “What is this guy doing? Why have we been following him so blindly all this time? Maybe not all of his ideas are that great.”

32:39 AUSTIN: I actually completely agree with you. This was a big moment where everybody’s like, “This guy is bat-shit crazy.” I don’t know how else to put it.

32:45 JOHN: I’ve heard… I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts where they talk about the word being used about him is “Elon Musk is an asshole.”

32:52 AUSTIN: Really?

32:53 JOHN: Yeah. For trying to even think that he could do this.

32:55 AUSTIN: Oh, yeah. I thought that you were saying just in general. Which could be. But I also really agree with you on that.

This is a pretty narcissistic move in my opinion. To be like, “Oh, these kids are stuck in this cave. I can fix it. I can do it. I’m going to just send them this mini-submarine and all my engineers.”

And they didn’t do anything. They didn’t help at all.

So anyways, I don’t expect this to change at all with Elon Musk, and I actually encourage it. I like the stories. I think they’re really funny, plus this guy, as we’ve talked about in the past, he’s got a flamethrower company. He’s building an underground track with electric vehicles in Chicago that’s going from the airport to the city. So he’s doing a lot of cool things.

And in between, maybe a couple of weird things. But…

33:39 JOHN: He’s a real-life Tony Stark.

33:40 AUSTIN: Real-life Tony Stark. Absolutely.

All righty. That’s going to do it for today’s show. Thank you all for joining us on Flip the Switch today. If you haven’t already, please join our forum on Facebook. We talked a lot about Facebook today. Please go on there and join. You can talk to us. We’ll answer questions. Sophia posts a lot of really good articles. A lot about what we talked about on the show. Follow ups. Maybe some more details.

So please check that out. And then as always, this is going to be Joe Hollerup, Austin Mahaffy and John Saunders signing off.