Navigating the Freelance Landscape in Paid Media with Sam Noble

So hello, Sam.

It's so good to have you on as a guest.

How are you?

It's been such a long time since I saw you.

Yeah, really good, thank you.

Just been, uh, busy working, looking after the kids, and,

uh, general day to day life.

And how are you, how are you enjoying this, uh, phenomenal UK weather

we seem to be having at the moment?

It's just dire, isn't it?

Every morning I look out and like, oh, great, and it's

windy and raining again, lovely.

Yeah, nothing you can do, no, and as I say, I'm looking after the kids.

One of them's in a school that's sort of in the middle of nowhere, and there are

floods every morning at the minute, trying to get there, so that's really great fun.

Yeah.

These, these, these are always this sort of challenges.

I think, uh, you know, most people that live in these exotic places just

never have to kind of worry about, they never have to worry about seasonal

weather or anything like that, you know, but having lived in Hong Kong,

like sometimes that's bad as well.

Right.

You kind of, you know, you go and you go, I wish it wasn't so hot.

Right.

And then eventually kind of go, I wish it was colder, you know, but, but I

think it's, uh, you know, yeah, I think it's just, it's a, it's a British thing.

Isn't it?

We just talk about the weather and how bad it is.

Even when it's hot, you complain about it's too hot.

You're never happy.

So I've known Sam for, Oh, I didn't, I don't even know how long it's probably

like 15, 20 years, something like that.

It's been a while.

Um, and you've had, you had a fairly sort of, uh, transitional kind of

career in, in the, in the industry.

Perhaps you can just tell everyone a little bit about who you are and where

you're all, what you're all about.

Okay.

So I, um, I, like you say, I've worked in the industry, I'd say

it must be 24 years, I think now.

So I started my career basically working for a travel agency, um, called Sun Sales,

a tour operator as such, but literally just doing admin day to day stuff.

And then I've worked my way, um, through that.

What am I actually going to do with my life?

Anyway.

The, uh, the marketing director there hired me as his PA and that's where I

started to get properly into sort of marketing the traditional side of things.

And then transitioned from working there to another in house

brand, but financial services.

So extremely competitive where I then learned digital, then

went agency side for 10 years.

And then I've now been more recently, I say more recently, it

was eight years ago now I set up my own freelance consultancy, which.

That eight years has literally whizzed by.

So I've kind of gone in house agency freelance and, and sort of

purely focusing on, on paid media.

So anything from Google, Bing, Facebook, Pinterest, and anything that you've

sort of paid to pay to advertise.

And in terms of like the, the, the transition

from that sort of, you know.

Uh, working in house, working for an agency, doing a consultancy kind of

role with, I mean, which do you prefer and, um, you know, and what, and what

advice would you give people kind of like that maybe at the point crossroads

of, I need to choose what to do now, you know, what are the kind of pros

and cons of each of those really?

I'd say freelance for me is hands down the best decision I've ever

made, but it does come with challenges.

Um, you, you are, you're on your own, you're your own boss.

So you have to be extremely sort of motivated, uh, make sure that you

are getting up and actually doing what you need to be doing and sort

of having a structure in place.

But.

And also making sure that you're able to sort of get out there

and networking's fundamental.

Like you can't just get business as a freelancer if you're just

not sort of networking with other people in the industry.

I think that's absolutely key.

But for me, I think I loved working agency side because you're then sort of

pulling on the knowledge and experience from a whole breadth of different people.

And so I feel like you learn more when you're working agency side

because you've got that and you sort of bounce ideas off of each other.

Whereas now as a freelancer, you're sort of.

Yeah, I'm on my own, um, but that's what I mean.

So the networking side of the thing becomes even more important.

And as a freelancer, you kind of, you can tap into different groups and stuff.

There's loads of us in the industry that are doing it now.

So you kind of learn from Slack groups and Facebook groups and things that you're in.

So it's a, it's a different way of working, but freelanced for me is yeah,

absolutely the best decision I've made.

And what, what would you say are the downsides of freelancing?

I think you mentioned, you mentioned there about like, you know,

having the people in the office.

Yeah, I mean, but again, I think, you know, even if you look at

it now, I mean, I think so many companies now they are still.

Like everyone's working from home.

Right.

And, uh, I mean, I, I saw something on the TV.

I think I watched question time the other day and they were talking

about, you know, since the pandemic, the number of people playing golf in

the week has gone up by like 350%.

And I'm thinking to myself, are these people that should be working from home,

but they're really just playing golf.

Right.

And, uh, as you say, I think, I think, I think, you know, if you, if you

run your own business and you you're working remotely, I mean, I've worked

from home for probably 15 years now.

Right.

So for me, it's like, It's been water off a duck's back right

when we went into lockdown.

It's like, yeah, no, no change for me.

Um, other than everyone was in the house.

I used to kind of like have the house to myself and now all of

a sudden everyone was there.

But other than that, you know, as you say, it's the discipline

of getting up and knowing that.

I always kind of say every morning you wake up, you're

basically unemployed, right?

Because, you know, you have to go and find your next client if, if

that's the case, or make sure you're looking after the ones that you've

got to make sure that they continue to work with you, keep coming back.

Um, you know, you obviously.

Again, you know, you don't get the luxury of paid holidays.

I mean, if you take time off, then in a lot of cases that that

means you're not earning, right?

how do you kind of balance those sorts of things?

I think the holiday side of things that you've touched on is.

A really interesting one, because I think it's, as a freelancer,

depending on how you bill your time, I bill my time as a date rate.

which means that if I fill up my month with time, which is, was a biggest

mistake I kind of made, I think, at the start, is I was like, ah, okay,

there's 25 working days in a month, that month, 20 days that month.

22. Let's just fill all of those days with work.

And then you get to it and you think, Oh God, when am I going to have a day off?

Like, even though you've got your weekends, you think, how am I going

to actually take an actual week off?

You've still got your clients to sort of work for.

So I've sort of stripped that back a bit now.

That was the one of the, the sort of the mistakes I've made at the start.

And now I don't fill my time completely.

I'd always got a bit of a gap, which means that I have got that flexed.

How much time do you try and fill?

Is it half the month or?

No, more than that.

I'd probably say about 85%, 85, 90 percent of the time.

then I use that time that I've got left for, you know, I want to go in to a

school assembly or it's sports day or.

Some personal development, I might want to attend a conference

or whatever it is in that sense.

or you go on holiday.

Now, when I'm going on holiday, I work double the amount of hours in the lead up

to that to try and fit all of my work in.

And I never switch off.

So my laptop comes with me.

I check my emails every day.

I check my PPC campaigns every day.

Then I might go out and then come back and check them again.

So, yeah, as a freel I don't think you necessarily Switch off as a

PP, because at the end of the day, you're managing someone's money.

and every day that campaign is still spending.

So you kind of, I can't rest unless I know that it's sort of performing

how it should be performing.

So I think that's a tough one that people, I think will struggle to

get used to if you're so used to sort of working in house or agency

side and then become your own boss.

It's that balance of being able to say, no, I don't want to

fill my calendar up completely.

Without them panicking, thinking I'm, I haven't got all my days filled.

There's a, there's a fine line between the two.

But, but I also think that managing the relationship with the

clients that you work with, right.

And explaining to them the way in which you work, right.

Is an important part of the process,

So all my clients, whenever I start working with anyone

new, I will say exactly the same thing.

So I do school pickup every day and I don't want that to change.

That's something I want to do as a mom.

So they know that I will work from nine until around three o'clock.

I'll do the school pickup and then I will probably.

Be back online a little bit later.

So clients will receive emails from me sometimes at 11 o'clock at night.

That doesn't mean to say if they email me at 11 o'clock at night, I'm going to

respond because that's not an everyday thing, but it is managing their, the

kind of expectations from the get go.

Yes.

I might work Sunday.

I might work a Saturday that week, but then I might have a

Monday off the following week.

Like it's, that's the benefits of, of sort of doing freelance work when

you're managing campaigns, obviously.

If you're working with a client on a consultancy basis where you

need to be in the office with them or you're doing training, that is

a fixed, allotted amount of time.

That, that's what I would sort of plan in, but anything surrounding

that sort of campaign management time is pretty flexible, which is.

Super helpful from a, a parental perspective.

one of the challenges I've always found with consultants

is how they find their business.

So how do you find business for your, how do you find your clients?

So I think I've been really lucky in the, over the years.

So when I first started working at Koozai, we, we didn't do any sort

of conference speaking, we didn't really have any attendance or sort

of presence at any events across the UK or, or around the world.

And.

I convinced the, the owner to let us kind of do that and get

the, the brand's name out there, get the agency's name out there.

And we started having various people go off and do conference talks

or we'd sponsor different events.

And it's from that that I've sort of made a huge amount of connections globally.

Um, just from speaking at different conferences and sort of networking.

And I think that for me is where I would say I get the vast majority of work from.

Followed then by sort of other referrals from existing clients where they're

saying or somebody said that they need a bit of PPC support and they'll

then say I'll go and speak to Sam.

Or also businesses where you've got one person working there and then they

move jobs when you sort of follow them.

So I think I've been really lucky and literally I say, I touch wood every day

on this one because I do feel genuinely.

It is lucky really that I've, I've got such a lovely network of people

in this industry and everyone is so friendly and so helpful that if

you need a little bit of help or you've got a little bit of downtime.

You reach out to a few people and they put the feelers out and off you go again.

So I think that absolutely fundamental.

I think I can't, I couldn't understand, I don't know how people being

freelancers that don't have a network of people can generate business.

Cause I think it would be a really, really tough market to be in, especially

now, like you were touching on with everyone working at home with COVID

and stuff, our post COVID, there are so many more freelancers out there that.

I think it's becoming even more competitive, which it must be quite

a challenge for a fair few, and that's to say, touch wood every day.

Yeah, I always remember when I first started, I mean, like, you know,

I was working from home, went away on holiday and like yourself, I kind of used

to, to, to work and try and do, do things.

But at the time, I mean, this, this kind of predated, um, everyone having laptops

and internet being all over the place.

So most of the time I would be, you know, Putting on my trainers and

running down to the local village to try and find an internet cafe.

And there'd be all these like 10 year olds playing games and I'm

sitting there trying to manage it.

I'm thinking this is like so unprofessional, but you know, but

at the end of the day, that, that was kind of the wild west really.

Cause it, like I say.

I think a laptop at the time was about five grand and I just thought

I can't afford one of those.

So,

so

I say I'll have two hours on this computer.

I would go, go down there in the morning, you know, do some work, you know, go

back, have some lunch, go for a swim, go back there in the afternoon, do a

bit more work, you know, go out for a drink in the evening, go there again.

And I'm sure they must thought, I don't know what game he's playing.

And I'm like, I'm not playing game.

I'm here.

I'm here for work.

Right.

So like

a homeless worker.

Shelter yourself from the cold.

Absolutely.

But you know, but at the end of the day, it's sort of like it,

like I said, it just evolved.

And I remember my very, very first PPC client, they said, can you do this for me?

And I'm like, yeah, absolutely.

I can do that.

And then I'm like, how do I do that?

And quickly going off to try and find out how to do it.

Right.

Whereas, you know, I think the days of winging it are probably gone.

I think we're, we're much, much further past that than, um, than before.

But interestingly, you talked there about Investing money in

sending people away to speak at conferences and sponsoring events.

I'm amazed at how few agencies now will do that.

They won't encourage people to go and speak.

They won't encourage people to attend conferences.

You know, they weren't, they wouldn't do any sponsorship, right.

To me, it was always a complete and utter no brainer.

Every time I spoke at a conference, I would walk away.

I said it, it used to be like shooting fish in a barrel, right?

You'd go along, you'd present, there'd be a queue of people

that want to talk to you, right?

As long as you've kind of done some great content.

And I know from watching you speak, you deliver great content, right?

So it would be again, a no brainer for people to want to kind of go.

She's, she's pretty knowledgeable.

I think we'll, we'll hire her to kind of do some work for us.

know, I don't know if you, if you consciously stepped away from

speaking, but I know there was a period where you kind of, You

didn't do speaking so much, right?

Was that kind of conscious or subconscious?

No, that was on purpose.

So that was just before COVID.

We were looking at sort of our time and our schedule and what we were

doing every sort of couple of months and I was thinking, Oh my goodness,

we're travelling all over the place which is amazing and I would never

sort of be ungrateful for that.

I spoke InOrbit in Slovenia which is a brilliant conference and flew in.

It looked amazing in the location where we were right on the waterfront.

And I was there for three days.

And the only thing I saw was a bar, a restaurant and the conference hall.

But I've ticked off on my, uh, on my bucket list, the places

that I've been to Slovenia.

And I was like, I haven't actually been there because I haven't seen anything.

I've, I've been in the country.

I stayed overnight and it was kind of getting to that point where

we're trying to squeeze everything in and sort of running out of time.

And then COVID hit and we were at home for.

Oh, a very long period of time.

And it was quite nice.

Like, it was nice to not be traveling all the time.

It was nice to be just able to spend time with the kids, to be actually able to

focus on work and stuff around the home.

So I've taken, I did take a step back for a few years to be fair, and I've

slowly started doing little, because you get a bit of a bug for it, don't you?

it is quite, it's good fun.

Um, and so, yeah, I started doing a little bit more again and I've got

a couple sort of lined up that I'm looking to do, but I'm going to be

a little bit more selective rather than saying yes to everything.

if they are overseas, just trying to tie in a couple of extra days to actually.

See the country, you know, Jim, putting together a slide

deck is a huge amount of work.

Yeah, and I don't

think

people appreciate how hard it is, right?

Again, I know some people will just kind of blow the dust off one they had

prepared earlier, change the name of the conference they're attending at.

I always make sure I completely start from scratch with a brand new topic

and kind of like go, go right from the beginning rather than trying

to repurpose something I've got.

From before, right.

So,

you

know, um, and I mean, yeah.

And I mean, much like you, I, I used to travel, I worked it out.

I used to travel for three months of the year, speaking at conferences

and traveling around the world.

Right.

Which was great.

I mean, I, I, I always kind of said, as long as you've got a laptop, you

can do your job anywhere, right.

Because I work from home, as long as I had, you know, decent internet at the

hotel I was staying at or the venue I was speaking at, I could do my job anywhere.

So, you know, I, I used to purposely do that.

I would go and visit friends and, you know.

Visit, stay with them, um, you know, have a good time and.

And then as you say, COVID happened, you know, we stopped traveling

and I don't know where else.

I mean, I think when it kind of came, when it came back, right, I think I

have you health problems kind of pre COVID and during COVID and, you know,

and then I just thought, you know what?

I need to kind of like invest some time into myself.

So I kind of kind of lost weight and started walking and getting.

getting a bit fitter.

Um, you know, and that I sort of purposefully took myself

off the speaker stage, right?

I wanted to allow other people to have the opportunity kind of

to, to get out there and speak.

And it's nice, isn't it?

To watch all these other, like there's so many new people now that you think, Oh,

and they're producing brilliant content, but if we all stuck there and did the

same thing, they wouldn't get a chance.

So,

but at the same time, I also thought.

You know, I used to say to people, I'm too old, too male and too white, right?

And I wanted to try and encourage more female speakers, more people of color,

and, you know, and, and younger people to kind of get out there and speak, right?

And, but, but equally, I think it's also important that people don't lose sight of.

You know, where we've come from, where we are now, where we're

hopefully trying to get to.

And hopefully I can kind of convey some of that when I do speak at conferences.

So I have, like you, been a bit more selective in terms of coming

back and doing, you know, I've done PubCon a couple of times, delivered

one day workshops, right, so it's a full day where we can kind of

really get into the weeds on stuff.

Uh, love that, absolutely love doing that sort of thing, the

kind of the one day workshops.

I know you used to do those at Brighton, didn't you?

BrightonSEO.

Yes, yeah, I did, yeah.

You know, and for me, I still love that.

Again, that's potentially on the cards again.

I love those sort of smaller groups.

I remember when you first did training at Brighton, when we PPC training, we

had about, there was one, one day where we had 35 people on the training course,

which was a huge amount of people.

And then now, obviously now, lots of different sort of tracks on, but It's so

much that I, I, that I find that really rewarding because then you've got people

coming to you and asking afterwards, like, I've put this in place so you can see

that you genuinely are sort of helping.

And so I'm with you on that.

I think there's conference talking and then conference speaking and then

workshops is so different, aren't they?

What you sort of get from them.

Yeah.

And I think again, I think, I think because of the fact

that a lot of conferences.

Lost their slots at the hotels that they were at.

A lot of them have really never kind of regained where they were.

So I think probably BrightonSEO.

Is the one show that Didn't miss a beat, right?

They kind of came back just as big, they've grown.

They've opened up in the States.

I know in the States, they really rolled the carpet out with the

kind of speakers that they had.

So again, like I know in the UK, they've gone down the route of trying to encourage

new speakers, first timers, you know, people that maybe not have done it

before, um, whereas in the States, they kind of like literally they brought out

the A list of, you know, who's the best.

The biggest and best in, in, in the business in terms of SEO,

PPC in BrightonSEO in San Diego.

Right.

And it paid off.

They had a great first show.

you know, and, and it's, it's just going to evolve and continue

to get bigger and bigger, right.

But at the same time, I think a lot of the success of that comes from,

they give a lot of tickets away.

There's this kind of scramble of trying to, people trying

to get on the ballot, right?

They get a one day ticket, not a two day ticket.

So if they want one, they have to buy the other one, right?

And virtually everyone gets the opportunity to go and.

Attend a workshop, right?

And a lot of people go, well, I'm going to be there anyway.

I might as well do that.

And another day in a hotel and three or 400 pounds on the

kind of cost of the workshop.

It's a no brainer, right?

So they can get education, training, you know, learn from somebody like yourself,

who's a seasoned, seasoned professional knows what they're talking about.

But they can get more time than you can in a 30 minute presentation.

30 minutes, you know, yeah, fine, you'll cover bang, bang,

bang, these are all the points.

But I think it's important if you can kind of really get into the weeds with

some of the more detailed stuff in a, in a workshop sort of environment,

really make a, make a difference.

So your company is called Biddable Moments, Do you

regret calling it that now?

I do.

really do.

It is.

Every time I'm like, okay, what's your email address?

Sam at biddablemains.

com.

Sorry?

Biddable.

How do you spell that?

It is, yeah, it is an absolute, I think, I think back when I started it,

Biddable was the The word that people were using for paid advertising, it

was there, and it was Yeah, biddable

media was, was the kind of the big thing, wasn't it?

But, but for whatever reason, it just never took, right?

It never stuck, right?

I, I tried to adopt it.

I tried to adopt it like you.

I thought, yeah, this is it.

This is what it's going to be called.

I'm, I'm all in for that, right?

And then all of a sudden, it wasn't, right?

It became paid social, PPC.

You know, and, and it's like, market,

do these, and I'm sure in two years time it's gonna change it.

Something completely different.

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

So yes, if, if I could turn back the clocks and to, to be honest with

you, I don't really think the name as a freelancer is really a pro.

The, the reason I did it in the first place when I, my, when I

first left, Koozai, I did wanna set up a dedicated PPC agency.

That was my initial thought process, which is why I kind of went down

the, let's come up with a name.

Um.

About three weeks after leaving and doing consultancy and freelance by myself.

I don't want an agency.

I don't want to do that.

I just, I'm happy for it to just be me.

And if I need a little bit of support, I've got a bunch of freelancers

that I can sort of pull on.

Um, rather than actually having a whole team of people.

So I think that adds so many different layers of stress.

And I just didn't want to do it again.

So, yeah, in hindsight, The Biddable Moments is, it's not really a thing

as such, uh, cause it does look like I'm an agency when I'm not.

whenever I talk to people and they kind of say, what do you do?

I call my company a consulgency.

Right.

So I do a lot of consulting, right.

But I also, with the agency of record for some of the clients that we work with.

Right.

So we, we kind of handle all aspects of their sort of marketing

strategy and implementation.

And, and again, I love, I love the clients, but I also love the kind of the,

the one off projects and problem solving and helping people get out of, you know,

deep holes that they may have been in.

Right.

Which sometimes they've been put there by other people and don't

realize that they are where they are.

Until

they don't even know where they are.

Yeah.

And then

it sort of uncovers a whole bunch of issues that.

Jim, I've just been kicked out of, you know, Facebook,

my Facebook has been shut down.

What, what can I happen?

And, and, you know, when you actually look at it, you go, well,

you can see why they go, Oh, they shut down for no apparent reason.

It's like, well, it may not have been apparent to you, but it was very

apparent to them and very apparent to me.

and I think, I think that's quite often where you can kind of,

um, you know, you can add value.

Immediately.

Right.

I mean, I had, Kaspar Szymanski on as a guest a few weeks ago.

Um, and he used to kind of be one of the web spam team guys at Google.

And then he left to set up his own SEO consultancy.

Um, and what, again, what, what, what was really helpful when, when I was

working for cheap flights, we got booted out of the index by Google in Australia.

And basically we've gone from having, you know, probably 20, 30,000 visits a day.

The none, right?

And, you know, happened overnight.

And it's sort of like, when you actually looked at it.

With the benefits of hindsight, you could see what, what we had done wrong.

They could see what we'd done wrong and they were able to fix it really quickly.

So they charged us a lot of money I remember the guy who's running

SEO basically said, Oh, that seems like an awful lot of money.

I'm like, what compared to the money that we're losing for every day of not

having 30,000 visitors coming in, right?

There's kind of.

I don't really see that there's a comparison between

those two sort of scenarios.

yes, we can buy paid media, and we were, right?

But you know, when you get 30,000 organic visitors, it's like, it's a lot to kind of

like, try and make up in paid ads, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, so I think, you know, in that respect it's like, again, people

sometimes don't Realize the implications of doing what they do, right?

That's always one of the challenges is that, you know, as much as we think we

know best and quite often with benefits of the expertise we got, we do, we don't

sometimes, you know, things change and you'll get an ad disapprove and they.

It could be somebody's interpretation of the ad versus your interpretation of

the ad and you kind of go and appeal it and whatever else, and that's, I don't

know what your thoughts are on AI, I'd be interested to know what they are, but

one of the things that always challenges me is that because more of the decisions

about Ads validity is being done by AI.

I'm more concerned that we're going to lose some of the ads that, you

know, are good, but because the AI goes, it's a one in zero, it's good.

It's, it's approved.

It's not approved or be disapproved.

And there's really no kind of appeal process.

there's parts of AI that I like and there's parts

of it I can see really benefit.

Sort of our day to day work within in paid advertising, but the vast majority

of it at this moment in time And I you can come and ask me this in three

four years time and I'll probably tell you a completely different answer But

right now I don't think it's there.

I don't think like when I'm looking at the adverts It's trying to suggest

that we write They don't make sense.

The keywords it's trying to suggest we bid on are far too generic and aren't

relevant to that particular account.

even trying to move people from a campaign from this bidding strategy to that bidding

strategy without at the amount of lead gen businesses that I'm working with

and have worked with over the years.

Where I'm working on a maximized conversion bidding

strategy with a target CPA.

And then Google's turning around and said, Oh, no, no, it needs to

be a maximized conversion value.

It's a lead gen business.

And now, again, I'd appreciate that.

Some lead gen businesses, I do put values against the.

The conversion actions that come in and I weight them around which ones are the

most important, which ones are the lowest.

It's, so I don't think it's quite there yet.

I think it's also struggling particularly with Facebook on British

English to Americanized English.

Yeah.

And getting that wrong.

So I think, yeah, I think there's bits that we can learn from it,

but relying on it, I think we are.

a way off.

It's funny when you kind of like, um, you're adding

an ad to say Facebook, right?

And, um, you know, they gave, they give you all the, um, sort of AI

suggested primary texts and they're all full of capital letters and they're

full of exclamations and emojis.

And I'm thinking.

There's no way on this earth that anyone that saw that ad, if I was seeing that

ad, I'd be like, what the hell is that?

Right.

But, you know, but I'm sure that there's a lot of people just

automatically will just accept the tick box being pre ticked for you.

Right.

And Hey, all of a sudden, all your ads have got five

variations that are all horrible.

Right.

And I think that, again, that's where I think a good consultant, good agency

can really kind of make a difference to, you know, the performance it's

like knowing what not to accept.

I've had one, one client recently messaged and said, why have all

my images on Facebook, on my ads that I keep seeing, got all of these different

colored backgrounds and I just miss feed.

And then I've gone in and all of the, on Facebook particularly, they have the, uh,

the automatic suggestions to enhance the creative, It's all ticked on by default.

And if they add a new feature in, they add it to all your

existing ads and they tick it.

So even ads that I've had running for a long period of time that

I know that option wasn't in there for, it suddenly appears.

And that is, that's, it's a frustration because from the client's perspective,

they're like, Oh, images for our products look horrendous, which granted they did.

And I had to go into every single ad one by one.

And check them all because you couldn't do it on bulk.

Yeah, it's just, it's the same with, you know, they, they add music.

don't be, don't get me wrong.

Some, I mean, some of the, the product images that clients give

you go, God, this is horrible.

So using generative AI to remove a background that kind of just doesn't

fit, right, and turning it into a white background or a black background.

Perfect.

Right.

But, you know, but as you say, like this wholesale, I will kind of say

it's a bit like whack a mole, right?

You kind of have to go in and retrospectively find what

they've done and undo it, right?

Because

And undo it.

Which shouldn't be the case.

No.

It should be, uh, it's, yeah, so that's That's a frustrating thing.

And I think, I think if the advertising platforms were able to utilize AI in

the right way and say, right, similar to what Google is doing, to be fair,

although if you tick a couple of boxes, they'll automatically do a load of

things for you without you realizing.

So you've got to be aware of that.

But I think Google are a little bit further along with, okay, you can

deselect everything for, The account as a whole, they won't apply it.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, it would always be like a lot of

the, a lot of the hidden dangerous stuff would be in a more options.

You click on the more options and all this stuff opens up and

it's like, do you want this?

Do you want this?

Do you want this?

Like, no, no, no, no, no.

you automated ad extensions.

I always love it.

This one, cause you go into your ad extension, you've got to click the three

little lines and it's more options.

Then it's.

Then you're going to find your automated ones.

And to me, I always think like, if you are going to sort of

mandate these things, they should, again, as you say, you should be

able to go at an account level.

You go, I don't want to have any of that.

Right.

Similarly, you should have the ability.

They should be opt in and not opt out.

They shouldn't be on by default and you can opt out of them.

They should be off by default and you can opt into them.

And then that way is a considered decision that you've made to Take

it or not take it I think that was always the thing with, um, you

know, Google display network, right?

You, you, you look at it and you look at the number of placements that

you get junky traffic from, I found myself writing scripts to find every

single dot CZ or whatever, every, there was all these top level domains.

Like, I don't think anyone ever bought anything using a dot biz or a dot.

CC or a dot, you know, there was so many TLDs that the publisher would be, sending

traffic that just wasn't converting.

And you go, you know what, there's no point in me having that, that on there.

So, you know, you kind of write it into the script again, you

shouldn't have to kind of do that.

You should be,

No, no, you shouldn't.

It it's just extra work.

That's not needed.

Right.

It's, and then there's all the like with, um, Google now with performance max.

Again, I love performance max, but I'm begging.

For more information and more insights to it.

Cause I think it's, it feels like it's going slightly the wrong way in that.

You want us to adopt different campaign types.

Great.

But we need the ability to optimize them and be able to take

things out that aren't working.

And I think hiding stuff away just doesn't fit right.

Yeah, I remember talking to Lisa Raehsler and we were talking

and having a laugh about what they've done is they've basically dumbed down

Google ads using Performance Max to make it better for All advertisers,

but the people that were able to do it before manually right with the

ones that were ultimately penalized.

You basically turned what could have been a really good product if people

understood how it worked into a mediocre product for everyone, So everyone

could come and get the same mediocre.

feature set rather than, you know, you understand how GDN works.

You understand how YouTube works.

You understand how Gmail ads work, mean, again, I used to run some Gmail ads and

get good success with them, but you know, there was such a, a volatile Campaign

type that people just I've tried it.

It was horrible.

I didn't work right.

It's just because they didn't do it.

Right, right in the same way.

I learned I learned GDN the hard way.

I learned how to do it by spending a bunch of money and not getting any success

with it, but eventually you work out

what to do and how to do it.

Right?

And it

was always a thing like people weren't running YouTube

ads because they couldn't, Produce the creative that they need.

some of the AI has been great in terms of it's been able to create that AI

version of the YouTube videos to enable them to have that additional exposure

on placements that they wouldn't otherwise have been able to have.

Right.

So

yeah, it's gonna this interesting times.

So, so where do you think that the, industry's heading

other than AI?

It's a tough, it's, I think it's a tough one.

I think for, for paid media, say a bid moment, bid media,

whatever we wanna call it.

I think it's.

It changes so much on a month by month basis.

I think it's so hard to predict where it is going because, like,

if you were to look back a year ago, we had Performance Max.

It wasn't anywhere near as big as what it is now, but it's

pushing and pushing and pushing.

So do I feel like they are trying to take control of campaign types?

Bing have launched Performance Max.

Facebook have got Advantage Plus.

even Pinterest have just come back out with their version

of advantage plus as well.

So there's, they're all trying to go down that route, but I don't think

it's going to take away from us as advertisers manually having to sort

of intervene with certain things.

I just don't think we're anywhere near AI completely dominating,

taking everything over.

I think we're going to see more platforms pushing ads more.

I think Google are probably going to start to monetize more

than what they already are.

Like we're already seeing paid ads appearing midway

through the organic results.

Yeah.

There's, there's ads coming in.

We get two to three to four Map listings now.

Is that all going to get fully monetized at some point?

so I don't think there's going to be any real fundamental changes,

but I think the, the platform's going to start to monetize things.

More, which is what we see every year, right?

Performance Max is there to make them more money.

And it absolutely is.

I saw that over Christmas.

It was a nightmare.

The amount of businesses that you work with, uh, sort of e com H2 up until

sort of Q4, it's really, really strong.

This year, everyone has struggled.

Um, cause the, the, the actual amount of competitors that

are out there from PMAX is.

I always use Shopify's performance as a barometer.

And, according to them, they said that, you know, the performance through,

uh, uh, black Friday, cyber Monday was 12% up on the previous year.

And I'm like, really?

I couldn't, I just didn't, I didn't, it didn't feel like that to me.

It, it just felt like, no, that the economy was.

In a bit of a, you know, reset, people were kind of having to pull

in their, their belts a little bit and kind of tighten up and touch.

Right.

So I don't know.

I, I, again, I'm not convinced that the, um, the performances at that

level, as you say, I think it's probably maybe Shopify sold stuff, but

there was more advertisers out there doing it, which meant that the ones

actually doing it,

you know, which meant that the advertising profitability for

the advertisers that were there was just nowhere near as good as it was

to take like for like these.

Businesses that we have on Shopify this year versus last year.

And just analyze those.

I, I would probably say that a lot of businesses have, have

struggled because I just think it's got so much more competitive.

Your average cost per clicks have gone up.

Um, and it's, it is a tougher market to play in.

So Sam, at some point in time, I'm hoping that we can find an

opportunity to kind of meet again in person, have a drink, um, sit down.

Maybe again, I'm hoping I'm going to get down to BrightonSEO later in.

In the spring, I hope

it'll be there.

The new HeroConf coming to Brighton this year.

I'm going to absolutely be down there for that one.

Yeah, I keep thinking I should put my name down to kind of present at

BrightonSEO or HeroConf or whatever.

But,

What did you say again?

It was, that was the one I did last year actually, I did Brighton in September or

I think the last time I presented for Kelvin, yeah, I think

I presented the, he did an event, I think it was called Biddable World or

something like that, and I presented that, and I, I pulled a party popper

in my mouth, I said this is one of my party pieces, and the premise was just

because you can do something doesn't mean you should, And I'm thinking maybe,

maybe that's, that's why he didn't want me to ever speak for him again, because

he thought I could have blown the back of my head off with a party popper.

Oh, it's, it's good fun.

It was a really good, it was nice to actually be back.

Cause it was, it was actually the first conference I ever did was Brighton.

So it's nice to sort of have a break for a few years and then go

back to your, back to your roots.

I always, I

always try and do like, I know they have two events in the UK, one in

the spring, one in the sort of the autumn.

I tend to do one of them.

It doesn't always, it's not always the spring.

It's not always the autumn.

I always try and do one BrightonSEO per year.

Cause I think two is too many.

What is, you know, I just don't think, I don't think I can cope with it.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard.

I mean, again, I, I kind of go, I network hard, I party hard.

I, drink too much.

It's just, you know, no sleep.

And I just think two, two of those in a year would be just one too many.

So,

a bit too much.

Yeah.

So yeah, I will be at the one in April.

So hopefully if you're there, I will definitely

see, see what I can do to, uh, to kind of make that happen.

So Sam, Thank you so much for being on today's show.

it's been phenomenal.

I've loved having you on as a guest.

Hope to see you again at some point in time in the future.

All of Sam's contact details and information about her.

Company that she doesn't really like the name of, Biddable

Moments will be in the show notes.

Oh, you definitely, you'd just do Samantha Nable, Mariana.

That's an easier one, isn't it?

Yeah, probably.

Um, but yeah, so, so, uh, it just remains for me to say, thank you so

much for being a great guest and, uh, to everyone listening and watching

in, we see you on the next episode.

Thanks a lot.

Perfect.

Thank you.