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The Marketing Architects
What Your CFO Really Thinks About Marketing
00:32:01
Only 2.6% of board directors have marketing experience. So how is marketing really being evaluated at the top? And what can marketers do about it? This episode, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Marketing Architects CFO Brent Longwall to break...
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- [00:00]
A
If I was mentoring a cmo, go to your cfo, schedule a time and ask her what's important to her and her team and what is finance focused on at that time? The CEO and the CFO have a really tight relationship. Not only you getting an understanding of what's important to that cfo, but also what's important to the CEO.
- [00:18]
B
Marketing Architects hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Lena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, a chief product architect of misfits and machines.
- [00:37]
C
Hello.
- [00:38]
B
Hey. And we are joined by Brent Longval, our CFO at Marketing Architects.
- [00:43]
A
Good morning. Thank you. Glad to be here Today we're back
- [00:46]
B
with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. But quick, before we dive into our topic today, I wanted to mention that Marketing Architects is going to be at Shop Talk in Las Vegas at the end of March. We'll have a booth. I'll be speaking on marketing effectiveness in streaming tv and if you're going, we'd love to know so we can meet you in person. But today we are talking about how finance really evaluates marketing. And we've brought our own CFO on the show to help marketers understand how CFOs think so they can communicate more effectively, justify their marketing investments and earn greater trust with the broader business. But I'll kick us off, as I always do, with some research and I chose a paper for this one. It's titled when and How Board Members with Marketing Experience Facilitate Firm Growth. This is by Kimberly Whitler, Ryan Kraus and Donald Lehman. For years there's been this concern that marketing's influence at the top of organizations is shrinking. And the data does support that. This study looked at over 64,000 board member biographies from S&P 1500 firms and found that only 2.6% of board directors have marketing experience. Even more interesting, prior research said in the paper found that fewer than half of 1% of Fortune 1000 board seats were held by active marketing leaders. Boards are dominated by what the researchers call throughput functions, things like finance, accounting, operations and legal roles that are internally focused and oriented around efficiency and cost control. Marketing, on the other hand, is an output function. So it's externally focused, demand generating and growth oriented. But when marketing isn't represented at the highest levels, the authors argue that firms tend to prioritize efficiency over growth. But there's good news for marketers. When firms include marketing experience directors on their board, they see significantly higher revenue growth. But this brings up the question, if marketing voices are so rare in the boardroom and finance perspectives dominate those strategic conversations, how is marketing really being evaluated? And how should marketers think differently if they want to influence at the board level? And that's what we're going to unpack today. But going straight to the source and interviewing our own CFO and, and we're also lucky to have our CEO on this podcast. So I think having both perspectives today is going to be valuable. So let's start with the main challenge of this episode. Why do we think there is a traditional tension between marketing and finance? And Brent, why don't you get us started?
- [03:07]
A
Yeah, thanks, Lena. I think really with this, it starts off with time horizons. We think from an accounting finance standpoint, more short term, you think about month end closes to quarterly reports and especially if you're a publicly held company and you know, maybe sometimes as far out as your long estimates, but those are very short time horizons. And you look at a lot of the initiatives that marketing is driven to accomplish, which is brand building. Well, those take 12, 18, 24 months to see come to fruition. And so I think right off the bat you have time horizons. I think a second one would be really around definition of risk. From a financial perspective, we look at risk as the unknown return to an investment. What is that ROI going to be? And that feels like a risk move for us. Marketing's risk is under investing in the building of a brand for long term growth. And in fact, we actually saw this this morning. Angela and I were on a call earlier today where we started talking about a new product offering at Marketing Architects. And we had a two phase approach. And we were talking about phase one before we move to phase two. And I immediately went to, hey, before we get to phase two, we should prove out there's a gain in phase one. And Angela quickly reminded us that even if we're at a break even in that phase one, it's going to be worth going to phase two because it broadens our services and it makes us more attractive in the market space. So we even saw that earlier today in a conversation that we were in. And then I think the last tension is really around measurement. Historically it's been really hard to measure brand building for clients. And I think the combination of better tools, engagement with marketing effectiveness principles, we see a lot higher correlation now. And attribution to where marketing investments can make a long term impact on the growth of businesses.
- [04:59]
D
Yeah, I totally agree. I think about, at its core, both functions are trying to create value, but they're doing it from different angles. And that's probably where the tension lies. We do need people focused on predictability. We do need people focused on managing risk. We do need people focused on safeguarding cash flow. But the realities of marketing, especially when those metrics aren't clear, clearly connected to business outcomes, which sometimes they're not, marketing can start to look like a cost instead of an investment. And that's where that tension is.
- [05:28]
C
The tension's pretty simple when you think about it, right? One function counts money, the other function spends money. So there's going to be, there's going to be some tension and I'll go so far and I'll throw myself this bucket. Agencies as marketers are actually really bad with money. And that the best agencies, historically, the ones that have risen meteorically and not plummeted quickly, was because they had a CFO that was helping to drive the agency. So often you look at the, oh, it's the creative founder or it's the strategy founder, that's all great. But you have to have someone in there that's doing what you guys were doing earlier today, looking at the product, what's the opportunity, how are we making sure controls are in place? And that's not to say that marketers are idiots. It's just they're driven by different values. And so having someone who can be the adult in the room and make sure that we can afford to eat next week is sometimes really undervalued.
- [06:32]
B
No, that's a good point, Rob. Well, to get into the mind of this adult in the room, which is Brent. Brent, I thought it'd be helpful if we started with just what is on a CFO's mind each month, because like Rob said, it's different typically than what a marketer is thinking of. So when you look at the business each month, what are the first sort of three numbers that you go to? And I'd be curious if you think this perspective would hold across other business models or other industries. That could be helpful to really first
- [06:57]
A
break it down into leading indicators and lagging indicators. So we have those two pieces and I think on the leading indicator side, the ppp, it's pitches, pilots, partnerships, that's the lifeline. So how many pitches are we doing on a monthly basis? How many pilots are now starting within that month and how many of those pilots really Converted over into partnerships, long term partnerships, long term commitments. So using Rob's funny math, because it was an acronym, I'm going to count that as only one of the numbers that I look at, the ppt. The second one jumps into lagging indicators and the first one's revenue against plan. Obviously revenue fuels growth for everything in that expansion. But then the other number is net income against plan. What are we doing? Because that ensures the positive cash flow, that ensures long term liquidity. And to your point earlier, it's different industries are going to have different focal points. Right. And so if you look at a manufacturing company, they might look more at debt ratios. If you look at where retail, that might be more around inventory turns. If you have a SaaS company, they're going to look at probably new customer acquisition and churn. And so different industries are going to have different measures that they look at. But really what it comes down to is I think everyone's going to have three key variables that it ties back to and it's growth, profitability and sustainability.
- [08:24]
B
That makes sense. I was thinking about this episode and the value for marketers. One thing I thought is it would be helpful if marketers knew how to evaluate a healthy business before they even join a new role. Because as a marketer, if you're getting into a business that's not profitable or struggling to grow or in a challenging category, probably going to be harder to want to invest a lot in marketing, support long term marketing goals. How would you define a healthy business? What does it look like to you as a cfo?
- [08:52]
A
Yeah, and this is, I think something that anyone could ask was they're coming into a business or evaluating that. And I think it starts with consistent revenue growth. And revenue growth happens two ways. One, it's new clients and so it's acquisition of new clients or new consumers. And then the second is organic growth. So the expansion of your existing consumer or customer base and those are going to ebb and flow at different times. We're going to have, for us, we're going to have some clients that are going to spend more than we anticipated at the beginning of the year. Some are going to spend a little bit less. But holistically I'd take more of a portfolio balance approach and say, you know, are we having consistent revenue growth quarter after quarter? And that's the way that we. I think that fuels everything that starts there. The second thing to have a healthy business is really an engaged team. When you think about from an employee base that's highly engaged, typically it's because they have a lot of autonomy, they're highly collaborative throughout the organization. But when your team is engaged, then you're thinking that they've got the ability to be really strong advisors to our clients. Right. They're almost stewards of their business and or in their respective role they're looking at how can this technology help us expand our service offering or broaden the value that we provide to either our clients or even the partners that we have on the media side. And so I think having that engaged team is really critical. And then the last is was mentioned earlier is balancing efficiency with investment. You obviously want to have, we think of financing, there's a throughput side of things and you want to drive greater profitability. But sometimes you have to take that short term hit from a profitability standpoint to ensure long term viability, long term sustainability. And so balancing where does efficiency come into play along with long term investment? And having those two work collectively and collaboratively is really important.
- [10:44]
B
That perfectly sets me up for my next question because I wanted to ask you about how you define growth for the business because like you're saying, like sometimes you're looking at. All right, is this growth or is it profitable growth? I know a lot of companies aren't profitable for years and years and years, but they could still be growing. So how would you define growth for the business?
- [11:05]
A
Growth always starts with revenue, top line expansion. And that just has to come. I think that's the biggest way to get there. It's important that teams, especially the finance teams, put the right guardrails around what is growth, ensuring that you are growing profitably. And give that to the sales team, give that to those account management strategic growth teams to have those bumpers in place. But it always starts with top line expansion in revenue. But it doesn't stop there. It goes further into that, into expansion of services on both the breadth and the depth of services that we provide. And so we've really embraced the book the principles out of Blue Ocean strategy. And as a marketing positioning, we definitely want to have that blue Ocean strategy, the all inclusive tv. But we push that down to each one of our solution arms and say if we were to offer our creative, our analytics, our strategy, if we were to offer those on a standalone basis, why would customers want to buy that? And so I think we look at constantly evaluating and expanding the breadth and the depth of the solutions that we provide. And then last one I think is employee growth. AI has been very disruptive to the industry, specifically into the marketing world. That's going to start to disrupt many other industries as well. And so talent development is a growth strategy. And so employees, all of our team members need to look at whether it's upskilling or expanding their own skill sets, the leverage of AI, the utilization and how are they individually growing. That becomes a key part to have a long term sustainable business.
- [12:39]
B
Yeah, so definitely expanding beyond revenue. But that'd be the, that'd be the most important maybe or the first one you would look to. Yanj, what about you as from your CEO seat, How do you think about growth for ma? Does it differ at all from how Brent's thinking about it?
- [12:52]
D
I'm happy that revenue was number one for Brent coming out of the cfo.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, that would have been a weird answer. Yeah, yeah.
- [13:02]
D
I do think, of course revenue matters. I think about growth as durable demand creation, revenues, the scoreboard in terms of what's happening right now and the lagging indicator to hopefully something that we've been working on for years. But I think real growth shows up in stronger brand preference. It shows up in more efficient acquisition of clients. It shows up in greater operating leverage over time. To me, sustainable growth means we're expanding that customer base, we're strengthening our mental availability, we're making easier for people to choose us again and again. It means that the marketing that we're doing today is effectively lowering our risk for tomorrow. I think when demand is strong, our pricing power improves, our pipeline becomes more predictable and the business in effect should be more resilient. That's the kind of growth I think that we should all be focused on building. But I also think that if we're only focused on the metrics of today and a lot of those are fairly short term customer acquisition things like that. We love the statement the long and short. There's marketing impacts, long and short and we should be thinking in both capacities. But especially right now in a time where our industry is being so disrupted with technology and AI, what does that lens on how we want to mindfully invest? There might be impact on profit this year that we might all put our hands in on and go we want to make that bet because yes, we could potentially have a better ROI on the year if we didn't. But we're making the five year bet or the 10 year bets and ultimately our more focused on ensuring that we've got sustainability and we're here five to ten years from now. And Brent just does a great job of that. He's very long term minded and will go with the business on investing into areas that we think make sense.
- [14:49]
B
Yeah. And that is a challenge for marketers. But it's important making sure that your marketing is not just too focused on the short. But I know a lot of CMOs are challenged because sometimes their tenures can be so short they get in the door and they're expected to produce results right away. But really they might want to pitch for investments that are going to take a couple years to see them through. So there's this huge part of marketers job that is marketing to their own company and to their cfo. So Brent, one thing I was curious about is what would make a marketing investment credible in your eyes versus what would make you a little bit skeptical of it?
- [15:24]
A
First is tying the marketing initiatives to business outcomes. I think you do such a great job of this Elena, within our own business that the business outcome, it's not about impressions, it's not about clicks, but it's true business performance, business impacts that are going to happen. And I think it's important to do that and start that off right from the beginning. Also evidence of previous tests, you know, things that have done and worked in the past, test, learn, scale and having that methodology and that approach. And so those might be tests that we've done historically. Maybe it's tests within the industries and there's other things that you can point to that are benchmarks from other industry that have also done marketing tasks. So I think having that piece and then having a measurement plan, making sure that you're holding things accountable. Here are the initiatives that we have, here's the outcomes that we anticipate and that's driving back right into financial results. So if a marketer can come up and do that, I think that adds a lot of credibility. I think where skepticism comes into play is that there's talking about vague awareness claims or there's no path to revenue or there's no feedback loop to to find out even how did this perform and not even looking at that. So I think that's one of the areas. If a marketer came in and said focus really on loyalty over acquisition, I would really question that. You talk about the law of double jeopardy and smaller companies stay small because they focus so deeply on the loyalty aspect of things. They want to drive deeper into their existing client base. But we know to be able to grow, you have to expand that base. You've got to expand your consumer base. And so that's really where acquisition comes into play. So if there isn't some sort of a balance and more slanted towards acquisition. I would be really skeptical of that about that plan. And then the last one is if someone comes in with a very hyper targeted marketing plan, we know hyper targeting is very expensive. The data most of the time isn't even reliable. And at that point then you might not even be hitting the targeted customers that you want. And we know that the significant amount upwards of maybe 90, 95% of your customers are out of market at any given point in time. So if you're hyper targeting, you're not really expanding that base and making sure that you get into that mental availability for people that aren't in the market at that time that may eventually be interested in your product.
- [17:42]
B
That's right, everybody. My CFOs read how brands grow. So maybe you should send how brands grow to your CFO before you pitch a. It's a marketing investment. That's my own tip. We were recording an episode a couple weeks ago and talking about like, where does brand happen? Like, how do you define brand? Is it an in person experience through an advertisement? And one thing we talked about was there's this expectation that our growing expectation that marketing needs to get more involved in product, more involved in the business. And we were debating it. So we're like, well, is that marketing's job? Like, how much did they really put their time there versus communications? And that inspired this next question I have for all of us, which is when we think about marketing investments compared to other investments within the business, is it even fair? Like, should a CFO be looking at marketing investments and evaluating them by the same standards as other investments in the business?
- [18:35]
A
In principle, yes, it should be evaluated and I think we have to make determinations. There's a finite typically amount of capital that's available. We have to determine where is that capital going to be deployed. And that is maybe into marketing. It might be the expansion of products and services that we have. It might be into technology, it might be into people. So there's a variety of areas where we have to make determinations as to where to deploy that capital to get the greatest return for the business. But we have to have the right time horizons. And Angela spoke about this earlier. We might have some investments that have a very short term time horizon. We expect a return in six months, in 12 months. But you look at some of the brand building activities and that is going to have a longer term horizon. And so I think it's really important for the finance organization to make sure that you're allocating those investments that have both a short term return, but then also long term sustainability and profitability growth for the business. So I think it's important to get the terms of, yes, it should be held to the same standards, but. But we should be looking at time frames as to when we expect those returns.
- [19:45]
D
Yeah, I would agree. I think your evidence, Brent, of what we talk about a lot is marketing needs to lead that conversation in terms of how the investments will pay off and needs to educate a broader group of people, including the cfo, on how this works. This isn't their field of study. And what Brent talks about here is evidence of that. I think. Just it's not that you can't measure it, you know, you can measure it, it's how are you looking to measure it? That's where I think the conversation falls short very often between marketing and finance is that we're not creating a common playbook, common vernacular and just common understanding on how marketing does work and how the short and the long work together
- [20:29]
C
and how much fun you can actually have in creating that shared language. When you talk about allocating capital proportionally, that's such a fun financial term. That's also a media mix strategy. Right? Like we're actually sharing similar philosophies just applied in different areas. The nature of compounded interest is actually branding. It's both the interest of money, but it's also the interest in the consumer. So there's a real opportunity to sit at the same table, create vernacular you both can align and have some fun with. But of course, you have to measure what's happening with the marketing team.
- [21:06]
B
Speaking of vernacular, Brent, if you are mentoring a marketer who wants to become a cmo, who is a cmo, and they're wanting to improve their understanding of finance and speak your language, what sort of metrics do you think they should be confident in?
- [21:21]
A
My first inclination on this is, hey, understand the P and L, understand how your company makes money, right? And bridging some of those marketing terms into the financial reports and whether that's on the balance sheet, whether that's building goodwill on the brand equity, if it's on the P and L side of things. So I started thinking about other sales, acquisition, branding and share of voice and share market and excess share of voice and distinctive assets and trying to tie that all. And then it didn't feel really actionable to me. And so what does feel actionable is be curious if I was mentoring a cmo. Go to your cfo, schedule a time and ask her what's important to her, what's important to her and her team and what is finance focused on at that time? It might be a little different than what it was six months ago or a year ago. And a lot of times in the best organizations, the CEO and the CFO have a really tight relationship. And so now not only are you getting an understanding of what's important to that cfo, but also what's important to the CEO. And so then take that and once you learn that you have that curiosity, you hear what's important to them, go back and what I would say is use your favorite LLM could be Claude, it could be Gemini, it could be chatgpt in line up and say, here are all my marketing initiatives that I'm working on. How does this align to the CEO, the CFO's priorities and what's important to them? And then help the have the LLMs bridge that gap. And then now you can take, and then I think you can educate the CFO into a lot of these marketing terms. Like Elena, you've done for me with the marketing effectiveness, we've been able to learn more about that and I think that can bridge that language together. I would use some LLMs to actually bridge that gap of really what's important to the CFO and what's important to her, to where you're doing on a marketing side and how your marketing initiatives can then tie back into the P and L and then go and present that to her.
- [23:14]
B
Well, speaking of bridging the gap, marketers, one of the tougher pitches, it seems can be investments in brand, because it's more long term. If I'm wanting to invest in a brand initiative, what type of argument or what type of data is going to work for you or build trust with you?
- [23:30]
A
It starts with being very clear on what marketing initiatives are about sales, acquisition and what marketing initiatives are related to brand, because you're going to measure those differently and there's going to be different time horizons around those. And I think making sure that it's very clear that in building brand, you're addressing those customers that are in market, out of market. And as I said earlier, a significant amount, maybe 90, 95% of your customers are going to be out of market at any point in time. So then the brand is building that mental availability. So when they do come into the marketplace that is going to exist, it's going to be at the forefront of your mind. So that's going to have a longer time horizon associated with it. But building that and then I think using historical evidence, there's A tremendous number of case studies out there where share of voice increases share of market over time. And we know in actually in a down market, that's the time for a lot of brands to lean into marketing. You have that excess share of voice and that's going to help you increase the amount of share of market that you have. Especially if your competitors continue to pull back a little bit from a marketing standpoint. Because naturally in any sort of a downturn, finance gets a little bit tight, they get a little concerned, they want to hoard cash and we believe that's actually a great time to lean into it.
- [24:46]
B
Ang, what do you think? Would you agree with that? Is there anything else you'd expect to see if someone's making the case for a brand investment?
- [24:52]
D
Yeah, I think Brent had some great advice there. I think too, just starting with the evidence that brand investment is part of a discipline system versus just a leap of faith. I know I'm much more confident when I see consistent patterns across multiple data sources versus just looking at one isolated metric. I think that is things like long term sales lift. That's incrementality studies, market share trends, search and direct traffic growth improvement, hopefully in your cost per acquisition over time. I think it also means ensuring that we're really clear about what's being tested, what's been learned, how these things are helping to shape future decisions. Marketers can demonstrate that brand building is reducing risk and strengthening the business model Versus to your point Brent, just generating awareness, I think it becomes much easier to support that sustained investment.
- [25:42]
B
All right, just for fun here, what is one thing that we think marketers should stop saying to finance and one thing we think they should start saying and Brett will have you start us
- [25:51]
A
off, stop saying brands can't be measured. Walk into a level of accountability and because they can be measured, it's not easy. But brands can be measured and we. I'd prefer that people start saying here's our hypothesis, here's how we're going to measure incrementality and the impact to long term business growth and profitability and lay out that sustainability plan that's going to exist and walk into it. And I think we really respect marketing teams that have a sense of rigor and accountability and being able to do that would bode a lot of, I think confidence and bridge that gap between marketing in finance.
- [26:26]
D
Yeah, I would take that a step further because I had that same one. It's hard to measure and go to a place of produce a theory. We're going to test this and we think we're going to see X. What is X? If we do see it, this is what that means. And here's what we'll do. If we don't see it, this is what that means and here's what we'll do. You're like, oh, okay. It gives us. There's still uncertainty, I get it. But you're helping to better shape the path forward through a learning system.
- [26:56]
C
All right, I've got one. I gotta be careful because I might drop my microphone here when I say this one, but. All right, instead of how much budget do we have? Say how much growth are you willing to invest in?
- [27:12]
B
Nice. Some psychological, psychological tips.
- [27:17]
C
That one's never worked for me before.
- [27:18]
A
I just said I would throw it out into the universe.
- [27:20]
B
Maybe it'll work for someone else.
- [27:22]
D
We'll see.
- [27:23]
B
Love it.
- [27:24]
A
The wrong cfo, Rob?
- [27:25]
D
Well, CFO is actually probably more. More people will choose a path based on a fear of loss versus a fear of gain. Probably the CFO is the most concerned about that, I would think. So what do they stand to lose?
- [27:40]
C
Right.
- [27:41]
B
Yeah, maybe we can have the inverse of that.
- [27:43]
D
That question.
- [27:44]
B
All right, well, this has been super helpful, Brent. We appreciate you coming on the show and breaking down the mind of a money guy for us to wrap us up something a little more personal. What's something in your life that you under invested in that now you can see deserved a bigger budget?
- [27:58]
A
You know, with age comes wisdom a little bit and I think exploration and experimentation. Many of us in the finance area are very goal oriented, efficiency driven. You talked earlier, Elena, about finance being a throughput for function. And that's just the way we look at everything. So it's. We even look at that on our time and say how much time I investing in something am I going to get that return out of it? And we want to limit the number of risks or losses that we may have. And we a year ago embraced the accounting finance team here at ma. We embraced this mantra of embrace inefficiencies to amplify success. And it being okay that we're going to be inefficient in the short term. As we were testing, a lot of this was early around AI in looking for tools in which we can embed technology or AI to make us smarter, stronger and faster. And I think under doing that you recognize, yeah, we are going to have some short term inefficiencies, but a lot of times that's going to actually end up generating the greatest long term results and the long term returns because of that. One thing I wish I would have done earlier in my career is just spend a little bit more time trying new things, being a little bit more experimental in nature. Continue to be curious and not be efficiency driven and recognize as that. Just go wander a little bit. Go play in the sandbox a little bit more.
- [29:18]
B
Ang, what do you think?
- [29:20]
D
Yeah, I would say I thought quite a bit about this one and I would say leadership coaching. I actually started leadership coaching pretty early on, but it's never too early. There's so much value to invest in and how much maybe faster I could have grown with the right outside perspective just there. Those are really solid hours to be investing in yourself with.
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, I agree with that.
- [29:45]
C
Gosh, for me, I have been, I've woefully underinvested in my gadgets, my gadget budget.
- [29:54]
B
How is that even possible?
- [29:55]
A
How is that possible?
- [29:56]
C
I mean, I just. You're there too and you say that I just really need to up my game there. How about you, Elena?
- [30:05]
B
Are you joking? You're joking, right?
- [30:07]
D
I, I, I mean, that's how Rob makes a joke.
- [30:09]
B
Yep. Wow. These are all, with the exception of Rob's. These were really deep answers. And mine's not so deep. Mine is. We had kind of a crappy coffee machine for forever and I would keep just getting new Keurigs and just replacing it because they would always break. And finally my husband was like, let's just get a really nice coffee machine. And now, knock on wood, it hasn't broken like a year and it makes better coffee. It's better for you because you're not using those K cups all the time. But I think like taking a second to invest in something maybe a little nicer. Actually. I think we've saved money because we're not having to constantly order new cures.
- [30:45]
C
My gadget budget wants to learn about this coffee machine.
- [30:49]
B
Oh, we can talk about the coffee machine.
- [30:52]
D
Coffee machines are, in my experience, you either go with the $12, Mr. Coffee Pot, which is going to serve you for like 25 years, and you can buy good coffee and put in it, or you can go that route, but anything in the middle is just not good.
- [31:07]
B
It's not worth it. Yeah, yeah.
- [31:09]
A
It's interesting. Rob's gadget budget or timing is it's actually the antithesis of efficiency for marketing architects. Because what happens is he will start to communicate and talk and spend so much time commercializing all the wins of those gadgets as we lose company time on the efficiency side, as he gets
- [31:28]
C
so excited, it's not just the cost of money, it's the cost of time that I consume with my talk of gadgets. Yes.
- [31:36]
B
All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Brent. That was great.
- [31:38]
A
Absolutely. Thank you.
- [31:39]
C
Really appreciate it.
- [31:40]
D
Thanks, Brent.
- [31:40]
C
Thank you.
- [31:42]
B
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great Marketing Architects.