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The Marketing Architects
When CPM is King
00:32:17
Marketers are being told to stop buying media on CPM. But is that actually good advice? This week, Elena and Angela are joined by Chief Media Officer Catherine Walstad and Chief Analytics Officer Matt Hultgren to dig into one of advertising's most...
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- [00:00]
A
So all of a sudden if you just optimize the low seep cam, you can get on, I would call it lower retention inventory where you won't get the same payoff. So you do have to be careful, especially maybe more in the digital CTV environment because the worlds are kind of merging. You're buying it in more of a digital like fashion.
- [00:17]
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. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. And I'm joined by my co host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. Hello. And we're joined by Kathryn Walsted, our Chief Media officer at Marketing Architects, as well as Matt Holtgren, our Chief Analytics Officer at Marketing Architects.
- [00:41]
C
Hello. Thanks for having me.
- [00:43]
A
Thanks for inviting me. What a crew.
- [00:46]
B
We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. But before we dive into our topic today, I wanted to mention that Marketing Architects is going to be at Digiday's Modern retail event at the end of the month. So we're going to have a booth with some popcorn. We'll be doing a speaking session on marketing effectiveness in streaming tv. And if you're going, we'd love to know so that the team can meet you in person. But today we are tackling a growing debate in marketing effectiveness, which is should marketers stop buying media based on cpm? So cpm, which we all know is cost per thousand impressions, is the price you Pay to reach 1000 people with your ad. And critics are arguing that optimizing for it can push marketers towards cheap low attention inventory instead of real effectiveness. And maybe we should just abandon it altogether. But I'm going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And I chose two different things today. The first is a session. This is from Think TV's media marketing and effectiveness event. Last year, Dr. Karen Nelson Field and Peter Field, not married, just same last name, presented findings from a report titled the Eye Watering Cost of Dull Media. They published this with Eat Big Fish and Amplified. The study includes 115,000 biometric ad views. This was across 190 campaigns, 164 brands, 60 ad formats in 12 countries covering CTV, linear TV, social gaming and web. Across multiple studies they show that mental availability and ad memory tend to start building around 2.5 seconds of active attention. But a large share of digital impressions just never reach that level. And on extremely dull Media, only 9% of ad views crossed 2.5 seconds. The report argues that when we buy primarily based on CPM alone, we often end up favoring dull environments, whereas cost per attentive second tends to favor high attention formats. They also connect dull media to business outcomes showing declines such as -37% brand conversion, -77% brand conversion per dollar and negative 14% long term ROI. They estimate the total cost of dull media globally at $198 billion and suggest that advertisers are losing about 43 cents of every dollar spent in dull media environments. They also estimate media accounts for about 70% of impact versus 30% for creative. So this appears to be a big issue. But before I go into my next piece of research, Ange, anything stand out to you? Anything surprising from that study?
- [03:10]
D
Yeah, I would say what struck me here was if you're on a marketing effectiveness learning journey for yourself, for your brand, I would just say we need to be very careful of what the walk away impression is from research like this. Is the research right? Is it done? Well, I don't know. Given the players involved, I would say probably. Peter Field specifically has a pretty good reputation for his research. This is where research can be right and wrong depending on what you pull from it. We can take research like this and without some critical thinking, build a narrative that looks low CPM media is bad and high CPM media is good. The development of a belief system that could be incredibly damaging to the very goals that we have for ourselves and the businesses that we work for. Second, if you sell your product directly, your customers can buy your product or service on your brand's website and you're measuring tv. Well, this is not a question that you should be asking at all. We have to remember TV does two jobs, both short and long. And if you're effectively measuring the short, you don't wonder if about how low and high CPM media work together or against each other. It's maybe a little harder for retail only brands or QRSR spaces, but this is where direct marketers have a great benefit to be able to see data directly that can help them sort through things like high versus low CPM media and what does that mean for quality and ultimately the response and sales that I'm generating for my brand.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah, you're right. I wouldn't be surprised if that reaction you were describing, the dangerous reaction would happen from data like this because you hear about this and you're like oh my goodness, sounds, sounds really, really damaging. But we're going to get into kind of the nitty gritty of our thoughts on cpm, but that was maybe a little sneak preview of how we feel about it.
- [04:49]
A
Can I throw out a quick just straight punch and Google makes enough money we can throw punches at them, but 43 cents on the dollar? Like that's a scary figure. We commonly joke about the Google tax over here, but it does just feel like another tax on marketing. Could you imagine 43% of your money going to waste? That's just a really tough pill to swallow as a marketer, especially when we have to fight our CFOs for every dollar we get.
- [05:12]
B
Yeah, definitely a spooky, spooky stat there. I also wanted to highlight a different article. This one is titled what's Holding TV Back? Culture, Not Effectiveness by Elliot Wright. And the article responds to a piece that Peterfield put out called Five Charts and the TV Debate, which was again published in Think tv. And Field argues that TV remains one of the most effective advertising channels and that the problem isn't performance, it's how we measure value. So he draws on research from Dr. Karen Nelson Field and shows that most digital video ads fail to hold attention for even two and a half seconds, which he identifies as a minimum threshold needed to reliably build memory. Fewer than 0.5% of digital impressions reach 10 seconds of attention, and that's where brand effects become more meaningful. But TV consistently exceeds those attention thresholds. And when media is priced on cost per attentive impression, TV becomes significantly more cost effective, three times more cost effective than social video and around 60% cheaper than digital video platforms when adjusted for attentive seconds. I thought that was also a nice one to include. Since our perspective on the CPM debate, we're going to talk about both digital and offline, but we have a special TV expertise, so this episode is going to center more around that. But I still think it'll be interesting for marketers who have read stuff like this or heard you should stop buying media and cpm. And how do you think about advice like this? Okay, long lead in, but Matt and Katherine, thank you again for joining. We're excited to have you both here today. You're experts in media buying and measurement, so this is gonna be fun. Let's just get right into it. Spicy question to kick us off. Yes or no, should marketers stop buying media on cpm? No, but right episode. Done.
- [06:48]
C
No done. But they should totally stop buying only on cpm. We know CPM is the price of reach. Eleni, you talked about you know how to calculate a CPM what it is. We know that reach powers advertising. So if you ditch cpm, you lose the ability to understand if you're getting efficient reach. And so I think where marketers have lost their way is when CPM becomes the only proxy for assessing quality and effectiveness. A low CPM isn't automatically bad and high CPMs aren't automatically premium. At MA, we believe CPM is a starting point. It is not the finish line. So of course we want efficient reach, but it needs to be validated with tangible outcomes like sales, like just any kind of response brand lift. I think that's when CPM becomes a powerful signal.
- [07:41]
A
I think it's an interesting question and I think sometimes I sit over here a little naive. Our agency focuses on television and we have these marketers that come in and there's just this really strong association between cheap and low quality when it comes to marketing. We've all experienced this firsthand in the real world, right? You buy an off brand version of something falls apart in a week. And I think unfortunately a lot of marketers have just experienced that exact same thing buying media. You chase the low cpm, you ended up with garbage inventory and you get burned. And now there's just this stigma that cheap is low quality and it's almost become synonymous in marketers minds. I think that's where it gets dangerous. As Ange was alluding to earlier. If you flip it around though, like if you can pay less for the same exact thing, wouldn't we all take that deal 10 out of 10 times? That's not bad buying, that's smart buying. Now I'm not saying like cheap always wins, like low cpm, low attention inventory absolutely can lose to higher CPM stuff that's higher tension environments. And I think Elena's research makes that statement pretty clearly. But I think a lot of marketers have just overcorrected with the low CPM and they write it off before they even ask what am I doing, what channel is it? Is the attention actually there and what I'm doing. And they're leaving fruitful opportunities on the table. Especially when it comes to TV where you can get really efficient CPMs and high attention. And those things aren't, they don't have to be mutually exclusive and we have to stop assuming they are.
- [09:01]
D
Matt, do you think it's more common for marketers to assume that low CPM means bad or that high CPM means good and premium?
- [09:12]
A
Usually if you think one that means you by default believe in the other? I think, I think if you're thinking that it's usually because you got burned, probably burned on the low end first. And that has led you to wanting to test the higher CPM stuff. People usually are willing to take the smaller risk before they go into the higher, more expensive risk. So I'd say more people probably believe in the low side first.
- [09:34]
D
Yeah, I'd agree with you there, Ang.
- [09:35]
B
I guess you kind of gave away your answer. But yes or no?
- [09:38]
D
I'm very much aligned with Katherine and Matt on this one. I don't know that I need to regurgitate a lot of it. I think that in marketing we look for absolutes. We all have to have a playbook that we operate by. And sometimes those belief systems get established because of an experience, because of a mentor, because of a test gone wrong. And it's easy for us to latch onto something and make it Bible in terms of how we operate, operate from there on out. And I think that especially as you're moving into new channels, we might want to pull our previous experience just for background. But there are certain assumptions that we need to let go of digital space and being below the fold with low CPM inventory for something that never even gets seen versus what happens in the TV environment, they're just wildly different. Back to Matt's point, if we can talk about pay a fifth the cost to reach the same person in the
- [10:35]
A
same environment in the same.
- [10:37]
D
Yeah, right. Like why would you not do that? It's fine to bring learnings from channel to channel, but I think we just need to think through the fact that the environments are very different and reestablish new ground rules, so to speak, based on testing.
- [10:50]
B
So in the spirit of not having absolutes, let's be super clear. When people say buying on cpm, it leads to low quality, low intention, low attention inventory. Where do we think they're right and where would they be wrong?
- [11:02]
C
I think when you're talking digital, they're right in a lot of instances. In digital advertising, inventory is basically infinite. You can make impressions anywhere. We've all seen the autoplay video, the teeny tiny little placements, ads that are on screen for millisecond and then they're gone. And that's where you get low CPMs. But the trade off is zero attention. So in digital, if you're chasing the lowest cpm, you can inadvertently end up in some really low attention environments. Now that argument breaks down when you apply the same logic to tv. TV is fundamentally different. It's finite. The supply is what it is. It's limited, it's curated, it's regulated. And whether it's linear TV or it's premium streaming, the ad is appearing on the living room screen where the viewer has chosen to watch the content. Now in that context, a low CPM to me is not a sign of bad inventory, it's a sign of really smart buying.
- [12:02]
A
I think if I was to add on to that, I think everything is spot on there. I will say it's been interesting to watch traditional linear shift to streaming because streaming can be a little bit more digital like. And I think whether you're looking at the trade desk or any of the other DSPs or in our journey of building out our own DSP over here, the worlds are becoming closer and closer. Where CTV is sitting next to digital inventory, before you know it, there's leakage. There's actually digital inventory that can sneak into dsps. Everyone's aware of it at this point. You go to a CTV campaign, five, 10, maybe in a bad case, up to 20% of it, it's not even on a TV. You go a layer deeper, you look at your apps, you're like, these aren't actually apps anymore. Now we're talking about games and websites and if you're not careful and if you don't curate that those are lower cm, surprise. So all of a sudden if you just optimize the low cpcm you can get on, I would call it lower attention inventory where you won't get the same payoff. So you do have to be careful, especially maybe more in the digital CTV environment because the worlds are kind of merging. You're buying it in more of a digital like fashion.
- [13:05]
B
So Matt, you're talking about kind of the environment that we're buying. And Catherine, you mentioned that too. I wanted to dig into that a little bit more because from a media buying perspective, like there are structural differences between a channel like Linear TV that is different from digital because as we said in a Digital World Low CPMs can more often signal low quality inventory. So I'm curious in how does that logic translate to television?
- [13:27]
C
I'll repeat myself a little bit here. I mentioned a few. So in linear NCTV again the viewer has, they've chosen to watch the content. It's a lean back experience in their living room. You can't scroll past it while multitasking the way you can with digital video. And I want to double click on what Matt was saying. Sometimes low quality inventory sneaks into the bid stream disguised as ctv. And we pride ourselves on spending a lot of Time curating our inventory by hand to ensure that low quality stuff is not sneaking through. And like I mentioned before, TV inventory, it's finite. It's constrained by programming schedules, specific ad loads, which is naturally going to translate to higher attention impression. So when you look at how the two channels are fundamentally structured, a low CPM in digital is going to be very different than a low CPM in tv. It's like apples and elephants or oranges and elephants, what that comparison analogy is.
- [14:24]
B
Yeah, I was thinking probably like most offline channels would be similar like out of home. I get you get into digital out of home, that could maybe get sketchy. Radio, print, like those buying in those marketplaces is just a little different because like you're saying there's finite amount of billboards.
- [14:40]
A
I was just going to say the super interesting thing is that phenomenon of like low cpm, low quality has leaked into people's minds to even think that way within a channel itself. And I think that's where the thinking gets a bit dangerous of oh, I'm looking at my TV buy. I'm now going to think of my TV buy as low quality and high quality. That's just a different scenario than comparing digital to tv. And it's like that line of thinking will lead you to pay more to reach the same people. You see that just like far too often. It's unfortunate.
- [15:08]
B
Yeah. I think it's a growing movement too of just this fear over buying a low cpm. I'm trying to think of a good analogy for it or something in the real world. I can't. If anyone has something, let me know. But I can't seem to think of
- [15:18]
A
something spending, you know, $8 million on a Super bowl ad instead of reaching 20 times as many people.
- [15:24]
B
There you go.
- [15:25]
A
Or more impressions, I should say. Maybe not more reach.
- [15:27]
B
But if we're saying that you can't just rely on CPM to tell you if something's high quality, like just because you're buying at a 50 cpm, it doesn't mean that something that's lower cost is going to be bad. Then how should marketers be evaluating it Today? I wanted to start with high media quality before we get to the crappy stuff. If you had to pick a few signals that your media is quality, what would they be?
- [15:48]
C
I think I'd look for three things. So the first of which is attention. We've talked about that a little bit here today is the ad appearing where people are going to stop and actually watch it full screen, professionally produced content still Matters a lot. Secondly, I would ask, is the ad reaching new audiences at scale or is it the same people over and over again? High quality media is going to deliver broad incremental reach versus hitting those same people over and over again. And finally, and I think most importantly, is figuring out if the media is producing a business outcome. At the end of the day, good media should move the needle. It should drive sales, it should drive website visits, it should drive people into stores. It should move the needle on brand metrics like awareness. You know, at the end of the day, it's what happened because of the impression.
- [16:41]
A
I think media quality comes down to how efficiently can I maximize my reach of my ICP or my target audience? And we've just found, like, repeatedly for the last three decades that efficient reach is the biggest driver for our clients and seeing business results and outcomes. I think from there it is important to monitor response rates. And this might be a little controversial. You asked for some spice earlier, I'll give you the spice. But the reality is prime sounds like it's the best. When I came into the marketing world decades ago. Now at this point, like, oh, my gosh, prime, like, must be really good. Good prime steak, Everyone wants that. But the reality of looking at decades of data now is prime is just like any other day part. And we may have fallen subject to branding ourselves that we called it prime, and now we think it's like this premium thing. And there's more eyeballs there if you need to get reach, like, yeah, you have to be in prime. I'm not saying don't go be in prime, but if you actually look at response rates of prime versus early fringe versus daytime, the response rates are the same, retention's the same, but people are willing to pay more for it. So this is an interesting part of the equation. And we actually monitor the response rates of all our buys across all data parts, across all networks, so we can find the pockets that are more responsive and the pockets that are less responsive. The reality is there isn't anything that's like, oh, 10 times magically better than the others. It's often quite less than that. I think the last thing Katherine, hit it. But, like, you have to have results. So if you want to go test a high CPM opportunity, great. But like, your CFO is going to need the bang for the buck or if there's a more efficient way to reach people, my bet, you probably see more outcomes that way. And at the end of the day, again, like I said earlier, like, it's our CFOs that allow us to be in the jobs that we're at. And we need the business results, not just theories.
- [18:22]
B
Yeah. What's crazy, Matt, is that what we've seen about different day parts performing similarly. There are a lot of people that just fundamentally disagree with you. Like they just like know in their heart that that's not true. Even though like we have the data to show it is. And that can be challenging. But I like the advice of asking yourself, is my ad visible? Am I hitting new people? And then is it producing a business outcome? I like that as sort of the, the process. Talk about the opposite. What would be some red flags in my data that suggest that my inventory is bad or dull and maybe it's just the complete opposite. But is there anything else that we would look for?
- [18:59]
C
Yeah, there are a couple red flags that we see pretty consistently and it goes back to that outcome piece. One is huge impressions but nobody's home. There's no business impact. If a campaign is claiming to have massive reach and there's not an outcome that can be tied to it of some kind, that to me is a sign that those impressions maybe weren't as valuable as they were thought to be or weren't valuable at all. I think another red flag that we see is high frequency. Same group of people seeing the same ad dozens of times. We've all seen this on our streaming platforms, then that media isn't really expanding reach. It's literally just recycling impressions to the same people, which probably is not going to drive an outcome. Or it might one time, but not 52 times that the person saw the ad. So those are the couple that I would point to.
- [19:51]
A
I think that coupled and this may be less about bad inventory and starting to leak over into strategy, but a lot of times when you do go and start to key in and some people believe you need high frequency, but when you start to shrink and over hyper target, we just see diminishing returns where there might be signs of life. Initially your attribution models look good. They start showing good results. But then the Runway is just so short when you start to put yourself into a corner of maybe just a handful of networks instead of trying to reach everyone, the diminishing returns just show up really, really early in those campaign cycles. And that means you've just exhausted that small audience because you've over targeted them time and time again.
- [20:28]
B
That's a good point, Matt. The debates are similar. Like marketers look at it two ways. One is the environment my ad is in. Matters like so much I need to overpay for it or there's I need to reach this exact customer, but it ends up in the same thing, which is justifying a higher cpm. So Matt, I knew I wanted you in this recording because I have heard you say more than once cpm is king. Which is pretty opposite to what is happening right now in some of the CPM language. But that's a belief that we have at marketing architects. Why do we say CPM is king?
- [20:59]
A
It's easy for me just to say CPM is king and to be met with a whole bunch of resistance. I think the part that's important before you make that statement is something that Katherine alluded to earlier. We are super curated in terms of where we are showing these commercials. We are only showing our content in high intention, high attention environments. So whether that's linear, again, think more like SOFA laid back commercial on wall or CTV streaming. Again, we filter out all the more digital like environments. So apples to apples, we're showing commercials, people are sitting down, they're watching them. If that is all table stakes and all true, I would make the argument that CPM is king. From that point forward, the more people you can reach per dollar, the more outcomes you're going to see for your business. You could go spend $50,000 on one airing at A$50cpm and it might be the coolest airing of all time. I'm going to make the argument that if you took that $50,000 and reached 10 times as many people, you're going to see better outcomes.
- [21:59]
B
I think that one point in this debate we would definitely agree on, and Catherine mentioned this earlier, is that while we believe CPM is king, it should definitely not be the only metric that you're using to evaluate if your marketing works. So Matt, how do you think CPM fits within all the different metrics that we measure to and optimize to for clients?
- [22:17]
A
I kind of think of it as like an entry gate. So if you use that as the enter gate, it kind of tells you whether you're in the game from an efficiency standpoint. But like once you're through the gate, there's a lot of metrics you should be looking at. You should be looking at reach, you should be looking at frequency, you should be looking at response rate, you should be looking at acquisition numbers. If you have those. I think CPM is kind of the first filter to be like where should I be entering? And from there there's a lot of other really valuable metrics to optimize and sometimes that might actually lead your CPM to increasing to pockets where there are higher response rates. But I think CPM is just a really good first filter to be like this is what makes sense for my campaign.
- [22:52]
B
I wanted to talk about attention metrics because in the research that we shared that was front and center like they're even advocating for instead of CPM you should buy the cost per attentive second and we've had attention thought leaders on this show before. We've talked about it. Matt, I'm curious, when do you think attention metrics are worthwhile? Like what's been our experience with them in TV specifically?
- [23:12]
A
It's been a mixed bag and I think the hardest part that we're just seeing in the industry is are there univers attention metrics across channels? Like how do you compare something on a website compared to something on a phone compared to something on a tv? I do think it's a really important debate and I think the industry still has some development to have there. Like how no two impressions are the same when you're looking at cross channel. I think the way our clients approach it a lot of times is running incrementality studies which is kind of getting away from attention. But I think the reality is there just hasn't been a universal language of impression quality control. Right. Like you can have a digital display impression as one and a TV impression as one and it's just like oh, I had one impression in both. How do we actually get it to attention? I know people run studies on them out in the field and there's a lot of research on it. But those are like panels of people forced to sit down and participate in it. I think it's hard, I honestly want to raise my hand to be like I don't think channels are evaluated fairly when it comes to attention as it stands right now. And channels that do have longer sit down periods where you're engaged in content get the short end of it versus companies that own the world like Google Meta where they can serve 90 plus percent of the population and just say we have all these unique impressions.
- [24:29]
B
Yeah, I think it's interesting like the idea of attention and measuring and optimizing to it. We've talked about like there's issues with that but it sort of makes sense in your head. I think we're a little bit spoiled because we operate in TV so our impressions are going to have more attention. But I think it's good to talk about and maybe marketers could look at some of the General attention research. I thought it was really interesting in that second article that Peterfield has found TV while it might have higher CPMs or be more costly, it's much more efficient in a cost per attentive second. So I think maybe just being aware like high level how the channels differ might be a good idea as well. Okay, to start wrapping us up here, I wanted to make this sort of practical. So if I'm a marketer and I have this belief that higher CPM means higher media quality, how could I design a test to prove or disprove that belief?
- [25:18]
C
I don't want to steal Matt's thunder here, he's the data guy. But one of the best ways that I've seen to test and prove this is a head to head comparison. I don't even know if that's the right terminology to use Matt. You can tell me if I'm using it correctly, but it would be take the same creative, the same budget and deploy a couple different media strategies. One would be focused on high CPM inventory that's assumed to be more premium and the other is focused on efficient CPM buying with strong reach. And then take a look at what kind of business impacts result from those two different strategies. Something like sales response, brand lift. What we see time and time again is that high CPM inventory that is believed to be premium doesn't necessarily translate to a better outcome. Sometimes they do, but often, you know, like Matt was saying before, you're just paying more for the same media. So I think the real goal isn't high CPM or low cpm. It's finding the CPM that is going to produce the strongest result.
- [26:20]
A
I'll be the first one to say it's not easy. What Kathryn described is exactly it, but you have to get it to be an apples to apples test. There's numerous ways to go about testing that. For some of our clients they're constantly testing some high impact stuff. Think of more like premium live sporting events with a core base of just hyper efficient reaching TV buys as well. But we have to set it up structurally in a way that we can get a really good clean kind of a B read whether that's something that's more geo based or whether that's something that's more running different cells or more at a national level. The key is to be just very thoughtful to make sure that you're getting the good kind of apples to apples. Read the two against one another.
- [26:59]
D
I don't know if I'm going to add anything valuable to that. But I think a lot of times CPM is sort of an afterthought in a media plan. And it's incredibly important to be talking about as a marketing team, your range and CPM of what you think you should be targeting. Say there are three marketers that all compete in the same space, all the same industry. One's targeting $10 cpm, one's at 5, one's at 250. There's a 4x difference in the audience you're even starting with. And the driver of growth is reach, we would say. Right, Reach. We know that reach drives growth. How many people can we get top of mind, awareness, preference, intent with? Ultimately, we're trying to drive those sales, but most people are not shopping for your product or service today. So if right from the get go, we're cutting that addressable audience in half or more, we're just dealing with a wildly different reality than a competitor that's starting with a funnel that's 4x the size that ours is.
- [27:51]
B
So maybe Ang, you'd argue that it's not that enough marketers look at reach, but not enough of them are valuing it.
- [27:56]
D
Yeah, I think it's. There's so much conversation around strategy and consumer audience and maybe audience segments and where do we find them? And then the media just comes at its cost. And we question those costs a lot. And I think that's what's made us successful as an agency and why our clients see success and why they see so much reach for their dollar. But put more emphasis on what you think that CPM should be. And are there ways that you can ultimately extend that reach and drive more growth for the brand?
- [28:24]
B
Yeah, I know we mentioned this earlier, but kind of an opportunity for brand marketers to learn from performance marketers a little bit too. Because you think a performance marketer is probably going to realize sooner, okay, maybe this high CPM is leading to worse business outcomes. So I feel like this. Yeah, this belief system sort of changes according to what you hold your marketing
- [28:41]
A
accountable to sometimes too. As the data guy, it's easy to just be like unemotional about it. I don't do the creative, I don't do the fancy stuff and just be like, what are the numbers? If I have a million dollars and there's three plans in front of me, one's at A$2 CPM, one's out of five, one's out of 10, and it's all on the, say, TV again, commercials on a wall. You're talking about 500 million impressions compared to 100 million impressions. And again, if you can get the same thing but way more impressions, who wouldn't want the 500? And sometimes you just A, test it, but B, like take the emotion away from it. And if it's in the same environment, there's just so much upside to be had.
- [29:18]
B
Agreed. All right, to wrap us up here with something a little more lighthearted. What is something cost effective in your life that just massively over delivers and Catholic school Catherine. Matt. Anger than me.
- [29:29]
C
For me, it's a toss up between sleeping and walking, right? They're both free, but sleeping is super cozy. It comes with the best blankets that money can buy. My two adorable dogs that you can kind of see here in the background. I always feel happy when I'm sleeping. I always feel calm and relaxed. I mean, I assume I am feeling that way. But on the other hand, walking is also free. It can be done literally anywhere. I don't know about you guys, but it helps clear my head. It helps, I think, solve at least half my life problems and somehow it manages to produce some really kick ass ideas. So I think, you know, between those two things, those are definitely the highest ROI activities that, that I engage in.
- [30:16]
A
Could have probably guessed this, and this is cliche or on brand or whatever you want to call it, but a good spreadsheet, right? Like my whole life is in Excel. I have a two year old. What did I do? I created a spreadsheet of every diaper brand, the cost, how many diapers, and it saved me hundreds of dollars. That's just one example. You don't want to know how many spreadsheets I have for every facet of my life, but it brings me joy. It's cheap and it saves me money. It's fantastic.
- [30:47]
B
You're such different people, Matt, but that's great. Okay, Ang, what about you?
- [30:52]
D
Mine is sort of like Matt's, but is the most analog version of a spreadsheet, which is a not pen. Just writing things down. Being able to put your thoughts, your list, like it just creates order in my brain and it's continually just beats any productivity app that I've ever tried.
- [31:13]
C
You have really nice handwriting too, Ang. So if I were you, I would totally keep writing. It's good.
- [31:20]
B
I'm the same way. Like I have a digital calendar and a physical calendar. I just like to have both. Like, there's something about writing stuff down. It's great. I was actually gonna say podcasts. Like podcasts, they're free. And I learned so much from all of them. They're entertaining. I am obsessed with podcasts. I even listen to podcasts to recap TV shows I just watched. And how valuable is that? Like, it's just a free thing people are doing, including us. So shout out to us, honestly. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Matt and Catherine, for joining us. That was fun. Just as spicy as I wanted. So thank you so much for joining the pod. Thanks, guys.
- [31:56]
A
Thanks for having us.
- [31:58]
C
Fun.
- [31:59]
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 Marketing Architects.