Good afternoon everybody, and welcome back to our Lunchtime webinar express series. We've got a great session today with Alex Murphy co-founder of leading financial services digital marketing agency Balance. If you'd like to turn on your webcam, Alex, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Thank you very much Pippa. Today we'll be talking about brand and performance in balance. for coming today and signing up. We can see we've got a good close to 100 people on the quarter moment and growing, so that's excellent. Right, like Pepper said, it'll be about half an hour if I can stick to my timing and then we'll have a Q&A at the end, so I'll answer questions then. Okay, so the contents.  So who's this guy speaking to you? What did he say? Why are we here? Why are we here now? Who should we listen to on this topic? What do we do next? How can I convince others of the same things I've learned today or around this topic? Where has this worked before? And what did we cover in the summary? Sorry. And then finally a little bonus reading list at the end. So who's this guy? Right, so I'm Alex Murphy. I'm co-founder of Balance, a digital marketing agency specialising in frame services. I've been around a while now doing this sort of thing. Marketing is my first love and it's all I've ever done. I've worked with a number of brands, Admiral, GoCorpair, The Royal Mint, and that's enough about me. Okay, balance is an agency. To very briefly mention, we do obviously with all the digital marketing things like SEO, PPC, content, training, digital PR, and we've worked with some obviously excellent frame services brands. Our teams worked with them all. So before we start, I think it's very important that I share that an advisory warning. There are terms in this presentation that might be distressing to marketers of a delicate disposition. So let's get on with it. I'm just going to give you a fair warning. So hold on to your seats. Colouring in department. Synergy. Depends. Sostac. Let's see I'm talking after all. The long and the short of it. And with all finance department. So my apologies in advance again. So some definitions because we talk about brand versus performance a lot. But actually, what does that mean? Because one of the issues that we often have with brand and performance is that different terms are used interchangeably. So let's talk about what they are, what they're not. Performance marketing. Yes, it usually has a short term noticeable business effect. Tens to the language around it tends to be things like CPA, robust ROI. And it's normally something normally something you can do in real time. You can change bids in real time. There's aspects of it that are biddable. So yeah, it's certainly seen as a more agile form of marketing. It does not mean digital. Yes, it is predominantly digital, but using the two interchangeably would be incorrect. It does not automatically mean that it's the most efficient or cost effective form of marketing. Maybe in the moment it seems so, but not necessarily always. And it does definitely not, as we've learned in recent years, mean the most accurately measurable. It'll give you measurable results of whether accurate or not is a hard topic. Brand marketing does usually focus on building emotional connections with the customer or prospective customer. Does tend to go for broader reach to be effective? And does usually have a longer window to impact business returns? That's how we think about brand marketing. Brand marketing does not just like with performance. It's not constrained to a channel. Brand marketing does just not mean TV or offline or expensive. It doesn't mean that there won't be short term benefits to it. It's not all a distant horizon. And of course, and there's all her whole other topics in this brand does not mean slogans or your your logo or anything like that. It's much deeper. So now we've got that clear. Let's move on. A little dot. So some of you may be familiar with this. This is the Gartner hype cycle, and it describes a lot. Any new technology or any new thing that people get excited about and the waves that it goes through. Dr Grace Kitewell mentioned a number of times in this talk, referenced the fact that this has a lot of alignment to how we've perceived online advertising of the last few years. Now this curve tends to align from the early 2000s up to today and beyond. And the little cyan dot, they blue dot is where we are today. Now this also aligns with my career. And why maybe I'm a good person to be talking about this stuff. Obviously, Royal Mint go compare our more balance in that order and how they align to different phases of the hype cycle. So let's go back early 2000s. And this is why this is a time why we're even having presentations. That's why we've got such a good sign of today. It's not my charm and wit. It's the fact that this topic is so critical these days. So we'll go back to the early 2000s. I finished university and getting marketing jobs and marketing it. Fall now to favour within businesses, at least the smaller, medium sized businesses. There are barriers to invest in things like brand. We're only perceived as TV and at the time the options were limited. So TV was what people thought of as brand. That wasn't something you could do. Marketing had been consigned and used the first one to being a colouring in the bar. It's where sales sent a presentation to be made. Occasionally they did catalogs and they did some brand marketing, but it was kind of almost an indulgence perceived as rather than something critical to the business. However, then the hype cycle kicks in for digital marketing or online advertising. Notice here I'm saying digital and online, not performance. Though the two things, especially at that stage, were very, very tightly linked. So online advertising arrives and people think you can solve everything. You can see the money in and money out to measuring in real time. This wave that we see at the beginning, I rode that as hard as I could. I got an average degree and didn't fancy going to London. So if I was going to do well, I was going to have to get really good at this online advertising thing. And luckily I was, and the teams around me weren't. So I rode that wave throughout the Royal Mint and Go Compare and everyone loved it and it was great. But in that, I think we did a problem along so many other new of the first wave of digital marketers, is that we got businesses a bit hooked to it. Before we knew it, the brand budget was being handed to us. Whenever the business don't do effort, you leave performance marketing alone.  Do we need TV right now? Cut the TV a little bit. Didn't bother me. I wasn't a brand marketer. Never would have considered myself as such. And so it was great. I was getting money handed to me with no real issues. But of course, move on to the late 2000s. And but even before that, while I was still in Go Compare, I started noticing something, you know, the team there, the performance marketing team, there was absolutely excellent and would optimise to the instant degree. You know, they were as good as digital marketing people could get. But there was a thing that happened whenever we were maybe having a lean a month and we wanted to pull back a bit and TV was pulled back, or we'd had a period of time where, you know, you're talking budgets and tens of millions here, where we want to save a couple of miles. So TV's turned off or really seddiw it for a period of time. What I noticed was the optimisation of my performance marketing channels was hitting the ceiling. Couldn't explain it, didn't really understand why. My rather frustrated brand manager, my colleague, he at the time handed me a copy of Bound Shops, how brands grow, I think he knew what was going on. And so yeah, that's where we were. However, I moved on to Admore. And for the first time, I was responsible for all marketing. That was the marketing director then. Every single aspect of that businesses, marketing was suddenly my responsibility. Now I absolutely probably got that job on the merit of my digital experience. You know, they knew that we needed to be much better at that. I was very starting to become rapidly dominated by a price comparison acquisition. And so it wanted to look after its own digital skills and performance marketing. And when I went in, that's exactly what I thought I was going to be improving. But what I rapidly realised was that wasn't really the problem. Yes, it needed a lot of work, but it was bigger than that. So at the same time, digital was starting to fall off this height curve. You know, we noticed actually loads of display ads where we're junk load of load of bots and a very little actual value. We noticed that maybe the limitations are happening with performance marketing, where there was an absence of brand, it was much harder to do anything with it. We noticed that maybe there was a lot of scandal about attribution models being quite inaccurate. And so we were all then developing all these attribution modeling to kind of explain something that wasn't really there. So yeah, we were getting quite dejected and this was happening as as I was hitting Admiral. So I'm there going, well, hold on. Why can't I get brand budget? Why is it so hard for me to argue brand budget? Now, of course, I was part of the problem. Like for years, being shown people look, we can get customers nice and easily and cheaply and measurably. And you know where your money goes and that old adage of 50% of your marketing is wasted, it's gone. So, so you be, except of course, that wasn't really the case. I didn't understand the full picture. I was, I was too naive. And now of course, I was trying to argue against all of those years, going, oh, we need brand investment. And no, we can't measure it straight away, but look at all these things we're going to. I will help us get there. It was very tough. Now, I did get those budgets and it was a struggle. And, and that's the start of where I learned a lot of what I'll talk about today and continue to learn every single day. I had to avoid LinkedIn this morning because every single day I look at something and I learned something new and I want to change the deck. This is like version eight or something. So, so yeah, constantly learning, but we are maturing. Now digital online, people are starting to realise how powerful it is for brand building as well as performance. And people are starting to notice the balance that's required. But we're not quite there yet. You know, now I'm, I'm the old guy, you know, and, and people are talking about TikTok and every new channel comes along threads and everything. And, and I'm going, how do I apply that to the business? And so yeah, so I'm starting to know what, what the, the very time that people are heading me were feeling like all those years ago. And at some point in the future, what we hope for is that the challenge are used in balance, one of the challenge that disciplines are used in balance, not the agency, but the, the, the term balance in terms of the performance marketing work together. Yes, it's going to be predominantly online, but not just online. And for the good of the business. So yeah, that's the hard cycle and me. So why is, so that's why we're talking about this now, but why is it so top, why is it important in this particular situation? And you may have noticed the economy is a bit messed up at the moment, and it's not doing too well. Now maybe the recession didn't happen, or maybe it's not as bad as people thought, but regardless, it's tight times. A lot of businesses are really struggling. And when you're under the cosh, you're going to grab for the short term wins. You're going to want to go, well, look, I know if my money to spend today will give me money tomorrow, that's more important. And you know what it often is, but the businesses that they can see beyond the next three months, six months a year, time and time again have been proven to succeed. There's loads of what I couldn't go into today about how you spend through a recession and marketers who spend on advertising through a recession win. And there is things to be confident about. You know, this is a good time, because actually to the right, to the left, you've seen economic situation at the moment. So, you know, about 2022, it's diabolical, and then, you know, it's a little bit the yellow box of forecasters should have a key. The yellow box of forecast, it's not great, but it's getting better and consumer confidence is improving, regarding a prime day happening today. And I wonder how much money is going to be spent on that.  Right, so we know that's a good time. We know that things have evolved. We know that we need to put these things in balance potentially, but we don't really know why. Why are they in balance? What speaking, what thoughts are out there? And we also need to understand this so we can convince others. So, who are leading thought, who are thought leaders on this topic, sitting on me, I'm just good at reading other people's stuff. OK, so I've talked about four people here today. There's millions of others we could talk about, but these are four quite key people. Professor Byron Sharp, Les Benet and Peter Field, Dr Grace Keighton, Professor Mark Ritsen. So let's start with Byron Sharp. This is the book I was given by my frustrated brand manager a number of years ago, which is how brands grow on Byron Sharp on the Aranburg Basin Institute, tend to talk about a certain thing called, they talk about mental availability and physical availability. Now, on the right here, you have a little diagram done by a brilliant illustrator and marketing thought leader called Dan White. And Dan tends to illustrate concepts exceptionally well. But what Byron Sharp talked about was that 95% of your market at any point are not in market. Now, they're not ready to buy anything from toilet paper to fast cars to car insurance. You know, they're not ready to buy at that point most of the time. 95% number really is just a nominal number for saying most of the time. Now, don't get too stuck on that. But it makes sense, right? That the course people aren't right now and most people aren't right now ready to buy that thing. So if you're only hitting them with activation, if you're only using performance marketing to reach them, you're really only trying to do is really hit them on that 5%, which is a much, much harder job. You know, that was one of the strengths of digital marketing and performance marketing, but it's very, very hard to do. So all of our skill came from that. Meanwhile, the smarter brands are going, well, you know what, I'm going to continue to speak to my customers all the 95% of the time. Now, we used to talk this quite a family like, well, we'll send newsletters to customers throughout the year to keep them engaged so that when they do ready to buy, and that's all great, and that's all engagement. But real brand marketing is about building that relationship so that when they do hit what's termed a category entry point, maybe if it's champagne, it's a birthday or a wedding or something like that, maybe whatever it might be, that fast car you finally want to buy. Fast car or something like that. But regardless, you don't start then, you start when the 95% and what Dan points out is that they're almost in this pool at the top here, waiting. And that's when you apply the brand marketing to them and that's why it doesn't make sense to hit them with sales messages. And then when you get to that point that category entry point, that's when being excellent at optimisation, that's when being really excellent at performance marketing comes in. If you didn't have that, they'd just stay on the top of the or someone else would benefit from it. So that's how brands grow, according to my own chart. Long and short of it, I debated about putting this in, not because it isn't a fantastic piece of work, but because it's almost so ubiquitous now that it's almost starting to lose meaning, the word strategy loses meaning. And but it is really, really important, not so much for the metrics involved, but because it's a it's a way of showing, demonstrating to people how using data from a number of sources in the IP effectiveness studies and reward winners, they went, this is what we observed. That when people spent this much budget, 60% of the budget, and I'll get to that number in a minute, 60% of that budget on brand building and 40% on performance acquisition, the overtime benefited. The yellow zigzagging line essentially is your sales performance, right? So what's in your sales are happening again and again and again and they're driving business. But whenever you turn off the promo or the top IPC or whatever you're going for, sales just drops through the floor again. You know, and but with brand building, yes, initially when you spend the same amount of money on brand as you do on activation, you're not going to get the results that you want. You are going to get results you want. You're not going to get results that are comparable. People are going to go, what did all that money go? You know, why didn't we just spend on doing a discount or spend on more price comparison or affiliates or whatever? And and so you've got to manage the expectation of that as, yes, initially that will be the case. What you're doing is building a stronger baseline. So I love this chart because it's sort of a lot of people say, well, yeah, long and short, it's great. It came out 2015 when brands grows 2010. That was 2013 to 2015, the Binayon field stuff. But it's very hard to apply to real business, you know, I was doing it at the time and he's like, well, it's not quite that, it's not quite this. And it almost it talked about synergy. Here you go, there's the word again. But it talked about synergy, but actually it was almost people think, oh, maybe I should be spending my money on brand and modern performance. What am I doing? This chart from Dr Grace Kite and the Magic Members Group, they sounds like a band. They talk about the performance plateau. And the performance plateau really means that actually, if you look across time here, at the beginning of a business, it actually makes quite a lot of sense to, to be using performance marketing. You get a lot of growth straight away startups, fintechs, startups and new businesses and exciting new products and all those things. Performance marketing can work exceptionally well for you. But what happens is you do eventually hit a plateau and that plateau can continue until you've got something else helping it. Or in fact, you can get diminishing returns. You already get diminishing returns or regressive returns because, because you are competitive might well be doing this stuff, which is in the yellow box here, which is yellow, yellow peaks here, which is this is brand building. This is when you combine the two things together, brand and performance. There is this synergy, which means that you are uplifting those channels. Now, I could talk about it a bit more later, but think about what that really is. That's when you turn on brand advertising. People have seen a brand that and they have a stronger relationship to that brand or it's momentally available when they see them in front of them in Preston Barrison or on Google or on Amazon or whatever. They have a preference. You know, it's the one that they maybe think of searching for at that point because they're the top of mind. So what this shows is actually you need both. And there's a quite a lot of data around how the two of them are together. So this one isn't really a model. This is just a method. And I feel like it was maybe taken to make a little bit when he came up with it. But there is a lot of stuff out there about how to approach this.  There's econometrics and MMM, the mediums modelling. There's lots of ways you can go about this. You can get very complex and very detailed and also be very, very expensive to do all this data analysis. But what Ritsyn said is well, look, if you just want to just get a blank sheet paper and have a start with this, take 10% of your turnover. So a step one of the triple cook chips method, as you called it, takes 10% of your turnover. This is based on something else, a lot of research. But again, Dr. Grace Kye, I'm being a complete fanboy today. Again, Dr. Grace Kye talks about there's a chart out there which has just had enough time to go through, which says between 15%, roughly about 10% of your turnover when spent on marketing enhances growth. And the new your business, the more it should be and so on. That's on marketing, not on brand. It's just marketing's whole. Then apply the long and the short of it. So you've got that money, say it's 100,000, 60,000, 40,000. Then you start to activate it and you measure the both the short and MROIs and also the long term benefits. Now, short and MROIs, you might be putting that money in there and you've got your leaving money in the table. So of course you're going to spend more on your performance marketing, but hopefully the profits from that you can do to spend more on your brand marketing. But what Grace Kye says is and what I'll go into in a minute is about, well, that's all wonderful, but it's a model. OK, it's, it's, it's not meant to be perfect. That's just your starting point. So have a fourth chip and adapt to your circumstances. So why do we adapt to our circumstances? Well, because even in the original Bennett and Fieldwork and since then they've shown that there's a number of things that affect the mix. For example, your industry in financial services, the baseline isn't even 60 40 or as the original data was actually 62 38. It's actually closer to 80 20 brand, which sounds weird, right? Because a lot of financial products are thought of as commoditised, but that's why brand is so important. Because if the only thing is separating you from your competitors isn't is a point on the APR or three quid on your car insurance or whatever from those services and it's particularly important, but it applies for all industries. So you've got to adapt. Also you've got to adapt what's happening. We talked about the recession. This is dated from walk. It said right now if you want an item but its price is going up, what would you do? Well, in groceries, people are going to shop around but ultimately they're going to buy anyway. Necessities like household, you know, they might actually defer buying it. They're going to shop around but they're going to buy anyway a little bit less. But when you in things like expensive treats like electronics like maybe what prime day a lot of it is about people are going to be going and you know what I don't need this right now. You know, I might not need it for another year.  So adapt to your circumstances. Be aware of the picture around you. This isn't perfect vacuum. Equally through the age of your business it affects your mix. So from the IPA data bank 98 to 2018 it showed that actually in the first year the white in that table is performance in the first year. It's probably makes a lot of sense to get that engine revenue through a lot of performance marketing. You know, a new product new launches get a performance marketing thing happening. It's it's fine. You know, but over time early growth excludes the first year but maybe the first few years that should shape up. And as you become a leader brand use that use that brand equity that you've got use that in your spend reinforce that and you know, put aside forces and build barriers to entry because to someone to even catch up with you they cannot spend a fortune on their own brand to build the same level of equity. OK. And then how? So there's a lot to consider because all of those things is plus 3% here plus 2% there minus 4% there. There's a maximum work by chemical tracksuit and they built a calculator to try and take in some of this. I built my own version using AI which is a whole of the topic but I'm rubbish at code. So using AI but I built my own one based on all the research that's done and that adapts it based on whether you're innovating or whatever the link is there you'll see in the PDF but it's on theboundsagency.com and it's a calculator. So if you're funding services you can use that. If you're not funding services go to tracksuit with the original creators of this whole thing and they'll cover more sectors like FMCG and so on. Some considerations with the user models. These studies were done by marketers or at least what people would perceive as marketers. Bear that in mind when you're having conversations with the non marketers. You know, telling finance that a marketer came up with a brilliant study of why we should be spending more on brand is a bit like trying to convince a steak eater to switch vegan based on the opinion of another vegan. You know, it's not enough on its own. The studies are biased towards brand because brand was the thing that was not getting enough investment mostly at the time but the lessons are applicable for both. There's no one-size-fits-all. As I said, you need to adapt things. Don't be dogmatic. You know, the leaders in our industry argue with each other about what's right and what's wrong. You know, just take some good theories, your hypothesis and test from there. You know, don't argue about that until you've got quite a lot of years under your belt about experience of seeing one method or the other. Of course, mixing your budget is only part of advertising. If you're horrific creative, it doesn't matter how much you spend on brand, it's not going to work unless it stands out for being terrible. You know, it's a lot more to it equally if you spend a ton of money on performance marketing but you're horrifically unoptimised, then that's not going to work either. But just because you have a great plan and this is the next section, don't expect a blank check. So beware of hyperbolic discounting. And this scenario here is exactly what I've been through a number of times. I've created the perfect plan and based on red book after book, cover to cover, all the new analysis, put it into a beautiful deck and still, even how the CFO sit ups and they go, you know what? I totally understand what you're saying. I need to temp some budget cuts if that's all right. So it's not enough on its own. I didn't give the temp some cut but I would ask for it. Because you've got to do more. Because money doesn't come from the penny, it just comes in there just because you made a good argument for it. It's either got to be increased from the profits, essentially. You've got to find it. So your rationale was we're committed to you guys, we need to do this stuff, isn't actually probably that hard, all right? It's convincing. I'm just giving you tools to convince others and as well as yourselves. So you need to give it to the CFO, the CEO. So you need to tie into the right language there. But often the budget is being diverted from somewhere else. Now, within marketing, you might be diverting budget from performance towards brand or from brand activity towards performance, which I had to go through my early career, you know? You might have to convince sales that maybe they're going to see a dip if you're moving more towards demand generation than performance. And you can't have a budget for both that they're going to see a dip in the next maybe few months. That's a big fight, you know? But there's lots of evidence out there and B2B, for example, covers and do quite a lot of data on how demand generation works better than just demand capture. You know, you might have to convince your product teams. You have to convince sales. There's a lot to be done here. So how do we go about that? Use the right language. Brand consideration, brand equity, brand, brand, brand, it doesn't matter. Even things like ROAS and CPA to a degree are important and easier to understand, but they're still marketing terms to a lower degree. You've got to start using the language of the business. How does this business make money? You know, is it a public company? Does it have shareholders? You know, there's a lot of considerations here. The middle chart I've got here is, talks about a 4% increase in brand equity down the side. It was a study done, and it's in HV, a Harvard Business Review. And it says, okay, we did a 4% increase in brand equity. What did that actually mean to these four businesses? Our three types of businesses and the average across 4,000 brands. And they showed it. They had that brand equity score to all of these brands and then they applied it to what happened. Terms like annual revenue growth. When we did this, there was an annual revenue growth of 1% and you will shareholder value growth. It's a big one for a lot of companies. And you're often fighting against that when they want to keep their profit margins up. That they're pleasing the shareholders can be one of the curses against marketing. So you have to show how it keeps the shareholders happy. But the investment as a percentage of the business, how much more you want and you want. It's not just 3 million, it's, I need a bigger percentage of the businesses turnover but it'll net you an even bigger percentage back. Shareholder value return investment and return an investment as a whole. These old numbers you need to talk about and they will, as you see, they did vary by businesses, but these are just single examples of businesses, right, does vary. So you're doing that. Data driven should have been in my list at the top, right? But data driven decisions this easily said. Here I mean obviously using data, using performance, but all of these things are totally the just models, right? They're things that have worked for many, many, many businesses but they're a baseline for your hypothesis. You have to then use them to test. Chances of them giving you, of someone giving you a doubling your marketing budget, spend on brand of performance is very, very small, okay? But can you get 5% to test with? Can you say, well, look, I want you to shore away 10% for me but I'm going to spend 5% of the test and if that's successful, I want the other 5% this year. Something like that. You know, negotiate, give them an out if you're wrong. Give yourself an out. You know, as I said to a board in the past, I'm not in commission here, I'm not spending money for the sake of spending money. I don't get any kickback out of it. You know, spending money because I believe it's the right thing to do. So, but backup data and don't take it personally, be data-led.  Communication and language, I've already talked about this, but communication, think about what we talked about. Something that's going to be one of the biggest marketing jobs you're going to do, okay? Is talk about, talking about Bound Sharp at the beginning, 95% of the time, you're not in budget season, okay? So, do you just go all out at the finance department when you have to speak to them and you have to get money from them? Or do you spend the year, the other 95% of the time, building a relationship with them, showing what money does, showing what money doesn't, showing what your theories are, what they're based on, having a relationship and then explain to you how money works in this business.  You know, they have targets the same as you and you need to understand, equally with sales, equally with others. Show what your brand equity does for the price elasticity. That was a big one for me, price elasticity. Use lots of charts, but don't make the mistake of taking a chart into a meeting that you don't fully understand. I've done that earlier on and had someone just take it apart. I think, well, why does that happen? Or another one, and I nearly colluded it until I looked at it. It showed absolutely clearly the click-through rate improvement based on brand performance. So if you've got a high brand, you get a high click-through rate. This has been proven down again. But the chart I had showed a 0.68% click-through rate if your brand is number one, if your brand is number three and a 0.71% click-through rate if your brand is number one. Now, it's an improvement, yes, but the chart was massively stretched out. And actually a fan's person would go, well, how much is that 0.02% cost me? Just be wary of what you're going in with. Equally, when you mess up and you will, be transparent if I did. Understand what you did wrong. Don't brush under the carpet. Don't blag it. Maybe the circumstances are wrong.  Maybe you misjudged something. Be transparent because ultimately you'd dare to fight another day and be better coming up with time. So I'm going to move to two case studies in the summary. So it's a case study from the meal in a box kind of category. Gusto, many of you will have heard of, go back about 10 years or so when the whole category started, less than 10 years really, they were very much reliant on paid ads. They had very low brand awareness. And at a tipping point, I remember watching, I can't remember his phone in Tom, the CMO there. I remember seeing him in marketing week saying, you know, we were so deep into performance marketing now, we're going to move into moving into brand. And we have to spend more of our money on brand. So what did they come up with? They decided on a mix of about 60, 40. Now this actually wasn't based on whether it would involve the business field, no doubt, but it was based on their own data and their own tests. And they settled on a roughly 60, 40% split. That drove people into a demand pool, which then led to tighter acquisition.  It's not brand is what's driving it. So now from 2020 anyway, it's not now, but around 2020, they were 75% organic customer acquisition. You know, so that's a much healthier business, a much more sustainable business. You know, when it's up against people like Hello Fresno, that's why it's doing well. I was that one. And then my final example before moving to questions is my own experience. I started out in five years ago, gosh, I was in out in five years. I explained how I started, perhaps comparison was very dominant and we had an issue where it was very dominant. It's great, the performance of the business is doing exceptionally well and that was almost a problem. There was no burning platform. We had very weak consideration compared to our awareness, 97% awareness and quite low consideration. The impact of brand marketing was known was just something you did and performance marketing was terribly unoptimised. So I did all of this work to get increased budget on the ATL above the line. I had a big review of our creative. We changed our creative entirely. We kept a fluent device, the Lady Admiral, changed everything else, went animated to get greater emotional response. We started to measure what that did to click through rates on price comparison versus a control brand. We also looked after elephant and diamond. So they hadn't had any brand investment so they were my control test. We also moved brand and performance into one team. It's a balance, yeah? So they were all into one team with the same budget, worked out differently. And we used method more than being obsessed with the mix. It just happened to settle down a certain way. What was the outcome? Price comparison dependency sort of stabilised if not dipped. It was going 60, 65 cents, you know, it was going up, it flattened off because just direct marketing was working so much better. Our click-through rate from third position. If you think you've got a price comparison website and you have five results, it's like the second or third result. If that's a brand you know, you're more likely to click it and prove that click-through rate. It sounds very dull and very dry and it's worth millions. Our consideration became first in market. This led to the thing. It isn't a result in itself. It isn't a goal in itself. But that's what we were. First instead of fifth. And then we also had the lowest direct CPA in the market by quite a while. And I know that because there's an anonymous benchmarking thing called the benchmarkers. So and we did that with that sacrificing share. This is this model in growth. But yeah, performance impacts brand by increasing equity, increasing penetration, network effects and awareness consideration. Brand impacts performance by increasing elasticity, click-through rates, et cetera. But what you've got to work on over time and this little slant here is just like that. Just like that along the short of a chart is that it'll take time to improve that coefficient. You know that the money is energy going into a system. It's not spent and gone. And that's the big conversation you have to have. This money is being invested. Yes, we've all used the investment trick. But it's energy going into a system. And the better you get at these things, the more that energy transfers into the other type of business, performance brand and so on. So in summary, it's a critical time. Performance marketing is matured as a discipline. It's still got some way to go, but it's definitely matured a lot. We're working on conditions we're working against us. So we need to be really on this stuff for our business to survive past that and beyond. But it's a great time for marketers. We're well respected and we need to be well educated on what's available to us on that education. There's several works of critical thinking out there. There's tons of analysis now, but you've got to use it as a baseline hypothesis. You can't just rely on it because you won't get by in and you might be wrong. So just adapt and then find teamwork is critical for success. It's not brand marketers versus performance marketers.   So you work together, but also work with a broader business to get them buying and whatever you choose to do. And that's it. This is a reading list. I don't know if you want to move on to questions. Thanks, Alex. Absolutely fascinating presentation. We will head into Q&A. We've already received some great questions to get us underway. So thank you for those of you who have sent your questions in. Please do continue to post any questions and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next few minutes. Yes, I ran over. Yes, okay. First question. In your projects and teams, did you always get the budget that you wanted? Absolutely not. Particularly earlier on I didn't. I think I had a little bit of leeway when I first went there and they went well as a new guy. We got to give him some rope to hang himself with. So I did then, but after that, I always protected my budget. We often would ask for like a 10-15% cut and might get away with a couple of percent. I often got budget with new products based on this building consideration because newer businesses are on some ways easy to grow. So no, I didn't get it all the time, but I got better at keeping it and then sometimes increasing it as time went on. But it's not flawless. You go think of the big picture. Right, thank you. Another question that had come in was how would you advise justifying to board members that are investing in branding for a product portfolio that it's worth it in the long run, especially that it is difficult to quantify compared to other tactical marketing activities? That's kind of the last section. So for me, I noticed, and I had to rush through that a little bit because I was conscious, but what I did was a type of elasticity. So what I said was consideration over time. So where our activity should build a relationship which will grow consideration. That's meaningless to the CFO, but it's the number that we start with and we can directly improve. This consideration in many studies is correlated to improve click-through rates or improve performance. So take your performance channel and go, what's the big metric that we're targeting there? CPC, CPA, CTR, whatever. How can it tie to that? And talk about it logically. If you have to convince yourself, then you're not ready. Look out there what's happened. I've mentioned that ZAN do a really good report. I've done a really good paper on it. You've got to take your brand metrics that you can immediately influence through brand activity and then show how they tie to performance metrics and then show how those performance metrics tie to profit or elasticity or whatever it might be. You're talking in future cash flow. You're not talking in just having a luxury. Okay, great. Thank you. And talking of those metrics that you mentioned, there were a couple of questions that came in asking what metrics would you say are the core ones to analyse performance? Performance? I don't know. I'm a bit old school. For a couple of years, with a 30 million pound budget, we tend to look at two metrics above all, which were your cost per acquisition and your volume against target. Budget was not recently measured. The reason for that was because, well, we needed a certain volume, but we did not find hitting it if you're losing money on every customer. TROAS is a big one in performance marketing. These days target ROAS, sorry, and return on ad spend, sorry. It can be quite short termists and you can solve for it so it's a bit risky, but they're all useful metrics. But like I said, ROI, CPA, ultimately what can your business afford to spend on a customer and that's how you are sitting in the KPIs from that. Fantastic, thank you. I think we've probably got time for another question. This is around how smaller organisations what your experience is of those and whether or not you find that any smaller organisations that may not have as robust a marketing structure, whether they lean on performance marketing and ROI more than the longer term brand focused marketing. It's a hard one, no, because someone said to me once, it's easy to run an efficient corner shop, so you can get very good at being a very small efficient business and that's fine. If you just want to maintain the status quo, that's fine. There are other ways to build relationships with your brand that are beyond just going on TV or spending a fortune. Brand advertising and YouTube and valuable content, there's nothing to do with sales, is brand advertising, right? You're establishing authority. Definitely do that stuff, because if you don't do it, you can bet that it will be doing it. And it's, you know, it's weird.  Well, be on LinkedIn. Talk about what you think is important in the market because your little audience cares. You know, your niche will care about that. It's not about just speaking to them when you want money out of them. That's building brand. It doesn't have to be some fancy advert. Be more to customers than just a transaction point. That's what brand is. So, yeah, I don't think you have to rely. Performance marketing gets the wheels running and it keeps the money coming in, but you have to be doing more because one day you're going to find that it gets very, very hard and your business will not grow but your business will want to grow and you won't be able to achieve it for them. Amazing. Thank you so much, Alex. That's fantastic. And I think, unfortunately, that's all we've got time for for the webinar today. I would like to thank Alex once again and also to CIM Wales Committee for organising the webinar. So that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today. We do hope you've enjoyed the webinar. Take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again very soon.


Hey y'all, what's up? My name is Snolli. Welcome to my channel. You guys are new here and if you are, definitely hit that subscribe button because I make a lot of Austin content. And if you're already subscribed, make sure your post notifications are turned on so you never miss a video. It's been a little over two years that I moved to Austin, Texas and ever since I've been here, I get so many people asking me how do you make friends in a new city? So I wanted to put together a whole video just on ways to make friends in your new home. Whether it's getting an offer letter from your dream job in a new city or deciding that your life needs a little bit of change and deciding you want to move somewhere else. The first thing you should do is to ask your friends and family in the current state that you live in or in your hometown if they know anyone in the new city that you're moving to. You can always use Google to find out, you know, referrals on where to live in Austin or where to eat or what to do in Austin. But it's just a good feeling to get recommendations from people who you know or even through a friend of a friend. I personally didn't have any family when I moved here and I actually moved here without visiting but I didn't know a couple of older people that went to the same college as me so I was able to just ask them, you know, how is this apartment complex? What's this area like? And they gave me all those recommendations and it's just really helpful hearing it from someone that you trust. The second thing I did once I found out I was moving to Austin was I joined so many Facebook groups like any Facebook group I could find that was Austin based. I was moving here as a photography and videography freelancer so I just went and searched Austin photographers or, you know, Austin videographers. I wanted to get into wedding photography at the time so I searched that and found a couple of style shoot Facebook groups and then one of my favorite Facebook groups that I found was because I actually listened to the Morning Toast at the time I was obsessed and they have a bunch of listeners so they had a list of sub groups and Facebook groups that you could join whether you like TikTok or whether you watch this one reality show so there was actually a sub group for Austin listeners not only were the people in that group really cool but we had this common bond because we all listened to that podcast. There's another Facebook group called Girls New to Austin and there are just a bunch of like business networking kind of Facebook groups too all it takes is a quick Facebook search and you should find what you're looking for. I definitely recommend that you stay in the know of what's going on around your city whether that's free events, happy hours, or grand openings of stores that are popping up.  One of my favorite Instagram accounts is When Wear What Austin it's literally the most basic blue boxed feed but they are the most informative of what's going on around the city then there's also 365 things Austin, Austin, Texas things and there are also so many food Instagrammers that you can follow to know exactly where to go to get the best food around town. Before going to these events, I would reflect on what kind of a person that I could see as my best friend and then go to events kind of relating to that. So for example, if you're sober or just don't really like going out that much I would recommend going to a free yoga event or something more active and just less of the drinking scene. Not only is Austin just a friendly city in general but they are extremely dog-friendly. You can pretty much take your dog anywhere to bars, to stores, shopping, anything. I've never really heard someone say that I couldn't bring Sophie into somewhere which is crazy. It's definitely different in other cities. When we visited Houston and Dallas we didn't see as many dogs out and about but Austin is a whole another world when it comes to dogs. That being said, pretty much everyone has a dog here and a great way to make friends and meet other people is to go to dog parks because having a dog is a huge icebreaker. It is so easy to ask like what's the breed of your dog and just kind of start talking like that and people again in Austin are just so friendly and if they have a dog they like other dogs so they're gonna want to talk to you about dogs if that makes sense. One of my favorite places to take my dog Sophie is to go to Auditorium Shores. It has a stunning view of the city. You can also see the water. It has an amazing trail that goes through it and there's also just a big grass area where you can just play ball with your dog and chill, watch the sunset, that kind of thing. And then we have Zocer Park which is definitely one of the most well-known ones. This also has a great view of the city and it's just so fun to see all the dogs running around. You can also play like volleyball here if you're into that. They have like a lot of just like people bringing their own game soccer and everything like that because this place is like massive. Another great way to make friends is to join a fitness class when I first got here to Austin I started doing orange theory fitness and I would literally like scope out my class and see who's around my age and try to stop them after class to like make small talk or you know my go-to question would be something like how long have you been doing orange theory? Something like orange theory it might be hard especially if you're doing like a morning class because they might be in a rush to get back to work even though orange theory is like a group fitness class I feel like you're kind of in your own bubble so there are definitely more group fitness classes that you actually talk to each other maybe at 45 or something like that but definitely a good way to stay active and meet friends at the same time. One of the ways my friends made their friends is just living at their apartment complex and using all the amenities whether it's going to the gym using the study spaces hanging around in the common areas or again taking your dog to the dog park if you guys watch my vlogs you know that I moved into a new apartment complex within the last two months and I've been trying to go to their monthly resident events I didn't really go to that many at the last apartment just because I feel like at that place there were like families that were living there or just like older people that were living there but now I'm in my new apartment complex I definitely feel like all these people are more around my age definitely motivates me to participate in the resident events so I'm definitely going to force myself to go to more it can be intimidating at first but it's just good to know people in your apartment complex just in case you need them at some point I've actually heard a couple of success stories from people using Bubble BFF if you guys didn't know Bubble is a dating app but they actually have a section where you can find friends in your area which is so cool I actually tried using this two years ago when I just moved to Austin and I was getting a lot of people that were still at college at UT so they were like 18 or you know like a little bit older and I was just looking for people obviously who were out of college and kind of in that post-grad life so that's why I kind of gave up on it but I wonder if there's like an age filter now or how that works I definitely think it's worth looking into this next way is definitely easier said than done but you can always Instagram DM someone that you see that lives in your city maybe you're looking at some new restaurants and you're looking at their tag section and see someone posted about it I would recommend doing a little bit of stalking just to find out how long they've been in your city because if they are new just like you they're most likely in the same boat of wanting to find friends but if they've been here for like two or five years or 10 years I'm guessing they probably already have their friends but honestly shoot your shot because you never know what could happen lastly go out and explore your city whether that's you know going and doing the touristy things or going out to rainy street or West 6th Street I'm not saying go get hammered but I will say that a little look would encourage sometimes does help my biggest piece of advice for someone who just graduated college you know they're moving to their first city post grad getting into that lifestyle is to put in the effort if you're not going to try to make friends they're not going to magically come to you unfortunately because trust me I kind of thought that way I thought they would just you know show up or I just meet them wherever I go but if I didn't put in the effort of you know trying to meet mutual friends or DMing people on Instagram I would definitely not know as many people as I do now here in Austin making friends post grad is nothing like making friends in college I was personally in a sorority so it was easy to make friends because you were already grouped with people your age and you did have that common bond of being in the same sorority and you would see these people every day I lived in the sorority house for two years so I was living with 23 other girls and you know you just create bonds when you come home late at night eating ramen or watching bachelor in the TV room so it's really going to take a lot longer to make those long lasting relationships in this post grad lifestyle but making the effort is probably the most important thing the last thing I'll say is that when you do start making those friends always say yes unless you actually have something planned or you know you really can't go but don't start making excuses because you get nervous to go hang out with somebody new you never know what could come from that night you could be introduced to their friends or you can meet other people wherever you go and the more times you tell them that you're unable to come or that you don't want to come they're going to stop inviting you because they're going to think oh you know maybe they don't like me or you know maybe I should stop inviting them so definitely keep that in mind because you know there are people out there that are wanting to make friends just like you are but you know who wants to play as a friend I hope this video helped you find new ways to make friends in a new city and once it gets cooler I would absolutely love to plan some sort of meetup whether that's in Zolker or we can bring our pups bring some snacks I don't even know but comment down below if you live in Austin or if you are moving to Austin and would be interested in something like that if you're not already subscribed to my channel go ahead and subscribe now because I make a lot of Austin lifestyle content and I have a whole playlist with videos that I've made in the past two years whether that's recommendations on where to live in Austin or you know fun things to do in Austin so definitely go check out that playlist I will link it down below also if you guys are moving to Austin and are curious what the day-to-day life looks like here go follow me on Instagram because I have saved so many things to do here in Austin and most importantly what to eat in Austin all over my Instagram story highlights so go check that out if you guys have any more questions on how to make friends in the new city or anything about Austin my Instagram DMs are always open so I will see y'all in my next video bye


All right, I appreciate y'all coming out today. Spending some time with us. My name's Ed Bailey. I'm a Waddell, part of our extreme scale infrastructure group, our hyperscale group that has traditionally been known as DCS or Data Center Solutions. This is all a use of same team. We're part of the architecture team within that group. A lot of what we're going to talk about today, we're going to touch off a little bit on some of the trends we're seeing coming out of what called our hyperscale space, some of the things we're looking at as we are seeing some other trends in the market, and then really touch on, at a glancing blow on some of the infrastructure elements, and then all is going to walk us through the elements of systems management and resource management composability that we're really focused on advancing some of our innovation, some of our technologies on. We have a demo down in the marketplace where you can come see this live. So I certainly want to encourage you to come see us down there and talk to us after this so that you can get a little better understanding of what we're trying to do. And we absolutely want your feedback as we're working in this space as well. So with some of the shifting trends, I mean, some of these are buzzwords you all are very familiar with, where we're seeing pretty much everyone in our space and even in some of the emerging space here is in some form of cloud. We're seeing some customers starting to do proof of concepts, try to understand how they're going to go transition workloads, transition their environments. The software defined elements of things, software defined pretty much everything at this point. How do we enable that? How do we facilitate that and make it easy, make it flexible, make it agile, make it useful? In the open aspects of things, we are very engaged in the open management. You'll hear words like redfish. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. Would love to show you that demo in the marketplace as well. So we have that running on the product we'll touch on today. And so the open aspects of things and really understanding from a customer's perspective, what are the elements of open that they really want to grasp and make a key tenant in their deployment in their infrastructure? And what are the ones that are out there that maybe don't add quite as much value? One of the things we know for certain is that customers that we're talking to are really shifting from this idea of buying monolithics. I'm going to buy five more servers, five more of this, 10 more of that. We're really talking about resources. We're talking about elements of compute, elements of storage. How do I get those into my environment and get them deployed and provisioned as quickly as possible? In the space that we're kind of born out of, that we engage in more day to day, in that hyperscale space, that's the element of buy. I mean, that's where we want to operate. We want to ship fully integrated validated racks, ready to roll into place, hook up to management, hook up to power, let's get it deployed, let's get it provisioned, let's put it to work. And so that's our focus when we're looking at these types of elements. And what we're doing that with in our space for a while is a platform called the DSS-9000. And I was about to touch on really what we've enabled with this, but just to set a little bit of groundwork. What we're focused on from a hardware perspective are infrastructures that give us that flexibility and agility to go get the right SKUs, the right configs, the right resources for our changing workload, changing customer requirements, but do it in a manner that we have consistency in the infrastructure, in the management, in the elements that touch our provisioning tools, our deployment tools, our data centers, so that we're not turning the wheel every time. We have a shift in demand or a shift in workload, shift in use cases. Again, we're focused on the restful pieces and secure pieces of management. Open management, where we are focused on not only looking at technologies to go implement in the future, but what matters today? How do we generate that flexibility and agile today? This is something that will be coming later part of this year. We have a half rack of this with a demo again in the marketplace, so please come and see us. So with that, I was gonna kind of run us through the solution aspect of this where we're talking in terms of systems and resource management. I'm Ali Yosef. I'm in the Extreme Scale Infrastructure Group at Dell. I touched upon the hardware, so what I wanna touch upon, a full solution that is just beyond the hardware. There are a lot of pieces out there. When we started building this demo, we had the goal is to deploy an open stack workload on our infrastructure in an easy and simple fashion. We started with the DSS-9000 as our choice of hardware, and for a reason that I will be touching upon a little bit later, but also there is this work around the Intel rock scale architecture. The rock scale architecture is around managing a pool of resources, whether that's storage, compute, or networking. And in a magical fashion, bringing those pool of resources and creating a workload out of that. And there is the release of Pod Manager, which is an integral part of the rock scale architecture. We'll be also touching upon that a little bit later. I mentioned the DSS-9000, and why we use the DSS-9000. One critical piece in the DSS-9000 is this rock manager, this entity, this controller that is in the rock that knows everything about the rock. It knows about the resources of the rock, all the chassis and the servers and all that. And Pod Manager can do that, but it also can do it through this Redfish API, a very easy, simple to use HTTP-like API. So that's the new Redfish standard that has been defined by the DMTF standard body. Now to bring all of this together, right? I mean, we wanna use this infrastructure. We wanna interact with it. We partnered with AMI to build the front end tools and the CLI to be able to extend dashboards like Horizon. So with that, I'll go to the next slide. I mentioned Pod Manager, right? So Pod Manager is the main piece of the rock scale architecture. It is this, the best way to think about it is the set of Linux services that you can install on a physical machine or a virtual machine. But what it does, it obviously, as I mentioned, it manages these pool of resources, but it exposes this front end API for the outside world to consume and request things from Pod Manager. And at the back end, it talks to these pool of resources, network, storage, compute. And for example, in the case of our Rack Manager, it talks to the Rack Manager to get those resources through the Redfish API. So that at a high level, what Pod Manager is. Hey, question, question. So we've talked about Redfish, right? What's the big deal about Redfish? So if I can summarize it in a few things, obviously it's a modern API. It's the new API to manage data center hardware. It is simple to use. It is HTTP sending like a curl commands and things like that, secure. And it can apply to a single node. It can scale to thousands of nodes. So it is fitting for a single node and can scale in a data center that is like thousands of nodes. One last thing on Pod Manager, as I was talking about, you see these PSMEs. So every pool of resources needs to implement this PSME that conforms to the Pod Manager API, the Pod Manager architecture. And so this way the Pod Manager can talk to it. And so it is Redfish to our Rack Level Manager. So what I wanna touch upon is, so there were these building blocks. How did we use them? What was the benefit of it? What did we get out of them? One thing that was obvious was the discovery piece, right? I can out of band discover everything in my system, all my servers, the chassis, everything that is in it. Didn't have to have the system in a certain state. They just, systems were added to my rack and I can discover them and know exactly what I have in the rack. So that was huge, right? And beyond discovery, I can do more, right? I can do this whole inventory of the rack, right? I can get information about each node. I can get like the CPUs, memory and hard drive. That is huge, right? I mean, out of band, I don't need to boot to an OS. I don't need to pixie boot, one of the challenges. Sometime when we're discovering system, we rely on booting into an OS to discover the system, right? A bootstrap image or whatever that is. For whatever reason, sometimes it doesn't boot, right? It's not set up to pixie or the boot settings is not set correctly or whatever. But being able to discover that and control that part is huge. As I mentioned, the inventory is huge as well. To be able to get this CPU, memory and hard drive and have that aggregated and be able to do with it. And that's where the rock scale architecture comes in, right? This ability to compose a node, to build a server out of those pool of resources, that aggregate CPU, memory and hard drive and just put it together and create a workload, a server. So I have my server, right? I have my server now, I need to configure it, right? I mean, that's a big thing. To be able to set bias settings out of band, right? To be able to configure the RAID or just power control the nodes, that is huge. So that's one of the, that's the rack manager with the ability to just control everything out of band. And finally that I'm done, I can deploy it. I can send it, you know, I can provision my nodes and you know, through the single management interface, I can just tell my nodes to boot to the provisioning server whether that's being fuel or ironic or whatever that is. Where else do we see configuration go? I think configuration, one other thing that can be interesting here, what if there is a way to do a bias update, do firmware update, just through the single IP, the rack manager that we have in there. I think that's huge. Another piece, you know, what if we can tell the nodes, you know, point the nodes to some ISO image and tell it to boot to that ISO image and to run some diagnostics. So there are things that we can add to this. But you know, today just setting bias setting, configuring the RAID and power controlling the node is huge. And I was in one of the earlier key nodes and there's gonna be like 400 million servers in the next few years. And managing that is obviously is a huge challenge. So anything that can help that ecosystem is great. What I'm showing you here is just a snapshot of an extension to Horizon dashboard. Work that we partnered with AMI to do this plugin, this Mega Rack plugin to Horizon. Basically what's showing you, and I don't know if you guys can see it in the back, but the top table is showing you nodes that have been composed, that's been built and are part of my OpenStack cluster. And at the bottom you're seeing the list of resources, these pool of resources that are available to me that I can build. I can pick from, call it bag of goodies or something. So that is another example of an OpenStack integration project, a fuel. By the way, I love fuel, all right? I use fuel and I love it. It's a simple to use tool. You know, a rock scale architecture can play a role here where it can discover the system. I understand fuel has its own discovery process. But again, if we can discover the system reliably and send it to fuel, basically have the system that's showing up in the rock scale architecture tab, everything that is discovered when I'm ready to add it to my OpenStack cluster, pixie booted to a fuel and have a fuel takeover from that point on. I talked about composability, right? That's the big part of the Intel rock scale architecture, the ability to compose a node to build a server for my workload. Composing a node can be as simple as a one CLI command that I can send and say give me a node of default everything, just give me a node out of the pool of resources. Or can be advanced, can be based on my requirement, my workload requirement. It can be, I can say I need it with this many cores, this many hard drives and such and such. There is a mega rock composer from AMI that does this advanced filtering that, and I will be happy to show it to you in our queue, in our booth for the demo. So when it's all said and done, I went through few steps, I configured and sent it to my provisioning tool and boom, I have my node added to OpenStack. So that was huge to me, right? Just using these simple tools out there to be able to quickly deploy, whether it was a Nova compute node or a Cinder backend. So that's what the live demo is about. How does the DSS9000 or just the elements of systems management hardware, how does it aid what you've been trying to do here? So the big thing in the DSS9000, as I was mentioning, building this workload that is fitting to OpenStack and the DSS9000 has this mix of compute and storage and with a uniform way of management, a single point of management, a single IP, being able to pick from that workload was huge, right? Just having a configuration skews that are fitting for my OpenStack and just me sending a few commands and picking from that and extending my OpenStack cluster. So had you been asking me all the questions, right? Let me ask you a question. So obviously I love the rack management part of it and that is huge, but the DSS9000 has more than just a rack level management if you could elaborate on that a bit. Well, so what we're talking about again is logical resources, right? So when we're talking to customers and a lot of our environments, frankly, we have customers that never even seen the hardware, right? We're talking logical resources, compute, storage, other elements. And so again, when we talk in terms of the things we're focused on, certainly from an open perspective are the elements that the customer engages with. And it starts with the management and the pieces that I'll have talked about. But we need to be able to have the tangible goods, have the elements that we can operationalize from a deployment perspective and give the flexibility again based on the shifting workloads or the shifting needs. And so what you're seeing here is kind of a high level overview of an infrastructure that gives us flexibility with regard to the sled elements, if you will, the physical elements of this thing, but a common experience, if you will, with regard to the power and the management pieces. So again, this is something that we've had in certain spaces for a little while now, and we're looking to bring this to the broader market with a lot of the elements that I always touched on. Another question, Ed, I think in one of your earlier slides, you mentioned that this trend that you see from one U2U is that is to rock scale design. Is that a trend that you see continuing? Yeah, I mean, we think so, right? I mean, when we're talking in terms of how do we buy resources? How do we get those deployed? We need to make that easier. We need to make it faster. We need to be able to capitalize on the dollars that we're putting in the infrastructure as quickly as possible. And so we absolutely see that continuing and expected to continue to grow pretty aggressively. So where do we see this going, right? I mean, it's just going to continue from a capability perspective when we talk in terms of more integration into open stack environments, more capability from a resource management perspective in how we go discover these things. Intel has done a great job pushing us with rack scale architecture. There is a longer term vision for all this. The ability to take advantage of a lot of those elements today, frankly, from an asset management composability perspective, they're real, right? And they're out there. And so we're continuing to build on that. The ability to use this for bare metal provisioning. Our focus on this is to be able to do this out of band. We want to be able to enable this with as few touches, if you will, as possible in the provisioning process. So the out of band element, the ability to leverage redfish, the open systems management, and have the hardware facilitate that is absolutely critical to our vision here. And again, kind of redundant, but the ability to go take advantage that in future technologies, as we look at disaggregation of other elements of the hardware, we're trying to put the foundation in place to be able to take advantage of that as quickly as possible. So kind of in summary, why is this a focus? We were at the expo last night for the little happy hour. And frankly, I think we surprised a few people with regard to what we were showing here and what we're trying to do. This is a priority for us. To continue to enable, call it solutions, be it hardware, systems, resource management in open stack environments is absolutely priority. Our commitment with Intel on rack scale architecture and continuing to evolve that. 1.2 is something that we're working through now. We're excited about more announcements throughout the course of this year and something that we're really excited about. Really, this is just the beginning in that front. And then with all this is the broader del from a deployment services standpoint. The ability to go do systems and solutions like this but leverage the broader being, if you will, is something that we're excited about too. It gives us a significant capability when we're talking in terms of having multiple data centers, gear on the edge, being able to push things closer to regional users is a focus for us as well. And so with that, we can do a little Q and A here. Certainly, we really would like to invite you down to come see us at the expo. I mean, that's where Ola can walk you through the demo live. Like as I mentioned before, we have Redfish live there and we have the hardware elements live there as well. I just wanna say that Meretic Ganguli from Intel, she's one of the architect for the rack scale architecture will be at our booth to answer any questions around the rack scale architecture. Two to three p.m. today? Two to three p.m. today, she'll be there. All right, we really appreciate your time. We appreciate you all showing up to see us today. Thank you.