Hello, good evening everyone and welcome to our new season of Marketing Club events. Tonight, we'll be kicking off the series with the latest trends in digital marketing with Dana Rawls. The Marketing Club was created primarily to help students get the most from their CIM accredited degree and prepare them for a career in marketing. This webinar is one of six online events. We'll be running this academic year for our Marketing Club series with further webinars in November, January, February, March and April. Of course, CIM members and other marketing practitioners are welcome to attend as well as students. For the uninitiated, the CIM accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the accredited degree provides. And if you're a student, you can sign up now to receive regular Marketing Club updates. Simply take a photo with the QR code you see on screen, we'll also send you a link to the sign up page after this session. Each edition will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So I'd now like to hand over to Daniel Rawls, Program Director for Imperial College Business School and CEO of Target Internet, who is our guest speaker this evening over to you, Daniel. Thank you very much indeed, Phil. Great to see you, everyone. Let me just go through and explain who I am a little bit and then I'll tell you what I'm going to go through in this session together. So I'm Daniel Rawls, CEO of Target Internet. I'll talk about Target Internet in a moment, but we work with lots of the world's leading brands upskilling their teams around digital marketing. I'm founder of the Digital Leadership Program, which is an alternative to the university route into digital marketing. And if you want to say anything during the presentation, Phil's just giving you the CIM details. I am at Daniel Rawls on Twitter and if it's on Instagram, it's Target Internet, but that is me. Target Internet works with all of the brands that you can see here, helping upskill their teams from helping the McKinsey consultants, the team at Google and lots of other brands that you'll know very well indeed. I'm also program director at Imperial College, where I head up digital marketing and digital transformation and I'm the host of the Digital Marketing Podcast, which is a global top 100 business podcast. And the reason I show this particular slide, you'll see us there next to Reid Hoffman, who started LinkedIn and PayPal, but next to the Financial Times, BBC Radio 4, this costs nothing to produce. So I'll touch on that a little bit later on as well. But the point of this is that it's not about big budgets. It's just about understanding audiences and actually going back to the fundamentals of marketing. And I'm going to talk about this a bit today, but the whole thing of getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time in the right channel, that's what marketing is about. And this podcast just ticks those boxes. There's nothing if you listen to it, there's nothing particularly clever about it. It's just me and my friend Kieran chatting for half an hour, but it gets a lot of listeners as well. And I've written a few books on the topic, which I promise not to mention at all after this whole aim of this is the persuasion that I know what I'm talking about. So let's start where I like to start. And if you want other presentations, don't panic. It's not the same presentation. I just wanted to highlight this. This is from Internet Live Stats. And this shows you what's happened so far online today in terms of content creation. We are up to over four million blog posts already today. You see, according to this, there have been more videos viewed on YouTube than searches done in Google. A hundred and ninety five billion emails today, so on and so forth. Put this in perspective.  By the end of lockdown, that number was up to 65 years of content every day. The latest figure I've seen, which is not verified yet, says it's getting up to 78 years of content every day. If you think about the likelihood of anyone actually watching your video, it is in getting increasingly small. So coming back to marketing fundamentals, right content, right place, right time, we just need to make sure that we're really ticking those boxes and we understand our target audience. So I want to talk about a lot of latest trends today, but I want you to have at the back of your mind the whole time. Actually, let's not get distracted by a lot of this stuff. Let's really focus in on what does this mean in terms of getting that right content in front of the right person at the right time. So yes, huge volumes of content. That means our job is harder, but actually hopefully that sets the bar for us. And it says, if we're going to do this, we need to do it right. We can't just be sitting here blasting out content. Now, I'll come to something at the end of this presentation. We've just updated the digital skills benchmark, which looks at where are the industry skills? And what we've seen is a slight uplift in content marketing skills. You might think that means great, more good quality content. It doesn't. It just means more content because more people have got to the basic level of understanding. So actually, unfortunately, it means more average content, which is what this noise is kind of the problem that we're suffering. So we've got this at the back of our mind. Right, key trends, key things that are happening. You may or may not have noticed this. You may not have seen it rolled out to your account yet. We're seeing what we're kind of referring to as platform unification, particularly across the Facebook real estate. So across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, the platforms are starting to merge. And you'll see this in a number of different areas. But what you're seeing now is within Facebook, you'll be scrolling through and you will have Instagram Reels. That is those one minute up to one minute videos now recommended to you in Facebook. What does that mean? It means anything you're creating within Reels is now reaching a much broader audience because it's reaching that Facebook audience. Now, we talk about the shift away from Facebook and everyone's using Instagram and TikTok and so on as well. Realistically, an awful lot of people are still using Facebook very actively. Young people as well, to some extent. But definitely, if you look at the kind of 35, 45 plus audience, they are still very active Facebook users in many cases. And that is the audience, the highest disposable income. So for a marketing audience, that can be quite an interesting one as well. Latest numbers, average TikTok user is now spending 52 minutes a day on the platform. Does that mean you should be on TikTok, not necessarily? We'll maybe talk about that a little bit later on as well. It really depends on your brand as well. But this platform unification from Facebook, keep on out for this. The idea that you'll be able to send something from Messenger through to WhatsApp, if that's the person's preferred platform. And if you prefer Instagram Messenger, it will end up there for you. So this cross kind of communication across these different platforms. What that also means is that Facebook is unifying some of its advertising options so that you're going to see a lot more advertising options within messaging apps, within WhatsApp, within Messenger and within Instagram Messenger as well. So we're starting to see a lot of this starting to happen. So keep an eye out on this kind of stuff as well. Big changes in the world of email. Now, you might look at email and go, wow, that's not really where it's at in terms of marketing and digital marketing. I'm going to try and change your mind about that tonight because we've seen some huge shifts in this space. But Apple, as you probably already know, have been really focusing on privacy lately.  There's kind of the word in the way to say, no, thanks. I don't really want that. That's about your information being tracked to talk about cookies and things like that in a moment. But actually, they said, well, actually, in email, there's a level of tracking going on that people probably aren't aware of. And actually, we're going to stop that. So at the moment, you may or may not be aware, when you open an email, how your email service provider knows that you've opened that email is that there is a little hidden one pixel image in your email. And when you would even notice it, it's the same background color as the email itself. And that will load when you open the email. So we now then know that you've opened the email. Two problems with that. One is that maybe you open that email for one second and then you go, this is for me and delete it. That will still show as an open. Or how about if you've got a image block up so your email client isn't loading images, even if someone's opened it until they load the images, you won't know. Anyway, it's not not the most accurate measure, but it was a measure we relied on. And we tend to benchmark. I've got this open rate for this email, this open rate for this one, this one was better. That would tell us if our subject line was good, it would tell us did we send at the right time. But what's now actually happening is they're saying, or Apple are saying, if you've got iOS 14, we're going to stop that from loading. So it's going to hide your IP address, which in turn will hide your location. It will hide if you've opened an email or not. Now you might think what that's going to mean is that your open rates are going to dip because everybody that's using Apple Mail or any iOS device, you're not going to see that open. Actually it's going to do the opposite. What they're going to do is they're going to cash it, they're going to load it for everyone and they're going to show it to them but they won't load it for that individual. What does that mean? It basically means your open rates will go up. So suddenly you're next month or two, you're running campaigns and your open rates jump up and you go, yeah, brilliant, that's fantastic. No, it's not. What it probably means is that this Apple change is having an impact. All you've really got to do is set a new benchmark. But if a large percentage of people on your list are on an Apple Mail device, it means that open rates are not really telling you anything useful because it's going to give you a false positive from that point of view. What does that mean? It means you need to focus on click-through rate and actually it's a much better measure anyway. Next problem with this email update is that when you're in Safari, they are going to allow you and you're filling a form in to give a temporary email address. You know when you go through and it says, get a 10% discount or download this white paper now. Just give us your email address. You'll be able to give them a temporary email address and at any point you can just delete that email. So what that means from a marketing perspective is one, I can't trust my open rates, so I need to focus on click-through rates. I need to set new benchmarks, my open rates. But also, it means that I really need to focus on click-through rate, but ongoing click. Give me your email address and I will keep providing you great free stuff. Not as the white paper now, but a white paper every month. And it should be about building relationships. Now really, if you go and look at direct mail, that poster we would get through our doors, the same kind of thing happened. We were getting bombarded with so much of it that we had to put the brakes on it and we had to say, right, it's got to be about quality. We need some rules and regulations. So I actually think this is probably a good thing. It's going to slow down what we were referring to bacon. So spam was the stuff you just didn't want. You didn't ask for it in the first place. Bacon was all that stuff that you asked for, but you never read. Well, actually maybe we start to think about this a little bit more carefully. So look out for this, you're going to see a shift in your open rates over time. That brings us onto this whole third party cookie thing which is confusing a lot of people. So I just wanted to kind of clarify and give you some resources. As it's been said, my slides, you can download them from within the handouts on the platform now. So all these links are in there. At the end of the session, I'm going to give you some takeaways that you can download. So I'm going to try and keep you the end of the session. So you can download those, but you can get my slides in here. So third party cookies. What is this all about and what's going to shifting? Basically all the major browsers are going to gradually disallow third party cookies. Safari's already doing it to some extent. Chroma kind of building up to it. What it really means is a lot of the advertising that you're seeing out there at the moment. Their targeting is going to start to be a little bit limited. So at the moment, if I go, I've got a screenshot here from the Daily Mail website. I go through to that website and all the different ad networks on there that show me ads have been able to track me across multiple websites. They've built a profile about me and then they can use that profile to target ads at me. The reality is that a lot of us don't want that and other browsers going to stop blocking it. So first party cookies, if you've been to my website, I can build a profile of you and I can target things at you. And I can potentially target at you on other websites. That will still continue. But the reliance on going to platforms like Facebook's audience network or the Google display network and using all that accumulated data they've got to say, I want people in this location, of this age are interested in this. A lot of that data isn't going to be available. What's the solution? First of all, first party cookies are much better anyway. If I've got you to my website, then I can target at you differently. I can still do the kind of targets based on content. If you're on a digital marketing website, I can assume you've got an interest in digital marketing. But Google is really pushing forward in terms of artificial intelligence. So not actually collecting data about an individual but using AI to try and target some of these things as well. It gets usually complicated and really technical. So I've put a link on the screen there that you can read afterwards that will really give you the lowdown on all the technicalities. You can absorb that at your own pace. But essentially, we're going to start seeing some different advertising options and I'll get to the whole AI targeting thing in just a moment as well. Right, I said I'm going to talk about email and I'm going to try and persuade you how important email is again. The newsletter on your screen here does not look particularly exciting in terms of design. But the context behind it is what's really important. So we did a test with this and we said we've got our podcast audience. We've got over 3 million listeners to the podcast. But the problem with the podcast is broadcast.  So we said what's really important? What's important is community. We want people that really want to engage. How are we going to do that? What's the best way around it? Well look, we could do a Facebook group but the problem is Facebook groups engagement has been going down and we don't own it. And we could do LinkedIn groups but they're no good anymore because they're absolutely bombarded with spam. And I could do a clubhouse or I could do, but none of it felt quite right. And the problem with all of those things is that you don't own it. The social network own it and that means they have control over it, but also if people shift away from that platform, you lose your audience. Email, however, if I can get you to opt in for something and actually engage with it and give you a two-way communication via email, that could be pretty powerful. So what we said was, wanna sign up for our newsletter every week or two or three depending on when we've got something good to send you. We'll send you three tools, tips or techniques. There will be no ads and no sales. And the format is there's an intro paragraph. So this is what we've been up to. Three tools, tips or techniques that you can take away and use and just download straight away. Not all our stuff, loads of third party stuff we found useful. And at the bottom we ask a question of the audience. The email comes directly from my inbox and any replies come directly to my inbox. Now they're put into a sub folder for me so I can deal with it from a management point of view. What amazed me about this is average open rates are about 22 to 25%. Average click-through rates are about 3%. We're getting 70% open rate and we're getting 30 to 50% click-through rate. So it's off the charts in terms of that. But actually at that bottom, you see the bottom paragraph where I go in and say, here's a little question, like what are you reading at the moment? What are the best digital marketing books? So I don't really know what to read at the moment. About 10% of the audience reply to it directly. Now that's a lot of workload to deal with but actually that's a one-to-one relationship with my audience. So this is really important. This builds community. There's nothing clever about it other than it fits into the user journey. Because the user journey is these are marketers, these are students that need to stay up to date with things. Therefore they want this. So think about how you can use email effectively and always think about this whole thing of marketing. What can I do for my audience? Not what can I do to my audience? And if you get that, then you suddenly become a trusted partner. Then you can build community. Then you can drive engagement. Then when you want them to do something, it's not such a big ask. They go, well actually we've got this service. Why don't you subscribe? You'd get more of this kind of stuff as well. So getting back to those fundamentals but think about if you look at your engagement rates for social media, they're gonna be low. If you look at your engagement rates for email, good email, they're way higher. So actually we need to take a step back and say if I'm really truthfully looking at my analytics and saying how much is social media contributing to my end outcomes? And if I put that much effort into my email, would it do as well or would it do better? I'm not saying it will. I'm saying you need to question it because that's our job as marketers is to test and learn and test and learn the whole time. But don't assume that some of these old channels are now dead because we're all bombarded with email. We're bombarded with emails that aren't relevant because actually if we can do the right thing, it can't work still. Right, lots of changes going on with Google Analytics as well. So I mentioned this last time but I wanted to give an update on this. The standard version of Google Analytics is universal analytics and that's what about 92, 93% of us are still using. The new version of Google Analytics GA4 has come out. Now eventually everyone will have to move to GA4. You can have universal analytics and GA4 running on the website at the same time. So there's no reason not to do that. The overhead in terms of saying your website down we've done lots of testing on this is pretty much minimal. So it's not really causing too many problems from that viewpoint. The problem is you've got loads of reports in universal analytics that don't exist in GA4 but Google are really putting a lot of effort into GA4 and there are all sorts of interesting things now coming out. Now, when we talked about this last time the disparity between what universal analytics was giving in terms of data and what data we were getting from GA4 or there was in some cases a 30% difference which is just, it's no good at all. I don't know what I can trust. We've seen a lot of that slowing down and we're now seeing at most 5, 10% difference in the figures. So what we're advising our clients at the moment is have both running now and then January of next year is when you can start really thinking about checking going, okay, I'm pretty trustworthy at the data now. I'm gonna move across. What that means is you need to start upskilling yourself in GA4. The great thing about this is actually even if you haven't got universal analytics or GA4 there are demo accounts that you can get for this stuff as well. So if I jump into my browser I've got that internet live stats here. Let's go in and let's go GA demo account. What they've now launched is you can have a Google Analytics property for the Google Merchandice Store which is basically a real website that they give you the data for. Underneath that which you probably won't just be able to make our Google Analytics for property flood it which is an app so it's showing you that GA4 is good for apps and for websites and then below that universal analytics for Google Merchandice Store as well. If you click through to those you can get access to GA4, an example set of data and play around with it. And I would definitely start familiarizing yourself. I think the most important, one of the most important things within GA4 there's a lot more attribution modeling. I come onto that, what on earth that's about later on. But really importantly in the current version of universal analytics everything's at a page level. It's about pages loading. If I want to see how many people scroll to the bottom of the page or I want to see how many people played the video or played the podcast I need to add some extra code to my web pages. In GA4 it can trap these things automatically and you can add new events. You can see here like file downloads, PDFs, we couldn't trap that easily before. People scrolling, people playing the video to the end, people progressing through the video to a certain amount, people starting the video, people using internal search, all of this stuff can be tracked automatically. That's really exciting because it starts to give us a whole greater level of detail about where did someone get to filling the form in? How long did they watch the video for? And actually when you're setting goals in analytics we really had four main types of goals. A destination, which is thank you for buying, thank you for filling the form, you got to a certain page. We had a duration, you stayed a certain period of time, a number of pages, you looked at a certain number of pages and then we had events and events were great because it was like watching the video to the end but you needed to add extra code. So if you're an e-commerce website or a lead generation website it was pretty easy because the thank you for buying or thank you for filling in the form. We knew we'd got what we wanted. Whereas actually if I was a brand and it was all about, I wanted you to maybe watch a video because I think you're then more likely to do something well actually now I can track that whole lot more easily. So it's gonna be really interesting, it's gonna give us a lot more that we can do with it. So start learning about GA4 if you haven't already and start to look at some of those different reports that are in there because they are great and it's really starting to expand. You was focusing a lot of effort on it at the moment. Right, last time I spoke about a healthy cynicism of influencer marketing. So what I mean by that is everyone wants to be an influencer. Let's show a little update on that as well. So if I go to Google and I search by Instagram followers and I'll zoom right in and I'll spell that correctly.  There are now, this has gone up by over 30,000 a month. There are now 165,000 people a month trying to buy Instagram followers. There you go, buying Instagram followers 100% real instant now, $2.97. I don't know how many I get for that $2.97. The point being, what does that say below? 89 cents per, I don't know if that's 500 or 5,000 because it's blocked off behind what I'm looking at. But the point being is that there's a lot of people buying Instagram followers. So we've got a healthy cynicism of this whole thing. Now a recent study has shown us the in reality 76% of Instagram influencers now when they have to do the hashtag ad when they're going through they then are kind of hiding that. So they're not putting it front and center. They're putting it halfway through the post or they're going through and kind of hiding in the hashtags at the end and so on as well. That is clearly, it's not necessarily against the law but it's not really in the kind of the idea of how things should be done. So there are lots of new guidance rules coming out for influencers. My whole thing with influencers is to say, look influencer marketing can work really effectively. It doesn't need to be about huge influencers with tens of billions of followers. It could be micro influence and that's absolutely fine. But the reality is that you need to be able to calculate your return on investment just like any marketing. And if you can, then you need to think twice about it. So just really try and put some metric against how we judge these things. And we need to make sure that our influencers are actually looking at this in a kind of ethical viewpoint as well. Right, something I mentioned last time and I wanted to update on as well, algorithm changes for Google algorithm. Core web vitals, what's that all about? Core web vitals was a set of changes to the algorithm that basically were trying to help Google understand the usability of a website. So trying to understand how good an experience was it for the user, now you think, how does an algorithm work out? How usable something is? Well, in this case, what they're able to do is use these three measures, just to give you an update on these. LCP, largest content for paint, that's your whole page loading. It's about speed of loading, two and a half seconds. If you want to look at your website, Google page speed insights will give you insights to how fast your page is loading. First input delay, you don't need to get to a website and you basically want to click on something and it's still loading. Well, they're saying that you should be able to load things up nice and quickly and then you should be able to click on it immediately and it should be more than 100 milliseconds. The last one you only really see on quite dubious websites, cumulative layout shift. If you want to go to a website, you go to click on something because I make shifts then you end up clicking on an ad by accident. That cumulative layout shift, Google does not like it. This was supposed to come out in May this year. It was delayed until August this year. It then came out and you can find out about your website and how it's doing. So let's go through and show you how you can find out about it. So if I go to Google search console, which is a Google tool that allows you to kind of see your website from Google's perspective and understand, are there any challenges upon with your website? I can see the traffic that I'm getting from Google. I can see a whole range of different things but you can see here now there's a measure that says core web vitals. Now if I go to this website, show you how quickly it loads by there you go. That loaded very, very quickly as far as I was concerned. If I go through to another page again, load up very quickly. According to core web vitals on mobile, we have 467 poor URLs and on desktop we have 467 poor URLs. The whole website needs to be sped up. Why is that? This website is basically built on WordPress at the moment. Now you may not be aware, but with WordPress you add plugins. It's the most common use content management system and every plugin you load adds a bit of extra code to your website. They're very commonly an unknown thing. So we only use it on these three pages so it's only gonna slow down those three pages. The reality is in most cases, the plugin loads a bit of code on every single page of your website even if you're not using it. So you get code bloat. Your website gets bigger and bigger. Now in this particular case, it is perfectly possible to build very, very efficient WordPress websites. I don't wanna say that you can't for a second, but the way that ours has been built over a long period of time, adding more plugins, custom plugins and so on, it's kind of got what we call code debt, which means there's all sorts of tangles in the code. So actually to address this, rather than just trying to make it a little bit more efficient, we are rebuilding the entire business from scratch. Now, that sounds pretty serious and it is there's a long term reason for that. So this has happened and we were okay, concerned what it's gonna do for our search rankings. Well, actually, if I look at my coverage and let's go performance actually. If I look at my performance and look at how much search traffic am I getting? And I look at it over the previous months, it's actually gone up. So let's put this in perspective. Core Web Vitals is part of the algorithm. And it is an important part, but it's not as big a part as we thought. Now, from what I understand, having spoken to a few people at Google, that will ramp up over a period of time because they realized that most people weren't ready for this. So actually, speed up your website is still massively important. You need to look at Core Web Vitals, but actually it's a problem, but if you've ticked all the other SEO boxes, it's not the end of the world yet. Let's say yet, because it may be in the future. So where are we with the algorithm overall? Quick whiz through these and I'll tell you what's growing. On page optimization, still important, the right words on the page in the right place. That's just helping Google understand what your content's all about. I'll touch on that. Link building, other people linking to, still important, it's a vote of confidence. Why would someone link to you? Basically, because you've got to meet useful, entertaining education on your website. It's getting harder and harder to get links of a dubious quality. It's really about those organically growing because you've got great content. Social signals, a small part of the algorithm, but how many people are talking and sharing your stuff on social media? Next to, this is the next one is the biggest grant, user behavior. What's that? Well, if I go through to Google and I do a search, so let's do digital marketing, and let's just do that, go past the ads. Okay, so if I go into the results down here, if I click on this Neil Patel website, and then I go straight back to Google, you'll notice it says, just down here, people also search for. That's showing you that Google knows that I've gone to website and gone straight back to Google. That shows a negative experience. A positive experience, if I go through and search, I search this, so what is data scraping? I can see here that the number one result, if I click on that, that's our website. And when people get here, it's very clear what they're searching for that is here. But then we've got this video at the top of the page, and it's basically an explainer video. It's something that tells people what it's about. Why is it there? Well, some people prefer video content to written content, so some people will watch this. What that will do is it will increase the dwell time on this page. So that's a positive signal to Google. What that means is then, when we're creating content, we want to make it broken up with headings and subheadings. We're gonna add video on every page so that increases the dwell time and caters to those people like video, but we want to stick a video up and hope for the best. What we'll actually do is we will create multiple versions of the video and we'll test them out either as an AV test, two different versions of the page, see which one gets the best dwell time, or we'll test them in social media first. We'll push them onto our social platforms, we'll see which video gets the most engagement. Now, what's really interesting is the thumbnail of the video and the video itself has a huge impact. So we did a test with this. Kieran Rogers is my marketing director. He's worked in marketing for more than two decades. Very experienced. He's been the e-commerce manager at FactFace. He's worked at Elemis and other massive brands as well. Louise is my marketing manager. She's 21 years old and she came into the role. When Kieran did these videos, he's put them together quickly, getting them out there because he knew what he was doing. Louise was being far more meticulous and kept up what we were doing. So we thought, well, let's test. Let's test Kieran's video versus Louise's video. What Louise got right is she tested different thumbnails. Louise's video, by nature of a slightly different edit and different thumbnails, got 12,000% more engagement than Kieran's, which was slightly embarrassing for Kieran, but actually we did a little bit of a podcast all about it, so you can learn all about it, but we're testing and we're working out what video is better, what layout of the page is better. So A-B testing, you can use Google Optimize. So if I go back to my browser, I go to, let's go back to Google Analytics. What you'll be able to see is over in the top right hand corner of Google Analytics, I've got the little set of squares that tell me what other Google products I've got and down there you've got Google Optimize and Google Optimize allows you to set up A-B tests and lots of other types of tests as well to see which version of a web page is better. So that's gonna really give us insights into what's working better for our particular videos. So if you're interested in that whole thing, we've got a much more in-depth podcast guide in the slides as well that talks you through the testing process we went through, what works and doesn't work, but as part of the Google algorithm, core advice is there, it's probably not as important as we thought it was, but it will gain importance and it's important from a user point of view anyway, whereas that user behavior, staying on a page longer to well time is increasingly important. So it's definitely worth going and having a thinking about that. Conversational design, I touched on this last time and it's really moved on. Conversational design is making chatbots useful. 97% of us at the moment, when you see a chatbot pop and go say, can I help?  This is a screenshot from HubSpot, it's the CRM system that we use and fundamentally what this is doing is allowing me to kind of create scripts. I want to trigger something, trigger the chatbot, then I want to give someone some options, then I want to allow them to trigger that, but what we're doing is based on previous behavior, previous purchase. If you go on and look at three pieces of content about SEO, I could offer you my complete SEO downloadable guide. If you're an existing customer, I could offer you a tour of the new features since you've last been in. If you look like you're looking at pricing, I could send you through to a sales person if you wanted one. If not, I can give you something to download, I can allow you to book a meeting and those kind of things as well. Lots more we can do with this. The whole first party cookies, customizing things on your website, you can customize content that people see, you can customize their chatbots, you can trigger them emails, you can in fact create audiences that you can then upload into Facebook and LinkedIn other places and target ads at those people. So this whole integration of data, making sure that our websites, our custom relationship management systems, our email service providers are all fully integrated, gives us the ability to get the right content to the right people at the right time. This isn't artificial intelligence. This is just clever scripting. Now, AI and marketing, we're seeing a lot of tools kind of appear with this. Let me just show you this one.  It might be quite hard to find stock photography or might have to go and get a model to do that and it's all a bit of a problem. So instead you could use this website and this is a load of faces as you're seeing in just a moment. And what you're gonna see is all of these faces here are basically not real people. All of these people have been generated by an AI. And I was doing training course the other day and someone said, that's my cousin. And I had to kind of reassure them that it wasn't their cousin, but these are generated faces. And you can have a play around with this. And let me show you up here as well, the face generator. And bear with me a second because there's something wrong with the power supply for my Mac, which means that it's about to go flat on battery. There we go, I'm back. So I'm gonna generate a face. I can go through, right. Okay, this person at the moment, how about if I want them in a happy pose? Let's update their face. There you go. What about, are they surprised? It's not perfect at the moment. Hello, looking pretty surprised. The point being, this is moving pretty quickly. We can do videos of this very soon as well. So think about what that means from the point of view of when you can generate an animated face doing anything you want. How useful that will be.  Now, just while we're on this and to start bring this into reality where this is really useful, you're gonna start seeing a lot of this, which is I'm in Google ads and basically it's saying here, when you set your targeting options because of this whole third party cookies thing, it's saying just do automated targeting. And it says generally, automated targeting can improve campaign performance by up to 20%. This is Google using artificial intelligence to target my ads. So they're using a whole lot of data to try and find people. They look at what's on my website. They work out people's interest. They try and match the two things up. You need to test this. My advice at the moment is to do a couple of things. First of all, build a campaign and run it without automated targeting. Set your targeting criteria to the best of your ability, run that campaign on a limited budget. Then do the same thing, but set it to automated targeting again on the same limited budget. Then what you'll get is two sets of data that show you your budget. You'll see your average cost per click. You'll see your average click through rate and then you then be able to go into analytics and you'll be able to go through and look at what return on investment you got from that investment, that particular money that you spent on the budget. And you'll be able to see, did you get better reach? Did you get better engagement? Did it drive the outcomes that you actually wanted it to do? This AI is getting better all the time, but we need to go through and to make sure that we've tested this out because we can't just assume that these ad platforms are doing the best thing for us. We need to kind of test it out. So I said there was a skills crisis and we're about to publish with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the latest version of the Digital Marketing Skills benchmark. If you want to benchmark yourself instantly, if you just Google Digital Marketing Skills benchmark, you will find it. If you want to benchmark your team, you can go in and do that as well. But fundamentally, what we've seen is what is the most in-demand skill? So I wanted to share that because we're all kind of learning all the time with Digital Marketing. The most in-demand skill is analytics analysis. That's looking at analytics and working out what it's telling you. And I'll just finish with a bit of a story in relation to that. We were working with a High Street Bank and Retail Bank and they said to us that we want to learn more about content marketing. So we gave them a big training session in the workshop about content marketing and they said, brilliant. We've embraced content marketing and now people are staying on our website three times longer. That sounded really good. But we said, we'd better look at the data. Excuse me. So what we actually saw is before they redesigned their website with all this great content, what was happening is people going through to the website, they were making five seconds to the page to load and then they were going through and clicking login to personal banking. That was it, that was your average visitor. When they redesigned the website, they moved that login button. Then what happened? People came in, they waited five seconds to the page to load. They then spent 10 seconds saying, where's the button gone? And eventually they clicked on it down here. The visit had gone from five seconds to 15 seconds. Your analytics reported a 300% visit duration and you said, brilliant, people are staying three times longer. And in reality, you've just annoyed your customers for 10 seconds. So we have to be able to paint a picture with the data. And we have to go through and say, what is this actually telling us? We then need to change something and then we need to look at the data again. And that iteration is absolutely what's at the heart of digital marketing, changing it from being art into a science. And the skill to do that, to interrogate the data, is the place where the skill gap is and is the place where a lot of the opportunity is as well for all marketing roles, but also for specialists that are interested in those kinds of things as well. So lots of opportunity. Also, what you'll see is this isn't the latest data, there is still a big skills gap though and you'll see the report in the next couple of weeks when it comes out as well. So what should we do with all this change and all this noise and all these skills gaps as well? We just need to step back to the fundamentals of marketing. And that's basically to focus on our user and their journey. What are they? Do they actively want what I've got at the moment? Are they just browsing in social media? You know, if they're using TikToks, they really want my business to business service. When I send them emails, should I be trying to sell them stuff? Once I understand who my audience is, what they want, where they want it and when they want it, that's it. That's the fundamentals of marketing. And if you get that right, that's what works. Doesn't have to be anything particularly clever like our podcast or that email. The creation of those is nothing complicated at all. It just is the right content at the right time. We understand our persona is a marketer or a student who wants to stay up to date. Therefore, that in a podcast format is useful. Send them a couple of tools at the right time is useful. So if we think from that perspective, and I bring you back to what I said before, think about what you can do for your audience, not what you can do to your audience. So all of the websites that I have mentioned are in the Digital Marketing Toolkit. If you Google the Digital Marketing Toolkit, we updated this about 10 days ago. So if you Google Digital Marketing Toolkit, you will see the very latest dispersion of that. It is a PDF that has got about 50 of the best tools, free tools that are out there. It's not supposed to be a definitive list, it is a curated list, and it is there to help you out. So Google Digital Marketing Toolkit, and feel free to download that completely free, no email registration or anything like that required. That's all my slides. If you wanna get in contact, it's Daniel Rolls on Twitter, Target Internet on Instagram. If you're on LinkedIn and you'd like to connect up, it is just Daniel Rolls, and I will be really happy to connect this mention that you had a listen to this webinar. So I know where you'd come from. If you want the podcast, the podcast is ad free, TargetInternet.com forward to that podcast, and you will see all of the episodes. There's about 280 odd episodes, and there now is plenty to keep you going for a very, very long time. That is everything for me. I'm gonna pass back to Phil in just a moment in terms of any questions and things that you've got, as well, so thank you for listening to that, and you can continue to enter your questions into the question. So Phil, have we got any questions coming so far? We have, yes, Daniel. Thanks very much for that. That's a really good presentation, but before I get to the questions, I just want to remind people that there's still time to download Daniel's presentation slides on the handout section, and just a reminder that if you're enjoying the webinar and you want to post on social media, you can use the hashtag CIMevents, okay? So one of our attendees asked about the free tools that you've mentioned. I guess every tool that you've mentioned this evening, they'll find on your digital marketing toolkit, is that correct? Yeah, they will. Let me just show you that actually, I could explain how it's kind of broken down as well. So if I just Google digital marketing toolkit, and this is the moment of truth, because one day it won't be at number one in Google and I'll embarrass myself, right, there you go. So digital marketing toolkit, updated in September, it's broken down by section. So for example, the first is data insights and blogs. If you want to see what percentage of people are using TikTok, are listening to podcasts, there'll be data in there. If you want the keyword research tools, they'll be under search. If you want the social media tools, they're all in there. So it's broken down by category. We update it regularly, but you'll find everything there, and everything I've mentioned today is in there, with the exception of those AI faces. If you want that, if you just search generated faces, you'll find that website. And it's quite good fun to play around with, have a look at generated faces as well. Okay, great, thanks so much for that, Daniel. Okay, going right back to the start of your presentation, you talked about the importance of email. So the question here is, how do you manage the right to be forgotten or unsubscribed when sending email to a personal email address? So, very clearly opt-in process in the first place is really important. So you need to make sure that it's very clear what people are getting and that they are opting in. So all the GDPRs are all about that as well. That data then needs to be stored in a centralized system, and you need a process for people to get in contact with you to say, I want all of my data to be deleted. So in an ideal world, you have a preference center that someone can go into at the bottom of email. They can always have the unsubscribe button, but if you've got a preference center, they can go in and say what they do and don't want, and actually they can request to be deleted. If not, in your privacy policy, as part of GDPR, you need the contact for someone to say, I want you to get rid of my details as well. If they don't have that, you should use the contact at email address for that business, and they should therefore go through and delete all your details should they ask them to. So for example, in our CRM system, we've got a track of all the communications we've had with someone, what they've done on our website and so on. If someone wants to delete that, they can. The option we always give them is we can say, we can delete that and keep your email, but mark who has a do not contact. The logic of that is otherwise, if they come back to our website and fill in a form again and log in, it's gonna start clicking their data again. So we're gonna give them that flexibility, but you need to put those measures in place, and as part of your GDPR, and in the UK, it still counts as a regulation. It's now GDPR UK, and you need to go through and make sure you kind of have those processes in place, and that's all laid out in your privacy policies and so on on your website. Great. Okay, a question around e-commerce. So to build an e-commerce website for a growing brand, is WordPress a better platform or something like Shopify in the long run?  It's got amazing functionality. The problem is you are limited by what they offer, and although that is a lot, don't get me wrong, and there are plenty of really, really big businesses out there, a lot of the products that you see on Instagram that get big, like there's lots of things like, health products like Goalie that do kind of vitamin jellies and things like that, they ran on Shopify websites. However, WordPress gives you a lot more flexibility. Now bear in mind, you can start on WordPress.com that will give you some basic functionality. Then you can move to the expanded hosting and eventually if you want to, you can move to your own hosting. And you have absolute control over customization or those kind of things. The thing is make sure you get the hosting right. It's probably one of the most important things you need someone that's gonna deal with security for you, someone that's gonna update things that's got really responsive customer support. The one that I would recommend is listed in the toolkit. So if you go to the toolkit, under the stuff in there, we use a company called Kinster, go and have a look in the toolkit, that's the one we use, we kind of recommend them. But if you get that right, WordPress gives you a lot of flexibility going forwards. Just make sure you don't get plugin bloat, which is just adding thousands of plugins. The answer to everything is not a plugin.  Great, okay. I'm gonna come back to some technical questions and just a tip, but obviously we've got quite a number of students who are actually on the webinar this evening. So they've got some questions around how to, how to succeed in this particular sector. So if I can just probably read out one or two and then you'll get a feel for the sort of things I want to know. So what's the best advice for students who are looking to enter the sector is one. Are analytics and contact marketing skills in demand all over marketing or specifically digital marketing roles? And do you have any tips for someone coming out of university not knowing what part of marketing they want to go into? So three questions there. Yeah, 100%. I think they're all very closely connected. Right, I would say we need to stop separating marketing and digital marketing. I mean, realistically though, roles are advertised as digital marketing roles, marketing roles. Basically the digital marketing roles are more in demand and the higher paid. A marketing director role don't get me wrong, but a marketing director should know I think about marketing and digital marketing. So I honestly think that digital marketing is a good way to go. I guess I would since I spent a lot of time educating people and that was my career. Analytics, content marketing very much in demand as all brands are using digital marketing now. The big brands that are very big on TV and brand will still be doing all this digital stuff as well. My advice is something I kind of learned in the hard way which is that a really good way of starting your career in digital marketing is to go into a small or medium digital marketing agency. Why I say an agency is that you will work on lots of different projects and you will get your hands on lots of different things. The reason to say a small agency is that you won't just be stuck doing one thing. You'll have to be a real kind of problem solver and you'll have to work on lots of the things and you'll get some client facing skills and you maybe get some technical skills and you can work out what it is that you're kind of good at. I think the type of marketers that are in demand are what we refer to as the T-shaped people which has been talked about in skills a lot which is they have a broad set of skills but they have a deep level of knowledge in one area whether that is analytics or paid search or SEO or it doesn't really matter design or anything. So be a problem solver. Get a broad range of skills but deep dive into particular when you work out what it is that you want to deep dive into. I don't think there's anything I was saying I don't know what I don't want to deep dive into yet. I also think people say well if I get into the agency world I won't be able to go client side. Totally disagree with that. If you've been on the agency side moving client side is not too bad at all. Going the other way is harder because people go well you won't really get the cut and thrust of it and you know the pace of change and all those kind of things as well. Both had their advantages, both had their challenges I know plenty of people that have done both but I think starting a small agency gives you and a growing agency will give you lots of opportunity because you'll get to try out lots of things. You'll get to learn what you like and what you don't like and you will have to get your hands there to do all those different things as well. So it's a great opportunity and there are loads of roles kind of going in those kind of positions at the moment as well. But as a student to differentiate yourself you know if everyone's got a degree in marketing or whatever it may be you need to show some practical stuff. Here's a WordPress website that I build and optimize then I blogged on and I created a podcast and I drove traffic to it and I ran some test campaigns in paid social doesn't need to be spending any more than 20 pounds and I demonstrate you've done it hands-on. Show the analytics, show what you can kind of drive from that. The digital marketing podcast costs us nothing to produce. We started off with really low quality mics we did it in cafes. You're here in the background I used to live in Brighton for a very long time and you can see goals in the background and all sorts of things and maybe added some personality. Now we've got a studio but the point being is produce something create something and demonstrate it. Find a brand or something that you can work on for free. Get some kind of hands-on skills because if you do that then you can differentiate yourself and I've learned this, I've gone through and I've applied it in this way go off and do your Google Analytics qualification. So you can do a Google Analytics qualification think about doing those kind of things as well. You've got Google Garage that gets you to the basic stuff and so on to do those online certifications if you can do them as well. But I think start in an agency if you can and kind of build things up because that'll give you a broad set of skills. That's great. Thanks very much for that Danielson really sad advice there. So it's got loads of questions I'm not going to be able to get through them all but I'll do my best. So we're going to get a bit more technical now. How long does it take with new websites for the Google Search console to work and show the core web vitals as having a new web? As having a new website is still not showing anything and the website has been up for around two months now. Is there a minimum time? It should be 30 days but if you're not getting it, let me just go in for you. So if I go to search console if I go into core web vitals what you should get and I'll show you two ways of doing this. It should be when you go through that you can go through here and if the report is empty you should still be able to drill into it and then you should be able to and you may not but you should let's give this a second to open up this again because it's just gone back in a circle. Okay, it's opening up now. When I go into that what I should be able to do is there go for an ask the validation and I should go validate fixes if you're not showing up. So that's one that you may be able to do. If you can, the big problem is that there aren't enough links through to the website. So you want to gain more links through to the website. So down here when I can see links I can see the number of external links to the website. If that is starting to show up a number in there doesn't need to be hundreds. It just could be in the kind of dozens. The other thing that I want to then forego through and do is make sure that they are actually coming back to my website. And if I go to URL inspect and I put the URL in here it will then give me the option of resubmitting that as well. So it may be you need to kind of resubmit but there's a number of steps you could kind of do that as well. If you get really stuck you've got my social media contact details feel free to reach out and I can send you some pointers towards that as well. And still on the subject of analytics then what is the best place to go if you want to upskill on the new GA4 Google analytics? Right, there's an absolute kind of a lack of good tutorials on this at the moment. So the best way of doing it is to go through and get that Google analytics demo account and there's a load of data in there that you can start playing around with and you can start understanding. Google are starting to release if I just show you as well in here I'll go into Google analytics and I'm going to go for my universal analytics. You can see it says UA75 whatever it is I'll code there. If I go to this version this is the GA4 version as well. When you're in here as you're going through any particular reports if I go through to user acquisition I'll make along those lines as well. What you're seeing here is there's a little few things along the tab here where you can kind of get some insights you can customize the reports you can do segments all those sorts of different things as well have a play around with all those settings and see what they do one they're changing all the time as well. There are some tutorials in here but it's a little bit lacking in the GA4 side of things as well. So the best way is kind of playing around with it at the moment. The other place that I would look is Search Engine Journal are doing a pretty good job of this and Moz are doing some good tutorials at the moment. They're quite SEO focused but they're not bad places to go as well. So to take a look at those. Okay, I say we've got those questions I can't get them through more we've probably got a couple of minutes left Daniel. So this question is do you think all brands should be on new platforms like TikTok? And I guess a supplement to the question is are there any new social media platforms that we should be looking out for? My feeling on this is first of all, should we all be on TikTok? Absolutely not. Lots of brands are trying to go onto TikTok at the moment that really aren't very well suited it they don't get it and there is nothing more cringe worthy than seeing a brand trying to be down with the kids on TikTok. It just doesn't really work. So if it's right if that's where your audience is then if I was marketing at a university and I was targeting 16 to 18 year olds then maybe that is a place I'd go. If I'm doing a B2B service it's just not relevant it's just not where my audience is. If I asked my audience to use TikTok one in about 20 of them does and they're not going there for that kind of stuff. So no, you're better off doing one channel well than six channels badly. I think it's really, really important. In terms of the upcoming channels things that are kind of shifting what I would actually say is rather than focusing on that at the moment we should be looking at how the channels we're using are changing. So if you look at how Instagram is changing the focus on video and reels how those reels are now showing up in Facebook messenger advertising, WhatsApp advertising that kind of stuff. And actually maybe stepping back and going channels isn't really the issue it's our content. Let's just do something that's exceptional and rather than doing four bits of content do one but do it better. I think that has that moves the needle a little bit more. There is definitely an advantage to being like first lead on a platform. If you, you know, those YouTubers that got in early those podcasters that got in early they got the audience while it was building as a lot of the Tik Tokers have but that's not necessarily as a business what we want as an influencer it might be but again influence can be taken away from you by these platforms. They can stop monetization they can do different things. So I would just go actually focus on the content not the platform video is pretty universal. So we could see how that works with different platforms. That's great. Okay. I think we run out of time actually Daniel. So thanks very much. Again, some brilliant questions and some brilliant answers. And also sadly that's all the time we have for our webinar. So again, thanks Daniel for your presentation. We do hope you found it interesting and worthwhile. We'll be back with a special lunchtime marketing club webinar on the subject of boosting your employability on the 20th of October when we'll be discussing the skills and competencies needed to help you progress to the next stage in your career. Obviously Daniel covered digital skills in his presentation this evening. So that's on the 20th of October. And on the evening of the 17th of November we will hear about binge marketing. So this is all about how to apply the techniques and tactics that creators of films and series use to tell your brand story and build your audience. You can find further details listed on the events page on the CN website where you'll be able to register for these sessions. So on behalf of Sam, thank you once again Daniel for a really good presentation and thank you too for joining us. We hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Goodbye.


Hi, this is Dr. Don. I've got a couple of questions from students asking what's a good way to get the code that I need to load a data file into my project. Here we're in Posit Cloud and we have a worksheet open, an empty code chunk here, and there's a data file that I want to get and have it available to use. It's in my data folder in this workspace, so I just click on that to expand it. Then I'm going to scroll down and the one I want is called as DPS underscore 500. One way to get the code is just to click on that name, go to import data set, and you get this window that opens up. Up top it shows you the total path to that particular data set if you want to use that for some other reasons, and it gives you a preview here, kind of an Excel-like preview if you want, but down here is what I'm most interested in. This is the code preview, and this gives us the code that we need to put into our document so that we have a reproducible document, and that there are three lines of code here they have you. The first is the package we need, which is the read Excel package. This is an Excel file, and then it gives us, we're creating a new data object called DPS underscore 500, which is just the first part of the file name, and then read underscore Excel, and then the short path to that particular data file, and then we've got a line there that we can view it, which is essentially the same thing up here. You don't want to click on import, do not click on import. Click on this little pad up there, I call it the copy icon, and then that copies the data, and then I'm going to cancel this view, get it out of the way, go over here into my empty code chunk, control V to paste, so there we've got that code chunk, and I'm just going to go ahead and run it, and you can see we've got the data object created over here, DPS underscore 500, got 499 rows with 16 variables. You've got the view of it here that you can scroll around and see what's in it if you want, and also all of the variables there. So that's a quick way, and again what this does is put the code into your document, and then when you knit the document it will not throw an error looking for this particular data file. So I hope this helps.


Congrats MMG fans, you won a Mickey Mouse asterisk wild card playoffs after the refs rigged the entire season. This game just destroyed MMG's legacy and invalidated all of his past ring, not to mention my entire opponents team being injured and 60% of their O-line being out. I'm not even a fan of your opponents, but this ring will definitely not count in anybody's book unless they are a delusional MMG fan. Sorry to hit you with some reality. Back to your fantasy land where you think this was a real playoff run. This is what they say to me! Rage quit after rage quit after rage quit, we find ourselves one game away from the Super Bowl. This has never happened to have this many rage quits. I don't know why people are quitting so early. I've won games where I've been down 21 to 0 and I've lost games where I'm up 21 to 0. So why is everybody so skittish? Gentlemen, I want you to know that the frustration is shared. I wish every single Wheel of Mutt episode could be a super heat fourth quarter overtime banger. But damn boys, the script writers have a weak playoff run right now, but I do have a theory. The script writers kind of cakewalked me to the NFC championship, which is today's game. And I have this sinking sensation that today's game will without a doubt be the most difficult game that we have played. That's what I believe. I don't know what it is, but I think finally we are going to have a ball buster nail biter. Absolute beauty of an NFC championship. So my only option is to lock in and get some dubs here, boys. Headed into the NFC championship. The lineup's looking awesome. 84 overall.  I like my wide receivers. I like the rest of my own line and my tight ends are S plus tier. Defensively, my linebackers are looking beautiful, although I'm not the biggest fan of Junior Seau. Derwin James, Ed Reid, both had amazing games last game. Primetime, Eric Stokes, Pat Pete could probably get a superstar corner today if the option arises and my D line just got a little bolster from Cameron Hayward as my second detackle. Leonard Williams and Nick Bows had a great game last week as well. So I'm like, I'm actually nervous. I can feel that today's game is going to be a big game. It's the NFC championship, boys. Our first ever of Madden 24. Our first of only two wheel spins since this is the playoffs. Keep in mind though, the wheel is juiced. As you can tell here, team wheel 86, 87, the team wheel has been sliding by a lot recently. So any player in the game, 86 to 87 overall, they're going to be a cowgirl, baby. They're going to be a cowgirl. This team has only one Dallas Cowboy. If you count beyond Sanders as a cowboy, I'm glad to get a little bit of diversity. Not that kind of diversity. Well, actually, probably that kind of diversity. Be honest. Oh, oh, why did this pass me? Of course. I currently have 84 prime time in there. What better upgrade than to make prime time better? Prime time was already amazing. I also will have an all time kick returner, partner turner, but taking prime time. So this is this is the obvious call here. Oh my God. Why did this just cross my mind? Prime time could be our prestige. Oh, do we prestige a corner or do we prestige Gronk at tight end? That is a hard choice. What isn't a hard choice though is buying prime time here. I am obviously taking this 86, 87 copy. There's only two Micah Parsons in him. Uh, I don't need Micah Parsons. I would love a better corner. Well, that's a massive upgrade. So 84 prime time up to 87 prime time. Obviously he's better in every single category. He also is our new kick returner. That's awesome. I love having a defensive player as kick return to because they don't get winded for the ensuing offensive possession. Prime times, aka X Factor is shut down. Definitely one of the best in the game.  I have to equip this, but I've got to free up some ability points on the rest of this defense. By the way, massive shout out to EA.   Last year was so riddled with discounted abilities that there were literally like 20 players per game with abilities. It was so annoying. Technically, it could still come back. So I don't want to like jump the gun here. But so far this year, I feel like abilities have actually been balanced and that makes me so happy. Like I've got four guys on my defense with abilities, an appropriate amount. And on offense, I think I have three. Also gentlemen, I cooked up a little prize picks for Monday night football. I got Mike Evans, more than 54 and a half receiving yards. Jalen Hertz, more than 236 and a half passing yards. Prize picks is my daily fantasy sports sponsor and code MMG will get you an $100 deposit match. There's a link in the top of the description. Check it out. First wheel spin lands us prime time. Amazing way to kick off the episode. Low key, I would take another corner here if it's possible. Oh, so I get to spend this much on one. Oh, that's gonna be 200k in it. Oh my God, let's go.  Yeah, you like that, huh? Huh?  You like that, don't you? Yeah. 200k to spend on one single player. That's a jackpot. That's a jackpot of every day one. I mean, it's actually not 88 overall players at minimum are 290,000. So it's actually, it's 86, 87 again, which is nice. I actually need a right guard. Like low key Chris Lindstrom is actually a really good buy here. Such a weird position to be getting with 200k on the line, but the rest of my positions are so good. The only other guy I would consider is Seau, but no, I got to be smart, man. Mike on Wenu is just too low of an overall to take into an NFC championship game. We got to bolster that right there. And I like Chris Lindstrom a lot. So a plus six overall upgrade at right guard. Chris Lindstrom comes in on the offensive line. We've got Bakhtiari Nelson, Josh Meyers, Lindstrom, and Tevin Jenkins.  Gronkin Gasicki, Metji Jamar, Jerry Rice, and then defensively Ed Reid. We got a lot of legends on defense action, which I usually don't have. We got Ed Reid, primetime LT, Junior Seau. This is a squad, boys. There are no excuses for losing ball games, especially with the cakewalk we've had to get here. And of course, the last thing is the challenge wheel. I love the challenge wheel. But man, I am laser focused on winning this. Oh, we have yet to get this one 16 plus in a quarter. This one kind of forces you to take a risk and go for two. You basically just need two touchdowns and one quarter, but you'd have to get the two point conversion on both. The challenge wheel is locked in. Our team is locked in and we're loading into the NFC championship. I can feel this being a good game. I'm so nervous actually jug fit. We're playing in Steelers. Oh, it's a night game in Steelers stadium. He's got Bo Jackson, Bruce Smith, Eric. Yep. Yep. This could be a good game. No kick returns. Oh no, it's Devin Hester. Come on. Fly down. Fly down. Let's go. I'm going to start in big nickel. It's so weird. I'll blitz Lawrence Taylor. I'm going to stay on Trenton Simpson here. Does he run to kick this off? No, he's going to pass to kick it off. Just a little bit behind that. I can definitely pick that off if he keeps throwing it. Boys, if our best game of the season is the NFC championship, I don't think anybody's complaining. I'm going to go on Lawrence Taylor. I think it'll be most difficult for him to cover here.  Let's go. I can't believe Bryce didn't got rid of that. We're going man again. Cover two man. I've got Bo Jackson. I'm hoping to block. No, go ahead, Bo. I don't mind. Good defense. Sterwin James. Sterwin James. Clemson man. It's fourth to nine in the NFC championship and he's going to go for it from the 21. You're lying. I'm blitzing hard. I'm blitzing hot. Come on, boys. It's the tackle and guess what we did last game, boys?  Turn over. It's about Gronk for Gisicki, but Gronk where Franco Harris is. Vanguard is activated for the first three plays of the game.  All we got to do is follow our blocks. Good. Oh, weird. Oh, go Gronk. Gronk cleanses it. Gronk cleans the move and Fred Taylor's it again. He knew he was back better than like crazy. He knew. This is why we tune in, boys. This is why we watch Wheel of Mud because nobody, nobody is running Vanguard Gronk at fullback. That's probably not true. I'm sure a lot of people are.  I'm not going to like jinx myself into a loss here. Let's just play. He's rattled now. Opening drive was weak.  Leonard Williams. Oh, he's so rattled. He's in trouble. He's an eye formation himself. Does he run it? He's got a really good run team. Oh my God. And I'm like this. Dodge the blocker. He's going to pass. Guess pass. No way you run this again. You're not built like that. Can I get there? Can I?  It's a bad pitch back. It's a bad pitch back. But I own you. I'm smelling all your plays.  Who knows huddles after a failed run? You're obviously passing. Why are you going to let me do this to you, man? A slightly faster running back gone. Wait a minute. 16 plus in a quarter. Oh, I'm sorry, you guys. I wasn't even thinking.  Oh my, are you? Dude. Stop me. Stop me. Or I will run a high form stretch on you. This isn't even a good play. Right behind Gronk. Bro. Fred Taylor gets tall. Takes it to the two. We're not in yet though. I'm going to read option Kenny Pickett. Actually, no, inside zone. Jesus. To get out of that defense. Everybody runs this. It's the most meta defense, but it's like nickel. It's all, it's all DB's and safety's.   It's the divisional. Like you had to win five games to get there. You had, you had home field advantage. The logo was on your field. It was a night game.  Oh my God, you're in your playoffs. There's no other way around it. You had to have won five games to get there. Why are you quitting in the first quarter? And you can see it right there, boys. Super Bowl. When the Super Bowl become a seasons champion, I literally, the next game, I swear to God, if I play the greatest player of all time next game and I get flooded, it will be the saddest Super Bowl run ever. You know what, boys?   I don't care. I'm going into, I'm going into a mutt champions game where we will definitely find better competition. And that game, this is my NFC championship. Okay. So if I lose this game, a lot of the playoffs, if I win this game, we're playing that Super Bowl. Sick of these poverty players. On top of that, if I win the game, I'm taking a jackpot player. Hey, two NFC championship wins. The Packers couldn't even dream of one. All right. Let's go. He's got 89 Ramsey. Oh my God. Nice ball by him.  This is a run. Leonard Williams would blow it up. Leonard Williams, that was like a combo tackle. He slowed him down into Trenton Simpson. That defensive, that tandem duo on defense has been so nasty. Fourth and one. This could be a stretch. What do we, what do we expect here? A fourth and one. Oh, nice run play. That was really nice. Nice throw. Honestly, it'd be kind of sick if I could do wheel of mud like in these games, but the problem is it doesn't actually track you to the Super Bowl. Like there's no, there's no record. You know what I mean? So let's say I beat this guy here. All I get is a win, but it doesn't, it doesn't take me to the playoffs. I feel like a big part of wheel of mud is actually like making the playoffs and having the playoff logos on the field. You know, I feel like that's a pretty cool part of it. I'm manned up on the halfback. Let's see if he blocks him. Then I can just kind of free float.  Just got to get to the quarterback real fast here. Oh, I shade it outside too. I can't believe he cooked me like that. Way to stop that. Damn, I'm surprised that that was open. Now he's running. He's running again. We got to go fill this. Let's get under when we fill this run. Oh, he's got nothing open though. Oh, we stopped that. We stopped that third and go. Dude, he's had a lot of like third and fourth downs, but he keeps converting them. Let's see if we can finally stop him here. Wow.  We don't pick it off, but he doesn't catch it either. It was not a bad ball. He's going to go gun empty quads. I'm just going to drop everybody into coverage here. Great deep. Oh my God, we had so many bodies there. How was that open? Good touchdown. That's not me. I got to be able to stop that. I don't get how we have formation subs in franchise, but not in mud. It feels like it'd be a really easy addition, but we got Gronkian. We got Vanguard.  There is no limit to how many Vanguard blocks he'll do. So like right there, he cited two. I'm going to run this right at the left side. I really, like he's got the numbers there. I still don't think he stops this. Oh, great move Fred Taylor. I think he probably knows I'm doing this, but he did. He very much knew. His user got flattened anyway, though. Third and nine. I have no idea what this defense is. He has so many people in so close. Gronk's actually open there. Nice ball, Stain Bones. Oh, and he fights.  I love this little stack here. You got Gronk and Gisicki. Just two excellent options. Gronk's there if he gets in front of it. Oh, hey, we made the Superbowl though, so I do need to think about my prestige. I think it's going to be Gronk. Just going to dive this left side. Oh, great. Oh my God. I'm built like that. I'm actually playing so good. He's Gronk there. Oh, that's not there. That's such a like, I do not need to be throwing that. God, Fred Taylor, you're set. Let the computer make them. That was a smart decision. He's got two. He's got all stone walls out there. It's an interesting set. I really feel like I could run this. I'm going to go for it. Oh, beautiful blocking. Look at that push out front, man. I'm so proud of my Olaan. It's such a bummer that in my actual season, the games are so shit, but in this, this is very, I mean, this is competitive football. All right, boys, please, please give me your opinion in the comments, because this is actually so important to me. Would you prefer I played every game of the season in Mutt champions like this to have a higher level of competition, but we can't legitimately track our record? So we would just be like, we're tallying it ourselves, you know? I think, dude, every time we have those BS rage squids or super weak games, it would solve that problem. The only sad thing is we never get a Super Bowl presentation. We never get a wild card logo on the field, divisional logo on the field. I feel like that's a decent trade-off. It really is. I'm going to go man up juju with Ed Reid because he's going to do that corner route. I'm going to jump it.  Oh, you like that, boys? I'm going to go with a man blitz here. I'm going to hover the middle with Trenton Simpson. I doubt he throws running back. He's too scared. Oh, where were you going to throw? I think you get picked off. You throw that. I'm just going to play a lot of zones here.  Thurman James, house it, house it, house it, house it. Oh no, you can't. Damn, they're fast. Damn, they're fast.  A few things here. I get ball at half. There's a minute 55. I would really like to use this entire clock. He knew I was going this side. Oh no. Second to nine. I'm looking at Gronk here. I'm not going to predeterminate. It's there. Dude, he's a monster.  The odds he stops this are like zero. I have no idea how he would stop this.  Honestly, we just play good defense. Coach is saying go for it, but I don't agree. I get ball half anyway. Taking my points. Perfect kick too. All right, boys, let's just consider this our NFC championship. Yeah.  I'm like right on that, but no lurker. You can't jump up and get that. Big man blitz here. Don't mind. This is awesome right now. I'm on cloud nine, baby. It's the suit and the 100 milligrams Adderall I take every day. Oh my God. If one wasn't good enough, we got the second. I won that game. I said I get a jackpot if I win it. I'm taking it. We also technically have another rage quit wheel, but I'm not taking the extra rage quit wheel because I technically wasn't supposed to be playing the game anyway. I don't know. There's just so much going on here. At the end of the day, I hope you guys are enjoying. I hope you're loving the wheel of mine.  So I'm going to do that. Even if every put the eight year old on this game quits. I'm not going to lie to you guys for my jackpot. Like I actually kind of want Bo Jackson because he's so good and Fred Taylor like statistically is bad, but it would just be a bad omen. Fred Taylor has been so good that like, how could I replace even if like on paper, he's bad. There's no way. So I take it. I'm taking a free safety. So there's two crazy good free safeties. There's Sean Taylor. There's Jesse Bates who's a limited. You know who's played amazing. Ed Reid has been spectacular. So I'm going to do the same thing I do in prime time. I'm just going to upgrade Ed Reid to his 87 overall. This is kind of like, uh, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'm not willing to make like a gigantic personnel change going into the Super Bowl, but I'm taking 87 overall at read. Oh, by the way, also would be an insanely good prestige. Wow. Oh, that's the other thing we got to talk about prestige players.  I just like, I didn't vision this going so well. 84. Ed Reid's coming out. 87. Ed Reid's coming in. As you can see, incredibly better stats in every category. Here's our defense. So many amazing legends prime time with that pick six to seal that game up. 87. Ed Reid, 88. Lawrence Taylor who had some huge sacks played great. Durban James was incredible in both of those games. I honestly didn't see much of Stokes or Pat Pete in the Super Bowl. I could definitely consider upgrading them. I also could upgrade Cam Hayward. Then offensively, this grunk with Vanguard has been exactly as busted as I imagined, but we need to consider our prestige player. So whoever we prestige should be locked into the lineup for the next nine months of wheel of month. The odds grunk gets another card. I feel like are low, but the odds that prime time gets another card are really hot.  Like they literally can't stop. The only other, my two genuine prestige options are prime time and grunk.  I think I go grunk because grunk has Vanguard and Vanguard will always make him a blocking threat even when everybody's got 99 overall teams. The next episode is the Super Bowl.  Super Bowl is next. Get him hot. Get him lit. Let's go. That's not getting anybody lit. Let's go! Three more people rage quit. All, yeah, three in the Super Bowl. All three guys I play. Poop, poop, balls, wiener, wiener, wiener, wiener, balls, wiener.