I gotta go do a video about bodybuilding. Oh yeah buddy, I've got my pre-workout. Got my pre-workout, I'm gonna do some cardio after this video, so I figured I'll drink a little bit of it. Now it'll probably help me with this video since I am a little lacking in energy today. So yeah, here we are, let me have a sip first. Okay, it was more than a sip. Cherry lime flavor, ugh, tastes like life. Today I want to talk, but instead of just doing another bodybuilding competition update, I want to get into some specifics. Oh wait, I just realized. I didn't turn off the fridge again, so I'm gonna do that now. See I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm gonna get this right, and the AC, so. Wait, ugh. See, the only thing I'm afraid of with turning off the fridge is that knowing me and being ADD and just my mind going everywhere, million places at once is that I am gonna forget and then all of my food is gonna perish. Yeah, I'm not even concerned about the food that I had to buy, I'm concerned about the food that I have meal prep I spent so much time meal prepping. If I came home and I had four or five days worth of food that I had meal prep that was just spoiled, that would be a big downer for me. On to the content of this video. Today I want to talk about some things that I think those of you who follow me at least for fitness, for wellness, and maybe for some of you who are interested in possibly building muscle and bodybuilding and maybe competing one day, I think this is gonna be really interesting, cool, informative stuff. So let's see, I wanted to talk about what it feels like to really get down into the low body fat percentages. Like I'm talking single digits, I'm talking like eight, seven, six percent and below. What that feels like, what does that do to you? What does that do to your body, to your psyche, to your energy, all of that stuff. So we'll cover some of that at least from my perspective.  So when you're losing weight, you're not just losing fat, your body's starting to catabolize muscle and it's starting to use up stored muscle glycogen which is how your body stores sugar. So it's fat, glycogen and muscle tissue that's breaking down for as needed for different nutrients.  And then at the end, I will show you what we'll do, I'll show you my torso and compare that to when I announced that I wanna compete in May and what my body looked like then. So the date of the competition is October 12th. It's in Muscle Beach, which is in Venice, California. Muscle Beach is like the Mecca of bodybuilding. There's a Gold's Gym there, it's known as the Mecca. That's where like when bodybuilding was like a huge thing in the 70s and 80s, it was all about Muscle Beach. So it's really cool that the competition's gonna be there. It is the Federation is INBA and PNBA for the pros. This is my first competition that I'll be competing as a pro, so I'm really excited about that. And this is also the first tested competition that they're having in Muscle Beach. And I know that INBA, PNBA is really trying to create some credibility as a tested, credible bodybuilding federation. And they're using Olympic testing standards, it's WADA. It's the World Anti-Dubbing Agency Standards for Drug Testing because eventually their goal is to be accepted into the Olympics as an Olympic sport. That's their goal. So we wanna make bodybuilding credible and the only way to do that is to create a level playing field just like any other sport in which there's no performance enhancing drugs that are allowed and there's enforced testing and stuff like that. So as of today, I am just over seven weeks out and it's exactly 51 days out until showtime. Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is I go to the scale and I weigh myself and I track that every day. So today my weight was, what was it? So today my weight was 167.6 pounds, 167.6. When I started dieting, I was at 178. I was hovering about at that weight. So I've lost basically 11 pounds of weight, which is great. But the thing I wanna communicate to you guys and for anybody who's trying to lose weight is that it hasn't been a linear line of lost weight. My weight fluctuates daily. Here, I'll show you. I put it in my notepad every day, what my weight is. And you'll see that on certain days I've had cheat days. So I'll have like a refeed meal of like usually I choose to have in and out at night for dinner and you'll see the next day after the cheat, my weight goes right back up. Recently I think you could see one time, let's see. Okay, so you'll see on August 13th, my weight was at 170. The next morning I clocked in at 0.8 pounds higher than I was the night before. And this is just a small example, but and I've had like way more drastic variations like that when I didn't have a cheat meal and it just like went up the next day and I'm like, what the heck? But you have to understand there's a lot of variables that contribute to your daily weight fluctuations. There's definitely been times where it has gone up way more than that. Why is the weight going up? When I've been doing the same thing every day, dieting and not having enough calories every day, it's going down, it should be going down every single day. But the truth is there's a lot of variables that contribute to weight fluctuation. Some of those are say one day I put extra sodium in my food. Well, now my body's gonna hold on to more water because of the salt in my body. And just the added water weight is enough to bring my body weight up a pound or two. Sometimes I'll have a really intense workout. I told my coach this recently because he's like, hmm, it's weird that after your cheat meal, your weight didn't go down as quickly as it should have. And I go, well, I just had a really intense leg day and legs is one of the biggest muscle groups in the body. So when I do a really intense leg workout, you know, there's inflammation. That's what the soreness is, is your muscles inflamed. So it's enlarged, locked in all this extra water to help with the healing process. So I'm carrying more weight just because of that. Although I track it every day, I also keep in mind, you know, that there's gonna be fluctuations. For those of you who want to weigh yourself every day, that's okay, but just keep in mind that it's gonna go up and down and don't let that dissuade you. You have to think about over the long term, what's the pattern over an extended period of time, not just from one day to the next. Cool? All right. Looking at the past two weeks of weight loss, you'll notice that I've lost about three pounds of weight. And you might think, gee, well, if you're dieting that hard and you're going through all that with your clean eating and cardio and all that work, and you're only losing three pounds in two weeks, like that doesn't seem like that much. And I know other programs where you can lose more weight quicker and if you do this diet or that diet or whatever. The point is when you're getting a competition ready, the idea is not to lose the most weight in the shortest period of time because when you lose weight, you're not just losing fat. Typically when you're losing weight, you're losing a combination of fat. Your body is catabolizing or eating its own muscle tissue, breaking that down and turning that into nutrients that it needs. And also glycogen, which is stored sugar. That's the form that our body stores sugar. The goal of a diet for a competition is to lose as much of that weight being fat. You want to train your body to go, okay, I'm going to take the fat. I don't really need to take apart the muscle. And the muscle glycogen, it's there when it's needed. It's really fast, easy to burn energy source. So, but we want to hang onto that hard-earned muscle. We work so hard to body build and to create muscle. The last thing we want to do when we're losing weight for a competition is to suddenly break all that down. So how do we do that?  This is why there's such a big emphasis on protein intake for body builders who are getting ready to compete. We want to hold onto the muscle so if we keep feeding our body lots of protein, the body doesn't have to break down muscle for protein. Another tactic is with cardio. So a lot of people when they want to get shredded really fast and show off those muscles, they make the mistake of just going ham on the treadmill or running or whatever cardio it is.  And we don't want that. We want an emphasis on fat. So that means we want to keep our heart rate in the fat burning zone. You'll notice on a lot of treadmills, it'll show a table for where you want your heart, what range you want your heart rate to be in in order to stay in a fat burning zone. Which is essentially the zone where your body is gonna disproportionately consume more fat for energy. That's what we want. So what that looks like is basically a light, it's a light cardio workout. When I'm doing cardio, it's essentially a fast walk on a slight incline. It doesn't look like much, it seems really easy, but the reality is that's exactly where we want to be, where we want a heart rate to be so that we're burning primarily fat as a fuel source. So here we are, 52 days out. I get tired, I get run down by the end of the day. I am feeling a little sluggish, but overall, especially compared to past reps, I'm feeling, I'm okay, I'm doing all right. I'm constantly sore as always because I train really hard all the time. So I'm trying to maybe go to the gym a little bit less, but overall, no complaints. However, what I do want to talk about is once your body starts getting into the single digit body fat percentages, this is where things start to get a little bit tricky. Now, for me especially, I'm talking about like 8% and lower. Every half percent to percent, once you get to 8% lower that you go is just exponentially more difficult. Here's why. Essentially, you're depleting your body of all its energy sources.  You have a battery on board that you can pull energy from whenever you need to. Now, imagine that battery being gone or basically that battery being at 10%. You have such little like reserve energy on board. So all the energy that you get is gonna be from the meals you consume. Workouts start to get a lot harder and more difficult and the crash starts to happen a lot quicker. You know, I'll go strong and then all of a sudden, boom, I hit a wall. That's it, there's no more energy. My body's not able to draw from anywhere really, not very efficiently. And so my energy just tanks until my next meal. Also, now that the body is really scrambling to find energy, it's trying to prioritize what it puts its energy into. So if you're working out a lot and training really hard and you're getting muscle inflammation and all that, your body's like building muscle at this point is not a priority. We are talking about survival. We need enough energy to sustain our body to get through the day. And if you're putting demands on your body to not just survive, but grow muscle, your body's like, mm-mm, I ain't doing all that. That's not, we don't have enough energy for that. So get out of here, stop doing that. So what that feels like is recovery is just starts to get longer and longer. It's more miserable, it's more painful. This is when you can start to notice the more occurrence of things like tendonitis and other injuries. This is when you start to become a more injury prone. There's just not enough resources in the body to keep you well lubricated and moving and repairing and doing all the normal functions that it can do when you're getting plenty of calories on a day-to-day basis. This is when I start to wake up every day and I never feel quite fully rested. I'm always just a little bit tired, not quite getting enough rest. And the big challenge for me personally is that I currently still, I work five nights a week bartending at a restaurant and we don't have a bar back. So not only am I in the well, which is where the bartender makes his drinks, making drinks for the entire restaurant for all the servers and all their orders, but I also have a bar top of guests that are sitting there. They want to order drinks as well and making all the drinks.  If I need more garnishes, I gotta run over the fridge, grab them, put them out. If I need to cut more, I gotta cut it. All of this simultaneously, while taking care of the guests with a smile on my face, I gotta have a pleasant demeanor. And the thing is, as the day goes on towards the end of the day, my energy really starts to tank. And this is when my body wants to shut down, it wants to rest. But this is when I have to turn up the most because I'd really have to turn it on and be present for my job, right? So this is very, very difficult. I'm very tricky for me. And this is definitely the hardest part of my competition prep, because I'm always starting to get tired and I have to counter that with caffeine. Sometimes I'll work seven, eight hour shifts. That's been really difficult for me in the past. And I know from here on out till competition day, it's gonna be a struggle and it's only gonna get more difficult. Not only that, but I'm working in a restaurant. I'm constantly surrounded by food. I'm getting food on my fingers and my hands because I'm taking people's plates away and then bussing stuff and I'm smelling the aromas of all these amazing fishes and noodles and beef and what have you constantly wafting through the air and I'm surrounded by alcohol. I'm literally holding alcohol in my hand. I have glasses of delicious liquid, refreshing cocktails the entire time. It's so hard. It's like I'm surrounded in temptation. Yeah, that's my life five nights a week until I hit the stage. Whew, it's not easy. And as I said, when you're in the low body fat percentage, once the energy from my last meal is consumed, boom, I hit a wall, it's done. My energy goes, and everybody around me sees it. It's like I just power down and now I'm like dead tired rave. I'm moving really, really slowly. My thoughts are just like are also moving very slowly. My motor skills suffer. My hand-eye coordination at that point, I start to get clumsy. I start to knock things over. I'm like a bull in a china shop. I'm also, I've become irritable. I start to get a headache and I'm just not very personable and that's so hard, especially on a Friday, Saturday night when we're open till 11 p.m. We're open until 11 p.m. in the restaurant. And a lot of guests sometimes will come in at 10 30, 10 45 and they're like, hey, yeah, we wanna come get a drink.  But I gotta get through it.   And then last but not least, how does this all relate to HIV? Honestly, it doesn't. I don't do anything differently. I don't take anything into consideration because of the fact that I have HIV. I know a lot of you guys are worried about my, about dieting when you're on HIV or working out or supplements. For me, there's no consideration there. And I've had doctors appointments. I've had lab results that I've had just before competition and pretty much just after a competition and they've all been really, really good. In some cases, even better than normal when it's near competition because I'm eating so cleanly. And so it's actually been really good for me. I have kidney, liver results have all been really positive. So there's no concern there for me as of yet. I've been doing this for about three years now. Anyway, that's it for you guys. I hope you guys found some value in this. Let me know if this helps you or what you get out of it and I will keep you guys updated. Whoa, hold up. I just came from doing cardio. Like I said, I was gonna do, but I realized, do you mind, please, just one moment? I'll be right there. I'll be right there. One moment. Thank you. So I just came back from cardio and I realized, can you wait, please? I realized that I never did my comparisons. So let me do that now. This is the front. I'm gonna try to splice this side by side with the other video. Okay, we got a side, other side. There you have it. That is what my body looks like right now. And while I was on the treadmill, I was posed with an interesting question. So someone saw my story today with my picture of my torso and he asked me, Nick, thank you for asking this question, Nick Rydel. So there was a point where I had some definition but not that much and then all of a sudden it seemed like overnight in the course of a week, suddenly I have all this muscle definition and he's like, how, what did you do? How did that happen? What happens when you're at a certain body fat percent range? You might be losing weight but your body's pretty much gonna look the same. When you look in the mirror, your body's pretty much gonna look the same. But once you start getting low enough, for me it's like sub 10%. Once I get low enough, then all of a sudden it's like the muscles start to appear because there's enough fat that's gone now that you can really start to see details. And then once that happens, anything I lose from there on out is gonna be very pronounced.  It's just the result of getting finally down to that body fat percentage where everything starts to peek through. But yeah, that's the answer. I didn't do anything differently, it's just the same, it's just getting to that body fat percent level. And people who ask me like, how do you get abs? What do I need to work out? What do I need to do? The answer is you just gotta lose the weight and once you get to a low enough body fat percentage and your abs just will, they'll show up. All right, for realsies this time, I'm out. See you guys, stay tuned. Great content, as always, like this if you like this, subscribe if you haven't, hit the bell if you wanna stay notified every time there's a new video and I'll see you guys soon. This is.


We did some good things. We did some obviously things that are going to get you beat. And it is somewhat frustrating, but can't go on the road, especially against a good team. And do those types of things and have penalties and start drives on the ten yard line and penalties on special teams, turnovers. So, you don't have to look too hard on why we lost. Special teams really. I guess there was a hold, I guess we held and then, I guess the gunner was shaving towards the line of scrimmage. I think they explained the penalties out on the field. I guess that's where we're at, we gotta buy, we gotta get healthy mentally and physically and get back to playing football, how we know how to play it. Taking care of the football, playing complimentary, knowing the details. You know, a lot of things to improve. Fumble's uncharacteristic of the team generally. Yeah, we got all three backs fumble today, so yeah, we gotta take care of the football. Yeah, and I mean, we've lost two games in a row. We've lost two games in a row, we lost at home, came on the road and played very competitively for the first half, and they're disappointed. And obviously the way that the game went in the second half, a lot of these guys have been grinding through, pushing through, so a lot to do with mental health of just dealing with injuries and dealing with things. This is a good time for us all to reset and focus on this football team and getting healthy in all aspects. Give our guys credit, but it's games about points, not stats. They were able to throw it and complete passes. We didn't rush well enough and cover well enough. Well, we just never, I don't think we did enough to disrupt the middle of the pocket. Give them credit, they blocked us and they hit a couple down the field. Be curious, there's some screen yardage in there and they're doing a nice job with screens and that was something that we knew coming in. So good plan. We didn't play well enough or coach well enough.


Good evening, everyone. I'm David Smith. I'm the Chair of the Future Forum Board of Directors, and I'll welcome all of you guys here to the LBJ Library and to another great Future Forum event. Few matters of housekeeping before we get rolling with Mark. I want to thank our sponsors for the Future Forum, Texas Monthly, Hayes and Boone, James and Heather Parsons, James Cahin Jr., Joe Cook's catering, the Ratlaflaw firm, Wilson Sasone, Goodrich, and Rossati for all they do and all they contribute to the organization. I'd also like to introduce, we have two new board members on the Future Forum board. One of them's here, Vikrant Reddy. Vikrant joins us. We're excited to have Vikrant. He's a Senior Policy Analysis in the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. One of the things that we've started to do thanks to Carsey, where's Carsey? Carsey, Mr. is we've started a series of member happy hours that meet approximately bimonthly. Our next one is going to be at the Hotel Ella on Wednesday, May 21st, starting at 5.30. Appetizers will be provided in the bar. We'll offer a discounted drinks until 7. This is a great way to go in a more informal setting and get to know a lot of the great people in the Future Forum. And also, it's a great place for us to get to know the membership as well as get ideas for Future Forum events. Lastly, join us immediately after Mark's talk for reception, more merriment, and a little bit of food. So we hope you'll stick around for that. And also, for those of you who are Future Forum members, thank you for your continued involvement and support. For those of you who are not, I would encourage all of y'all to really consider joining, say, a terrific organization and it does a lot. And I really think that it is, if not the heart and soul of the LBJ Library, certainly the next generation of people who are going to keep this place being special for future generations. I'm going to introduce a guy who really needs very little introduction to this crowd, but I'm going to do it anyways. Mark Strauma, who all of you know as former legislator from North Austin, now heads up the Austin Office of Google Fiber. From 2004 to 2013, Mark represented North Austin area and Texas House of Representatives. And he received honorable mention on Texas Monthly 10 best legislators list in three of his five sessions in the House. I personally really miss Mark being over the legislature and being a part of that body. He was always a joy to work with over there and really always was on the leading edge of working with both sides of the aisle on particularly educational issues, but also on tech issues. And I think he really did a great job representing this community and the things that this community holds dear. Prior to running for public office, Mark founded the first Internet company to enable American to fill out voter registration forms on the Internet. He was very, very engaged in rock the vote. And we will actually be doing something on voting rights next year. We're already planning on it that we hope you'll come back for, Mark. Having said that, I'd like for everyone to welcome Mark back here to the LBJ Library. And I can't wait to hear you talk about what we have to look forward to with Google Fiber. So, Mark, all yours. I don't mind. Now I'm not going to carry it around like a rock star. Good to see you guys. Thank you for coming out with the understanding that I hope you had an advance that you would be walking back to your car in a torrential downpour. So, I appreciate that this represents some significant commitment.  I think I've been on a few different panels here and I never got to come as the real me. I am glad to be here in particular because I think the world of Katherine Robb and of this organization and of this library and the resource that it represents for Austin. It's just something I'm proud of this institution. So, as you just heard, when I was in my early 30s, I started a company that created the first application that enabled any website to offer its users or its visitors the ability to fill out a voter registration form on the Internet. And in the 2000 election, 700,000 Americans used that technology to register to vote. Which is to say, if you don't mind my saying so, that at the age of 33, I had registered almost as many voters as Jesse Jackson. But I hadn't worked nearly as hard as he did to do it. Think about what it took to register 700,000 voters the traditional way. Think of how many volunteers you had to organize. Think of how much paper and pencils and logistics. Think of the amount of shoe leather that was worn out registering 700,000 voters the old fashioned way. I hired some college students from this university. I paid them with pizza and chocolate bars. They wrote some code, stuck it on a server. The Internet did the rest of the work. That is the transformational power of technology. And it has revolutionized not only the democratic process, the political process, the way we recreate, the way we travel, the way we do business. It has changed things in ways that materially improved the human condition, in my view. So now let's go meta for a minute. 170,000 years or so ago our early ancestors invented clothing. That was a useful innovation, depending on how you feel about that kind of thing. 70,000 years later came ceramic pottery, another transformative innovation. And in general, in those times, innovation moved in that type of increment. 20 or 30, 40,000 years would go by and somebody would invent a wheel or fire or something really useful. But then there would be long periods where things didn't change a whole lot. Then about 2,000 years ago came an innovation that accelerated the pace of all other innovations. And that innovation was paper. And with paper, it became possible, for the first time really, to share information across distance and time. Until then, your ability to share information was limited by your ability to carve something into the wall of a cave or to send a smoke signal to somebody with a line of sight to you or to communicate an oral tradition. But with paper, it became possible to transmit information across distance and time in a way that just fundamentally wasn't possible before. And then around 500 years ago or so came an even more disruptive innovation, the printing press. And suddenly it became possible to share information across distance and time at scale. And then look what happened to the pace of human innovation. You get democracy and free markets and the enlightenment and the industrial revolution and ultimately it leads us to where we are today in the digital age. And in the digital age, the ability to share information across distance and time at scale has accelerated to a line that is almost straight up. Because now through the internet, we can share information in ways that were not remotely comprehensible a long time ago. And that's a pretty exciting thing to be a part of. And I will argue that the next generation of that transformation is coming in the form of 100 times faster internet service. So let's start with a baseline. In America, we pay quite a bit for internet service. Did I skip one there? Did I skip one there? No, that's the first one. American internet service ranks pretty high compared to countries that we compete with. If you accept my contention that the ability to share information across distance and time at scale is important to innovation, then it's important fundamentally to economic competitiveness and therefore it's an important national interest. And we're not performing very well on a cost measurement.  And there are a lot of different measurements of average internet speeds. You can find lots of different ranking systems, but in none of them are we top tier. In none of them are we top tier. And in some of them, we rank even worse than in this one. Now you have probably, I'm sure you're all familiar with Moore's Law, which says that the processing power of a computer chip will roughly double roughly every 18 months. And you may be less familiar with the fact that there is a Moore's Law equivalent for computer storage. But you probably understand this empirically and anecdotally because if you refresh your computer every five years or so, you'll find that it's got a tremendous amount more storage capacity for a lot less money each time you do that. Internet speed had one brief period where it enjoyed a slope similar to Moore's Law. And that was in the late 90s, early part of the last decade, when we transitioned from dial-up internet service to broadband internet service. And you probably, at least some of you in this crowd, can remember what that transition was like.  It was awesome, right? Holy cow, I can email people. I don't have to send them a letter or a fax. You didn't know that dial-up internet service was terribly, terribly slow because you had not experienced broadband. But what broadband did for you, now you can argue the acceleration of internet speed from dial-up to broadband is just a difference in degree. It is, it's just faster. But the things you can do on the internet in a broadband environment are not different in degree. They're different in kind. You could not have Netflix in a dial-up-enabled world. You could not have YouTube in a dial-up enabled world. You really couldn't even have Facebook. The things you use the internet for in a broadband-enabled world are different in kind than the things you could do in dial-up. And the speed that fiber is introducing to this market, the speed that is achievable when you have fiber optic connectivity to the end user, is the equivalent of a Moore's law for internet speeds. And it is an order of magnitude change similar to the transition from dial-up to broadband. Now, what will we do with that speed? It remains to be seen. It's fun to speculate about, but no one knows. If we were to engage in a little raw speculation, just for fun, I would certainly think that gigabit internet speed is going to create incredible opportunities for electronic health care delivery. I would hope that it will create immersive online educational experiences. I would bet that it will lead to some kick-ass gaming applications. But the truth is we really don't know what people will do with a gigabit. It is, in some measure, an article of faith with me based on my entire life's experience, that given this speed, people are going to create awesome things to do with it. I can think of one application that I suspect gigabit speed at the home in the residential environment is going to unleash. When I first got to Google on my first day in the office, this calendar entry pops up in my calendar and it says, go to room X and meet with person Y. I go to room X, person Y is not there. But a big-screen TV in high definition is displaying person Y to me, who is a thousand miles away. And I had a 30-minute, real-time, high-definition video conference with that person. In and of itself, that is nothing spectacular. You have probably used video conference technology from a hotel to catch up with your kids back home or however you have used video conferencing technology, you have probably used it. But today's video conferencing experience is pretty limited mainly from bandwidth. When you have a lot of bandwidth, and we have a lot of bandwidth connecting Google offices to each other, and you connect a high-definition video camera and a strong microphone and a high-definition big-screen TV and you start doing video conferencing in high definition with no pixelation caused by the limited bandwidth, with no asynchronous asynchronicity between voice and video caused by limited bandwidth. When you have a high bandwidth connection empowering a high-definition video conferencing, let me just tell you, the first five minutes of that first meeting I had with a person on a television felt a little weird. By the second five minutes, it felt normal. By the second day of doing meetings like that, I could not imagine how I had ever done business without that technology. It is the first technology I've encountered since cell phones and email that I now look back on and say, how did I ever live without that technology? What did we do before video conferencing? When you have to travel for Google, you book your travel on this internal corporate website. You go to that website to book your trip, and the first screen you get is going somewhere. Have you tried video conferencing? Half the time, I'm like, yeah, they're right. I could just video conference. I don't need to go because having a meeting in high definition on video conference is really almost as good as being in the room with somebody in a lot of ways. It's really extraordinary. It's gotten to the point, in fact, this past Friday, you know, in the Mountain View headquarters, I've got a few of the people here from Mountain View today, you know, they, by Friday afternoon, you know, they have a little bit of a happy hour in the office. I've gotten to the point where I tune into the happy hour by video conference. I hang out with people. It works. You never knew what an unsatisfactory user interface the telephone was until you start video conferencing in high definition. And now I just can't stand talking to a disembodied voice on a device held up to my ear. I can't see their expressions. I don't know if they're about to say something. I don't know if they're nodding in agreement or shaking their head in frustration. I don't know if they're fully dressed or in their underwear. It's a completely unsatisfying user interface that I never knew didn't work until I had this new technology. And that's the kind of thing, that's the kind of thing that I hope gigabit internet speeds are going to unleash. Now, two final points, and then we can address questions. First, if you had told me when I started working at Google Fiber that the way Google was going to make the internet 100 times faster was by sprinkling fiber fairy dust around Austin, I probably would have believed you. In fact, the way Google makes the internet 100 times faster is by taking the fiber optic material that is the backbone of the internet that transmits data at something approaching the speed of light from city to city and country to country and extends that fiber optic cable all the way to the inside of your home. And that super fast conductive material means that the data flowing to your house never has to slow down. It's not impossible to do. It's not novel technology. That technology has been there for a while. And now you see that technology not just from us is getting wider adoption because the market is starting to demonstrate demand for that type of speed, for that type of technology. The process of building that network is a significant one. It's not a matter of sprinkling fiber fairy dust. It is actually a matter of deploying an entirely new communications network throughout the city all the way to your front curb and to your home. Where there is aerial infrastructure, we will deploy it on that aerial infrastructure and that will have a lighter impact. Where there is no aerial infrastructure, it has to go underground. And deploying an entirely new underground network in an already built out metropolitan area like this one is a challenge. It is a significant investment. It is a massive undertaking. I have learned more about construction and infrastructure in the last nine months since I joined Google Fiber than I ever thought I would know. When I drive through the neighborhood with my wife now, I'm noticing little vaults on the side of the road that have been there forever, but I never saw them before. And the way the aerial infrastructure connects neighborhoods and houses to houses is stuff that I just always took for granted, the way you take it for granted when you turn the tap and the water comes out and you can drink it. But all of those things are really the miracle of modern municipal America. They're really a remarkable accomplishment of innovation and ingenuity. And I feel a sense of regret that I took them for granted for so long and I have a profound appreciation for the ingenuity that enables us to deploy this complex infrastructure to serve our households and our businesses. But I want you to know you're going to feel the construction effort. You're going to see it. You're going to see people up on poles. You're going to see crews working in streets. There's going to be times when they have to block off one side of the road while they dig a tunnel across to the other side. It's just a massive, massive project. And on the other end of it is a more competitive, higher speed, better quality internet marketplace in Austin that is a benefit to every consumer in Austin, not just the ones who adopt our technology. It's going to make everybody's services better and more affordable and has already started to do that. The second point I wanted to make was about the process that we will go through over the course of the in the future as we deploy this and start marketing it. So everybody always asks me, where are you going to build it? When can I get it? And let me attempt to answer that this way, although there are still a lot of questions that I can't give you detailed answers to yet because we don't have those detailed answers. In general, what you need to know about it is this. We will build this network throughout the city to nodes that are cabinets. These are the cabinets I was referring to that are on the side of the road that you may not ever notice if you're like me, but that are part of the communications infrastructure of the city. The fiber will connect to those nodes and then the homes connected to that node, we will have a marketing campaign. We will call the homes connected to that node. There are a few hundred homes per node. We will call that a fiber hood. It's just a word we invented made up. Doesn't really mean anything except the homes connected to that node. You will live in a fiber hood and you will have the opportunity for your fiber hood to qualify for service.  It will be a transparent process where you can go to a website, put in your address, find out what fiber hood you're a part of, find out how many people need to subscribe, keep a running tab. There are people who probably check that website every day, how many more people still need to subscribe for my fiber hood to qualify for service. And then once it qualifies, we lay the fiber and we install. It's not a quit process. It's not an easy process, but it is a transparent process and everybody will have a chance to, each community will have a chance to, in a sense, control its own destiny. In Kansas City, that has resulted in some really cool stuff happening, like communities gathering together to rally their neighbors, to drive enough demand to qualify the fiber hood. And in Kansas City, in the first round of marketing, 180 out of 202 fiber hoods qualified for service. So that was pretty great and we'd love to see that kind of result in Austin, but it'll be a function of demand for the service. The last thing I'll say about Kansas City is this. They've had some really cool stuff happen in Kansas City since Google Fiber came to town. Fitch upgraded their bond rating and called out the new fiber optic service in town as one of the things driving the economic vitality of the region that would cause them to improve their debt rating. There is this cool community called the Kansas City startup village, which was a group of entrepreneurs who went and bought up the homes in the first fiber hood that qualified and got service installed and just started launching small businesses out of all those homes and they eventually they kind of took over most of the neighborhood and now it's this thriving little entrepreneurial enclave and attracting entrepreneurs from outside Kansas City, attracting investment in homegrown entrepreneurs from outside Kansas. So local entrepreneurs are now attracting investment from out of state because of the unique opportunity. And imagine what this could mean for Austin. Kansas City has a remarkably entrepreneurial community. It has a lot of kindredness with Austin. But for Austin to be on the cutting edge of this next generation internet that will lead to applications we can't imagine today, but that will be as transformative of the way we use the internet and the role the internet plays in society as Netflix and YouTube and Facebook have been vis-a-vis the evolution from dial up to broadband. If you think about what it means to Austin to be one of the first markets to have the opportunity to explore the possibilities of that level of service, of that new technology, it's a huge thing for Austin. And when you combine it with a university here that has one of the top 10 computer science departments in the country that also has things like the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the ACE Center and all the other great things going on here with technology. When you combine that with being the center of state government and the culture and the community we have here and the interest I get from the music industry in what we're doing, the opportunity for them to have simultaneous jam sessions by video conference like I described to you with bands in Kansas City and in the future fiber markets. It's going to create some really cool stuff that is fun to think about and completely impossible to predict. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you have with what time we have left and I appreciate you all coming out tonight. Do you mean why didn't we put some wires in there before or why didn't they put some space for it? Right. So that's the good thing about Arial. The bad thing about Arial is they're visible, right? So you trade accessible for visible, right? So there's no question Arial is a lot easier to work with to upgrade over time. On the other hand, Arial is probably not as secure from weather events. So if you want to protect against outages, you're making tradeoffs with those things. Would it have been possible for the underground infrastructure in the city to have been architected in a way that was more future proof, more adaptable? I'm not an expert on that. Like I said, in the last nine months I've learned a whole lot about outside plant construction, but I'm still not an expert by any stretch. What I've observed is two things. One, it is really hard to upgrade the existing underground plant. There is a lot of stuff underground. You can't see it. You need really good records of where things are and those records don't always exist. So one of the things that we're working with the city closely on is using our construction process, which is going to involve a whole bunch of the city's underground infrastructure. When we go out and do construction, we have to dig a pothole, look and see what's there. We will document what we find there. In the cases where the city's records aren't great about what's already down there, we will be updating those records. So one outcome that the city has pushed us for and that we think is a good one is that at the end of our process, all the places where we have had to dig holes, we will not only be returning to the city a document, a digital record of where our stuff is, but also where the other stuff that we find down there is. It would be easier in the future to upgrade, to evolve networks over time if those records can be kept really clean. The second thing I would say is, again, I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the folks at Google are. And as I understand it, a fiber optic network, there is no technology in the laboratory today that we're going to say 10 years from now, I wish we had, when we were digging up all those holes, I wish we had put something other than fiber, that a fiber optic network is future proof for the next several decades. And so somebody 40 years from now might come back and say, man, they should have done it differently, but we are trying to be sensitive to whatever, to sort of everything that's knowable today in building a network that's future proof and in leaving behind a record that enables further expansion. And that is one last thing. The city does prioritize in reviewing our network design that we maintain sufficient additional clearance for there to be future network improvements, not necessarily of communications infrastructure, but water and wastewater, and all the other things you have to have for this city to grow. And so all of that is taken into account. It's an extraordinarily complex deal. And I will tell you the folks at the city who have to manage all that, my hat's off to them. It's a really hard, it's a really hard deal. Yes, sir. Right. So the cost was on a cost per megabit basis. So if you think about it, we're offering a thousand megabits down and up. And so on a per megabit basis, our number, you know, we will compare very favorably to the rest of the world at the price we're offering in Kansas City and at the speed we're offering. Now, how much market has to be delivered at that price and that speed before it changes the international rankings? I've never done that math. I don't know. I would think more than a few. You'd have to be, you'd have to have a pretty good amount of market share to move the international rankings. Yes, sir. You're talking about residential, what I was saying. Yeah. We will, we've publicly announced there will be a small business product here. Enterprise has different requirements that we're not prepared to meet those. I mean, here's why I say that. If you're an enterprise with, you know, mission critical requirements for, you know, five nines of uptime or more and all kinds of redundancy and super quick service levels and all of that, you need a more established provider than we were new, even though we're backed by Google, we're new to this business. And it'll be a while, if ever, before it makes sense for us to try to compete in the enterprise marketplace. I hope that answers. Yes, sir. If you mean how is the material different? It may not be. I think we're very particular about the materials we procure, but I would, yeah. It depends on what they're offering you. But I will just, let me just tell you what our offering is and you can ask for a comparison from whoever's trying to sell you something different. It's a thousand megabits up and a thousand megabits per second down, a gigabit up and a gigabit down. It's a symmetrical connection. It's enabled by fiber optic connectivity all the way to your home. And that is not a unique offering in this market. There are other providers offering that. You just got to make sure that's what you're being offered, right? That's how I would answer that. Yeah. Yes, sir. That's a good question. That's a good question that I probably should have addressed in my opening remarks. So I would, I think in a number of ways. Well, there's two ways to get at that. One is what applications will emerge in a gigabit enabled environment that will strengthen democracy the way online voter registration on, and all the other forms of online activism that emerged with the advent of the internet. In my view, they, those did strengthen democracy, by the way. And I don't know the answer to that question. I haven't, surprisingly, I guess, I haven't thought through what application I would develop for a gigabit enabled world that might make democracy better. I'm guessing it'll involve interactivity. One thing I would say about a symmetrical connection that's a gig up and a gig down, you know, most internet connections today have much more down speed than up speed. And that, when you make it symmetrical, when you make it as fast to send information as to receive information, I think that may lead to a change in the way we think about and use the internet. I think we have a predisposition in our minds sort of to think of the internet primarily as receiving and occasionally about sending information. And that's really because we have this sort of archetype in our heads of an internet that makes it easier to receive than to send information. So when I think about what impact it might have, big picture on democracy. One impact might be that this notion of user-generated content and every person a publisher may have, may be more empowered by a symmetrical connection. That's one. Bigger impact on digital inclusion with probably an ancillary effect on democracy, but let's talk about digital inclusion for a minute because you mentioned that. First is, and you're sitting right behind the leadership from the city of Austin that are responsible for the cities that have a role to play in the city's digital inclusion effort and its community connections program. When Google Fiber announced that it was coming to Austin, it in through in a partnership with the city donated 100 connections, gigabit connections, to the city that the city had went through a very arduous process of selecting a broad cross-section of community organizations and public institutions, libraries and schools, who end their geographically diverse. And they, you know, it's just a good mix. They had a really good thorough objective process of choosing them. And those 100 entities have been designated. You can look them up on the city's website and they'll all be receiving a gigabit connection for free. That's a big deal. And I don't want to diminish that at all by my next statement, which is a bigger deal is that part of the Google Fiber product offering includes today's broadband speeds, roughly five megs down, one meg up. If you pay a $300 construction fee, you get today's broadband speeds for free for seven years. So now you can say, you can take that $300, you can finance it over 12 months. So for $25 a month for one year, you get seven years of internet connectivity for no additional cost. I've just spent the last half hour telling you what a big deal I think it is to go from today's broadband speeds to gigabit speeds. But I believe it is a much bigger deal to go from no internet service to some internet service. And so my goal is to get as much subscription to that no monthly fee internet service as possible from that segment of the market that today is totally disconnected from the internet and all the things that the internet enables. To me, that's the biggest impact we may have. Yes, ma'am. You just named a couple of communities I used to represent. So they've got my cell phone number and I would say a significant amount. But right now we have to focus on Austin. Like I said, this is a massive, massive effort. And we got to get Austin right first. Yes, sir. We do. And if you know any, have them call me. It's a smart thing to do. If you're building a new building, if you're building a new subdivision, if you have a green field of any sort, going back to your question about why didn't people anticipate these needs to upgrade networks over time, it's a lot easier to do that now than when they poured the cement in the streets whenever they poured the cement in the streets that I live on. Those were poured a long time ago and they might not have anticipated the internet when they poured that. But now people should plan for this. And whether they're building a tall building or whether they're building a sprawling subdivision, it's a good idea for those developers to anticipate the need to have a future-proof infrastructure. Yes, ma'am. So the city is not funding our network deployment and there are no economic incentives involved, none of that stuff. The city is a partner, though, through the community connections program that I just mentioned. And because this deployment will require a lot of partnership with the city in managing the impact of the construction on the citizens. So, you know, for example, they've been really clear with us. Don't think you're building anything downtown during South by Southwest, you know? I mean, we have to work very closely with the city on all kinds of logistics, not to mention permitting and making sure that we know as much as can be known about the existing underground infrastructure, most of which is the cities, right? Water utilities and that kind of stuff. We have to know as much as possible about what's there so that we can construct responsibly. So that's now the fiber. Who owns the fiber? It's our fiber. So we build this network at our expense and we own the fiber. And there are other providers who already also have fiber underground. There are some companies that are in the business of building fiber and then leasing it out to other companies. And where there is available dark fiber, that's another one, I guess, if anybody in the room has some dark fiber that you want to lease to us, we will take it. But where there is dark fiber available, we will access it on reasonable terms. But most of the hard part of this build is what is called the last mile, the part that extends all the way to your house. And there isn't dark fiber that we can acquire there. We'll have to build our network there. Yes, sir. This is a good question. And it reminds me of the part of her question that I didn't answer, which was what are the other cities? You mentioned Kansas City and Austin. The third is Provo, Utah, which is not rural by any stretch, but it's a smaller city. And Provo had actually built its own fiber network all the way to the home at the taxpayer's expense. And I suspect, I wasn't there and I, you know, I haven't done an exhaustive retrospective on this, but I suspect their analysis was similar to what the concern you're raising, which was they didn't feel like they could attract the private sector investment that would result in that network. And so they did it themselves. What they found, I think, was that managing that network on an ongoing basis was a significant challenge. And monetizing it was even harder and something that a municipality wasn't well suited to, or at least they felt that they weren't well suited to. And so then they decided to take private bids for somebody to come and acquire the network and manage it for them. And they ended up choosing Google to do that. And they were not delivering gigabit speeds. They had fiber all the way to the home, but there's a whole bunch more than that to generate gigabit speeds off of that fiber. And so for the citizens of Provo, what they got when Google Fiber acquired that network was our investment in upgrading the utility of that network to them. And now they've all got gigabit internet speed. So it's been a great partnership so far. To the larger question about rural America, I mean, there's no question. I spent some time describing how big a construction undertaking this is to give you a sense of why it doesn't happen overnight. And while we've announced that there are nine additional metropolitan areas that we're looking at for possible expansion, it's just not going to happen overnight. And to try to contemplate when we would get to 100% of America, having that type of fiber deployment, I mean, I'm staggered by what it's going to take to just build Austin. It's a big undertaking. Yes, man. Let me do the second one first. Direct impact on jobs is hard for me to answer because a lot of our construction gets done through contractors and I actually don't have visibility and the number of jobs they're projecting they're projecting to directly create. I think the better thing to look at because at some point that network will be built and then there won't be a whole lot of construction jobs building it, right? So I think the better thing to look at is the indirect effect on job creation of just being one of the first gigabit cities and what it means for entrepreneurs in Austin, what it means for work from home and why it might make corporations think that they want to have a headquarters or a big investment here because it creates so much opportunity for Austin to grow its economy. And like I said, in Kansas City, they've already started to see that effect. So your first question about UT. I wish I had something to announce. I don't. But let me tell you, UT is on it. At the region level, those guys have my cell phone too from when I was a legislator and I get phone calls. We want Google Fiber at UT. We want our students to have the fastest internet service in the world. We want to leverage all the assets of the computer science and engineering departments here and the UT is on it. They've made it clear that they want to figure out a partnership and we have to just figure out what the right partnership is. And we're working through it and I'm, you know, we want to have a relationship with UT and UT seems to want to have a relationship with us. So something good should come of that, but I don't have anything yet. Bill, did I see your hand? Can I just say the first, because I've known you, yeah, go ahead. Okay, wait, first of all, when you started with what are your future plans? And because of the way I came to know you when I was a politician, I really dreaded where that was going. So I'm so grateful for where it ended up. Future plans after the network is deployed for how to leverage the network. That's the question. Let me talk specifically about TV. Of course, there is a TV product. Google Fiber is not just gigabit internet service, but it's also a television service. And I actually just two weeks ago went on a install visit in Kansas City, watched a customer get installed and saw the television service before we had installed it, switched him over, and after, and I will say the gigabit pipe delivering your video over IP creates a really good image on the screen. Now it depends on the TV, but it's cool. And it's just more data populating the video screen, right? So it's just going to be crisper and clearer. The, did you mention 4K? TV is, yeah, okay, should have known. 4K TV is going to do a lot better over a gigabit pipe. I mean, I think gigabit and 4K, I don't know what the future of 4K is. 4K is a new television standard that you thought you had made your, bought your last TV when you got your new HDTV, but you may be in for a new technology. I don't know if that'll fall into the category of technologies you can't imagine how you lived without, but I think gigabit, gigabit enables 4K in exactly the way that you're contemplating, I think, by asking the question. I'm not sure how 4K, I don't, what I can't tell you is how limiting is brought to traditional broadband on the use of 4K technology, but I gotta think you're gonna enjoy your 4K TV more over a gig when you get a 4K TV and when there's some programming in 4K to watch on that TV. It's a complex ecosystem, it's all gotta come together. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am? You may have to tell me when to stop. Okay, sure. So Dark Fiber is a fiber that some private company has deployed underground or ariely that they deployed with the intention of leasing it to somebody for a profit. So they probably had some other reason to be deploying something, and they decided to put some extra capacity, I think kind of along the lines of what you were suggesting, and they figured we'll install some extra capacity, we'll incur the additional marginal cost of building some extra capacity, and we'll sell it to somebody. That's what Dark Fiber is. If I didn't answer the question about rural, it is because I don't really know the solution for rural. One solution for rural towns is build their own fiber networks the way Provo did. It got them a fiber network. It's a hard thing for a municipality to manage themselves. And the private investment getting to rural America, you know, like I said, I mean we're in two market, three markets now, we're looking at some more. It's going to take us a long time to build an entirely new network in those markets. It'll take us a long time to grow beyond that footprint. And so I don't, you know, what we do hope, I mean I think Google has been pretty explicit about this, is that we don't want just us to be the ones investing in gigabit internet speeds. We want to bring the whole industry up to that standard. And I think Google has already demonstrated that it's having that effect. Yes, ma'am? How do we fall behind? I don't think it's just that because our population, there is enough population concentrated in the urban areas that even in the urban areas we're not getting a competitive speed and price. And I think that the, I mean, I think the reason is that one of the reasons is that there just hasn't been enough competition. It's a hard market to enter. I can testify to that very much from a firsthand perspective. It's a difficult market to enter. And so I think it has presented consumers with limited options, which has limited the quality of their options. Yes, sir? As far as what? I can't, really. I can tell you this. Google is a kind, and this will probably be my last answer. It looks like I'm out of time. I'll stay around. So here's what I can tell you. We feel an enormous sense of urgency, but we have to do it right. We feel an enormous sense of urgency because, A, getting this product to market faster is good for the business. We've sensed and measured pretty extraordinary demand. And, C, the whole premise of our business is that speed matters. So let me... Two years. To close on this point, that speed matters. If you think about how Google got to be Google, there are a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that when you went to Google for a search, back in the slow days of the Internet, even slower days of the Internet, it got you results faster. It had that very clean homepage that didn't require you to load a lot of graphics. And even if it was just milliseconds faster, it made you want to go back to that search engine versus ones that got you results slower. Google has, since that initial experience, seeing the effect that speed has on consumer behavior has always optimized for speed. When I got inside, I read about this test they did where they shrunk the size of the map on Google Maps, and they did A, B tests. And they wanted to see what the effect of shrinking the size, because when you shrink the size of the map, it makes the page load infinitesimally quicker, probably imperceptible, except that when people, the people who got the smaller map that loaded faster used Google Maps 20% more than the people who didn't. I go home and I see my seven and four-year-old daughters playing on the iPad with their backs up against the wall on the other side of which is our Wi-Fi router. They don't know what a Wi-Fi router is. They don't know that that happens to be the point in the house where the internet service is fastest. They just naturally gravitated there because that's where they had the best experience. That's the effect of speed. That's the impact that this will have. Thank you guys for having me out.


Our next speaker, Shannon, is the Client Services and Delivery Director at HERA, where she oversees all elements of delivery for the broad range of clients. She's super passionate and a genius at one of the artist's parts of SEO PR campaigns. So far in her career, she's helped create campaigns for brands such as IRS components, travel supermarkets, and pretty little thing. Today, she's going to talk about something very topical, how her company era navigated the COVID news agenda and what their lessons may mean for the future of digital PR. And if we're lucky, we may get to see an appearance from our super cute dog, Hudson, who'll see you soon. On the 19th of March, 2020, the first U.S. State stay at home order was issued in California. Then just a mere few days later, Boris Johnson took to our TV screens in the UK and the words, you must all now stay at home, rang across the nation. That meant that our lives as we knew them, they'd changed. They'd flipped in a hairpin and that forced our industry as we knew it to change. Things were different, they were never going to be what they once were. That forced the roles that we were in, in house, at agencies, consulting as experts in all things digital marketing and link building, they had changed too. Now, for our industry, it really felt like a tale of two halves was emerging and some agencies had seen a 95% increase in growth in their revenue. They had more clients on boarding than ever. They couldn't recruit quick enough and things were booming. On the other side of that coin, we had some agencies reporting a 95% loss in their clients and that may have been because they were working in specific industries and things were falling apart as they were trying to hold them together. Eris sits bang in the middle of that. We had the highs, we had the lows, we saw the changes and the churn with clients. We also on boarded new team members as well. Now, Eris story, two weeks into that and that very first lockdown, we lost more than 50% of our revenue and that's because we worked with a lot of travel brands and we were trying our best to help them get through this challenging time the best way we knew how. We wanted their businesses to come out the other side of this. In April, things looked like there were glimmers of hope and we won a huge project with a household brand that we are still working with today. A couple of months ahead of that, our largest client who paused back in March turned their activity back on. They were back operating at full steam and they saw the need and the opportunity to pick up activity again. Then six months from that announcement in the 23rd of March, our full team were back from furlough and this is a moment that I will never forget in my career. Being able to announce that everybody was back and that we were going to be one unit and one force to be reckoned with again, that was priceless. In November, as a business, as an agency, we had one of our highest revenue generating months ever. It was the third best in Eris entire kind of five, six years of kind of existence and we really, really thought we've closed the door on all things 2020 and we are looking forward, ending the year on a high and moving forward into 2021 with a back. But despite all of these wins overall, we were still down. Our agency world as we knew it, it wasn't working as it once had pre-COVID and this really challenging ongoing polarisation, it caused a state of survival mode, not just to trigger within me but within the leadership team and no doubt our team members too. This forced me to grow up and I grew up hard and fast across a period of 12 months. This is my personal journey so pre-pandemic in my head of PR and content role, you can see here the trajectory was fast and was going up in the right direction. We had onboarded some of the biggest names out there that we could potentially work with, some real top tier golden clients and we had some of the best minds in our industry working for us. Then like any roller coaster, things dipped and that is when that pandemic hit and it hit us hard and fast. Just trying to do my day job was a challenge, I was trying to get results with the team and we were working as well as we could in order to deliver, in order to perform and make sure that our clients were getting an ROI. The jumble squiggle there that you can see, well actually this was a real period of mixed emotion, mixed experiences, the highs as I said were getting the team back from furlough and in the same time as that, we had some really difficult business decisions and conversations to have. I battled imposter syndrome almost daily, are we doing the right thing? Am I in the right role? Could we be doing more? Should I even be here? Turns out my bosses thought I should and by the end of the year in 2020, I personally was ending on a bit of a high two and transitioned into this director role. Now defining my two roles at the start of 2020 in this head of PR role, my goal, my view, my vision was to adapt and find new ways to innovate in order to generate these all important links, drive coverage for our clients and impact real SEO results, trying to increase traffic and rankings. Then on the other side of this in this director role, my only goal here really was to get the company through this really challenging situation in one piece. So that's my personal story, that's how I experienced these in the last 12 months, but we can't deny as I've said this pandemic and everything that we've experienced, it also affected our industry as a whole. So the problem, surviving this COVID news agenda. This time last year, I was on the Moscon virtual stage and I walked you through the truth about digital PR campaigns. We spoke about successes and failures as such. We spoke about the highs and the lows, the challenges that you can have. And if only I knew in that moment whilst I was presenting to you guys that I was actually going through one of the biggest and largest challenges with the team that we would ever face, I probably would have laughed. I didn't know it, I couldn't see it. Now that challenge was that we have never ever seen a news agenda like this before. And this is it. This is it in visual form. And in the centre of that news cycle once COVID broke, we see all of these really, really important life changing stories coming out. We had everything from panic buying, people couldn't buy loo roll, right through to anti-vax campaigns, BLM, one of the biggest moments in again our lifetime changing culture, outlook, views, behaviours of people. Then we've got the Trump impeachment going through to the elections as well. In the US, Brexit, capital raids, you name it, these stories were huge. They will go down in history. But as an agency and as a team, whilst all of this was going on in the news agenda, we still had to get our clients into this so that we could drive coverage and links to increase search visibility. We did that using two different tactics. We have the evergreen campaigns that I'll walk you through and then the reactive side of things again, that I'll explain a little later. The challenge here was that the space for our clients to play in was getting smaller and smaller and smaller because these huge news stories, they were dominating. That meant that in eight weeks from Boris Johnson's announcement and this stay at home order coming in, furlough being introduced and everything like that, 75% of our campaigns were either paused, pivoted or stopped entirely. So what that looked like for a travel client of ours then, this is an actual email that was sent out and it says, we spotted that this morning the Maldives now has confirmed COVID cases with some tourists in isolation. Now our inspirational travel campaign was inspiring people to book holidays to the Maldives. It came in a top 10 ranking that we had come up with. There is no way that we could launch this campaign in this moment and try and encourage people to jump on planes, go across the world and expose themselves to this virus. Then another industry, a DIY client of ours, we were launching a campaign around mates rates and discounts that you give when you're in the building trade and when furlough kind of came in and Boris Johnson said, you cannot go out to work tomorrow and that industry paused. There was no way that we could go out and again be talking about discounts when people were ultimately losing their jobs and livelihoods. So we had to pause there too. And then the internal side of things, the things that our clients and stakeholders don't necessarily see in the outside world. We have one of our team leads here, Ruth saying we need to hold off on outreach this afternoon because of the announcement around the sad news and the Duke of Edinburgh passing away. So it's fair to say at points and at numerous points actually across the last 12 to 18 months, myself, my team, we felt like headless trick-ins trying to muddle through, trying to get our clients into that really, really small space in the news agenda. Now on top of those challenges, that 25% of campaigns that we were able to pitch in and that we could do something with, we could go out there on behalf of our clients and speak to the media. Well, actually journalists were coming back to us and saying that they were being kept on file. And again, a real life journalist response. This isn't of interest at the moment, I'm afraid, but I've got it on file in case anything changes. Now, we're pretty confident that had we pitched this campaign pre-COVID, it would have got coverage. It would have got links. It's because of that all-encompassing dominating news agenda that we believe it was parked and popped on file. Now it's fair to say that the summary of that and kind of where we are is that large evergreen campaigns, they weren't getting the cut through that they once were pre-COVID. And this was a real eye-opening journey and experience for us because we had spent five years putting processes and frameworks in place that made our approach to digital PR sustainable. It made our content work harder. We were trying to deliver the best ROR we could by not having these kind of one hit wonder campaigns. I even told you and shared some of these processes with you. This is my 2019 MozCon presentation. I took you through tactics and tips on how to supercharge link-building efforts with a digital PR newsroom. Some of the processes that I went to on that day or that I went through sorry on that day were around introducing and kind of linking your campaigns to a content calendar, looking ahead, seeing how you can make these days work to your advantage or should you not be launching your campaigns on these days because the news agenda is going to be so busy. 12th of July right here right now, it's national simplicity day and once we may have done something about this, we may have a campaign that hooked into it, but during COVID and this crazy busy news agenda, it's fair to say I don't think that many people care about this no matter how important it once was. So that meant that some of these processes as I said this content calendar in particular, it was redundant. We were having to work in a completely different way. And again, another process that I explained was about forward planning, looking three, four months ahead, getting your evergreen campaigns lined up so that you could execute them with efficiency, launch, drive those traffic, drive those pieces of coverage, including links, which will obviously impact traffic as well. But the challenge with this when you're planning so far ahead with the COVID news agenda being so busy is that actually long-term planning, it becomes impossible because it is so unpredictable and you're having to live and breathe these campaigns in the moment, not necessarily looking so far ahead anymore. Now the news agenda, as I said, it was changing so so fast that long-term and forward planning a process and an activity and an implementation of strategy that was core to what we were doing to deliver, it became practically impossible. Now as PRs, link builders, outreaches, we are used to the news agenda dictating our every move, telling us what to do, giving us hints on what we can kind of pitch in and stuff like that. But because of how busy things were, this was 100 times worse. And because of that, we were forced to move to a more reactive mindset, living and breathing in the here and now. This is an example of one of our content strategists, Lauren. We were working with a sparkline of ours, looking at things like glamping and spa breaks, stacations, that kind of thing because we can't travel. And we're having to keep one eye all the time on what's being played on the TV, what the news agenda is coming out with. And we can see here, this celebrity, Johnny Vegas, he's actually produced a television program on glamping. And that means because he's famous and he's got his name to it, that's probably going to be in the news agenda when it gets launched. And therefore, we can use that as a hook to get our client in it as well. Now, this short, sharp, snappy tactic, it worked, but there was also something much, much bigger at play. And that was the fact that journalism, as our industry was suffering, was and still is suffering. It's still having a really difficult challenge in time. And within the first eight weeks of furlough and kind of lockdown kicking in, 44% of journalists that we were going to be outreaching to, they were on furlough as well. So that space to play in, it gets even smaller. The news agenda is hectic, it's crammed, it's busy, and the people that we're speaking to, that pool is significantly reduced. Now, as we know, August, it's traditionally a really, really quiet month for digital PR campaigns and outreach. Often a lot of people are on there some holidays, there's back holidays and stuff like that in the UK. And so we can forward plan for that, we can build around that. But the last August, it was the quietest we have ever experienced, which brought forward a whole realm of different challenges once again. And for one campaign launch at the start of the month, we received 250 out-of-offices from 400 journalists emailed. That is insane. That's a huge, huge number. We've never seen anything like this before. And as I mentioned, that just goes to show that that outreach pool, those contacts that we're speaking to, it's also getting smaller and smaller because the industry is facing some big, big challenges. Now, that combined with the fast-paced nature of having to change tactics to drive links and coverage on a team that's reduced. Remember, it's only August and we're not quite back as a full team yet from furlough. It put an immense amount of pressure on us to perform. And this is, of course, the email that no client services director wants at any point. Now, this is a client, a really nice client. We've worked with him for years and he comes back to myself and our account manager, Charlotte, and he says, thanks for expressing your awareness of the current situation. It's actually really quite timely because we were only looking at your team's performance yesterday morning. He's clearly unhappy about where our results are. Now, the only saving grace is that we got there first. We identified the problem and we presented him with some solutions. So, it's fair to say that, yes, performance on some of our accounts, it was affected by what we were all going through. And as a unit, as a team, we had to dig a lot deeper than we already were. But I just want to remind you at this point that we are living in a global pandemic. We are still living and experiencing this. We didn't just have these challenges at work. We also had them in our personal lives. We couldn't see friends and family. So, there is a whole lot of stuff going on here, not just affecting our industry. And the performance side of things, we know the error wasn't the only agency to have challenges during this time. But we may be one of the only ones to speak openly about it. Now, this pressure that I've spoken so much about and this pressure to perform, it actually starts to, you know, you start to put industry standards at risk and we start to slip up and things that, you know, campaigns that would have gone out of the door watertight and without any kind of indiscrepancies or inconsistencies, we start to see things like small typos creeping on in because we have this pressure to get them launched and out in that really small window in order to get links and coverage. Now, performance pressures plus a really hectic news agenda, that's the perfect storm for an imperfect campaign, as I've said. And you do start to see quality and standards starting to dip. Now, performance pressures and the hectic news agenda once again, that can also force us as PRs and link builders to spend much bigger stories because we have to get that cut through. We have to ensure that our clients are getting into this really small space. So these campaigns here, creative genius or fake news. And in the top right here, you can see one of Aira's very own. We came up with the idea to launch on behalf of one of our clients, the ultimate work from home desk. It meant that you were still getting your daily dose of vitamin C with that light. It kept you cool. It meant that your posture wasn't kind of, you know, impacted as you were spending all of these hours working from home in an environment that your body wasn't necessarily used to. And we launched it. It did really well. It got coverage and links and top tier press. The middle campaign here you can see from another agency starts to consider and challenge the way that people's hands might evolve because we are all gaming more during lockdown. We've all got more time on our hands. And then the last one here, this ring, we also know that, you know, the ongoing story and kind of pun and play around Harry bow rings. This agency created the ultimate Harry bow ring, but it was for real this time. And you saw the gems there, you know, they were real. And again, you could inquire about this on the brand site. So it's fair to say we've responded to a difficult situation with bigger, bigger PR spins and stories and bolder ideas because we had to. We had to make sure that our clients were getting in that small and very, very busy news agenda. We also start to lean on formats that we know work really well. And this one here in particular reveals, you know, it's the dream jobs format that you would have seen no doubt. It shows that you can get paid money in order to go to the pub and eat steak with your pals. What a dream. And on top of that, we see lots of brands starting to come out with this story. It's been around for a little while.  But the core point here is that we respond to this difficult situation with tried intensive formats because we go back to what we know in order to get links whilst the pressure is on. Now I get it. I've lived and breathed it with the team and there is a awful lot of stuff going on. We have more news, huge, huge dominating stories as I walk you through. And that means that that space to play in for our clients is much smaller because it is such a dominating space at the moment. That forces planning issues. We can't look ahead. We can't use these processes that we've once relied on to drive links and coverage. We have to pivot. We have to embrace this more reactive style. The very real thing is that businesses, industries, they're still under threat. That's a huge, huge challenge here. And of course that feeds into this fourth point here around there actually being less journalists. Some were made redundant. Some were on the furlough scheme. And that meant that we had less experts, less journalists to speak to in order to try and get our clients in the news. The challenge with that is that we can start to risk quality and relevance in favour of launching quickly because of this huge mounting part of challenges that we are presented with and that we are living through. And yes, it works for now. There's tried and tested formats. There's bigger and bolder ideas. But we can't forget quality and relevance because actually that means that we're starting to be in danger of producing the same irrelevant stories, irrelevancy in terms of the link to our brand over and over again to get links. And we need to be innovating. We need to be keeping these core things in mind. Now, do we really think that Google wants us to be producing irrelevant stories? Actually, they want us to be looking at quality and relevance. And that's what they want to reward longer term. So this approach, it isn't sustainable and it never has been. It's going to present us with bigger and larger challenges further down the line. So the solution then and explaining what got us here, well, it won't get us there. Now, it's fair to say that Error has learned some really hard lessons whilst in survival mode. I've personally learned them and I know no doubt you guys probably have gone through some similar experiences as well. So these lessons, they span three pillars and I want to walk you through them today. So we've got ideation, production and of course promotion. And these are central to any campaign. I want to share three tactics to help future proof your digital PR work, try and increase relevancy and quality of output at the same time. These are going to help you survive this ever changing, dominating news agenda that we are still seeing and experiencing almost 18 months on from the very first announcements back in March last year. The idea is that they will also help you increase the quality and relevance of your output. So they're starting to move and encourage us to do things that Google wants to see and that Google will reward us for. So let's start by looking at ideation and this ROR framework. Now this is no surprise. Every successful campaign idea campaign starts with a brilliant and original unique different idea. So how do you know you've got a good idea? And we could talk about this for hours, no doubt. But when you're working under pressure and kind of you have this melting pot of challenges that you're trying to navigate through daily, I believe that there are three important things that you need to validate your idea against whilst working under this pressure to make sure that it's a success and so that you have the confidence it can deliver the impact that it needs to. Now these three things, we have relevancy, opinion and resolution. ROR. We need to start to think of this as a bit of a natural selection Darwin-esque way of validating our ideas. So let's start with relevancy and actually we need to ask ourselves a cold hard question. Should our brand that we are either working within in-house or working for in agencies, should they be talking about this topic and or theme? Now let's define topics and themes. So for topic it's three to five subjects that are defined at the kickoff point for any project and they directly tie into that product offering and they act as really really solid structure and guide rails for it as well. Now themes, they're a layer deeper within this and they often mean that your brand can have a solid opinion or voice and you can start to consider making them famous on them as well. So let's ask that question again. Should your brand be talking about the things that they have been historically? Should they? So once you're confident that they should and you have your topics and your themes there, let's head over to Reddit and BuzzSumo. Now I want to start with Reddit because we here you can see when we type in women in STEM and we start to look at that within the field of engineering, here in this screenshot we can start to see the trials, the challenges, the tribulations that women within this are experiencing and this shows you what people, that audience they care about. Then go over to BuzzSumo and again type in women in STEM and you can start to see some topics and emerging and some themes coming through. So we can link it into COVID speaker series, universities, you name it, it's there. Harvest this information and you have your topic identified as women in STEM and you can also start to see your themes emerging as well. Universities challenge the impact on COVID and of course scholarships. So my tip here is that you need to be establishing these topics and themes and then overlay them on Reddit and BuzzSumo to make sure you're producing very relevant ideas for your brand. Let's look at opinion. So this has to be your brand's opinion and what can they have a clear, unique, different, distinctive voice on? This should also be really relevant to the theme and the topic that you've already identified. Things that you might start to consider at this point, food for thought for you is time. How long has this challenge been going on? How can they talk about that? What should the future look like? Finance, what's the financial implication of, you know, the topic or the theme? Solution. Can they start to offer real life, tangible solutions to getting over hurdles, to make the industry better, to start to innovate against it? This opinion needs to go in any press material and you need to be ready to offer unique comments as well from a key stakeholder within the business. So my tip here, whether your brand or confirm whether your brand has a clear voice or opinion on an idea before creating it, you need to make sure that there is an element of confidence that can come across that then increases the relevancy too. And finally, resolution. So let's be honest, we are not going to solve real world issues with digital PR campaigns alone, as much as we might want to try. But that doesn't mean that your campaign shouldn't offer your brand's audience an answer to a query or in fact a resolution. This directly again ties back to relevance and being able to overlay that opinion that we've already spoken about on that topic and or theme. So real life audience query, how much would it actually cost in the UK to rent a royal residency? We then took this kind of, you know, back into the drawing board, had brainstorms around it and two assets were created for a client of ours that reveals the size and monthly rental cost of each royal property. And here we can see whereabouts the royal properties are located in and around the UK. The result of bringing all of this together was some great links and coverage.  The campaign is sitting between color 10 and 20 links. But all of these links and coverage that was secure, they're on high quality, high trust, authoritative, relevant sites to the brand. You can see here in the middle one there is in the real estate section. That is exactly where that brand should be sitting. And of course, your own lifestyle there as well. So my tip here, you need to be curious about the challenges that the audience faces. Be bold and be fearless, go and explore them, go and research them and start to think about how you can answer the questions that they have. Number two then, let's look at the pillar of production and start to explore format libraries. So we're big on sustainable digital PR, but it's as much about day to day detail as it is an overall approach as well. And given this really hectic, crazy news agenda, it makes complete sense and logic to spend more time on projects at the moment in the outreach and promotion stage than it may within the development and production stage. Now I have to stress production is still super, super important. If you are, you know, coming up with the design, it is important that it looks great. It's on brand and stuff like that. But do you really need to add interactivity parallax and stuff like that for it to go out and get results? It's actually all in the story. And our data tells us what formats work really well for digital PR as well. We can see here interactive, this was a study that we took a couple of years ago now, but we can see here the interactive come up on top trumps and they are on average secure somewhere in the region of 20 to 25 links followed by statics and gifts. So we can start to use these insights to create format libraries. And we've got three key formats here that we use quite often for our digital PR and link building campaigns. We've got the tile index there, stacked bar chart and of course the world map. And what we're able to do here is that because the code for interactivity is already written and the basic design is there, our designers and developers can lift these. They can polish them. They can make them bespoke. But a lot of the efficiencies are made because we have the templates and wire frames. As I said, they're tailored bespoke to each client. We put their brand in there and their needs, but it acts as a really solid foundation for efficiencies. It streamlines that process without compromising on quality and gives us more time to outreach so everybody wins. Action for you guys then when you go back to the office, research those popular formats for your brand and start to establish and think about creating these content libraries in order to drive efficiencies. Final pillar then promotion and starting to manage these unforeseen circumstances.  There are plenty of brilliant talks out there from other agency kind of leaders and stuff like that.  We've experienced as I've explained, we've experienced this on a number of occasions, probably more than 10 times if I'm completely honest in the last 12 months, thanks to this incredibly busy news agenda, but that's okay because each time this has happened, our plan has become more and more robust and now we know how to get through this and that covers these three points here. We need to assess the situation, communicate well and then get a bit of perspective. So again, let's start with assess. So firstly, we need to review all social media outlets because news outlets kind of feed in and get their news from what's trending and stuff like that and start to put our thinking caps on our forward all seeing eye and make a call on how big we believe this story is going to be. And is it going to grow throughout the day? If it's trending, as I said, it's almost certainly going to be picked up by the press and covered in top 10 news sites. That's how we found out going back to the start of this presentation and that email that I had to send or the team had to send around the campaign in the Maldives. That's how we found out that holiday makers were asked to avoid going to the Maldives and we were able to act and react very, very quickly. Now, one person needs to be able to take charge and comfortable making this decision. It's a biggie.   And you can see that's exactly what happened in that Maldives situation here on Slack internally. Jasmine spots it, she comes back and said, this is the government's stance on the Maldives. And I say, our hands are tied. This is the right thing to do to cause this launch. She goes back and says, no problem. I'll draft an email to James now. Secondly, we have communication. So you need to always be back to the client and stakeholder efficiently. You need to be really, really clear of this risk. You have to explain to them what happens if they do launch. And this is an email where you can see that kind of happening. We said we shouldn't be inspiring people to go to the Maldives at this time. You have to take the reins. You are ultimately the expert. They need to trust you. And then when you communicate it back to them, you'll likely receive an email like this. Hi, Jasmine. We completely agree. Let's put it on pause and follow your proposed next steps, which is to re-plan, make sure that everything is correct so that we can launch at a better time. And finally, making sure you have that perspective.  You have likely been working for weeks and months to get this launch and start to see this campaign do, you know, work its hardest and get these results in for clients. It's normal to feel disappointed and frustrated at this point. Be vulnerable. Ask those important questions. Say to your client, look, how has this gone down internally? What can I do to help you manage stakeholder expectations? Say to your team, I know this is rubbish. I wish we were able to launch, but it's just not right. And then start to channel this time to be productive with your relaunch planning. Go back into the press release. Start to change dates. Start to look ahead and have a positive productive time, instead of worrying about the fact that you've not been able to launch on that day. Now, I have to, you know, this is no secret, have to be honest with you, with the news agenda so competitive and full, this is likely to happen to you at some point when you're launching a campaign, especially at the moment. To my action and tip, take a breath in that moment, assess, communicate and have some perspective. So in summary, circling right back around, these frameworks have been born out of areas, out of mine, out of my team's lessons from being in survival mode when that triggered within. The goal of sharing them with you today is to, one, be more authentic with your campaign work. Two, do what's right for the brand. And three, place a larger focus on quality and relevance, because this is exactly what Google wants to see and hear us doing. You will have better digital PR outputs that are going to drive real business growth, not just focusing on kind of links there. You will start to look at traffic, rankings, revenue, business growth increases. This is what being in survival mode has taught us. Thank you.


Hey, this is Brett and today I'm going to show you how to find your RPO sticker for your 2015, 2016, and 2017 Chevy Corvette. 18 and up is going to be a different sticker or a different spot actually. They're actually not going to have a sticker in 18 and up. You have to use a QR scanner. But anyways, for 15, 16, and 17, you're going to go into your trunk area here.  On these, if you lift it up, you'll see a silver sticker. Now this car, I want to verify if this one has the ZF1 package, which it does, is right there. And I can tell that this one has a 342 gears. It's an LT1. And you can tell all your other useful information from this sticker and those codes there. It's good to help you find out if your car that you're looking at has a particular option you may be looking for or not without actually having the original window sticker. So that's how you do it on your 2015, 2016, and 2017 Chevy Corvette RPO stickers. Thanks for checking out the video. If you learned something today, give us a subscribe in the upper left hand part of the screen and like this video. And if you want to check out how to get those RPO codes with the QR scanner and the 18 and above in the upper right hand part of the screen, you've got a video showing you how to do that. If you want to check out more of our demonstrations or more of our Corvette videos in the lower part of the screen, we got links to both of those. So check those out. Give us a like, subscribe, and share. I really appreciate it. And I hope you learned something today and I was able to help you out. Thanks again.