In this video we'll talk about the new Zion Smooth Q4 smartphone gimbal. If you don't own a mobile gimbal yet and are looking for a powerful stabilizer that will take your videos to the next level, make sure to stick around as the Smooth Q4 comes with some awesome features. What's up everyone, Bennett Grazer here with smartphonefilmmaking.com, the best online course where I teach you everything on creating high quality videos with your smartphone. And today we're going to talk about the Smooth Q4 by Zion. It's not always easy finding the right gimbal and there are so many out there on the market and each has their own unique features. It can be overwhelming, I too had to find a gimbal that works for me and choosing the right gimbal is important so that you can get the shots you need. I personally enjoy reviewing smartphone gimbals as I like to explore their new features and help you make the right purchase decision. Now there are six things I consider that are most important when it comes to buying a smartphone gimbal, that being the size, setup time, battery life, special features, performance and price. Now before you start I want to thank Zion for sponsoring this video and sending me over the Smooth Q4. So let's start off with the weight and the size. When choosing a smartphone gimbal I prefer having one that is compact and small. The Smooth Q4 feels lightweight not heavy at all at around 340 grams. There are lighter gimbals out there but I prefer a bit more weight on a smartphone gimbal as I can operate more smoothly and get more stable video results. It has about the size of my hand but it is a bit too large to fit it in my pocket. It would be possible but I prefer carrying it in my sling bag since it comes with a tripod as well. So let's look at the setup time to get this gimbal running. It's important for me to have a quick setup time as I want to be able to capture moments quickly. Unfolding the Smooth Q4 takes six steps which is a bit too long for me. First I would unfold this part that will be one then these two arms right here two and three and then I would unlock all three motors so four and then five and then six. Now there is a hack to it you can leave the arms unfolded and keep the roll and tilt motor unlocked this way you will only have two steps to unfold the gimbal. I can just simply put this up unlock it and I'm ready to go. So the startup time takes around seven seconds I can simply just press this button on the side and now it's turned on. So as you can see it does take a little bit of time but this isn't a big issue for me since I can set it into standby mode by press holding the mode button for long and now it will enter standby mode and when I'm ready to shoot I can just press the mode button again and start shooting. In terms of battery life the Smooth Q4 can operate up to 15 hours which is great to bring on trips this way you don't have to constantly charge the gimbal and can use it for multiple days. There is a fill light included which I will talk about later but if you use the light a lot it could decrease the operating time. I really wished you could charge your smartphone with the Smooth Q4 because shooting videos especially when using a professional app like Filmic Pro drains a lot of battery and I also wouldn't have to bring an extra power bank with me. Now to charge the gimbal fully it takes around 2.5 hours which is normal for most smartphone gimbals. So let's now move on to some of the special features the Smooth Q4 has. A special feature that the Smooth Q4 has is the portable fill light. This can be useful to increase the quality of your video when shooting in low-lit environments. The great part is that it uses magnets which you can mount on top of the gimbal or easily take it off and you can see it will produce a fill light. Now I can also choose the direction of the light by simply switching this and now I can use it to brighten myself when doing vlogs for example. Now you can also choose the level of intensity of the light by pressing on the wheel on the side and as you can see it can get really bright. Now it also comes with different magnet filters which you can use for creative use and I can simply just attach it to the front of the light which is really cool. Another great feature the Smooth Q4 has is the built-in extension rod. This is pretty awesome. This can be especially useful for vloggers that allows them to have the camera further away from them and have more in the frame not having to worry being cut out. Another reason why I enjoy the extension pole is because I can get more creative and use it easily to get low shots for example or even fake drone shots. This way I don't necessarily need to bring an extension pole with me keeping it as minimal as possible. Now if you want to unlock the Smooth Q4's full potential the ZY Kami app offers intelligent shooting modes that will help you get the shots you need. I generally don't use the app that come with the gimbal as I prefer creating the shots myself but maybe for your needs you might find some useful features. So let me quickly walk you through the ZY Kami app so that you can get started when using it. I'm gonna open it up and now click on this camera icon over here and I'm now inside the ZY Kami app. Let's now switch over to landscape mode by triple pressing the trigger button and we're gonna start by switching to the selfie camera right over here. So we're currently in video mode as you can see to your right and at the top left you can head back to the home menu and over here below this one we have it set to automatic mode but if you're a pro you would want to switch to manual mode and dial in your camera settings but basically you want to keep your ISO level low and if you're shooting 4k 25 frames per second you want to keep your shutter speed double your frame rate which is 1 over 50 and then we have the exposure value which we're going to leave and then we're going to head back and now the values are locked which is important to avoid exposure changes while recording. Then below we have our resolution and frame rate that we can choose we want to choose the highest resolution possible which is 4k and either shoot in 24 or 25 frames per second for normal speed and if you want to slow down your footage you can choose 60 frames per second right over here. So I'm going to leave it that way and then we're going to head back then you also have the glamour effect but this is not supported in 4k as it says here. So below we have additional settings we can choose which microphone we want to use currently it's using the built-in microphone we have grid lines which will help you compose your shots better currently have the rule of thirds enabled. Next is wide balance important don't set it to auto make sure to either choose one of these presets or you can even create your own custom wide balance I will set it to 5600 this way you won't have any color shifts when filming. So let's move on to gimbal up here you can select different scene modes then we also have a follow mode you can either select the follow mode either by choosing the mode button over here or using the zycami app and currently it's set to pov mode but I use follow mode for most of the time on the smooth q4 I can simply press the mode button to switch between different shooting modes on the dji ohm 4 for example you'll have to use their app to switch shooting modes which can be time consuming being able to switch modes quickly on the smooth q4 allows me to operate faster I also like how I'm able to use the record button on the gimbal not only when using the zycami app but also filmic pro and the native camera app next we have the joystick speed I usually keep it at a medium and then we have the zoom speed I don't use zoom too much as it can degrade the quality you can also important auto calibrate your gimbal if you have any problems and then we have a general just some information about your gimbal now below you see three icons you can see the battery life of your phone the battery life of your gimbal and the current shooting mode you're in so on the top right you have your creative templates that you can use when recording your videos it will basically edit the video for you for example if you want to quickly post your videos on social media and you have different presets to choose from and below it you can switch between the front and selfie camera then you have the recording button over here but you can also use the record button on the joystick then you have gesture control where you can use your hands to start and stop recording and it will also track you as well if you drag a square around your face you will see that it follows you perfectly and this can also be very useful if you need to track either yourself or a subject that is maybe moving fast or you want to have them in the center of your frame and below you have your media where all your videos and photos are stored and then you also have different shooting modes such as you know photo go live and then we have the smart capture over here we also got the panorama slow motion even dolly zoom where it shows you exactly how to create one you also have the timelapse feature and even hyperlapse so that was a basic walkthrough and quick overview of the zy kami app let's now talk about the performance before you decide on a smartphone gimbal it's important to check the gimbal's maximum payload capacity as it won't perform at its best if you exceed those limits maximum payload of the smooth q4 is 280 grams the iphone 30 pro max is a heavy phone weighing at around 240 grams but it should be compatible with the smooth q4 so let's head out and put the gimbal to the test so that you can see how well this gimbal performs and how smooth the shots really are all right guys so we're here in the city of zirg and we're gonna shoot with the smooth q4 using the iphone 13 pro max and for today's model i invited meghan bush gonna help us out pull her on instagram she has some crazy pictures but don't watch too long and of course we also have george with us you probably know this guy from a previous video and today he's gonna shoot all of the behind the scenes and guys don't follow his instagram don't follow it's already too much but i'm still gonna put it in the description okay and when are you gonna start your youtube channel i don't know you promised us i don't have much time instagram is taking a lot all right so we're gonna get started we're gonna shoot some videos with the iphone 13 pro max let's go so message to the audience i think it came out pretty well the handling of the gimbal felt really good it followed my hand movement without any problems and the footage looked really smooth the smooth q4 starter kit starts at 119 dollars which includes the smooth q4 gimbal and the tripod there is also a combo kit available for 149 which not only includes the gimbal and the tripod but also a bag and the fill light for starters the standard kit is more than enough if you find yourself filming a lot at night or are a vlogger the combo kit would be the better option so here are my final thoughts on the smooth q4 gimbal we know that zion has been creating gimbals for quite a long time and they're good at it i think it's a great gimbal to have as it operates smoothly even with heavier phones such as the iphone 13 pro max i appreciate how they include the mode button this way i can see in what shooting mode i'm in and can quickly switch by simply pressing it i think the folding design can be improved it would be great unfolding the gimbal in just one step for a quicker setup time i also wish they included a built-in power bank as i do need to charge my iphone often when traveling the extension pole is certainly a helpful feature to get low or high angled shots i don't use it that often but when i need it it's there vloggers would certainly appreciate the extension pole as you can record yourself more smoothly and have the camera further away from you now the portable light takes it to the next level i've never seen this on any other smartphone gimbal and it's great how you can change the direction of the light as well to either film yourself or your subject for the price of $119 you get a quality gimbal that certainly fulfills its needs for creating stable looking footage and has all the basic features that other gimbals have but with some extra features like the built-in pole and portable light and if you're someone that works with the integrated app then the zycami app is certainly something you should look into an important step to creating smooth looking shots is getting a good mobile gimbal such as the smooth q4 but just having a smartphone gimbal doesn't mean your videos will automatically look cinematic it will take practice and you will need to learn how to use your camera with your gimbal to produce cinematic video results if you're looking to improving your mobile video skills i highly recommend you check out smartphone filmmaking.com where you can join other students in the full program learning everything there is to filming high quality videos with your smartphone fast so i hope you got a good understanding of what the smooth q4 can offer if you have any questions make sure to let me know in the comments thank you so much guys for watching and see you the next time


In this video today, I wanted to share with you the one thing that's stopping you from making sales in online marketing. And that thing is a very simple formula, something that's missing from your equation. That is the 8 to 15 contacts rule. Now, I'm not talking about 15 people. I'm talking about contacts with one single person. So, Salesforce, which is the biggest company for sales CRM in the world, basically did a statistic a few years ago and found that roughly 80% of all sales close after the salesperson has contacted the lead for 8 or 7. I'm not sure which one, but it's 8 or 7 to 15 times since the beginning of that lead's cycle. Most salespeople, 80% roughly of salespeople give up after just 2 to 3 attempts, which is pretty sad. So, you're basically living most of your sales on the floor by missing those 7, 8 to 15 opportunities to contact your lead, to get them thinking about you. And they also say that a person needs to hear about your product for 7 to 15 times just to think of you, just to have you in mind to even contact you in the first place. So, how do you actually bridge this gap? How do you actually get to a point where you get a lead and you maximize the ability to close them? So, I'll give you an example. In Israel, we have a holiday now called Purim. And Purim is basically like Halloween. People dress up in costumes, there's really, really good sales, but instead of being about scary stuff, Halloween is more just about festivities and costumes. So, the company that I'm affiliated with, which does self-development seminars in Israel, decided to put out about 40% off of all products. So, the idea is people couldn't get the products because they were too expensive. So, we made the digital products much, much cheaper. Now, what we did, like most businesses, is send off an email. So, telling people about this very, very cool sale. And what happened was we got a few sales. So, we got about $1,000 in revenue. Now, that's what most people do. They basically send out an email and that's where it ends. We didn't end there. Then, we sent out an SMS, which means a message to people. That was not enough. We went to WhatsApp and we shared the message in all of our groups. And also, I asked the guy who's in charge of digital support for the courses, the online courses, to message every single person that contacted him in the last two months and tell them about this great, great deal. So, that's not enough. What I also did was make a video with the owner talking about this deal and then go to Facebook with advertising. So, not just upload to Facebook, but upload it with monetization and also on YouTube. But we didn't just do that. We also asked for people who are fans, friends, customers to share this to basically stoke the flames. That's not all. I also asked the CEO, there's the owner, there's the CEO to also make another video and to talk to all the loyal customers and ask them to share it. So, customer referrals. Sorry for the English. So, that's another thing we did. But then, that wasn't enough. So, we sent another email. So, two SMS messages. Sorry, another SMS. And then, we sent an extra three emails about this. Now, what's the point of this whole thing I'm saying? And by the way, we did even more than that. What's the whole point of talking about this? The point of talking about this is that at the end of this sale, we ended up generating over $20,000 of revenue from just a day and a half of pushing this out there. Now, does this cost money? A bit. Does this cost money? A bit. Did the advertising cost money? A bit. But at the end of the day, we maybe spent $1,000 to make $20,000 in profit. Now, again, what is the whole story behind this? Why am I trying to tell you this? Because people complained. People said, you're messaging us too much. It's okay. We know about this. But, if you're not getting complaints, if people are not saying, okay, I get the message, you're not hitting people deep enough. What happens is you send out an email. Most people don't even open it. You send out a message. People forget about it. You send a WhatsApp. People just forget about it. You send a video. People watch just 10 seconds of it. What you want to do is overflow people with contacts. And then what happened was we maximized those 8 to 15 contacts. Also, even the sales people told people about this sale. And what happened was people kind of popped. Imagine that people are basically like these different balloons that each need a different amount of interactions to close based on how relevant they are, based on their personality. And what happens is, first of all, there's the low-hanging fruits. So what happens is you send out an email, like just one message, and immediately pop, pop, to go. But then you get also the SMS, and then another one goes. And then you get the WhatsApp, and another one, and another one. But then what happens is most people miss the people at the top, the people that are right up here, the busy people, the people with the actual money, because people with money have a lot less time. So these people you miss.  The weak customers, or the ones that are already bought in, and that means you're not growing your business. But by hitting people up to 15 times, you can basically start popping the higher balloons of the people that are busy. There's many, many different opportunities. Before the holiday we sent out, there is going to be a poor deal. And then during the holiday we sent out, before you go out to party, check out this deal. And then during the parting in the evening we sent out, are you not parting? You should do this instead and get the deal. And then after the parting we sent out, I hope you had a really good party. Now it's time for the deal. And what happened is we popped all the balloons. So basically maximized the opportunity by overloading people and making sure that nobody gets missed.  Very simple. Do not message the people that have already bought. So just make sure that people who already bought it are not getting the same types of communications because that could get annoying. But if somebody did not buy, if you do have a good deal that you want people to get, you think it's really a good deal, it would be immoral of you to not let people know about that deal and not make enough effort, not put out enough action, enough activity to make those people make a decision. If you've only made enough decision, enough of a commitment to just send out just one single email, how much enthusiasm do you think you're going to get from those people? The good things in life. Everything that takes effort, you have to work for it. You have to invest. You have to actually put out an effort. You have to show that you care. So it's not enough to just send an email and expect them to come to you. You need to come to them in many, many different ways. Follow up in as many different ways as you can. As many different platforms and also as many different senses. Sorry, auditory, emails, visual. You want to go for the statistics more like the brain. Emotional, make a video, put out a long video to basically get them invested. You want to make as many different attacks until you hit your targets. If you do not reach your targets, this is something I learned from Grant Cardone, by the way. If you do not reach your targets, the only reason you did not reach your target is not because the target was too high. It's because your activity was lacking. So even if you do actions that are not very efficient, that have low efficiency, those are not the best actions you can take. But you take enough of these actions, you're going to end up making progress. You're going to break that wall. Let's say that there's a wall here and I want to break it. And the best way to do it is obviously with a bulldozer. Just run it over and then there's no wall. But then let's say that I have a hammer. A hammer is much less efficient, but we'll still do the job if you pound it enough. Let's say that I don't even have a hammer. All I have is a freaking table, a few chairs, and maybe some boxes. Well, in that case, I can still break it, but I'll have to hit it many, many more times. So the only reason you won't hit your goals is because the lack of activity is the meaning that if you have a certain target, you want to always keep increasing the activity until you hit your targets. Never lower the goal. So this is the lesson for today. Just to summarize, you want to hit people between eight to 15 times if you want to maximize the amount of sales you're getting. Even more than that, by the way, this is just an average guideline. And by doing that, you hit the high level of people, the people that actually have the money, the people that are actually busy, the people that are not yet persuaded because those will be your new favorite clients. Persistence pays off. And again, if you see that you're not hitting your targets, increase the activity. Don't stop. Think later. It's too late because you've already started. You already have the target. Now it's time for actions to increase your activity until you hit your target. That is all you need to do. Hope this video helped you. If you haven't subscribed yet, please subscribe and like it. And if you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I'll be happy to help. See you soon.


I'm Zeke and welcome to the dream green show quick fact 67% of you guys that are watching this video right now are not subscribed so go ahead subscribe to the channel So you don't miss out on any future videos, but in this video. I'm gonna tell you guys why I am stopped I'm going to stop completely using acorns I'm about to close my acorns account and I'm gonna show you guys how I'm gonna invest my money from acorns to make even More money in the future other than letting it sit inside that account and basically it Do not much of anything for me, but just cost me extra money I'm gonna go through all the pros and cons of acorns, but at the end of the day This is not gonna be an app that I recommend anymore on this channel So it's a bit of how can you transition from acorns to a better platform to make even more money in the future And it's a kind of a video is kind of a rant to show you guys Why I'm not gonna use this platform anymore and how I'm going to invest my money into Google and I'm gonna show you guys exactly why I'm investing into Google in this video So so make sure you stay throughout the entire video. So you don't miss out on any crucial information guys I'm talking about this one move right here. Just based off of statistics over the last What 80 something years based off of statistics this move can make me maybe Almost three four or five times the amount of money. I could make it by just keeping it in acorns So hopefully I can triple my account just from doing this move that I'm about to show you guys in this video But before we dive into this video, this video is brought to you by Weeble Sign up now by clicking the link down in the description and deposit any amount of money One penny if you want to and you'll receive three free stocks paid up to $3,300 with those three free stocks You could keep them inside the platform and decide to use it or you could sell those three free stocks And withdraw all of your money guys. It's literally free money. Do not miss out on this amazing Opportunity also, I'm gonna leave a link in the description to coin base that is by far the easiest way to buy and sell Cryptocurrency right now you receive a 10 free dollars worth of Bitcoin by using my code down in the description to coin base But enough talking guys, let's go ahead and dive straight into this video Welcome back dreamers here we are on my acorns account right now. I have $9,706 inside of my acorns account I have my portfolio set on aggressive automatic times to and I invest $10 every single Friday now This is the the this is the thing right here. It costs to use acorns It costs up to five dollars a month sometimes even more to use acorns And especially if you are early investor just investing with your pocket change that five dollars will be maybe 10 15 20 percent of your portfolio So for the first year or so you'll be losing money just from them overcharging you I'm gonna show you guys how to do the exact same thing that acorns is is doing with your money And you can do it completely free.  Now. This is the aggressive This is the most aggressive acorns will invest your money This is the most aggressive they will invest your money and we take a look at what they're investing in on aggressive 55% and large company stocks 10% medium company stocks 5% small company stocks and international company stocks If you look at the bottom on up the ticker symbol is IXUS ticker symbol IJAR medium company stocks is IJH and his is the largest percent of your portfolio Large company stocks 55% and they are just investing into the ticker symbol VOO VOO is a ETF that tracks like the top 500 companies in America So it is it is the standard loud when people say I'm gonna outbeat the market. They're talking about VOO Can you can you outperform VOO or can you underperform VOO? So that is like the standard guys VOO So they're gonna take your pocket change and invest it into VOO So if you guys just wanted to do that So if you guys want to do that on Weboo or on Robin Hood, you could do that yourself I'm going to show you guys how to do that in just one second But basically they're just investing your money into the ETF VOO. That is not aggressive at all You're gonna if you're on this channel, you're not trying to retire in 60 years You're trying to retire quicker than your parents retire, right? So otherwise you want to be on this channel trying to figure out how to make money quicker than 60 plus years, but yes, you would Disinvesting to VOO. That's the standard 30 40 50 years You're gonna have a million dollars for sure because VOO Historically speaking does go up six to seven percent every single year So we go, so we take a look back and just go to my portfolio and scroll down a little bit Um in the last 30 days, I invested 226 dollars, but that's from a little bit of referral So my roundups every time I swipe my card my roundup is on times two So that's 51 dollars and 16 cents. So we go right here 51 dollars divided by 30 days That's they're investing a dollar and 70 cents of my roundups into the market every single day Which is fine. I'm fine with that and I invest $40 every single Month into a corn. So so basically I invest around two dollars and seventy cents a day into the ticker symbol VOO So now let me show you guys exactly how to do that on Robinhood so that you don't have to spend your money on a corn in order to do the exact same thing All right, so here we are Robin Hood ticker symbol VOO. This is the exact same thing They've been investing to over the last five years that up 83% like I said, it's a pretty solid ETF But it's not really that aggressive. It's just the market is not aggressive at all So what you could do you can hit trade hit buy and you at the top right where says shares You want to click that and hit re-encurrent investment? So if I know that on a coins my pocket change every time I swipe my car and I'm investing around $2 and 70 cents a day I could show you that I can invest into the market every Monday through Friday Every day right there the exact same way and then once you had a select your payment account You can invest that same one dollar into via of you want to that same two dollars into via of you want to But me just for the sake of this video I'm gonna let this run for the next year or so just to show you that I could do the same thing Acorns and do you make more money than I would putting this five thousand acorns because they are taking a percentage of My portfolio because it costs to use acorns and this way is actually free guys And I'm bringing this to all these subscribers because I want a lot of people do not have Thousands of dollars to invest to have a small account and they're trying to grow that small account and acorns is in a lot of it up and I only like to refer to you guys great apps to use like Robin Hood weeble Moo Moo I will only refer those apps to you guys because I use them and I trust them and other people that use them also Don't don't have many complaints about them at all But I've been seeing a lot of complaints about acorns in my emails And I really have to dive deep into it and see that a lot of people with small accounts Is it's not really worth your time Especially if you could do it on platform like Robin Hood completely free doing a weeble completely free So here we're gonna I'm gonna hit review swipe up And just like that guys every single day, I'm gonna invest into via oh five dollars I'm gonna save a whole bunch of money Then I will have invested into acorns and let me show you guys what I'm gonna do with my acorns money when I rich All the nine thousand dollars. I'm gonna come over to tickle some of geo GL which is Google right now I have two shares Google is having a twenty two one stock split right so that means for every one share that you Own of Google they're gonna give you 20 shares and then divide the price in by 20, right? So so right now Google is at two thousand six hundred and eight dollars that mean when I would draw my nine thousand dollars I could pick up three more shares giving me five years someone that had that stock split five times 20 I'll have a hundred shares of Google the stock price is gonna be divided by 20 bringing the stock price around Let's see two thousand six hundred dollars two thousand six hundred divided by 20 Google's gonna be worth around 130 dollars after they do the stock split now This is why this is so huge when when a company like Google have a stock split Or when any other successful company that has been performing will have a successful stock split like a three to one five to one Google is having the twenty one they usually outperform the stock market by six percent in the stock market like I said is VOO is SPY that is the stock market So if I'm taking my money based off of historical dollars data after the last 60 70 80 years that when a company have a stock split they outperform the stock market by six to eight percent The last one was Apple that had one day outperforming by 12 percent and Tesla outperforming by like 20 or 25 percent when they had their stock split So Google is another tech company that's having a 20 to one stock split So if I want my money working harder for me, I'm gonna take it out of VRO, which is what Acorns is investing into I'm gonna put in Google and it should outperform VRO by six to eight percent based off of Based off of historical data making me a ton of more money in the future guys So I'm gonna just completely get done with Acorns and I'm not using that platform anymore I'm gonna eventually get five shares of Google Anticipating the stock split if you guys want to know more about the Google stock split and exactly when it's happening Click click this title right here That'll take you to my stock split video to show you to give you a deeper dive in on exactly what is happening with Google and How it's actually an amazing thing and the last reason I'm done with Acorns is because I've been telling you guys for years that if you Use Acorns, they do have an invite a friend's Section to where if you invite three friends if you invite five friends that week you get sometimes 300 maybe 400 dollars invest into your account right now They have an event where if you invite six friends This week you'll get a thousand dollars invested into your Acorns account. It sounds amazing But we're actually what actually what I've been experiencing is that I myself have not been getting paid out I've gotten three or four friends to sign up sometimes when they'd have the $200 before program I have not been getting paid out and it's in fact in Acorns account You can't even see who you're getting to sign up when they sign up if they deposit it or not And they're completely screwing over me. So I went to my email I checked my emails from you guys to see if the same thing was happening to you guys and I had Number number of emails from subscribers out there people that are my friends saying that Acorns is not giving them that money So so I only could promote platforms that I actually trust and I'm losing all of my trust in Acorns Hey, they're charging smaller accounts so much money to where they're not gonna make any money their first year and To that they don't play out their video content creators like me that actually supported their program On YouTube making tons of videos about them And I might have to take those videos down because they're all a lie when Acorns is out here Not paying out their referral programs to their influencers like me and then what's even worse is that they're not Paying out their referral programs to people that really need to grow their account when they're paying out $200-$300 for signing up two or three of your friends and they're not giving those people that money So this would be the last time I would ever make a video on Acorns unless something dramatically changed about that app To where it's a great app for small investors to get started Until then I could not pull up promote this platform any further So that is that I'm gonna redraw my money invest into Google outperform VOO and also still invest into VOO for the foreseen future But other than that guys, I'm done with Acorns and there you go dreamers That is how I plan to outperform the stock market from switching from Acorns and investing it into the actual company Google and if you don't want to invest your Pocket change into Acorns and just want to invest into the exact same companies. They're investing into those are the companies They're investing into basically they're just investing into ETFs and the main ETF they invest into is ticker symbol VOO So yeah, like I said, I only promote great platforms of you guys want your three free stocks that they if you deposit one penny and Actually, if you just deposit one penny, you will receive three free stocks Valued up to three thousand three hundred dollars. Now. I'm not saying you're gonna get three thousand three hundred dollars You could get the minimum or I've seen people actually get a Apple stock and Netflix stock I've seen people actually get those inside of the discord So if you guys do want to keep up with what stocks I'm buying because I buy more than just via Oh, if you guys want to keep up with what stocks I'm buying I'm gonna leave a link to patreon down in the comment section the patreon to take it to my discord inside the Discord I post every single time that I buy and sell a stocks I post my technical analysis in my swing trades. We also have a great community of traders in there So if you sign up, you have a whole bunch of knowledge access to a whole bunch of knowledge It's just one place at the type of your fingers And also we have some pro day traders in there that day trading option trade and they post their trades every single day So if you want to be a part of a great community check that link out down in the comment section Don't forget to pick up your three free stocks with weeble, but other than that guys I'm Zeke bringing you the dream green show and I'm out. Peace


Get ready, boys. It's gonna be crazy. Here it is, game over. It's a freakin' biggin'. I feel this cast. I just have a tingling sensation down my body. Oh my god. It's a freakin' giant. Oh my god, it's another giant! Yo, what's poppin', people? Welcome back to another video. Thank you guys so much for the support. Listen, man. If you're new to the channel, please hit that subscribe button. Hit the notification bell. Hit the like button if you guys have been enjoying the content. Today, we're gonna be doing some bank fishing. You guys love the bank fishing videos. So we're bringing them back today. And we're actually at a special little area. So in one of the last videos, we actually came out to this new pond on this golf course. And I caught a freakin' toad. Let's roll it back. Should be one right here. See this little indention on the bank. Uh-oh. Oh gosh. Oh gosh. It has to be six plus. Oh my gosh. That was one of the biggest fish of this year for me. So we're gonna have to fish it today. Listen, man, we gotta go fish it. We gotta make it happen. I actually have Fletcher that's gonna come out today, but he is actually taking a Schmedley right now. So I told him, I was like, bro, I'll meet you at the pond. The fish are biting. Can't be waiting on the Schmedley. We're gonna get it started, guys. Let me show you exactly what we got rigged up. And then we're gonna get out to that pond one of the biggest fish of the year. I'm ready for it. I got a custom pro on a Mach 2 and then I got a pro TI on a Mach crush. I got a snatch by 6 cents right here. If you guys want to get the discount, man, I pop it up on the screen and you can get the discount for yourself. I can help you out. A little stroker crawl on a Texas rig. I actually think I'm gonna cut off this trap, man. I'm feeling something right now. I hate to break it to you boys and girls, but I think I'm getting addicted You know, I just... Like, look how good it looks. You know what I mean? Listen, if you haven't thrown the Chatterdunk, it catches big fish. I caught so many big fish last year on it. So many big fish this year on it and I got to try it in this juicy pond.  The Chatterdunk has to catch a big one. So we're gonna go ahead and go over there now. I'm gonna tie this bait on, though. I have a little, tiny finesse trailer. This is a White and Chartreuse Chatterbait. This one is the White and Chartreuse. Throw in that little natural color. I haven't really thrown the white much, but I do have one with me just in case they don't end up eating this one.  Let's get it. Listen, man, we're right here next to this pond and there's a freaking good fish right there. I can't believe I let him swim away from me like that.  It's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be good. We got to check our drag. Here it is, game over.  I think... I can't move them. Oh, it's a four pounder. He is fighting so hard. Oh, yes! Oh, yes! He looks like a high three. He's not four. Mmm! Mmm! Look at that. Choked it. I mean, look at that. You couldn't choke it any better. Well, boys and girls, don't sleep on your boy Noah. It's exactly where I saw him blowing up and there has to be more fish. I literally landed in that corner where he blew up and he ate it right away. Look at that. First fish today, three pounder. What? I thought it was a four, but heck, I'll take a three any day of the week. That's a good fish. We're going to get an awesome release on him right here. It's kind of hard to get down to the water, but we're going to try without slipping. I got some shoes with some tread on my tires today. So, all right. Pretty fish. Look at that. First fish today. Are you kidding me? Wait. That was the best release I've ever done. Holy cow. Now that is the way to start the video. You can't make it up, guys. You can't make it up. I literally didn't even have to reel it. I like threw it in there and it was done. All right. We're going to throw a couple more casts. Then we're going to go to the next pond. All right. Never throw in the chatter donkey in here. Guess what? We know there's big ones in here now. Like, oh, one just swam off the bank, really small. We haven't caught many fish in here, but they're in here. And there's some freaking giants in here too. So, what do we hook another one like that, that last one? That was crazy, guys. That fish was so big. Yes, yes, yes. You were a warm one. I just saw something roll and then all of a sudden I just slowed it down and he said, let me just eat it real quick, Noah. Just let me have it. I said, you know what, Jimmy? I'll let you have it. And guess what? I let him have it. Look at that. Pretty little bass. You're about a pound or a bud. I ate the bite. And I hope you appreciated the meal, even though it was a fake one. See you, bud. All right. That's a good little sign. We've only casted like three or four times and we've got to fish. That water is so warm. It is kind of cool out today, though. I ain't going to lie. I was like driving over here and it was a little chilly. It was a little nipply out this morning. Well, man, what a start to today's video. If it's going to be that easy now, I don't know what to say. We're having fun enjoying life and enjoying fishing. That's what it's about, man. There's a ton of brim on the bank. That's why these bass are so big, man. They're eating these big bluegill. All right. Get another sales call. I swear. I feel this cast. I just have a tingling sensation down my body. Oh, my God.  Oh, my God. It's another giant. I just sent a jib. Oh, my God. I don't even know how big he is. He's freaking giant, guys. Giant, giant, giant. I told you how to tingle and slingle and slingslation. Oh, my God.  Oh, it was huge. Oh, my God. What do I do? Oh, my God. You can't make this up. Calm down now. Calm down. Calm down. It's okay. It's just a fish. We're just fishing. We're just... Yo, guys, you cannot make this up. You can't make this up. You can't make it up.  Yo, there's brutes in this pond, man. I swear. I told you guys I had a tingling slingslation. I would weigh it, but the golf cart's all the way over there. Fletcher's not here yet. He's going to be so mad, honestly. I told him. He had to take a shimad. I was like, dude, I just got to go fish, man. What in the world? That's a five pounder, though, guys. Like I said, I would go get the scale. Wow, the water's too long. I don't want to hurt it. I'm trying to see if Fletcher's pulling up at the best time ever, but I don't see him. But that is a five pounder. Holy cow. I mean, look at that brute. That is a toad, boys. Toad. All right, just show you the size. Look at this. I can't tell... These things are 10 and a half. Look at that fish, bro. Oh. It's a little gushy. I don't know what to say about that, but I think we can confirm. That's a five-younder pounder. That is a five-younder pounder.  Thank you, baby. Oh. Guys, this is crazy, man. We just started. We caught a three-pounder.  Are you kidding me? You can't make that up. I was like, I got a tingling sensation in my body. Thomp. Okay. What in the world, guys? There's brutes in this pond. This is the second time we fish here. There's brutes. And I'm not going to lie, the golf course out here isn't the best. Like, the fishing out here, like, I've been to better golf courses. This is just fun. I'm having a good time. Every one of my videos is about having to go... I don't care if I'm fishing the river, if I'm fishing a lake, if I'm fishing a pond, if I'm fishing a golf course pond, a farm pond. Listen, man, I'm having fun. That's what it's about. A lot of them guys get too competitive at it. And listen, man, I know about the competitive side. I fished tournaments my whole life. I fished tournaments the last 10 years. But, man, I can tell you, I don't care who you are, to catch a fish like that, that's fun. And it just seems like they're biting today. I don't know. Because, like I said, we haven't caught a ton out of here. I think we caught three, maybe? Like, last time we caught three. I caught this two on the same, pretty much the same cast last time, and then that really big one. I don't know if Fletcher caught any inherent. That's just crazy, man. It's just unbelievable. There used to be a ton of grass in this corner, and it's all gone. It looks like they either sprayed something or it just died off. I don't really know. But, um, holy cow, we caught a freaking five pounder. I didn't even take a picture. Fletcher's not going to believe me. I didn't even take a dang picture. Why did I not take a picture of that fish? I didn't buy myself. I don't know, I have a big problem with taking pictures of a fish unless they're like eight plus. I feel that cast for some reason. Someone's telling me. Oh my God, he hammered me. You can't make this up, guys.  So this is my theory, guys. This is my game plan right now. I'm covering the bank right now between five and 15 foot off. I'm going to try to catch the fish without a roaming shallow right now this morning. And then I'm actually going to... Oh my God, oh my God. Oh my God, it's another... Oh my God, there's no way. Oh my God. This is crazy. About a pounder, a pound and a half. Pretty little guy. Anyways, what I was saying, we got very cloudy conditions overcast today. It's pretty cool this morning and I'm fishing five to 15 foot off the bank right now. Just covering the water, trying to get those bass out of... I don't even know what to say. I don't even know what to say. Can I start? Can I talk? Can I talk to the camera fish? Can I at least just give the people an explanation? They're on five to 15 foot off the bank. And I'm just covering this water. We got clouds today. These bass should be roaming. And that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm covering the bank because they're running in packs like that. You guys just witnessed it. There's multiple fish roaming along the bank eating bait fish this morning. When it's in cloudy conditions, that's what you want to do. You know, these fish are going to be roaming so much you need to be covering some water like this. So I'm just walking down, casting. Very basic. And catching these bass out of roaming. Once I'm done fishing the bank on this pond, I'm actually going to start casting out in the middle. I'm going to cover some of the water out there. But like I said, at first I'm just fishing the bank right now. There's another good reason why I'm throwing at the bank right now is because I'd rather catch the fish right here than catch a fish out there and spook the fish on the bank. So I'm trying to catch the fish that are closer to the bank right now. Because at the end of the day I can catch more if I do it that way than if I go ahead and start throwing out deep right now and I spook all the fish that are up shallow right next to me. This is a little tiny trailer I'm throwing very small. Like recently I've been downsizing my trailer and it seemed to work. Like I don't know what it is, but downsizing this chatterbait trailer recently has been the key to my success for the last couple of videos. I don't know why, but it's working. I've put bigger trailers on there. It just hasn't been doing as good. I switch up to a smaller trailer and they're biting it. And I'm still catching good ones on it. It's just crazy. So that's something to think about. But let's keep on covering some water and see if we can catch some more. It's been a fantastic day so far. I can't complain one solid bit. I've already caught five fish. Three pounder and a five pounder. I mean how can you... Oh my God. Eat it. So last time I kind of called my shot on this. There was this tiny indention on the bank and I was like, you know what? There should be a fish there and sure enough it was massive. I think that bite I just had was a good one though. Oh my God. Oh my gosh. This is crazy. It's not big. Even though he's acting very large. That was awesome man. There's a bunch of these solid like pound and a half fish in here. I can tell. A ton of them. The last time the other two that I caught were about this size. And then you just got those footballs. Massive fish. And these colors on the bass are awesome. Mouse are very small. Just aggressive hyper little bass and they're so fun to catch man. I'm having a good time right now. Thank you bud. I don't know if I filmed a video this fast in a very long time. Ooh. That was a fish. Yep. Look. I got one more trailer in my pocket. Took my tail. You good bro? Two seconds. Alright. Just wanted to make sure I didn't have to help you come and pull it out or something. I'm not going to lie man. I've caught six fish already man. Already? Oh my God. There's a huge one next to me. I'll see you in a second. Guys. Huge bass. Just try to eat a dragonfly. Oh my God. He just had me right there. Oh no. No. No. No. Not today. This is insane. That was the hardest hit I've ever had. Oh my gosh. What are these fish on? They were like cracked out or something. That bite rate was insane. What in the world? Oh dude. It's insane. You forgot your camera. There's some eating dragonflies right here. There were some eating some dragonflies right here. Did he get one? I caught a five and a three. It's cracked. What's up? Not that fat. No. But he was big bro. Yeah. He was just a big fish. Dude. They're just like these conditions like the overcasts are just they're roaming. Oh it's prime dude. Just gotta be. You can see everything in this water dude. You might eat it. He turned away. I think he saw me. There's a good little fish. He got like two pounds. There it is. There's one. There we go. Just had one followed in. Three back in there. Had a good little pounder. Nice. Here we go. We actually came back to the palm where I started off. Oh nice bass. I want about two pounds. Try to eat it before this one. Heck. Three back in there and got the job done. Dang it Jimmy. Fish are just roaming. Oh that's depressing. Dude what? There's another one with it. Look he's trying to get it out of his mouth. There's like five. Dude this is great. Oh What? Oh my god. No way. Dude that was so cool. That was epic. Oh my gosh. You can't make that one up. There was literally five bass. What was I saying? They're roaming like that. Look at that. Fletcher just got out here. Fish bump. Look at that. He's throwing a swim bait too. I'll show it to the camera. There was just like maybe four with him. There was a ton. It was a whole pack. This is a prime example of what I was talking about. These bass are roaming the banks in packs. And that's exactly what that was. That was crazy. That was like the most fally thing I've seen yet. That is the definition of some fall fishing. At its finest. Man. Good thing you were with me. Holy cow. I would have been freaking out. Look at that thing. We both filmed the video of this guy. As you can see it's probably about still a good little swim bait.


Before I came out here, I talked to Rand about my personal brand, which is Sexy Black Church Lady. So when I say how y'all doing, I'm going to need some real response and some amen's and stuff as we start having this conversation today, OK?  Before I get into the slides, I've had this one overarching career insight about how to be a happy marketer that I want to share with you, and it's really all about keeping your career, keeping your work, keeping what we do every day in perspective. The best way I know how to articulate this is to share with you this really profound Buddhist adage that I learned back in my agency days when my first full-time jobs in marketing. You guys will definitely want to write this down and imprint it on your heart. It goes like this. It's PR, not ER. It's PR, not ER, right? We're marketers, but you get the gist. The idea is that fear and anxiety of our leaders, of the other people around us, about what we're doing can be very contagious. But before I started in marketing, I had a super rich life journey that included things like I was a teenage mom. I had my son when I was 17. So I now have a 24-year-old, which is odd, because I feel like he's older than me. Don't know how that happened. I was a probation officer. I was an attorney. I was a real estate broker at the very, very worst part of the great, other people call it the Great Recession. I call it the not-so-great recession. So years later, when I was the chief marketer at my fitness pal and my team would start to freak out about whether a thing that we were doing was going to work or not, I would ask them to come along with me and do some triage. Do we know where other children are? Is anyone going to jail? Is anyone going to lose their house? If not, we're good. We can work through everything else, because we're marketers. And we have to keep what we do in perspective. And by that, I don't mean to minimize what we do. The flip side of that is we live in the best time ever to ever have been marketers. The energy flows so fast. The creativity moves so fast. Technology moves so fast. You can go from concept to actually immediately directly touching a customer so much more quickly than has ever been possible before. And frankly, so much more quickly, I saw once I got on to executive teams, then any other function in the company, you have the ability to have that impact. So I do talk to a lot of fearful and stressed out marketers, and one of the pieces of advice that I give them all the time is, if you're fearful and stressed out because you're working in a fear-based organization because people do more often make decisions than in your company because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't do something, then out of the motivation to create something beautiful or impactful. Or if you're just working on products that you don't really like that much or you don't feel like are that impactful or good, don't work on them. Just don't work on them. There are many, many companies out there, many leadership teams who are conscious and consciously trying to create beautiful companies, beautiful cultures for their people, and products that may or may not be changing the whole world, but are creating a positive impact on the people the customers you serve. So go work there. Now, I could actually drop the mic on that because if you followed all of that advice, you would probably be a happy marketer. But I promised I would talk to you a little bit about the transformational consumer and the content crisis that we're in. So let's do that. Here we go. First, since we're talking about fear and happiness, I want us to have, let's do a little exercise and group vulnerability. I want you to each take one minute, pick a person next to you or near you, and each of you give an answer to this question. What are you afraid of? Tell your neighbor one thing you're afraid of. Go. Now, make sure you switch. Here's the deal. Human beings, baby humans like this guy right here, we're born with two fears and two fears only. We're born with a fear. Does anyone know what they are? Shout it out if you do. They're born with a fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Those are the only two fears that humans are born with. So the first takeaway every time I do this exercise is that tonight everybody should give a ring to their parents and figure out what happened that you acquired so many other fears in your lifetime. But most of my work, in most of my work, I talk with CEOs and CMOs and marketing teams and based on my extensive research with these audiences, I am petitioning the powers that be to add one more fear to the list of inborn human fears. The fear that you'll get no love on Instagram, the fear that no one will follow your Twitter channel, the fear that no one will download your app and no one will buy what you're selling. Now, generally I think of the fears that I hear the most as bucketed under the fear that we won't grow. The lack of growth is the biggest fear that I hear from CEOs and CMOs and it's usually lack of growth of leads, of customers and of followers. And what they usually do to fight those fears is also growth related, right? You solve the fear of growth with growth hacking. You solve these fears with brand advertising and user acquisition efforts. Marketers are afraid to, the ones that I talk to are often afraid of the silly metrics that they're given, metrics that they know don't actually mean much of the business.  So that fear of someone's constantly criticizing the work because it's so public. The fear that as soon as we get started and get traction, someone's gonna come along and move our target again. Having to market products that you're not really that into and ultimately the lack of influence in the organization, the lack that people will hear you enough to give you the resources that you need to do the work that you need to do. Now, I think even these fears almost all track up to and live under the leadership team's fears of lack of growth of customers, lack of growth of leads, lack of growth of followers. And I think those are worthy things to want for your company, but I feel like we are all looking fixated on the wrong thing, right? When you look beyond the vanity metrics about how many customers we have, how many followers we have, how many downloads we've gotten, to add the metrics that it actually takes for a company to succeed, you see quickly that we're all afraid of the wrong thing. As far as I can tell, any company and any industry at any stage will be successful if it engages two audiences over and over. It's customers and it's employees. And the data that I've seen shows that most companies aren't actually doing that great a job engaging either it's customers or their employees. Now, Track Maven's report says that brand published content is up 35% and customer engagement with that content is down 17%. We're publishing more, people are engaging with it less. Ad data, there's a really interesting, whole new field of eye tracking ad data that shows that even when you can get customers in front of a screen and play a video ad on that screen, 60% of them avoid the ad by just turning their heads, just by turning their heads. I have almost only worked on apps, so I know a lot of the big brands out there are looking to solve for some of these problems by creating an app. But I will tell you from my experience with apps that it's way harder to get people to engage with an app than it is to get them to engage with a tangible product. Local Lytics says that something like 60% of apps that are downloaded will be used less than 10 times and the vast majority of them are used only the single time they were downloaded, just the time they were downloaded. And the news on employee engagement is not so much better either. And I actually see a lot of parallels between engaging your internal audiences and your external audiences. Gartner says like 70% of American employees rank somewhere on this spectrum of disengagement from kind of like neutral and meh to toxically actively hateful toward their employers and toward their work. Now, we have a disengagement dilemma when you can't actually even pay people to be engaged. If we fear anything, it's not the lack of growth of followers and that sort of thing we should fear. We fear should be disengagement because disengagement is the number one limiting factor on every business. If we're fixating on growth and getting people into the top of the funnel without paying attention to engaging them and stopping churn, what we call it churn in the app world, once they're in, it's like pouring champagne down the bathtub drain, right? When you get to a place where your cost to acquire a customer is greater than the lifetime value of that customer to your business, that is not a sustainable business model. And the other reason I think that disengagement is the number one limiting factor on businesses is that you can actually buy growth, right? You can growth hack your way and get people into the funnel, you can brand advertise your way enough, you can buy followers, you cannot buy engagement. You cannot buy engagement, you have to build it. And if you do build it, then having an engagement engine, making your marketing, your content marketing programming serve as an engagement engine for your business takes the limits off of any business in any vertical.  Now, engagement means lots of things, there are lots of metrics around it. When I say engagement, I generally mean just people care about what you sell, they buy what you sell, they read what you publish, they watch your videos, they tell other people about it. An engaged customer is a customer who cares about your product, opens your emails, spends time on your app. These are the things that takes for a business to survive. A deeply engaged customer is a love mark and I'm not sure if you're all familiar with that, the phrase and the framework of love marks, there is an incredible book written by Kevin Roberts from Sachi and Sachi about the love mark phenomenon. But he just says that a love mark is a brand that has earned its customers loyalty beyond all reason when you think about what the product actually is. And he says that quantifies that love marks are brands that have reached high levels of love and respect from their customers. Now, the thing I disagree with him about is he says the way you know if your brand is a love mark is that if your customers can't get to your product, they protest loudly. Now, I've never worked for a CEO who would let me take the product away from customers to see if they protest loudly. But I have spent enough time on executive teams now to know that in C-suite, SIG engagement actually is measurable along all of these lines, return visits, time in store, time on site, time in app, repeat purchases, all of these things that ultimately lead to increased customer lifetime value.  Most often, the companies that I talk with are looking toward digital things to drive engagement. They're looking at digital, they're looking at social, they're looking at big data, they're looking at demographics. I argue that this misunderstands the essential nature of the disengagement dilemma. Digital solutions work for digital problems and I'm a digital chick, but I'm going to show you my exhibit A, the lawyer and me couldn't resist doing that, of why I don't think disengagement is a digital problem. Normally, I require, actually let's try it guys, let's actually read this quote all out, it's gonna be music to my ears, let's do it now. Okay, advertisements, all of you, are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence, sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. I think you can tell by that language that this quote was not like tweeted last week. Does anyone wanna guess when this quote was written? Clue, that's the guy who said it in 1759. This guy was writing about advertising being disengaging in 1759.  Disengagement is a human problem and the solution will also be human. We will only fix the disengagement dilemma by understanding the undying principles of human motivation and reorienting our product and our marketing efforts to align with the reasons why people do what they do and why they want what they want and buy what they buy. Now, here's some basic truths about human. Human beings since time was begun have wanted to be healthier, they've wanted to be wealthier and they've wanted to be wiser. It is still to this day one of the most powerful purchasing motivators the desire people have to transform their lives in these ways. The challenge with these things, healthier, wealthier and wiser, as aspirations is that all of them require behavior change and behavior change is hard.  So there is a particular consumer group, I'm not gonna go into the framework a ton because I wanna get into the meat of the action items around it, but there is a particular consumer group who has figured out that there are brands out there that can help them live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives and they're constantly eagerly out there engaging with those brands. They're early adopters, they're highly influential in the buying behavior of the people around them. Those people are called the transformational consumer. That's what the book is about. In order to engage the hearts and minds of people you have to be serving their aspirations. And if you wanna be the kind of, oh, one point is unless you're selling, this is not just a framework that is helpful for health companies or personal finance companies. I say that unless you're selling actually like alcohol, tobacco and firearms like the federal agency and there's some arguments about alcohol being a nice stress manager, but we won't go into that right now. Unless you're selling one of those things you really can reach and engage customers by helping unlock their desires to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives.  So you're wrong, that's garbage bags can be transformational too. If you wanna be the kind of marketer that engages customers, that drives business results and that as a result develops internal influence and autonomy and sovereignty over your decision making, if you wanna be the kind of marketer that consistently gets the resources you need to do the programs that you wanna do, do these things. Let's go through them rapid fire. The first is to rethink what you sell. You don't sell a product, you don't sell a software or app or a packaged thing or even real estate. What you sell is a transformation. You sell a transformation from having the problem that your company exists to solve to no longer having that problem. You may sell confidence or being more successful and your customers being more successful in their career, being more productive or prosperous. You may sell well-being in their bodies or their relationships. You may sell something that helps them be better world citizens or better parents. But what you sell is easing the frictions that they experience along their journey or you sell more fuel for them to get from one stage of their journey to the next stage, to get across their path and their journey faster, more joyously, more beautifully even or more easily than they would have done without your product. A lot of this idea of rethinking what you sell is sort of my rallying cry to all of us as marketers to get out of that product first worldview that is very, very easy to get in when you work in a product company because everyone else in the company is very focused on your product first. This is about shifting into a problem first worldview. It's about no longer fixating on the things that you sell and instead fixating on what problems you actually solve for people. In the process of rethinking what you sell, you will have to rethink your customer and who they are. Your customer is not just your existing customer base, the people who follow you on Twitter or Facebook, even like target buyers of your product. Your customer is anyone who is out there dealing with the high level human scale problem that your company exists to solve. You have to find what that is. You have to find that deeper human motivation that your company exists to solve. Often, just as a tip, the origin story is often, your founder's original reason for founding the company is often a clue as to what that deeper motivation is. I'm gonna give you a couple of examples here on how to define the PDC as a term I use in the book. It's a personal disruption conundrum, but the problem, the high level human scale problem that you exist to solve. I used to run consumer content marketing and PR at trulya.com. It was a real estate search engine. We never talked about ourselves as a real estate search engine. We always talked about what we were doing, the reason we existed as being to help people make as wise a possible decision as they could on the biggest transaction they would ever make in their lives, right? At Slack is another good example. Slack is a tool you could call a group chat software, but that's not what they talk about. They talk about their reason for existing as making workplaces more collaborative, helping people be more productive at work, and helping companies tap into the untapped hidden value in all the documents that exist that no one knows about in the company. My fitness pal, we were calorie counting app at Essence, but we didn't talk about that. We saw ourselves as like really kind of an Avenger, an Avenger superhero team out there battling the status quo injustice that we saw, which is that it's so much easier to live an unhealthy life in this world than a healthy one. We did not like that and we were on a mission to solve for that and to remove every kind of friction that we could possibly see from our customer's journey to living a healthier life. How many people here are familiar with the hero's journey or have used it in their work? Yes, okay. So there's one way in which I really strongly encourage you to start rethinking your customers and it requires that you know a little bit about the hero's journey. So the hero's journey is an age old human story arc. It's just sort of a narrative. Think of it as like a fill in the blank almost kind of story but it's much more than that. The hero's journey has been found in every one of the most engaging stories that human beings have ever told themselves across all time, across all cultures seriously. The hero's journey is this, it always involves a hero. It always involves that hero being called to an adventure so they have to leave home and go out into an unknown world where they have battles and they have quests. They're aided by mentors and guides and sometimes tools. They ultimately have one big battle, they are victorious and then they return home and when they return home they come home with the spoils of the quest but they also come home changed as changed people having been through this battle. And now a lot of marketing, there has been a lot of writing and marketing about using the hero's journey because the story type is so incredibly engaging to the human brain. The hero's journey is a story of Luke Skywalker, of Jesus Christ, of Wonder Woman, literally that arc is just an arc that your brain sees and goes, hey, that's just like a really good movie or a really good story. So many, many people have said all marketing should tell stories built on the hero's journey with the brand and the role of the hero. I argue that we should be creating this story arc through our content marketing but that your customer should be in the position of the hero, right? Then your job is to understand what their journey is, to understand what their quest is, to understand what the battles are that they fight along the way of solving the problem that you exist to solve and your job is to position your brand, whether it's your company's spokespeople or your content marketing or your actual product, your brand becomes their aid, their guide, their mentor and their tool.  It actually means like talking to customers, but remember the way I've defined them, not just people who already use what you use, get out in the world and talk to all of the people, not all of the people, talk to representatives of the people who are trying to solve the problem that your company exists to solve. Your whole company is now tasked with becoming an expert on their journey. And when I talk about doing customer journey mapping, which this is a very, very redacted version of the real customer journey map I built at my fitness pal, I am not talking about mapping your customer's lifecycle within your brand or your own channels. That is an important and worthy thing to do, that's just not this. What I'm talking about is mapping out their real world journey, their real world experience of going from having the problem that you exist to solve to no longer having that problem. And I'll share with you a few of the elements that you need to make sure you capture as you sort of document that journey. And there's actually like not really a shortcut to doing it. You can kind of do it online sometimes with like online communities, online listening, reading all the Reddit channels that are relevant to your subject matter. But you do have to actually immerse yourself in this information and spot patterns to create this kind of customer journey map. So what you are looking for are, you're looking to identify the universal stages that people experience as they go from having the problem to no longer having the problem.  You also are looking for the things that get them unstuck. What are the progress triggers that help people go from one stage of the journey to the next? You'll want to inventory what Google calls their micromoments, right? Where are the places along their path that they're looking to know something or go somewhere or do something or buy something? Who are they asking those questions of? It may not be online. That was something we kept finding over and over again. It was often them asking about workouts, information from the friend that they knew who had used my fitness pile to lose 20 pounds, right? Or asking their doctor or asking other real life people. You actually want to capture both the online and the offline behavior. And you want to capture their natural language patterns. You need to know, I am stunned and amazed on a pretty constant basis at the big gap between the way companies talk about the problem that they exist to solve and the way their customers talk about the problems that they're trying to solve with that product. One of my favorite example of this is that when we first started out at my fitness pile, we were publishing some content for beginner workout. It was like beginner workouts for people who had knee injuries, which we knew was a common thing in people who were new to working out. After we started talking to people, I mean, and we did an ethnography. I think we ended up going to 12 different cities, talked to people in every city. We didn't just talk to them. We actually went into their homes, into their kitchens, into their pantries. Went to the drive-through with them. We went to the gym with them. And I took executives from different functions to every one of those interviews. We heard people say over and over again the phrase bad knees. No one ever said knee injuries. People said bad knees. So we ended up shifting the way we published that content. It was the same content. We just changed, optimized our headlines for their natural language and people dramatically, dramatically engaged with it more. Let's see. All right, now the next step is to rethink your marketing. And it does take a little bit of courage and badassery to do this. Rethink your marketing in a couple of ways. First is we all wanna tell big, beautiful stories about our brands. I would encourage you to make the shift of thinking of the content that you publish as needing to be high value content that fuels your customer's journey, your customer's progress along that journey. This content should not all be about you. It should be for them. The second big shift in marketing that I encourage companies to make is from growth, from marketing focusing just on growth to focusing on engagement. Marketing is an incredible engagement and retention lever. And I have found, I'll talk to you a little bit about it in the next couple of slides, I have found a lot of resources opened up in my company once I proved that marketing was actually able to drive retention and ongoing engagement of customers, not just growth. The way that this works is you use the customer journey information from your journey map and the micro moments, information to drive your content strategy. It just, the journey tells you what problems that they're having that you can solve with content. So this is like about a shift from, right, content's not any longer just about you. It's problem solving content for their journey and the journey stages and the micro moments are the information you need to understand what problems they have that you can solve with content. Select, just choose some of the friction, some of the quit points, some of the progress triggers and you can use them to build your core messages or message pillars that span your entire content strategy. Micro moments tell you a little more specifically what content will resonate with which people at which stage in the journey and specifically where they will be at the different stages of their journey, sometimes online, sometimes off. The natural language stuff does what I just said which is that it just when you have your topics and titles and headlines and subject lines phrased in people's own natural language, it's an immediate engagement trigger.  And the last step here is to turn your insight into influence. Now, you guys know who this is. This is Drew Carey, the comedian. Drew Carey has an amazing quote that I use in the book that goes something like this.  There's a support group for that. It's called the bar and we meet there after work. Work doesn't have to be like that and you can take the customer insights that we're talking about developing for your marketing strategy and use them to gain internal influence in your company and make your life better. I'll be quick here, but the first thing that you have to do is to use, you guys are the best storytellers in the company, right? Use your storytelling superpowers to make the business case for the resources you need to do the work that you know you need to do. The point of influence that you have within your company is at the place where the transformation, the programs you wanna do, the content, the problem solving content programs that you wanna build, they drive transformation for both your customers and for your company. That is your point of influence. So after you get the customer insights that you need to build that sort of a program and before you start making the shift into actually doing the program, do not skip the step of internal PR. Do not skip that step. Tell the story upwards. Tell it to as high up as you can get in the company of the customer transformation. You believe that your new marketing shift will carry out and of the business results that you believe that marketing shift will carry out.  I am a huge fan of proof of concept tests. Before I will do a video campaign, before I will implement a new software to do something, I'll run a subject line in the email newsletter and prove that people are interested in that content. It's just like lean marketing methodology. If you know lean startup methodology, it's start with a minimum viable product, get customer feedback to it and use that as a data point to optimize and iterate your programming. We should be doing the same thing in marketing with our content. In fact, when I first came to MyFitnessPal, they had 45 million customers and no email system. To send an email, I had to have a designer hand HTML code the email. I had to give that to an engineer who had to build it into the app and we had to release an app store update to send any email to customers. But we had 45 million customers, so it was gonna cost a lot to build an email and create an email infrastructure. So before I even bothered making the argument for doing it, I had, I did that hard work of sending four or five weeks worth of emails with that laborious process, but then I had the data points I needed to make the projections for what this program would look like if we scaled it. And we did scale it and we ended up starting a blog that went from zero to 10 million readers a month in, I think, the first nine months we had it. But I also would encourage, I encourage all marketers to get a little more CEO-ish about the way that you treat metrics. Don't just accept the metrics that you're given, especially if you don't agree with them, push back. And if you know what the metrics are that your CEO and your CMO are talking about all the time, when you push back and you say this is what I think we should be doing, phrase the projected impact of the programs you want to do in those metrics terms, not just in the ones that you're doing. Okay, number two is to reposition content as rapid prototyping. I think a lot of C-sweets are surprised at how much it actually costs to build a real great content programming. And so one thing that I have been successful doing is repositioning content is not just for content. Content is also an incredibly powerful way of rapidly prototyping product features, especially in a digital product. You can use a customer's responsiveness to a subject matter or to a headline as sort of a divining rod to help your executive team figure out what product features they'll be responsive to. As an example, so at My Fitness Power, when we started publishing cooking and recipe content, we had this incredible responsiveness from customers and it sort of laid the groundwork for us to end up building a bunch of features into the app that supported recipe logging and supported cooking. What was fun about that was it kind of was like a full circle of feedback loop because then we as the marketing team had the ability to market new product features that we knew would be successful because we knew people wanted them because they'd already been responsive to that content. The third point here is to reposition marketing as retention. And we've talked about that a little bit, but I've just seen time and time again where marketers get a goal, hit the goal and break their necks to hit the goal, but the goal doesn't actually convert into revenue, it doesn't actually convert into retention, it doesn't actually change any of the big things that the C-suite was concerned about. So then everybody's still kind of unhappy even though you did all of that work to hit the goal. I see this happening a lot because I feel that we're not as aggressively pushing back and arguing for what the right metric should be at the time when the goals are set in the first place. So this is a lot about learning to speak up and learning to push back. It requires you to cultivate some emotional groundedness and security and voice. It requires a little bit of a commitment to live in integrity, to not be saying one thing while you're feeling another thing and doing another thing. I talk to all sorts of marketing teams and hear them being like, gosh, we got these goals, they don't make sense. They come back to each other, they come back to me as a consultant and talk about how crazy these goals are and why it won't work or why it's not gonna do it. And my question is always right, well, did you say that? Did you say that at the beginning of the year? And the answer's often no. And the answer's often no because of fear. And I actually had someone say to me recently, Tara, if I pushed back on the goals I was given on the objectives I was given, at my company, that would be a claim. And I said, I don't know what a claim is. And they said it stands for career limiting move, CLM. To which I said, if you speaking back and saying these objectives that I have will not actually drive this overarching business and I know what will or hear some ideas about what will and that's gonna limit your career at a place, you should probably not be at that place. You should probably not be at that place. So this is some about metrics and being strategic and some about just being willing to speak up. When I first came into the scene of my fitness panel my brief as a consultant was just to answer the question, hey, we've got 45 million users and no marketing team. Should we even have a marketing team? And my answer was yes, you need a marketing team but maybe not a traditional marketing team. Maybe it's not a team that's gonna be super fixated on growth and brand marketing and those things. Instead I pushed back that our metrics should be not just a growth metric, a new user growth metric, it should be a growth of engaged users metric. And that ultimately was where we went. We did some things to grow new users but that wasn't our primary focus and a lot of that was because people just didn't know and were looking for some guidance. So in the end, I think in the first 18 months I was there with our content program and the customer research that we did. We grew engagement on the app about 22% on a weekly basis and 25% on a monthly basis all out of marketing. That's totally separate and aside from any of the work that the product team or the international team or any other teams did. And that positioned our marketing team to be one of few teams among my friends that were CMOs of the time at tech companies. We didn't feel like stepchildren at all even though it was an engineering based company. People valued our input. We were called into every product feature road mapping conversation. I think that was largely because we were working, we had positioned engagement and retention as a core function of marketing, not just growth. And finally, create a team of change agents throughout your company. Make sure every function is involved. Make sure people at every level are involved and make sure they're all understanding, participating in and working against the same customer journey map. I see companies want to, companies get very excited about customer research projects and ethnographies and personas and content strategies and then nobody sees them again after they're delivered. What we're talking about here is a whole company shift to a problem first perspective. That kind of shift requires strategy. It requires resources. Tips that I would give from my experience doing this pretty successfully would be if you can do whatever you can to get people as high up on the hierarchy in your company in an actual customer interview as possible. I mean, I think actually every company that we've worked with, in my consulting firm since I've left, we've had the CEO actually come into at least one customer interview. We have people from every single kind of team. We have people from HR and people ops come to individual customer interviews because those people are gonna need to be your squad of change agents that represent the customer and their journey and that problem first shift that you're trying to make in the little sort of everyday meetings and side conversations where decisions are actually made. That is about it for me. These are all the things that I do and where you can find me. I will say that last bit on influence and creating influence in your organization, there's a whole chapter in my book that's just about the organizational piece of becoming an influencer. I am happy to email that chapter to you if you email me at terra at transformationalconsumer.com. And these are the things I do, including a 30 day writing challenge that is entirely designed to respond to the marketers in my world who were struggling to have voice and influence. It's a free experience and it changes people's lives and careers. So that's where to find me and that's it.


A taxonomic study of larger foraminifera in Paleocene rocks from the Pyrenean basin led to the description of 60 taxa, including two new species, and a chronostratigraphic recalibration of the Paleocene shallow benthic zones, SBZ1 to SBZ4, based on correlation with calcareous nanofossil and planktic foraminifera biosomes. The results show that the SBZ1 is defined by an association of non-exclusive taxa, while the SBZ2 is characterized by distinct larger foraminifera biomarkers. The SBZ3-SBZ4 boundary coincides with the base of the Solandian stage, and the SBZ4 biozone appears characterized by glomalveolina levis and alveolina corisensis. This article was authored by J. Sarakeel, Viva Keddo, J. Ibacita, and others.


We stand for a more inclusive workplace in STEM. We stand for more women from developing countries to join the nuclear field. I truly believe that women can bring diverse perspectives, skills, and experience to the future of nuclear technology at SIS. Women also have great ideas, just as history has proven. Women do work in the background, just as men, so I do believe that we should also get equal opportunities in the nuclear field. Nuclear science and technology is at the forefront of addressing the world's biggest challenges. So, join me in celebrating and supporting the hundreds of women making a world of difference on International Women's Day on March 8th, 2024, and every day at the IAEA.


happy to have another jury member here with us who'd like to say a few words. So I'd like to welcome Mr. Anuj Poddar, who's the executive director at Bajaj Electricals. A very warm welcome, sir. Tell us how the experience was. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kati. And good evening to everyone. It's my pleasure to be here. I'll just share a couple of points for me. Firstly, as Anurag and Naval already laid out, there is so much action, so much innovation, so many things, diversity going on in the digital marketing space that is really fascinating to see a lot of that stuff. And then Anurag mentioned that, but I want to emphasize that for us, this was not just an opportunity to judge, but very definitely an opportunity for us to learn. I think this whole experience, the entire day that we spent seeing what's happening, it does open our own eyes to many more things out there that we ourselves take away with us there. Again, if you've seen some of the winners here already, you'll see some more winners that come up. One of the other good aspects of digital marketing is how democratic it is. And Naval referred to this briefly in terms of the long tail or number of entrants, whether it's agencies or brands. So I think the opportunity to win is much greater. It is not dominated by the large agencies or large brands. And we've seen that in the process of all the entries that we've gone through. As a jury, we made sure we looked at the context behind every brand situation, every industry and every brand, no matter what or agency, no matter whether it's a big spender or small spender, big brand or small brand has equal opportunity to win. So you know, that's one of the most valuable takeaways for this from this for all of us. Lastly, I do want to congratulate all of you, the winners. I know the virtual event does away with the pleasure of walking up to a stage and receiving an award in front of a lot of people. But I guess, you know, this is the best that E4M and anybody can do. So I think IDMA and E4M is doing a good effort in, you know, replicating that experience as well as possible. The only consolation message that I have, look at the Olympic winners, they themselves, from what I understand, have to take that medal off the train, put it around their own neck, as opposed to having somebody do that. So I do think we are living in unique times, special times, but that doesn't take away from the achievement and the credit that you deserve. And congratulations to each one of you. And I'm sure IDMA next year will be physically end. Thank you so much.