2021 Trends and Preparing for 2022, with Josh Dougherty

Josh Dougherty is the CEO and a co-founder of A Brave New, a Seattle marketing agency focused on helping businesses accelerate their growth through inbound marketing, branding, and web design. He specializes in working with clients to identify barriers to their growth and overcoming those barriers with strategic content and marketing tactics. He has more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and branding.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• What Salesforce's 2021 report revealed about how marketers feel about today's marketing environment
• How the unusual challenges of 2021 have impacted (and accelerated) marketing trends, including bringing the marketing and sales teams closer
• Why the chaos of the last few years has created both challenges and new opportunities for marketing to prove its value
• Why growth in every industry has been accelerated by the outbreak of the global pandemic, and how privacy law changes have created even greater complexity
• Why lots of high-quality data is crucial for navigating today's challenges, and why clearly defining your organization's long-term goals and strategy matters
• Why video as a content vehicle is also an accelerating trend that takes advantage of being "less polished, more human" to connect with viewers
• Why consumers are increasingly trusting and relying on artificial intelligence throughout their daily lives, and how marketers can leverage AI

Additional resources:  

• Salesforce's State of Marketing in 2021: www.salesforce.com/news/stories/state-of-marketing-in-2021/ 
• Takeaways from the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Convention 2021 by Josh Dougherty: https://www.abravenew.com/blog/takeaways-from-maicon-2021 
• Website: www.abravenew.com 
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jdough/ 
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/a-brave-new/ 
• Why ABM Is Your Small Team's Secret Weapon: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/kickstart-abm-small-teams 
• Get started with account-based marketing in HubSpot: https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/get-started-with-abm
• 5 most common problems with B2B account-based marketing: https://www.impactplus.com/blog/most-common-problems-with-b2b-account-based-marketing

Show Transcription:

Intro: Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. The podcast all about how brave entrepreneurial companies are unlocking their business potential using inbound marketing. Here is your marketing expert and host Polly Yakovich.

Polly Yakovich: I have a special guest for you today. Coming back, Joshua, I don't know your middle name, Dougherty.

Josh Dougherty: [crosstalk 00:00:23] my middle name, and I'm so happy to be here. Now, the whole world knows my middle name. Pretty generic, just like my first name.

Polly Yakovich: Don't give out your Social Security number.

Josh Dougherty: Hopefully my opinions don't be generic. We'll see.

Polly Yakovich: If you are not familiar, Josh and I co-own and co-founded A Brave New. And if you are wondering why I've made it whatever it is, 10, 12, 15 years without knowing Josh's middle name, you will know that those details escape me sometimes. So Josh and I like to talk about some topics from time to time, but we also like to quarterly ish, don't hold us to it, come at you with some trends, some things we're observing, talk about a few topics that are on our mind or that have been circulating amongst marketers recently, and we have four of them for you today. And we'd like to talk about them in light of Q4 budgeting, finishing the year and then also as we turn toward 2022, which feels so bizarre to say, and what we think is going to be percolating next year in the marketing world. Ready to razzle-dazzle?

Josh Dougherty: I'm so ready. I'm also so ready for my mind to mentally switch to the fact that it's 2022, because I still feel like it's May 2020. I always am like, "What? What happened?" The Kraken...

Polly Yakovich: A lot.

Josh Dougherty: If you're in Seattle, there's the new hockey team called the Kraken and they just started playing. And I was like, "Oh, I thought we just got awarded that team two months ago." Nope, three and a half years. COVID.

Polly Yakovich: Also, every time people say the Kraken, I'm like, "Oh, what is that again? A whiskey?" I thought it was a spirit, but no, a professional team. I did not know.

Josh Dougherty: It's an octopus, right?

Polly Yakovich: Yeah.

Josh Dougherty: I think.

Polly Yakovich: I think it's a giant octopus that takes out pirate ships, right?

Josh Dougherty: Yeah. A mythical creature.

Polly Yakovich: Yes.

Josh Dougherty: My son would tell me that was probably a giant squid, not an octopus.

Polly Yakovich: He would know. So the topics we want to hit on today, besides mythical creatures of the sea, are four. So we want to talk about us. We actually want to talk about marketing and marketers a little bit as a profession, what we've been through, what's happening in our field. We want to talk about your audience. We want to talk about strategy, which seems obvious. And then we want to bring it home with some AI thoughts. So, first of all, we want to talk about marketing. And one of the things that's been an interesting read, we'll link it in the show notes, and we'll be very good marketers and send you to the gated page, so Salesforce can get your email address that they want for their report. But the 2021 Salesforce report came out recently, as did several other things. Josh and I have attended a couple of conferences recently, one in-person and one virtual.

Polly Yakovich: And we wanted to talk about some of the things that we're hearing from other people, but the Salesforce 2021 report is pretty excellent. And one of the things that they start talking about that I thought was really interesting is just how marketers feel about all the things and how marketers feel about the things is actually changing marketing in the last couple years dramatically. And I would say as marketers, and Josh, you and I feel this, we have learned a lot over the last couple years. A lot of us have gotten budgets really cut. We've gotten really scrappy. We have gotten super nimble and flexible. I would say to flatter ourselves a bit we've gotten even more creative, innovative and then another thing that we've gone is much closer to sales, I would say. Particularly with sales conferences and in-person and other things like that going away, we've gotten closer to sales.

Polly Yakovich: We've probably dialed up our KPIs quite a bit and we are really laser focused on being revenue productive, supporting ROI, all of those kinds of efforts. I would say in the last couple years, and this isn't to say we weren't focused on those things before, but I would say in and during the end of this pandemic period, if your marketing programs felt like it was a little more on the PR side of the scale, looking at impressions and traffic and all of that, not that that's not important because if you're a marketer you know that the second you stop focusing on even one thing, the higher ups will say, "Actually, every single thing is important. Marketers are covering a very, very wide gamut." But if your program was a little bit more on the PR side of things, you probably moved toward more of the revenue, ROI, sales side of KPIs over the last couple of years. And because we have to answer for every penny in our budget, particularly in this last period, a lot of programs are getting super dialed in on their metrics.

Josh Dougherty: I think the big thing that has happened is as people's... I don't know, their revenue pipeline disappeared, they wanted marketing to help fill it back up and they didn't have the chance to do a lot of the old school things but I think we're hanging on. We're going to go to a football game and have a bunch of people join us, and that's how we're going to sell. Or we're going to take a bunch of people golfing or go on a trip. That just didn't hasn't been able to happen so I think those things were facing challenges anyways from the onslaught of data-driven marketing and data-driven sales, not just marketing, but now they've gone even further the way of, I wouldn't say extinction, but they're becoming less and less of a sales mix and so it's really incumbent on marketers to work more closely.

Josh Dougherty: I think another trend that we've seen from that perspective as Salesforce said that 78% of marketing orgs have changed or reprioritized their metrics, what that has done because it become closer to sales is it's made it so that we have to... The typical old excuse I think of a marketer was well, sales, isn't doing their job to close our leads so all we can report on is how many qualified leads we passed. And that just doesn't float anymore as an argument. I'm mixing my metaphors, but it doesn't work as an argument anymore. So now I think we've spent a lot of time in the last 12 months, and I think a lot of marketers have done this as well, diving in and saying, "Okay, if we can't use that as an answer, then how do we build the relationship strong enough with the sales team to be able to get to the results that we need to make sure there's the checkpoints, the accountability across both organizations?"

Polly Yakovich: And in the Salesforce report, you mentioned one statistic, but all these are really big numbers. 78% of marketing orgs have changed or reprioritized their KPIs. 90% of marketers say their digital engagement strategy has changed because of the pandemic or since the beginning. And 89% say the marketing channel mix has changed. Which reflects what you said, Josh, with marketing having to support and crash in for most sales teams on activities that they might not have done before or now some activities were just fully inaccessible, we've really had to pivot in it and be more laser focused on supporting the sales team.

Josh Dougherty: And I think on top of that, sales teams have become more digitally savvy themselves. So they're looking much more at metrics because of that same change they've been stuck in.

Polly Yakovich: And good news, they become more savvy because it works and also it's been the only thing accessible to them. So, that's been part of the battle. I would say for the sales and marketing team collaborations that we see with our clients there's always some friction there and we talk about this in multiple places, but digital transformation accelerated multiple years in the last two. And so a lot of that happened for sales teams as well when obviously they lost access to a lot of things they had used before.

Josh Dougherty: And I think we'll talk about this more down in the AI area, but we're looking and exploring ways and we're working on how do we pass data across, how do we score data to how do we leverage AI to be able to do that, to do that smarter, which again requires those really, I think, open lines of communication and a real commitment to having clean data across the board as well, which doesn't mean you're just working with the sales team, it means you're working with the sales ops team often as well to make sure the data's clean, set up, high quality and displayed correctly to the sellers so that they can go up the day working on closing things, not on digging through dashboards to find what they need.

Polly Yakovich: Are you saying that to me because I'm supposed to be sending that to you?

Josh Dougherty: Yeah, exactly. I would love 17 dashboards before you go on vacation tomorrow. That would be great.

Polly Yakovich: Sure. No problem. We recently heard Robert Rose speak. I think most people here who involve themselves in content marketing, content strategy would know him. He is one of the founders and leaders of Content Marketing Institute. He said that 90% of sales enablement has moved online. So it's interesting if you're listening to this and you feel like oh, that's not true for us, it's just an interesting barometer and a metric about what's possible. And a lot of the things that we're talking about, I think on the one hand it sounds daunting and marketers often talk amongst themselves and to anyone who will listen about what a big job we actually have.

Polly Yakovich: We're not the arts and crafts department, we're really doing a lot about supporting the brand, supporting thought leadership, creating content, sending the right leads to sales, but it's just a big responsibility, but there's also a lot of opportunity with everything that's happened over the last couple of years. I always think the more silos that get broken down, the more marketing and sales can work together. Josh and I, we talked about this before, we are unashamedly direct response trained marketers and so we love tight KPIs, we love being held to that standard. We think that that should be more of the rule. And so I think a lot of these opportunities are really great for marketing to really prove its value.

Josh Dougherty: I think it's also great to make sure our content is getting extended further because we think about marketers building thought leadership. A lot of that stuff, traditionally it's been shared via email with sales or it's sent in a one-off way. Something we've been working on with number of clients this year is creating a playbook that now that they're doing mostly digital sales enablement, we're creating a playbook where not only can we help document their best practices that they typically have as an organization, but also make sure that we're surfacing content that has been created. I think a great effort, a great cost even in many ways and make sure that surface can be used again and again by salespeople because there's no reason that that thought leadership content should be contained just in the marketing. So I think a lot of this collaboration is really in a good outcome of what's happened, which is ironic because we often think collaboration happens when we're in person, but it's like the digital work from home has really forced people to be more collaborative that way.

Polly Yakovich: And also, not to be dead horse with all this virtual teams and hybrid and all this stuff we've been talking about and how to work from home and la, la, la, but it really has made collaboration easier with other things too. We've had access to people we normally wouldn't. People who normally were on the road all the time were available to help lead your webinar or increased opportunities for collaboration with other colleagues and freelancers and people that normally we would maybe not have thought about collaborating with or partnering with, maybe a competitor, maybe talking about a human topic that's not directly about your product. And so that's been exciting too. And I think that will continue, hopefully. I think it's become the norm.

Josh Dougherty: And I think if that collaboration can continue between sales, marketing, it also gives you freedom to have the, I think, hard conversation with sales because when sales is driving for these bottom line metrics, this is where I take the whole conversation and flip it on its head. But I do think while we've pushed towards metrics like ROI closed deals, sales qualified deals, the open opportunities, which is all really good for us as marketers because it makes us more discipline, we've also discounted brand marketing, which actually directly influences how well you're going to be able to close these deals.

Josh Dougherty: And so by embracing this collaboration, you built a strong enough relationship to then have a seat at the table to be able to explain all this stuff that you are discounting at the top of the funnel needs to happen too so that we can make the bottom of the funnel more efficient. Doesn't mean you shouldn't focus on the bottom of the funnel first because usually there's a lot of ways to improve that bottom, but you can't do it at the expense of sharing and building a case and a story about why you're unique as a brand.

Polly Yakovich: Let's move on to audience. There are a lot of things going on with our audiences, they've experienced a lot.

Josh Dougherty: They expect us to know their middle name, so we're failing on that front.

Polly Yakovich: Exactly. I know my husband's middle name. I feel like that should get some points. I think that this whole audience...

Josh Dougherty: Is your middle name Michelle?

Polly Yakovich: Yes. Damn it.

Josh Dougherty: Damn it.

Polly Yakovich: He probably looked up the HR records.

Josh Dougherty: I didn't even do that.

Polly Yakovich: I would say a lot is happening for our audiences in multiple ways. And this bleeds into some of the other stuff we want to talk about, but our audiences, no matter who they were, if you were in the healthcare space and you're thinking about patients, they achieved multiple years of change in customer behavior and just months during the beginning of the pandemic, telehealth, virtual care services, things that people struggle to access, the adoption of that just exponentially grew and now people have those skills. So they have a changed expectation about what their digital customer experience is going to be. And for those people who are using really high-end or fast technology tools or dealing with companies that have massive amounts of data and smart algorithms, you think about your Netflix experience, your shopping experiences, those are now expectations of what it's like to interact with brands digitally, whether or not you have the budget and the algorithm and the data of Netflix or not. And when you combine that with some of the privacy changes that are coming along, it's a very interesting storm shift opportunity for marketers.

Josh Dougherty: I think it's pretty shocking actually, because we have become addicted to customized experiences that are possible because we gave away all our data and now we're saying, "Give me my data back and build privacy again." Which [crosstalk 00:16:44].

Polly Yakovich: Also read my mind.

Josh Dougherty: ... But also read my mind at the same time.

Polly Yakovich: And make everything perfect and seem less funny.

Josh Dougherty: Exactly. So it's going to be a challenging piece and I think this is where... I don't know. Sorry, my mind just started to wander a little bit, but I was first thinking about Apple is really leading the way and so they're showing things like stopping people doing cross advertising tracking, whether you believe that's 100% effective in how they've implemented it, masking how email opens. So we're going to be in this world where it's going to be really hard to track what's going on pretty quickly and we're already entering it. And this is where I think that first person data of can I get someone's email and not only can I get that email, but can I build a deep enough relationship with you that you're willing to give me some meaningful information about how you want it to be communicated with, what you care about, all those sorts of things so I'm not reliant on data that maybe will be more difficult to harvest in the future is really important.

Josh Dougherty: It dovetails nicely with something that is very relevant today, which is also we are all super burnt out on the content that we're receiving and seeing. And so the job is twice as hard now because we have to not only get all this first person data allow us to market better, but we have to do it in a situation where people are probably more skeptical than ever about what data that they want to give you.

Polly Yakovich: This crosses over a little bit with the strategy piece, but when you think about... So we talked about some of the opportunities and the challenges of the way that our audience has been interacting with people online, but when you think about the proliferation of content that they're being bombarded with, anyone can produce and put out content on LinkedIn, on their blog, you can reach a lot of people on social media platforms. And so having an audience that's not just exhausted by the influx of content and actually wants to engage with you, wants to reach out with you, wants to buy your product isn't just shutting down and saying, "I only do these three things because I know I can count on them and everything else is just too much. I can't process it all."

Polly Yakovich: So it's just a very, really interesting mix at this moment. The other thing is people will talk about wanting their data back, but they will still willingly give it to places that are going to provide them, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, people still are going to provide their data to them because of the experience and the convenience that they offer if your brand doesn't have those opportunities to offer that convenience. And you're more hamstrung by not being able to get that first party data, it's going to be an interesting Wild West for a period of time. Most people are really encouraging companies to try and get any first party data they can, and to build their file as organically as possible with what people are willing to offer them. But the catch 22 is people want to really customize an amazing digital customer experience and to provide that data-driven experience you need a lot of data and the data has to be of good quality. And so I don't know that we have a lot of answers, but it's going to be a very interesting time.

Josh Dougherty: I think the thing that freaks me out the most about that is we often think of an email as being the beginning of building a first party data profile on someone and now Apple's offering the opportunity to create dummy emails for people to be able to fill out and get stuff downloaded. So it's just that the bar is bigger. If we think back about what we just talked about, about this push towards bottom level metrics like ROI, et cetera, which is all good and abandoning as much effort on the top of level from the brand, sometimes that can result in people saying, "Well, we just want to recreate really quick, easy to chew content for the top, high level, top of the funnel, whatever you want to call it."

Josh Dougherty: And I think that's where this is going to be challenging and it's going to hit, this is more of Josh's theory than anything else, is that people are really burnt out by high level generic content that's just sharing some points that they could have figured out somewhere else. It may get you page views, but I think you're going to be much better off giving something super deep that's actually valuable, but we're going to have to test and move into that. That was where we've been going before the pandemic happened, but we're going to have to continue to test and move into that.

Polly Yakovich: I think Josh and I are really supportive of privacy controls from a human perspective, but it will make our jobs harder. And this is something that we get into conversations about all the time with AI as well is what's the right thing to do.

Josh Dougherty: Yep. And I think with the data thing, all this really affirms is that the inbound philosophy of being ridiculously helpful to people and not coercing them to do anything they don't want to do is true. It was true when there was a privacy Wild West and it was true now where we're trying to at least put a band-aid over the data issues that we have. So I don't really think we're reestablishing privacy, we're figuring out what level of privacy are we as a society okay with. But if you're helpful, if you're being valuable to people, if you're communicating in a relevant way, you're going to be able to get the first party data that you need. If you're just doing it to check the boxes for creating content, then good luck, it's going to be harder.

Polly Yakovich: And this is where, as we move to talking about the strategy piece, you can see how it really flows through everything. Marketers need multiple strategies because we've had to go from plan A to B to C to maybe a little bit back of E and then adding some of B back in. We also have to have a strategy for our data and what's happening, we have to have a strategy in place, a plan in place to implement anything with AI. And a lot of people are producing content and just churning out content, but you really have to have a strategy in place fo how you're going to use it to accomplish the things we just talked about, how you're going to maybe go deeper with it, how you're going to maximize it across channels.

Josh Dougherty: And I think the bigger question is at the end of the day what's the long-term goal that you're working towards strategically as an organization from both the marketing and sales point? Because you have to have those things tied together now. But I think a lot of the stop start the people are going to experience is if they're not willing to look 12 months in the ad and say, "This is where we're moving and we're going to stay committed to this for 12 months." Because I think with the flux in metrics from changes and how stuff that can be tracked with the flux in, I think, business and the desire to always move quicker when you're...

Josh Dougherty: To make changes quicker, the results, while at the same time, you're executing things that require a long time to implement and to bear fruit, you've got to come up with a strategy that you can agree on and say, "We're going to work towards this and we're going to stay committed. So that then as we evaluate things like video, how deep should we go in video? AI, how should we be leveraging AI for our organization?" First research where should we be spending money on doing research to do really great marketing. You can't evaluate those things effectively unless you have a strategy that you're looking at long-term and saying, "This is the north star of where we're going."

Polly Yakovich: And I think also a reminder to regularly be pulling back and asking those bigger questions. Sometimes really it's so hard to see the forest for the trees. So having to step back like Josh was saying and say, "Where are we going? Is that the same as a quarter ago? Did it pivot two degrees that we should really be pivoting our program? Because our direction has changed just a little bit, but enough that if we keep working on our plan for six months, we're really off then." And you mentioned video, video has been a trend as a content vehicle that has been erupting over the last few years, but accelerated even more over the course of the last couple of years as we've struggled to be very human with our brands and give people access to the real people behind the products and services that we're selling.

Josh Dougherty: And I think the trend that we've seen with our clients is less polished, more human is the way to go. So the type of conversation that we're having right now, you may be listening to it as a podcast, but we are on video as well, that type of conversation.

Polly Yakovich: And we look great. If you're just listening to it, we look spectacular.

Josh Dougherty: I'm wearing a hat because it's not Friday. I decided to break out of the mold. We used to have a client who would tell me, "Oh, it's Friday, you're wearing a hat." Trying to live that into my Tuesday life now as well. But that's the effects of the pandemic for you, I've lost it or gained it, I don't know. But I would say that video we have been focusing on panel discussions things that are more organic conversations versus highly produced stuff. Because at the end of the day, I think we've found more than ever, people want to get to the meat. They don't want to go to a webinar that tells them three things about, I don't know, if you're selling some sort of medical device, the three ways that a medical device can help someone's life, they want to get to the meat of what is the core thing that makes this medical device excellent, helpful, different than the stuff that... Or the other devices on the market, and really hear some unvarnished opinions.

Josh Dougherty: So it's always going to be polished to a certain extent, but I think as much as you can get to that human side, people expect that now because of things like Twitch and streaming and all these places where people are used to seeing folks share their opinions. And we need to think about that for B2B. We're often way too far behind on those type of tactics, because we think oh, that's just people in their day-to-day life. And I'm like, "You know what? A lot of the people that are fucking making decisions and organizations are also streaming video games all night, every night, so we should probably think about communicating to them in a way that feels real."

Polly Yakovich: So to close it out with our last trend topic thing that's on our mind, Josh and I just attended the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference, MAICON, a great organization. Joshie recently wrote a blog post about some of our takeaways from that conference. And we'll link that in the show notes too. It's a great organization, they have tons of resources, but one of the things, and this encapsulate some of what we've already talked about, is customers have become so much more familiar and trusting of AI over the last couple of years. And obviously this has been accelerating, but I think we're probably... Well, maybe marketers tend to have this less, but Josh and I don't have Alexa in our home for particular reasons such as this, but I was over at someone's house the other day and I was going to set a timer for my four-year-old and their seven-year-old was like, "Alexa, set a timer for five minutes," and it blew my mind because I could have done that, but it would have never occurred to me I forced myself to stay manual.

Polly Yakovich: But people are using AI so much more in their daily lives. And so one of the things we've been watching for years is all marketers are like, "When are the robots going to come and take our jobs?" And it's not really about that, but there are some really interesting applications coming up for marketers with AI, but they really require a good strategy in place. How are you going to implement test, use AI tools in your practice?

Josh Dougherty: And I think this is where it comes from, probably five years ago I would think I need a data scientist to be able to really leverage AI. Without thinking about I have Siri on my phone and my watch and my computer I'm using the compose suggestions in Gmail. AI is already pretty integrated into my life. Although those Boston Dynamics robots still freak me out whenever I see them, but I digress. I think there's the sense that you need a data scientist to do AI work, and that may be true as you get more advanced in how you're doing your AI work but really there is a ton of tech in a box that you could unpack and start leveraging. But I think the first step is to go through and think through where are you in your maturity process from an AI perspective?

Josh Dougherty: With a lot of our clients are that are in tech, they're always talking about a technical maturity framework and this is exactly the case of what you need to be doing as an organization is understanding what's our readiness to use AI, what are the key repeatable, measurable things that we could be thinking about automating that if we could do that it would save our team 50% of their time, so they could work on more effective things. And then once you develop that sort of strategy and then say, "Okay, we have 20 things we think we could automate using AI or that we could start using to make smarter decisions," once you have that framework then you can say, "Okay, we're going to do this in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, really prioritize." And I think only then can you really start leveraging this AI in a box mentality of things like MarketMuse, tools that allow you to be able to create ad creative and designs with AI tools that allow you to automate the content journey someone's going on.

Josh Dougherty: There's a bunch of tools to leverage, but until you do that work of thinking through use cases, identifying what you need to do to be ready and then mapping that out, you're at risk of doing the same thing we've all done with SAS in the last, I don't know, dozen years of ending up having a multi-thousand dollar per month budget that you're spending on AI platforms and you're leveraging all of them 10%. So I think it's just important to dive in slowly. Paul Roetzer from MAICON is really, I think, the chief evangelist on doing this type of thinking. So if you have a chance to read some of his blog posts over on their site I think it's good to help you think through how do I think in a structured way about the use cases I should be considering and dip my toe in?

Polly Yakovich: Well, any last thoughts?

Josh Dougherty: My last thought I think with all of this is if you're listening to this or looking at the marketing landscape and being a little scared about what it means to be a marketer, I think that's an okay feeling because there's a lot of change happening and it's going to accelerate and my encouragement to people as someone who likes to tries to be future focused and opportunistic and opportunity focused is to realize that this is equally a scary moment and it's a moment to think of some very brave and exciting new things that you could do or new approaches. We've lived in a state of constant disruption over the last couple of years, but I think it's in the disruption that big ideas can come. And so I'd encourage people to lean into that discomfort, read, learn, and try to think new ways. What you've been doing forever isn't going to work anymore so you've got to think differently. And this is a chance to think differently in ways by combining things together, maybe in ways that people haven't done in the past.

Polly Yakovich: I would say we definitely have our oh, shit moments, but Josh and I both are relentlessly optimistic, which I think most marketers are. And so after the feelings, I really encourage you to lean into what Josh is saying and just think what's the opportunity? What can I try? What can I bring to my organization? How much is my boss going to be encouraged and supportive if I say, "These things are coming and I've thought about some proactive ways we could test into whatever's next," and bring those ideas. Because I think for those of us that are curious, which most marketers are, there's always going to be the next, and this is really a fun time to be like, "What is that next and how can we influence it?"

Josh Dougherty: Totally agree.

Polly Yakovich: Thanks for coming on, Josh. So nice to chat with you as usual.

Josh Dougherty: I know. We should do it more. Here's to number eight, when I get invited I also want a t-shirt [crosstalk 00:34:33]

Polly Yakovich: Here's to counting and knowing what number it actually is.

Josh Dougherty: I want a t-shirt when I get to hypothetical 10, just to...

Polly Yakovich: Oh, nice. I will have to work on that. Note to our virtual assistant who doesn't listen to this podcast that Josh needs a shirt two episodes from now.

Josh Dougherty: I have a very fragile ego that needs to be stroked is really what we're learning.

Polly Yakovich: Hope you learned something. Very excited to hear back from you on how you're thinking about the future and what you're looking forward to in Q4 and 2022. So please reach out. Josh and I are very find-able and we will link our LinkedIn and ways you can contact us on the show notes. Love to chat with you about what you're thinking about.

Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts.