10 Counterintuitive Marketing Truths After 3,000 Marketing School Episodes

10 counterintuitive truths. So you can see it on the screen. I'm gonna start with number one. Okay. Free products are better marketing than ads. And I'm actually gonna let you take this one because you've done this quite a bit, with the products that you've, you've given away in the past. Yeah. I agree with this. And when you look at free products as advertising continually gets more expensive over time, just look at Facebook and Google's earnings. But what changes is when you give away something for free, eventually, because ad costs are so high, it's cheaper to build this stuff and give it away for free, especially now with AI than it is to pay for the ads. And you gotta figure out what can you give away for free, but sell them on the back end that's more expensive to make up for your costs of the free offering. And that's exactly what we're doing with ClickFlow. We're gonna we we have a we're gonna there's a free trial version, but we're gonna have stuff in the back end. There's gonna be buttons to upsell. And then, also, we're gonna look for product qualified leads, people that are good fit ICP for product, but also for managed services in the back end. But to Neil's point, I'm looking at a lot of these prototypes that I'm building right now within cloud code. I'm like, oh, I should just give this away for free. These are nice lead magnets that you can make now. And that's why Neil, I don't know if I mentioned this on this podcast, but we're mandated in my company. When the first year, when the new year started, I'm like, okay, everyone's gotta learn cloud code within the next six months. Everyone's gotta be proficient. We're gonna help them get there. It is a requirement. We're doing these office hours now. We're doing these hackathons, all these things. And I still don't think like it's enough, but we're going to have to, we're going to have to get it there. So anyway, all that to say, that's number one. Number two, Neil, is boring marketing makes the most money. Yes. Channels like SEO that are really ugly, email, direct mail. Pay per click, conversion optimization. They tend to make companies way more money than being, like, let's try to go viral on, Instagram or Facebook, or let's say this cool creative TV ad. If TV ads were so effect I'm not saying they're not effective. They actually do generate profitability if you know how to do it right. But if there were so much better than the boring Google pay per clicks, Google wouldn't be the most profitable company in the world. They're worth more than all the TV companies that I know of. If you combine them, they're worth roughly 4,000,000,000,000 from something that's boring. Yep. Now number three, high agency beats intelligence in the AI area. And what that means …