New Insights in the COVID era

Episode Description

This episode dives into the challenges and strategies of digital marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers the impact on various sectors like travel and e-commerce, discusses the effectiveness of automation in unpredictable times, and explores the adaptations necessary for businesses to maintain relevance.

The panel discusses:

• Adapting Marketing Strategies in a Pandemic
• Impact of COVID-19 on Different Sectors
• Challenges with Automation and Machine Learning
• Consumer Behavior and Expectations

Episode Takeaways

Adapting Marketing Strategies in a Pandemic

• Emphasis on regional and highly localized advertising strategies due to varying local regulations and conditions.
• Increased importance of maintaining updated and accurate messaging to reflect current service offerings and operational changes.
• Exploration of responsive search ads (RSAs) to test and optimize ad creatives dynamically based on performance data.

Impact of COVID-19 on Different Sectors

• Travel and automotive sectors are among the hardest hit, with significant drops in search and consumer demand.
• E-commerce has seen a surge, particularly in home improvement and consumer goods, as people adjust to home confinement.
• Discussion on how businesses are pivoting their strategies to align with new consumer behaviors, such as increased online shopping and demand for local services.

Challenges with Automation and Machine Learning

• Machine learning tools face challenges due to abrupt changes in consumer behavior and market conditions, affecting their prediction accuracy.
• Importance of closely monitoring automated bidding strategies and being ready to adjust manually when necessary to align with rapid market changes.

Consumer Behavior and Expectations

• Potential retraining of consumer expectations around pricing and promotions due to frequent and significant discounts during the pandemic.
• Need for clear communication about delivery times and service availability to manage consumer expectations effectively.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, let’s kick it off here. We’re at the top of the hour. So everyone, welcome to PPC Town Hall number six. So we started doing this a couple of weeks ago when COVID broke out or officially got detected and we all had to start figuring out how to run PPC and digital marketing in a completely different world.

We’ve been doing this every week since then and we brought on new panelists every time to have different perspectives. And sort of help us all get through this together. So I want to welcome new panelists and one returning panelist today. So we have Christi Olson from Microsoft. We have Jim Banks, PPC veteran for 20 years, and I know him from the days of cheap flights and the days of hanging out at popcorn.

And and then we have Aaron Levy who Now works for Tinuiti which is just the new name of

Aaron Levy: CPC strategy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, exactly.

Aaron Levy: It’s the new name of a lot of things that all combined into form something great.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So I know him from the days before that, but I don’t want to say the wrong name because I’m sure I would, but it’s,

Aaron Levy: I used, I’m, I worked for the artist formerly known as elite SEM now Tinuiti.

Exactly.

Christi Olson: That’s a best description, Aaron.

Frederick Vallaeys: And Christi, who else are you bringing to the panel today?

Christi Olson: Yes, so I have Adeline who is joining us. Hopefully she will not be talking too much today, but she is Participating in her first town hall.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very nice. Welcome Adeline so this is a new format as well.

So we’re running it on zoom I thought it was actually going to be interesting. So the past couple of ones we’ve done on go to webinar Everybody now has to do virtual stuff, right? So even for attendees to see what’s the difference in experience between the different platforms and the interactivity could be interesting for your own business.

But we decided to try Zoom because we wanted to make things a bit more interactive. So one thing you’ll notice is that there’s a chat. So that chat is open between all participants. So you can all chat with each other and make snide remarks about what the panelists are saying. If your remark is too snide, we’ll unmute your audio.

And you might have to actually say it to us in person, but I thought that would make it a bit more interesting. And then the other thing we can do now is we have a Q& A panel and within the questions, everyone can see the questions being asked. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can ask a question anonymously, but you can also upvote the things that you think are most interesting. At the same time, we’re also live streaming this on YouTube and the questions coming in on YouTube. We’ll try to transfer over to here to make sure we can answer those as well. So with that, let’s let’s get started. I’ll also go into screen sharing a bit. But the first thing I thought we should talk about was with Aaron being on the call is the Tinuiti dashboard.

And by the way, Aaron, is there anything else you probably want to introduce yourself a bit better than what I just did. Aaron.

Aaron Levy: But I don’t know where Aaron works or what he does or who he is. That’s a perfect intro now. So I’m based in Philadelphia here and I’m a group director at an agency called Tinuiti that some of you may have heard as, as Fred and Christie and Jim alluded to were a combination of, of a number of channel specific agencies that have combined to form a large Performance based agency where we basically try to do everything across the triopoly and then some other stuff too. So in turn, our, our analytics and business insights team has been very, very busy in the past couple of weeks trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do,

Frederick Vallaeys: this dashboard right here, which seems to have just reloaded. So we’ve looked at this a couple of weeks in a row, right? But I think there’s some new visualizations at the top here.

Could tell us something about these. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is, this is all data from a partner of ours called Pathmatics that some people may have heard, some people haven’t but it’s essentially index spend across their whole data set, more or less. The world or essentially whatever you want to look at.

Aaron Levy: I mean, look for better, for better or worse, most of the trends that we’re seeing, and we’re going to talk about this with, with Christie a bit later on Microsoft is seeing, but most of the trends are frankly what you might expect. And us being in digital, we’re, I’ll say lucky in a sense as much as one can say that in this time, namely because so much of our, our work is performance based.

So when you take a look at these things, you’ll see that for. What I’ll call normal categories or rather unaffected categories Things again like home improvement home and garden It had a little spike when people thought that they were going to get stuck in their houses forever and then Sort of leveled off to what was normal.

So a lot of this information is is Valuable but also potentially dangerous. I think a lot of the guidance that we’re giving our clients is definitely absorb all the information that you can possibly see, but it’s indexed for a reason because everyone’s situations are different. Everyone’s problems are different.

Everyone’s cashflow situations are different. Everyone’s supply chain is different. So what may be affecting one retailer, one of our clients. Everything is going gangbusters for them because everyone loves it. Some others are pivoting over to sweatpants, dress up at home sort of copy. But some others are, you know, some others are having problems filling their shelves, their virtual shelves.

So it’s, it’s all about communication. And what we’re advising most of our clients and everyone here to do is look at your own supply chain, your own inventory, and your own customer behavior. And actually that we’ve leveraged that script a lot from, from Martin that you’re pulling up now, and it’s been really valuable just to see the pops and drops and weirdness and strange things going on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So some people might be listening to this on the podcast only. So what I’ve pulled up on my screen right now is a script on Search Engine Lane by Martin Rutgerding. And so to Aaron’s point, what that script is doing is it’s giving you your own before and after performance data for COVID. Right.

So rather than looking at indexes and averages, this is account by account. And actually the script works on an MCC account, which is really convenient. So we have Esperanza from my team on the panel as well here today. So she’ll do, she’ll put this on the chat, I believe. So so great. Yeah. I mean, the other panelists, when we’re looking at this dashboard, right.

So it looks like travel and auto are kind of the ones that, you know, You know, even if your situation is different, these basically did fall off a cliff.

Aaron Levy: And I think both of them reflect Christie. I know that you have a lot of information. I think both of them are affected hugely less by the current climate and more by uncertainty.

You know, when, when the lockdown first started in most places, a lot of people were buying tickets in anticipation of going because they can just get the credits later. But now with financial uncertainty and people being worried about getting refunds and all of that drama that’s happening in News and finance making people more uncertain.

So which is why I think that like little blip happened in the middle of march but Christi i’m curious what y’all are seeing for auto because that’s a weird one.

Christi Olson: Yeah. I’m off. Yep Automotive has been an interesting category. Well, we’ve had actually quite a few really interesting categories across the board Because we’re seeing like you said travel We’re seeing decreases in travel searches right as the shelter in home orders start happening.

We, we started to see a little bit, like Erin said, the uptick of search behavior happening. And then once everything started really shutting down, we saw that travel had a substantial decrease overall in searches. Search volumes within essentially the automotive category. We’ve seen a handful of different things and fred pulled up some really great information we have aka dot ms Slash and i’m gonna have to look at I believe it’s covid 19 dash insights and i’ll I can check it in a minute To make sure that’s the right bitly link.

It’ll come up to this report area and you can look by vertical by country by region, all the different verticals, and he’s pulling up one of the ones in automotive. So, automotive, what our research team did is look at, based on when shelter in place orders went into effect by region, what happened to the search volume, the traffic, and the overall engagement within those areas.

So we saw that in some of the areas that essentially put the bans in place first. They saw essentially They saw that there was decreases happening at that point in time. So it’s fun watching you scroll. I’m like, ah, where are we, where are we going?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah.

Christi Olson: So it’s just gives really great insights at a state level based on when those statewide orders happen and what essentially happened to the click volume is specific in the automotive industry.

What I would say is a little bit different on the automotive space is that while we’ve seen a decrease overall in certain dealership related sites, Search trends. We’ve actually seen an increase in other automotive related services. So people are now realizing, well, I don’t need to drive my car so I can look for parts.

I can look for services. I can get the, the the service stuff done that maybe you wouldn’t have done otherwise, because you aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So if it takes an extra week at the dealership, you don’t have to worry about not having that car. So it, Similar to what Aaron said, when we go category by category, we see there’s some pretty different trends depending on what you’re looking at.

If you’re a dealership, the volume has decreased pretty substantially at the dealership level, but that doesn’t mean automotive searches as a whole has decreased going in place.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and I personally predict the surge in searches for car batteries when things open up I was trying to take my car out the other day and of course it wouldn’t start anymore.

Battery was dead. But yeah, some really interesting data and I think one thing that stood out to me in this report and we’ve shared the link right there is that one of the states I believe it was Georgia. There was one county that was shelter in place before the rest of the state and so it’s quite interesting to see the decline in searches in that one county You Residual was an increase going on around it.

And I’ve also heard anecdotal stories like people who live on the edge between or the border between two states, right? One state opens up again, the other states closed. All of a sudden, all of your commerce, all of your transactions, you’re just going to hop across the border and go to an entirely different store.

So I think that’s an interesting thing to keep an eye on. And I think it’s really interesting.

Jim Banks: When. When it, when it all sort of really started to kick in, I was actually on site with a client in Florida. And there was like, you know, like I went to the airport and I was on the next to last flight out of Orlando.

Virgin, Virgin were basically saying, we’re not flying from here anymore from tomorrow. Right. And I’m like, okay, well, I better go home. Cause I was, Thinking of possibly staying on a little bit longer because the weather in Florida is very nice. And, and I thought, no, I don’t really think a British guy in, in in America would be, I’d be very high on the list if I ended up getting sick.

So, so I ended up like going home, but, but what, what, what I found kind of really interesting was that there was a lot of people. What obviously like New York was a, as an early kind of casualty in all of this. And there was a ton of people that came from New York down to Florida because they didn’t want to be sort of stuck in case there was any of these sort of restrictions where you couldn’t kind of move from one state to the other.

So I think a lot of the kind of shift from New York to Florida happened because people were jumping on private jets and just flying down to their sort of country retreat in Florida. So.

Aaron Levy: Yeah, it’s been interesting here in Philly because we’re a stone’s throw from Delaware, which is always an issue anyway, because you go to buy big stuff there because it’s cheaper.

But certain people furiously pointing at myself for the people listening that really want to go play golf. Delaware didn’t close their courses and everyone else did, but they essentially wound up upping the enforcement of people crossing borders. And if you had Pennsylvania plates on your cars, then you couldn’t do anything.

So it’s. It’s been an interesting dichotomy and I, pretty early on, I mean, taking this back into a marketing perspective, we’re seeing different behavior for commuters. So like the suburbs that would normally be really quiet during the work, they’re now really loud. Because people just aren’t moving back and forth as much. But

Jim Banks: we saw a sort of fairly big shift. A lot of people used to kind of get on trains and commute into London. Right. And then obviously the social distancing was like, it had to be two meters and there was just no way that they could do that. So there was a massive uptick in kind of these portable bicycles, like, you know, the companies that make these sort of foldable bikes and, and there’s so many more people are cycling now.

And again, I think that’s going to become the new norm. Right. So and you mentioned obviously travel there, Fred, about, you know, You know, being decimated. I think like, like if you were a cruise company, most cruises and exotic holidays, they typically planned sort of nine to 18 months in advance of when you’re actually taking them.

So yes, I think, you know, generally speaking, travel has been completely kicked to death. Right. But there are still people looking for that sort of thing. And obviously, you know, the cost of flights is extremely expensive. And I think the reality of it is, is that. Probably anyone booking a flight now, there’s no guarantee that the airline is even going to be around for you to be able to consume the booking once it comes back online.

But the ones that are I mean, Bill Hunt said he was trying to book a trip and it was something like four or five times more expensive than it would normally have been. And he was trying to use miles and they wanted a ridiculous amount of miles to kind of do this flight. So again,

Frederick Vallaeys: You also sort of hear the opposite sometimes, right?

That it’s so cheap right now. Like you can fly transatlantic. At one point it was 11 on American airlines to fly from New York to London has like, okay, I’ll, I’ll risk that 11, even if they don’t.

Jim Banks: Heathrow airport. And we, you know, there’s still planes coming in and out. And I mean, I know that a lot of those will be supply planes going backwards and forwards with, you know, personal protective equipment, things like that.

But You know, there’s definitely people coming in and people going out. So,

Christi Olson: well, and I think it’s worth noting as we think about some of these different trends is I think travel is going to be the one that’s going to be the, and this is my personal opinion, not Microsoft spending. I think travel is going to be one of the verticals that’s going to take a little bit longer to see the upswing because we don’t know at a country, a state, we don’t know when the restrictions are going to be lifted for travel.

Like I heard like a week ago, I think they said Oktoberfest. Munich decided to cancel it. So it has, I think it’s only been canceled once for a cholera epidemic or in like the 1800s. So like you can start thinking about booking but it goes back to the The like Jim was saying the uncertainty. There’s other verticals I think we aren’t going to be seeing as much uncertainty happening.

And so when you think like Automotive well, at some point your state’s going to lift the restrictions. You’re going to need to get from point a to b So if you have a car or you need to get a car that’s when you’re going to start to look at it and I have to say like when I I think ford and gm both put like zero percent financing for seven years And at that point I was telling my husband like you want that pickup truck?

Now’s the time to go buy the pickup truck I’m not going to stop you on this end. Like if we can trade in your other car Go look at this now, because that’s the best time. So I think you’re going to start to see, even with some of the, as the financial uncertainty maybe starts to lift, you’re going to start to see people taking advantage of some of the amazing financing offers that are out there.

Then I think on the other retail side, it’s going to be It’s going to be interesting to see like if you’re in a luxury category, probably the people purchasing like your Rolex watches, they are going to be impacted as much as, as myself or maybe the people on the call might be impacted with making those type of purchases.

Purchases. So you’re going to see a lot of increases in volumes for aspirational that might not play out in the click side. So this is where from a PPP, yeah, PPC perspective, you can start to build your audiences. Like we can go down that tack, the list of the strategies to take because. You, you’re going to have to be thinking, who is your target audience?

Who are you trying to reach and start putting those strategies in place today based on how we think the economic recovery is going to happen and how that search behavior and search trends are changing and shifting the time.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And so for me here locally, it’s like, first you see the hourly employees kind of losing jobs and, you know, the gym shutting down and the barber shops.

And, but now it’s like Airbnb, obviously being in travel. They’re talking about not giving bonuses to employees. You got lots of startups that were you know helping the local economy here in the bay area quite a bit and all of a sudden their investors are saying listen You guys need to be able to survive for two years With the cash that we’ve already given you and assume there’s going to be no cash coming in and all of a sudden like white collar workers are losing their jobs and it’s just like It goes up and up, right?

And eventually it hits everyone. And so even with the, the Rolexes and the aspirational purchases I’m still very worried about how that’s going to play out as all the second order effects sort of start to hit us down the line. I

Jim Banks: mean, it’s, it’s interesting looking behind you, Fred, with all your lanyards, right?

I mean, obviously to me, that’s probably the only thing that has been impacted is my ability to travel to conferences and meet up with. Friends in the industry, right? And again, I think, you know, I’ve worked from home for like a long time, right? So that side of it didn’t bother me in the slightest, but you know, the, having to kind of stay at home and not go and see other people in the industry, I think is a kind of like a big deal.

Right. And yeah. You know, a lot of the award ceremonies were kind of canceled, PubCon in Florida was canceled, you know? And yeah, I mean, again, there’s, there’s no guarantee that any of these sorts of events that we would normally sort of go to sometimes obviously for, for kind of you know, client generation, but sometimes also to, again, just to sort of get a pulse on what’s going on face to face.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. No, I mean,

Jim Banks: for me again, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to hug anyone outside of my family ever again. Right. Which

Frederick Vallaeys: for

Jim Banks: me is yeah.

Aaron Levy: I want to give someone a high five so much. But Jimmy, you do raise an interesting point for, I’m going to do my best to be really careful to not Not diminish anything, but for all the people that were terribly affected there’s a fair number of people that are also totally fine.

And this is an inconvenience. So we’re gonna see, you know, when we were talking about verticals and how everything affects every client different. The pandemic is affecting everyone differently too. So I’m sure that we’ll see opportunistic buyers out there too, the same way that there are self gifters on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I suspect we might see some of that as well. So to Christi’s point, building an audience or going complete or avoiding going completely off, we’re generally seeing that. You know, when we expect the doors to open that clients who are doing that are, are doing well, it’s a tough decision for a lot of people to make because it’s trying to figure out whether you’re virtue signaling, signaling, or whether you’re being authentic or they’re being yourself or being disingenuous, but generally speaking, even though the world’s really quiet and everyone’s locked in, it’s not off.

There’s still a lot of, a lot of opportunities out there to still represent the businesses that you represent, or if you are a business to represent yourself with your voice, it’s just with a different tone.

Christi Olson: Well, Aaron,

Jim Banks: I mean, we work with the company in this sort of food delivery service and, and obviously, you know, for them, business has been great, right.

In, in, in regard of, you know, we’re able to get food out to people. Where ordinarily they would, would go to stores and things like that. And for, and for me, it’s almost like we sent out an email to all of their kind of customers and database to basically say, look, you don’t have to kind of go to the store.

We can deliver food to you. And everyone saw it as kind of like exploitative. And it’s just like, we’re just trying to help people, you know, and, and there’s that really thin line between helping and exploiting. And I think, you know, there’s a lot of companies that have kind of pushed that. Cross that, cross the line.

And so again, so many people have unsubscribed from this ago. I didn’t even realize I was on your, your list. And that’s the first email you’ve ever sent me in like 18 months. Right. And

Aaron Levy: there’s a there’s a Vintage sports company that like reprints old defunct teams, whatever. That’s one of my favorites called streaker, but they rather than doing their email blast, since we can’t watch any sports, they’ve just doing, started doing recaps of like old stuff that you probably didn’t see.

So it’s a good example of how you can stay on brand, keep marketing, have fun, and not, not be tone deaf.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me ask you a question for all of you, right? So, I mean, we’re talking a lot about messaging has to evolve, but it’s also very regional, it’s very local. It depends on what the regulations are. It depends on kind of the opportunistic things that you’re seeing.

And that’s very different for agencies, right? I mean, we tend to set a strategy and sort of like build it and then go for it. And now it’s almost like week over week, like, Oh shit, like this city, something changed, like we got to update the messaging there and that city. Now you can actually do takeout or you can drive up.

So what, what’s, you know, what have you guys been doing to make that not.

Christi Olson: I’ll let you take that one, Aaron, since that’s not me. Well, I mean, so I wrote a post about automation in times of crisis, which in so many words is making sure that if things go wrong, it’s okay. It was on Oh, where did I post that? And there we go. Search engine land, marketing land, technically. But I mean, essentially, so

Aaron Levy: it depends, which is very hairy. So as, as, as an agency, our role is to be an amplifier for a client’s voice and make sure it is heard the loudest by the rightest people. And, you know, the quietest by the people that we don’t really want to talk to. So a lot of things that we’re doing are, it depends on the client, obviously, but, you know, if there’s something that’s a gray area that.

doesn’t have a material effect or things like that, then okay, if it’s a gray area, we’ll get rid of it. If it’s things that do have a material effect, so, you know, do you want to plant the flag in, We’re an apparel vendor. Do we want to shift all of our stuff to like be comfy at home? Or is that weird?

That’s something that we’re generally leaving in the minds of our clients. And we’re still doing our best to be the best amplifier as we can. But from an ad copy perspective since so much stuff is dynamic and same with a lot of our display ads and Facebook and things like that You have to make sure that the tone is appropriate and like all things advertising and all things automation you have to make sure that when it goes poorly, it’s okay.

So don’t go and tell people to make appointments or an in home consultation or whatever, unless you’re explicitly stating it. We have a lot of home services clients that work closely together. And so for each of them, we went through an audit just to make sure that get a person in your home in an hour, like that. And, and just sort of figuring out whether, you know, whether we want to state how that we have adapted or whether our clients want to state how they’ve adapted or if they’ll just sort of get rid of the gray area.

Jim Banks: When you look at the sort of a lot of the sort of big publishing houses, I mean, they’re obviously dining out on this.

I mean, they’re making like they’re exploiting the opportunities that this coronavirus has presented, right, by sort of glamorizing some of the death tolls and the number of, you know, deaths. People have been affected by it. And again, I think, you know, I mean, we do a fair amount in sort of the programmatic advertising space.

And a lot of the sort of brand safety guidelines have been implemented. So you can actually say, I don’t want to be shown. So if, if they’re talking about, this is the number of people that died, the last thing you really want to see is like advertising. And so many of these sort of big publishing houses have been.

Kind of ungated some of the content because they got sort of you know, lambasted for the fact that they had gated information, basically saying, if you want to see this, you got to pay to kind of play. Right. And really it was just like, you know, again, all, all of the sort of education places and they’re saying, look, we’re giving our courses away for free.

Right. So Udemy and Coursera and all these sorts of places are giving kind of. You know, educational way for people, people that need to maybe retrain to do something else. But it is, it is kind of, you know, as Aaron said, you need to kind of go through and just look at the context of what you wrote at the time versus what is happening now.

And does it still apply? Right. And if it doesn’t, then obviously you need to sort of pause it. Right. I wouldn’t say stop it because obviously the strategy worked probably very well beforehand. Right. But just kind of revisit it when you need to and kind of bring it back when it’s appropriate.

Christi Olson: So I want to pose something to you guys, cause this is something we’ve been talking about internally, RSAs.

Cause it’s a good way, if you think of responsive search ads, good way to test the various creative, see how they’re working. What are your guys thoughts on that? And Aaron, are you guys doing responsive search ads for your customers and clients? We are. I mean, we haven’t, if we were doing it before COVID, before the pandemic.

Aaron Levy: We’re doing it now. And, and we’re probably going to do it after. If it was not performing well back then, it’s not performing well now. So things like responsive search ads, the, the biggest thing that we’re trying to do with most of our clients, and frankly with all tests, is just understand that this period is different from where it used to be, which is different for the period in the future.

So all the things that were still best practices and were top performers before are still good performers now. You just have to look at them in a way different lens. So the one of the challenges that we’re seeing or we’re worried about which frankly has surprisingly move fast is a lot of the smart automation and machine learning.

It doesn’t know that we’re in a crisis. It knows that this is really weird and it’s trying to figure out what it’s supposed to do, but it doesn’t know that like the world is changing.

Christi Olson: Well, and that’s our automation, Aaron. That’s like I’m preparing some of our webinars and stuff for upcoming events.

I’m like, okay I understand our product managers, like automation’s amazing, make sure you use smart bid strategies and like, or turn to manual right now, if we think about like strategies, you want to think about like immediately, I would say, look at manual versus automation for part time. Because if, if AI learns, it’s looking.

at your data a year ago to today. It’s looking at the data a week ago, a month ago, the traffic, the behavior, everything is swapped so much.

Jim Banks: One thing we’re doing is we’re, we’re heavily annotating like in Google analytics and the notes panel in Google ads to basically say this is kind of the environment because it’s always very easy to kind of look.

In 12 months time ago, how did we do last year at this time? Oh, we’re smashing it. We’re completely killing it. And it’s just like, I don’t really think you’re comparing like for like, right? I don’t really think like for like, we’ll probably ever exist ever again. I mean,

Frederick Vallaeys: that’s like how in schools right now, everyone’s getting an asterisk next to their grade.

Like this was the COVID year when nobody was actually physically in school. So you’re doing that through Google analytics. I’m showing on thie screen here, another interesting piece. So this is from a Tinuit errands company there. And this is Amazon data. They’ve just published this and you can go to their website, put in your email to get this to yourself.

But what was interesting is that conversion rates on Amazon have dropped off a cliff since the crisis started, and I think that kind of really feeds into the whole automation thing. Right. So how quick, I think,

Jim Banks: I think another reason that would fall Fred just started to Jeff is I think a lot of people have got this kind of.

Amazon prime mentality. And it’s kind of like, if I can’t get it on prime, I’m not going to buy it. Right. And I think that obviously Amazon went through this phase where they were prioritizing the kind of like the urgent and essential things. Right. So all the sort of junkie stuff that you would normally buy, they, they kind of said, okay, well, we’re, we’re not prioritizing that.

And I mean, I ordered some stuff and they said, it’s not going to come until the end of May. Right. And I’m like, ah, forget it.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s it.

Jim Banks: Not interesting. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: interesting to do with the messaging because they say it’s not going to arrive until the end of May, but then actually it does show up three days later.

Yeah, exactly. So, sandbagging it. I haven’t,

Christi Olson: I haven’t had that, Fred. I ordered stuff in late, late March and it literally just arrived this last week. And my husband’s like, when did you order this? I’m like, oh, it was for her milk bottles. You delivered

Frederick Vallaeys: it to your house. You can leave it right next to him, right?

Yeah.

Christi Olson: Yeah, but it’s one of those, like, you think it’s also the sponsored product. So it’s again, the advertised side. So then the question is, for people that are running their sponsored ads, are they aligned to what people are actually actually purchasing today? So that might be the I don’t know, Aaron, if that’s a you question or more of an Elizabeth question because I know she spends her days and nights in Amazon.

Aaron Levy: It’s, it’s a lot of people questions and I think I’ll point back to what I said a little bit before is that it’s about supply chain in a lot of different ways, not just about what Amazon can get out of their warehouses, but what you can get into the warehouses and what people can get to give into Amazon’s warehouses.

But you know, there’s, there’s the, the sandbagging thing where I’ve been getting my Amazon orders in like, not literally 45 minutes, but close. There’s a distribution center like over there. But I, I think it’s to preserve their prime brand long term when we’re talking about messaging for a longer period of time.

If Amazon didn’t reset those expectations and people happen to get an order in a week or two weeks, the world would go nuclear. Like there would be

Jim Banks: again, I mean, there’s massive kind of you know, outcry people are saying, Hey, I shouldn’t be paying for car insurance because I’m not driving. I shouldn’t be paying for this because I’m not doing this.

I mean, again, I think what Netflix had like a ridiculous number of new subscribers, like as soon as the lockdown happened, it was like massive spike in people wanting to subscribe to the service. And obviously, you know, obviously Amazon. Prime delivery is just one aspect of prime. And you’ve obviously got Amazon video as well, but I think a lot, a lot of people just associated with, with the prime delivery, right.

As you say, they had to kind of like set the expectations, right. And then obviously if, if they kind of over promised and under deliver, that would be bad, right. Whereas they’ve done it the other way around. And, you know, if they say yeah, end of May, and then they get it to you in two days, you’re like, okay, that’s fine.

That I was expecting it. But that, that definitely would have an impact in terms of the conversion rate.

Frederick Vallaeys: So we had a question from the audience on the topic of e commerce. And so aside from setting expectations, like a lot of companies are just offering black Friday type deals right now. And the question is, are we like retraining the consumer to come to expect that?

Like how much do you think that’s going to impact the ability to sell at normal pricing and in the future?

Christi Olson: It’s weird, Fred, because I’d say on this end, it’s going both ways. Depending on the vertical, we are seeing some of the Black Friday discounts. Other verticals, you can see prices are just skyrocketing because, again, as Aaron mentioned, supply chain, where it’s harder to get the product.

So they’re saying, hey, volatility, demand, we’re going to increase the pricing. So like, I, I actually have cautioned advertisers on his agency side about this of like, Don’t keep your black friday prices too long Because you will potentially train the consumers of why buy something the first week of november when you know, you wait two weeks You can get it for half off if you’re consistent all the time, so I think there is going to be a little bit of caution but again as aaron joked earlier, it’s the it depends answer that no one loves but

Jim Banks: I think also the the you know people sitting at home.

I mean it’s almost like Thanksgiving has turned into a seven week celebration, right? And you’re sitting at home with your family. You, you kind of hate being there and you turn to the internet to kind of like try and dull out the monotony of that. And I think a lot of it is that, you know, again, we, we work with quite a number of e commerce clients and sales are just through the roof.

Right. And I, you know, it’s, it’s weird. I mean, some of them are kind of fashion things like makeup and, you know, and you think to yourself. Why would people be buying makeup if they don’t even need to go out of the house? But, but again, it’s almost like they buy things. It makes them feel good. Right.

Christi Olson: Jim, you don’t know.

No, but it goes back to like one of the interesting ones. And I’m trying to see if I can get enough time today to sit down and write it out is when we look again, vertical by vertical hair salons, I wish I would have known that the crisis is going to happen. I would not have cut bangs in. Early January because now I’m stuck with these things that I’m not going to trust cutting myself But we look at like people are not going to salons, but salons are now opening up and saying okay great local You can order call us order and pick up in store I know not everybody has that opportunity But it’s shifting that business model to meet the demand where it is because we’re seeing an increase in hair care products It wouldn’t have happened previously Where the searches are happening more online because people aren’t able to go to their stylists necessarily.

And when they get their haircut, get those products and services. I’m only

Jim Banks: wearing these headphones to cover my bad hair, right?

Christi Olson: But I mean, it goes back to like, there is a shift now that people are at home. Some of the industry, some of the verticals, there’s a shift in how consumers are engaging. So there is an increase in upticks in those products.

I like that Aaron mentioned the gym scenario where I can’t even tell you how many ads I’m getting now on Facebook. Like, sometimes I’m like Have I done something wrong or have I shown something because I get like every third Sponsored post for me as a work at work out at home type of scenario, but it’s the businesses that are taking advantage of Using tools like we’re using now zoom to essentially say great.

You can’t come in in person. Let’s do classes online Let’s engage in a different way Again, I think

Jim Banks: I think companies that were smart shifted money from You know, maybe Google Facebook into places like YouTube. Cause again, people are going looking for answers. How do I cut my own hair? How do I kind of, you know, cut my own fringe.

Right. And if you had advertising kind of like on there, let’s say you were a kind of shampoo brand or, you know, hair, hair coloring company. Right. I mean, if you had like ads running alongside those sorts of videos, right. You’d be cleaning up now. Right. And

Aaron Levy: to, to an extent it’s. Oh, this is going to be such a blanket statement, but that’s okay.

I like blankets. The people that market well are doing well. The people that market poorly are doing poorly. So when we circle back to the Black Friday question, the, the great prices, whatever, a lot of the challenges or the people that we see issuing those to me look a little desperate. And to me that says that’s probably because they are desperate.

And that to me feels like the people that are addicted to the month over month. What was our row as yesterday on this last click? Whereas what you just described, the people that have become longer term marketers, looking at the longer funnel, the education funnel, looking at the whole thing instead of just the bottom.

Frederick Vallaeys: It also has to be integrated, right? I mean, like if you’ve been so focused on like search ads on Google, and that’s the only thing you know how to do it. Like, yeah, obviously you have a problem now because Jim is saying like, you’ve got to be on YouTube, but that’s outside your wheelhouse. You don’t quite want to go there.

And that’s where you get into trouble. Right.

Christi Olson: I’d say where I would say that you’re going to see some of that and I’d say it’s maybe Aaron a little bit less on the desperation is when you have people that have products that literally have a shelf life. Oh, there’s certainly that that’s, that’s when you’re, I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily desperate in the sense of like, I just got to keep the row as up but it’s also the.

Okay. If I don’t use this by X date, it’s, it’s done. It’s toast. Haven’t they done that in

Jim Banks: Belgium, Fred? Haven’t they kind of said that if you, you need to eat French fries twice a week, because they’ve got like mountains of potatoes that they’re going to be throwing out. Happening in the U S it’s happening here.

It’s like, well, why would you, why’d you need an excuse to eat French fries?

Christi Olson: Yeah. So like Fred, what’s on Fritz? What’s on Fred’s screen now, there’s two slides here that are pretty interesting. One is just showing weekly search trends 2019 versus 2020 for 10 different categories. So you can see here’s how by industry or by vertical the search, the shifts are happening in searches.

So you can see there are some searches some verticals that you really can see the consumer demand happening, like retail and CPG through the roof, as everybody was told to stay at home. And how do we get groceries to your house? Or Jim, in your example, how do you get. food delivered from those food services.

The next slide down is also a really interesting one to look at because this is the inverse. So when are the clicks happening? So you have the search, search demand that’s happening. So you have a lot of people that are looking. Do you have people actually clicking coming through where you might see that some of those consumer actions, the clicks are lagging and the lag is happening in part because Potentially, are they finding what they’re looking for?

Are they seeing in the ad copy? And this goes back to what Aaron was saying before, be really concise with your messaging. If you can’t actually get the product out, or if there’s delays, essentially showing that in the ad copy of messaging, so that you’re not going to be paying for the clicks to happen when people can’t actually act and consume on that back end.

So I, these are two sets of slides. I don’t believe these ones right now are up on the they’re not up on the COVID Insights page but it’s stuff that we’ve been looking at in addition to several other ones to say, like, are the verticals turning around? Are we seeing, have we hit the bottom and started to come back up?

And as we start to make recommendations, what could people be seeing in terms of the year over year changes, both increase in volume decrease potentially, or the, in some categories, there’s huge increases happening overall in clicks. How do you, how do you measure that? And how do you then take your strategies and act upon it?

Jim Banks: Cause I think there’s an inherent danger. I mean, the thing with statistics is there’s always this inherent danger of, you know, like again, early on, it was like not deemed to be that important. In America and like everyone’s saying, Oh, you know, too slow to act and so on and so on. Now, it’s kind of, you know massive.

And, and again, some people are going, well, it’s only with hindsight that you’ll know whether something was the right thing to do or not. Again, everyone’s kind of lambasting Sweden. They should have taken more kind of more care about it. They seem a bit bars a, and it’s just like, well, only hindsight will know whether that was a good thing for them to do or not.

Right. And, and the same way that now that we’re going to try and come out a lot down, it’s like, Is that the right thing to do or is it not the right thing to do? I mean, I was talking to one of my clients who I was on a call with him. I’m like, you’ve had a haircut and he goes, yeah, my barber decided to kind of open up.

He said, I’m 75 years old and I’m either going to die of COVID or malnutrition for, cause I can’t feed myself. Right. So, you know, he, he said, I’m, I’m doing haircuts and You know, he just asked his clients to kind of discreetly come to his store, not not all park outside and make it look like he was open for business.

Right. But it’s sort of, you know, you look at it and go, you know, the kind of financial impact to the economy has has obviously got to be weighed up with the financial, the impact of the kind of people. Passing away. Right. And again, I don’t know what the, the, the right sort of answer is. And again, only with hindsight will we know whether something was, you know, smart to do or not smart to do.

And I think you know, when we start looking at when’s the right time to start switching ads from one thing to say one thing to another thing, you know, sometimes it, again, you kind of sit with egg on your face or you could be a genius. Right. And you know, it’s just knowing kind of when to do those sorts of things is the hardest thing really.

Aaron Levy: You can, you can make data say whatever you want. You can make it give any answer that you want. So, you know, as you say, as you say, Jim, those who want to stay inside, we’ll look at the data that makes them want to stay inside those that think that this is no big deal, we’ll find data to make it that it’s no big deal.

And the same will go for all of your ad creative. You know, if, if you really want to have a sale or follow whatever, or if you really want to change your ads, odds are you can find data that says that’s the right decision. We’ve, we’ve largely operated on the idea of data inspired rather than data driven because data driven, you can make data drive you wherever you want.

But if you look at the data to enforce what you know is right you’ll make a lot smarter decisions.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And one of the points you made, Aaron, in your post was now more than ever, you just need to have a large setup and monitor these things because, you know, you make data driven decisions, but does it really pan out?

And you need to know quickly if it’s not panning out. So Jordan, one of the attendees Did ask me to talk about my script. So I’ll quickly talk about it, but I’ve got a new script Which is actually a geo anomaly detector So many of you have probably used the anomaly detector script from google So basically says for a typical tuesday by 11 o’clock your performance is off from what we normally expect on a typical tuesday but now because the world has completely changed and everything is like on a very City by city level we’ve taken that script script and done it at the geo level.

So now i will tell you maybe in aggregate your account’s looking good But hey in new york is looking a little bit unusual for a typical tuesday And it’ll actually send you an alert that looks like this email and then it has a whole spreadsheet behind it with all of the Expected behavior for a normal tuesday or whatever yesterday was versus what’s happening What happened yesterday.

So that’ll be on search engine land later this week. Are there any other alerts that you guys have been liking or based to, because we’re talking a lot about, you know, data can tell any story. What are the government’s doing? We don’t really know if it’s the right thing, but like as agencies, as PPC practitioners, like, how do we keep up with this?

Right. We’ve definitely changed our alerts and made them, I’ll call it tighter. Because if you, like, if you look at trends a week over week, Last week is entirely different from this week now, whereas in the past, like, okay, if something goes up or down 10 percent week over week, like, yeah, it’s pretty normal.

Aaron Levy: Whereas now it could go up or down 50 percent based on a day. So the systems that we do have in place to make sure that, you know, pops and drops are weird and not anomalies. We got to tighten them up a lot and, and the things that look weird now are different from how weird would have looked before and after.

So we just have to, we have to move a lot faster and look at shorter timeframes, which is uncomfortable. And we’ve

Jim Banks: tended to kind of like be a little bit more cautious of like running automated campaigns. So like a lot, a lot less target CPA you know, target row as than we would. Probably ordinarily have right and that’s not because I mean, again, at the moment, the cost of the traffic is certainly a lot lower, which is great, right?

But again, it’s like it’s still got to be reflected in the overall performance, right? Just having cheap traffic isn’t isn’t the answer, right? And as you saw on Aaron slide with with Amazon’s, you know, click through rates kind of falling, right? You know, it’s for us, it’s really got to be, you know, we’ve got to get the cheaper traffic, and it’s got to convert as well, right?

And I think You know, it’s if it doesn’t, then obviously, you know, if we do target CPA, we could end up kind of catching a cold. So I think we, we probably been a lot more cautious with that. That’s not to say we don’t have stuff that’s running on that basis and it’s working well. Right. But we just interrogating the data a lot more than maybe we would ordinarily do.

Sometimes we just sort of sit back and let it go. And now I think we just feel we need to To kind of be watching it a lot more frequently and certainly things like the anomaly report, you know, the the original one that Google had, we kind of get that, but you know, for us, it’s really, you know, as you say, the, If when you drill into the data and look you can look at it in Sort of like a more granular level.

I think it obviously can Potentially impact, you know bid modifications that you could do at kind of state level and that sort of thing so

Aaron Levy: I will say that we’ve been we’ve been Pleasantly surprised with how how smart things have reacted and with You know, with the Microsoft versions of smartening as well, that if you had success with using TCPA TRO as in your most volatile times before it’s keeping up now, which is a pleasant surprise.

I’ll give a caveat that we tend to work with bigger data sets. Our clients tend to. Skew larger scale so we have more data to play with but we were really worried that smart bidding wouldn’t keep up Not that it wouldn’t scale fast enough, but that it wouldn’t pull back fast enough and it’s it’s been a pleasant surprise It’s been encouraging

Frederick Vallaeys: how much have you been?

Adjusting targets based on what’s happening and competitors may be going in and out

Aaron Levy: not a ton. Similar best practices will nudge them up or down 10 or 15 percent in a couple of days. But I mean, look, we’re businesses. Our margin won’t go from 50 percent to 20 percent from 20 percent to 70%. So generally speaking, nudges have, have been doing it.

And then with demand and conversion rate changes, the tools keep up.

Jim Banks: Yeah. I mean, I think obviously the things like Google introducing the sort of. The frugal version of Google shopping again. You know, and again, I mean, that that’s obviously early days. We have really no idea how kind of good or bad that’s going to be right.

I mean, we’re starting to see sort of trickles of traffic to some of the clients that we work with in Google shopping, right? And again, I don’t want it to be cannibalizing the paid to kind of like, support the organic, right? Because obviously if there’s a lot more organic that push, push, pushes up shopping potentially.

So again, it’s just, I think we need to, to be mindful of what’s been introduced and what the potential Outcomes might be and just keep a watchful eye to kind of see how they kind of trend towards those

Frederick Vallaeys: What jim’s talking about is so google Announced this week that they will show free shopping ads for free shopping listings on the shopping tab and so what you have to do is you have to go into your google merchant center Enable your products to show on all surfaces And then you are eligible to start getting this free traffic and kirk williams.

He’s reporting roughly five percent Of clicks for many of his clients. I think it was like 0. 5 to 11. I think was the numbers That’s pretty much So I think we have Yeah, we had like one client that got to like 15 or 20, but I think it’s Were they selling hand sanitizer? I think what’s quite interesting is that the originally it was it said it was only available in the u.

Jim Banks: s And india for some stupid reason but they have actually rolled it out to other countries And I think it’s now in the uk as well And i’m sure it’ll kind of go across the board really

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I think one of the things was you, everyone can set it up to show on all surfaces, but then they have to switch over the actual results page to include the free stuff.

And so that might still be the holdup here and there. Yes. If you’re, if you’re an existing shopping advertiser, you don’t need to do anything. If you’re not a shopping advertiser, you need to set this up. So, so get your stuff into Google merchant center. Yeah, because even 5 percent of clicks, that’s.

All right, so let’s wrap it up here. I’ll give you each a chance to maybe make some final points about anything that you wanted to talk about from your companies or any final thoughts. Christi, do you want to go first?

Christi Olson: Sure, I can go. Since you have my slide up. If you saw the post we posted earlier, seven strategies for unprecedented times, I’m going to be creating an updated version that hopefully will get published probably next week or so.

We’re just going to be going a little more in depth into some of the changes and shifts we’re seeing. But what I would say is for paid search marketers out there, think about. Your customer and what value you can add to the customer based on what they are looking for at this point in time Now, I know Aaron might not agree with this.

But I would say think about your regional strategy And i’m going to throw that in there because I know it creates more it creates more work. Yeah, you say yes Okay, good because I say we were talking about the regional area. I don’t i’m not saying that you need to have Add copy at the city level.

But start thinking about how do you update the ads and messaging, especially if you’re in a vertical where people can go either in store, pickup, etc. to make sure that it’s relevant just so that consumers know how to engage with you at that point in time, especially if you have physical stores and physical store locations.

Because I can’t even tell you how many ads I’ve seen. That have not had that update or still says like get it in store today. Well, except for your store is closed. So We go back to the things you can do now Just look at be smart with what you’re doing. Think about your messaging your ad copy. Think about your overall strategies prepare for today But then also start to think about, and in the slide that Fred had up about the restoration strategy, start to think about what happens as some of these shelter in place fans get lifted, how do you update your messaging, how do you update what you are doing from a bid and budget standpoint to start to increase the traffic coming in based on what’s lifting at that point in time.

Aaron Levy: Christi, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I don’t like it.

Christi Olson: Well, I know, but it just means a lot more work for you. I’m not saying you’re lazy, I’m just saying it could be a lot, like, I remember agency side, like if one of my clients came to me and said, I want to have a different messaging strategy for every state, I would have been like, I hate you.

Okay.

Aaron Levy: I will agree with that. I hate geo because those tests are one that always work and I don’t want them to.

Frederick Vallaeys: And this is where we’re being pushed, right? I mean, like, yeah, we may not be affected in terms of not having jobs, but we are all a little bit more stressed and more work than usual and having to go into different areas than we’re used to.

But it’s either that or get fired by the client and choose your problem.

Jim Banks: Yeah. I mean, I, I was going to say like, even though we, we look like we’re coming to The end of this kind of first phase of the pandemic, right? I mean, this is, this is a kind of forever thing. I mean, this is going to dramatically change the world as we know it moving forward.

Right. In terms of some of the things that we have just taken for granted in the past, we’ll not, we’ll not be able to take for granted in the future. Again, all these places like companies like Google and Facebook have these massive complexes where they have You know, tens of thousands of people work. I mean, again, I don’t know what they’re going to do because the reality of it is, is that, you know, the, the kind of working from home, I think is going to become the new norm, right?

Which obviously then means that, you know, companies like Zoom are going to do well, but again, they need to kind of, you know, keep, keep rolling with the punches because it’s, it’s going to kind of evolve. And, and as you, as you sort of said before, I think it’s almost like we’re going to have to, as agencies, we’re going to have to probably work harder.

Yeah. To just maintain kind of where we are, right? Which again, I don’t think any of us are kind of afraid of hard work, but I think the reality of it is, is that, you know, there are going to be some companies that are going to be in need of help, right? Who probably spurned the help when it was offered in the past.

Right. And now they really need help because they could go under, right. And I think as an industry, we, we have an opportunity to help one educate people that maybe have you know, kind of got to the point where they’ve lost their job or something like that. And they can kind of retrain to kind of do some of the stuff involved in our industry.

Right. And, and again, I think, I think you know, that that’s, that’s an important point. Part of that process. But, but two, I just think it’s, it’s a case of, you know, we need to be flexible, adaptable. And just, again, just do, do, do good work and hard work for the clients that we work with. Right. And know that eventually kind of things will get back to normal, whatever normal is.

Aaron Levy: Yeah, I think if I have one thing to add to that, well, I’ll go, I’ll go two routes. Number one, from a work route. Number two, from a personal route. From a work route, I think both of you hit the nail on the head that this is not a time where planning is going to be effective. Like, you can do it, but it’s not going to be effective.

It’s probably going to be wrong, or your assumptions will be wrong. So you have to adapt. You have to be pliable. You have to change. And from a, from a personal perspective. I’ve about half of the team that I manage is remote. So I’ve learned how remote folks work and what sort of behaviors to watch and not.

And one of the things that I see the most with new remote employees is that they work more, not less. There’s that like gray area between work life like work life balance is a pretend word, but work life harmony, figuring out how they fit together, this is more important. So what, something that we’re observing, frankly, just from looking on LinkedIn, which I’m doing too much now People are struggling a lot with trying to figure out what that balance is.

So what I will say to everyone as a human is don’t try to replicate what you had before because it won’t work. Just as we’re trying, we’re telling companies to adapt their marketing. Make sure that you take screen breaks because right now you’re stuck on like 18 hours of screen time a day because everyone just watches YouTube instead.

So we actually instituted a mandatory days off here because shocker nobody was taking vacation days. Still do it work on your brain, take some free time, spring cleaning, do some spring cleaning, whatever. But make sure that you’re being responsible with yourself and not just with your work.

Jim Banks: I take myself out every day now.

I mean, I used to sit on my butt for like, you know, as you say, 15, 16 hours and I’ve always worked from home. Right. So for me, it’s, it’s been like, this is the, the, the same norm as always, other than all the people in the house that I live with, they’re still here. Right. I mean, normally they would go out and I’d be in the house on my own.

Right. But, but it sort of You know, now they’re not, but for me, it’s like, I’ve been told I can go out and exercise once a day for an hour and I’ve been taking advantage of that. I’ve gone out. I’ve exercised. I walk for about four and a half miles, right? To kind of just get fresh air, kind of get, get some kind of downtime from from work.

Right. And it’s been. immensely valuable for me to do that, right? And I think regardless of, you know, whether I, I can go out and go as long as I want. I think that’s just become like a, the norm that’s become the habit for me now.

Frederick Vallaeys: So the next time we see Jim in person at a conference, we won’t recognize him.

He’ll be in such good shape.

Aaron Levy: I don’t know about that.

Christi Olson: And those of us who are parents are stuck going like, ah,

Aaron Levy: When, when this all, I have a, I have a number of young parents on my team and Christi, you’ve always been a proponent of this, of like, I’m a parent and that means that I come with a kid sometime.

But a lot of people are like, Oh, how do we make sure that we preserve normal? You don’t. I’ve met, I’ve not had a one on one in a month and a half. I’ve had a lot of two on ones and three on ones with a lot of children. It’s okay.

Christi Olson: And I think it’s grace. I, what I tell people is expect grace. So like with her, we don’t have childcare.

So she is with me all the time. And like now she’s, she’s done a perfect job sleeping. Had she not, I’d probably ran upstairs, put her off to the side for a little bit. Maybe people would disagree with that, but it’s the everybody is going through something right now. And just extending grace professionally to everyone of like, Hey, it’s, it’s difficult for everyone.

Regardless of single, married, kids, no kids, pets, no pets, city, rural, rural it’s, it’s not easy across the board. It’s not easy from a work perspective. It’s not easy from a personal perspective. So just be kind to one another when you’re out there. And

Jim Banks: obviously, you know, when you go out to go shopping for food, you have to stand in line and, and like, it takes a lot longer to go through the store now.

And Again, it’s, it’s inconvenient, but it’s like, you know, the alternative is you could end up getting infected and take it home to your house or, you know, infecting other people. And it’s just this, there’s so many kind of things that could go wrong. And I think it’s just, you’ve got to be a little bit more, a lot more tolerant than Then you need to be ready.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think that’s the perfect way to wrap it up. Be kind, be tolerant. We’re all in this together. We’re all dealing with something. Christie, Jim, Aaron, thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone for listening and we’ll do this again next week. Everyone stay safe and stay sane. Bye.