Enjoy Truly Bad Marketing Stories
Get ready to feel uncomfortable as our producer, Zac, unveils a collection of marketing horror stories he stumbled upon while exploring the internet. No need to brace yourself, but be prepared to hear and react to some genuinely disastrous marketing tales.
Bloody Mary
This recipe is the authentic, original version found in a book created by the renowned Harry's Bar. We've documented it precisely as it appeared in the book, preserving its true essence and flavor.
In a shaker, Ice, three dashes of lemon juice, one dash of Worcestershire sauce, salt, cayenne pepper, and one jigger of Vodka; fill with tomato juice, Shake well, and strain in a large tumbler.
Drink History
The widely accepted origin story dates back a century ago when a young bartender named Fernand "Pete" Petiot invented the drink at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1921. This bar was a popular spot for American expatriates during the prohibition era and was frequented by many prominent figures, such as Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, and Rita Hayworth.
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Episode Transcript
Catelin: I have to admit I am a bad podcast host and I haven't even looked at this.
Rich: You're fine because if you read it, it says Zac:h is going to share horror stories with us from the marketing world. And you just he is once again given us zero information. We have the cocktail Given us zero information on what's going on here. He has done some research. He's found what he says are truly awful stories and we have to react so right here in the notes it says no need for any real prep.
Catelin: Well, thank God, so you're good. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I was so nervous that I was going to have to have horror stories of my own and I was like I don't think I can talk about that stuff.
Rich: I was too, and so I will certainly have any current clients.
Catelin:vThat was my fear. I was like oh my God, they're all lovely.
Rich: We love you all. You're wonderful. You don't ever challenge us in bad ways. So I was in the same situation and terrified. So I opened it this morning and got to the paragraph that says no need for any prep and I'm like, oh, okay, great.
Catelin: Just don't do anything. Show up, be charming.
Rich: I've been doing this for I think it's like years now. I've been doing marketing so I've got some stories, but I am less interested in telling those, because who knows who's listening.
Catelin: That's my, that was my. I was like we can't, we can't do this. The names have been changed to protect the innocent or whatever, like that wouldn't even apply.
Rich: And my really good horror story about Aretha Franklin. You'll buy me drinks to hear that one. So that does not go on the podcast. But you know, may she rest in peace. Of course she was, you know the queen of soul yes, the queen of soul, a wonderful, wonderful singer. She was also a diva beyond divas when you worked with her professionally. So we'll just leave it at that Was.
Catelin: wasn't there some like contract negotiation disputes or something?
Rich: Yes.
Catelin: Yes, okay, I was like I think I've bought you drinks and heard this story. You did buy me drinks. You might have actually just cried you without going to your house. Yeah, I think you didn't get any bartender Got me rolling.
Rich: So, speaking of bartenders, before we let Zac:h share these horror stories, we've got a horrific cocktail in my mind a Bloody Mary.
Catelin: Oh, you don't like Bloody Mary's.
Rich: I don't like tomato juice. I love tomatoes. I do not like tomato juice.
Catelin: Interesting. Yeah, it's just a weird thing. I don't like tomato juice either, but I love a good Bloody Mary.
Rich: Like I've tried, but tomato juice makes me gag, so I just can't.
Catelin: So just don't. Yeah, I don't. What are your other options? If it's not a Bloody Mary, what are your other choices? You just like head straight to a mimosa?
Rich: I mean I could do a mimosa, I could do a Bellini, I could just do vodka on the rocks. I mean Rose.
Catelin: With a pickle garnish.
Rich: I could do the See. I love everything about the Bloody Mary, like all the extra stuff that comes with it, except the tomato juice. This is a super traditional. This is the original original from Harry's Bar, or Harry's New York Bar in Paris, where Americans went. So this is like gosh,
Zac this is crazy. Humphrey Bogart, ernest Hemingway, Rita Hayworth they all went to that bar. They probably drank this exact same original recipe and it is simple.
Catelin: Yeah, it's not overly complex, and also like stuff you probably have in your fridge
Zac: Right, can I?
Catelin: tell you a funny thing about Ernest Hemingway is like you know one of the great American writers.
And Tyrell, my in-home bartender slash husband, a major. He says he majored in reading and talking, but English and theater right. He's like a true Renaissance man. And I remember one time he was like I was reading some Hemingway. So for Christmas one year I bought him the complete works of Ernest Hemingway and then I was like the next year or two years later I was like really scrambling for a gift idea and I forgot that I had already bought him the complete works of Ernest Hemingway. So I bought him the exact same book like two years in a row.
Oh no, was he gracious about it, he's like you got me this and I was like I did, didn't I? And I like looked up and there it was on the bookshelf and it's a hefty. I'm like it's not a small book, it's a hefty.
Rich: Well, because he didn't just write like one little novelette, like novella, that's more.
Catelin: Yeah, yeah. So this bloody If anybody needs a spare copy of the complete works of Ernest Hemingway. I got you.
Rich: Perfect. You know, when I see Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway together, I go to Ernest Borgnein, because I take the B from Bogart and that's where my brain goes.
Catelin: I don't even know who that is.
Rich: He's an actor. I'm pretty sure he's an actor.
Catelin: It's a great name. Yeah, and do you know what I do? You know what I go to is like communists, because isn't that like they all?
Zac: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rich: Because they didn't, because they were artsy, and the McCarthy hearings and blah, blah, blah.
Catelin: Yeah, so like so, yeah, except I mean it's not coming.
Rich: So they would have this non-communist, very French slash American Bloody Mary. So yeah, you grab your shaker, caitlin, you throw some ice in it, presumably, however much ice you feel like. You want Three dashes of lemon juice, say it with me Fresh dashes Fresh, fresh squeezed.
Catelin: only I was just trying to think of how many. That would be an ounces like, probably a quarter of an ounce.
Rich: It's really small. Yeah, I think I would probably do just like one quick squeeze of it.
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: A dash of Worcestershire sauce or Worcestershire sauce, depending on how you say it, but I think it's Worcestershire sauce.
Catelin: Worcestershire.
Rich: Some salt, to your tasting cayenne pepper, to your tasting one jigger of vodka and then fill the rest of it with tomato juice to presumably put in a normal size tumbler. Take, well, strain into A large tumbler, which I was like a what? Like a sixteen ounce maybe probably.
Yeah, twelve ounce like a yeah, the glass so not a bunch of craziness in this, but it is. The original is spicy. That's interesting, because when you order a bloody Mary, you have to specify spicy. However, if you were carries new york bar in Paris in nineteen twenty one spicy. It would be spicy, whether you ask for it or not. My mouth is watering, yeah. And then we get to additional research and a on our notes sheet.
Catelin: So thank you, Zac, that was no additional research.
Rich: I do, you know, so I may take this home and we may try this.
Catelin: Yeah, my husband Brian can't have and I was like it was a celery salt.
Rich: Yeah, and almost every pre made bloody Mary mix a celery salt and it's got a lot of stuff in it. It's crazy. We found a couple of places. So rail car, they make their own and if you give them a little like, if you're patient, they'll whip up just one thing of it for you. Yeah, without the sorry.
Catelin: So does he like everything else except the, the allergy?
Rich: yeah, I mean even like celery, and so we just can't have. Hmm sorry to me as a waste of chewing.
Catelin: Yeah, but like diced, you know little bit.
Rich: what if I told you you could just add like chopped up fried wonton pieces and get your crunch? Doesn't that sound better?
Catelin: I usually like, by the time I'm making like a chicken or tuna salad, I have like four stocks of celery in the fridge that are gonna go bad and I'm like well, it's either feed this to the worm, slash compost pile or, you know, use it for its intended purpose.
Rich: You know you can use the cell relieves and some of the stocks that you don't use that are just too thin or whatever, and like carrot tops and radish tops, and make a pesto out of them.
Catelin: Pesto, or you could make your own stock.
Rich: Make your own vegetable stock you could make your own stock.
Catelin: Yes, no chickens required so many things we could do with our kitchen scraps. I know if I was a better, you know, if I wasn't like working and raising a small child and then like also and and and.
Rich: Yeah, we really want to compost, but the dogs complicate that because we've got to have the ability to shield the dogs from it.
Catelin: There was like a reasonably priced bin.
Rich: Yeah, so what with our new yard will probably get into that. Alright, Zac:h looks like he's getting antsy, so maybe we should do a dance break. Let him dance this one out and then he'll be back on the episode, because we have no idea what we're talking about.
Catelin: I have no idea what I'm talking about most of the time.
Rich: We're back with that hello hello. Our behind the scenes comes in front of the microphone seems like that's been happening a lot more lately.
Catelin: It's like you like us.
Rich: Yeah, you were a recently, if I remember correctly yeah, the flexible work one episode yeah, which, speaking of you, are now where? I am in Charlotte, north Carolina right, which is not anywhere close to either of our offices, but but here you are, and we're glad to provide you the flexibility to do that.
Zac: Yep, make sure to listen to that episode telling more about our flexible work policy. But, yeah, definitely enjoying it here.
Rich: Alright we're ready for what you got for us.
Catelin: Carolina for a horror story.
Zac: Alright, so these are just like genuinely like bad like marketing stories. This first one is client side, so it's from the client's perspective, but there are also some agency side ones. These are all posted on forums anonymously Reddit or things like that so I'll just get right into it.
You guys can kind of just give like a reaction to it and we'll see how it goes. So my family owns a small local business run primarily by my dad, but my grandparents are still involved. They hired a marketing company almost years ago that they still use. They charge about $ a month for their services, at spend included. Recently my dad asked me to take a look at a new proposal the agency was offering. After a little digging I found out they are currently running paid ads on yellow pages and decks knowscom.
Catelin: Well, that's why their services are only $.
Rich: Oh my gosh.
Zac: Yes, you read that right paid ads on those sites. I looked into the ads and they have incorrect phone numbers and don't have the official business name listed properly. Instead they have variations of the name. They use thrive to fulfill the marketing services. It looks like thrive is a marketing software and fulfillment services agencies can use or sell to their clients. They're partnered with decks. Slash yellow pages as decks has rebranded the drive.
I emailed the agency on my dad's behalf and asked about having access to the Google analytics accounts, so I could make sense of all this.
Rich: Yeah, which is your right. You should have access to your own analytic.
Zac: They respond by telling me that there is an issue on Google's behalf and they don't have access to any of the tracking for all of their clients. They are troubleshooting to see what happened. They also don't have client access, so we could log in to thrive. To take a look at the campaigns, was told they would have to speak with an account manager first. Obviously, there are red flags everywhere.
On this one, I plan to have a meeting with everyone this week to get some answers. I wanted to vet about this experience with the community, which is our slash marketing, and see if anyone had any advice on how I should move forward with the situation.
Rich: Fire them right.
Zac: Goodbye.
Rich: We're done, we're done.
Zac: Yeah, that's. Oh, my god.
Rich: I mean, at this point I probably wouldn't even pay them for any like media that's out there. If, like the what if? You're right phone number. Oh my god, it just kept getting worse. This is why.
Catelin: This is why we report to our clients. Well, yeah, and also like have regular check ins. That's a nightmare.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, I think we've had some people who've come to us and are like, hey, like Google has my wrong address or my wrong phone number, can you fix this? But usually it's just because they haven't done anything, like they moved and didn't do anything and don't know how to fix it. Um, I don't think I don't know if we've had one where an agency was just like that negligent and they had a lawyer. Well, they've had him for years. years.
Catelin: It's like set it and forget.
Rich: It does not apply, I mean and that agency is getting like $, a year, which is not like that's times , right, and so that's not terrible.
Catelin: But that's not a lot of money.
Rich: But they're not. They're not spending it's. They're spending like $ on media, if that. Yeah like what they're doing is taking the Thrive service and I've seen this before. They're taking this third party service. That's kind of a turnkey one off. They're marking it up and doing absolutely nothing, so they're just getting paid to not do anything. That's awful yeah we would never do that. No.
Zac: The Yellow Pages party is what gets me.
Rich: Yeah, that's hilarious.
Zac: How old was this? Um? I think it was probably two or three years. Actually, it wasn't that bad.
Rich: But in um was it , , , somewhere in there Like we were spending on Yellow Pages as an agency like a ridiculous amount of money. It was like a thousand dollars a month or something and I was just like who is looking at this? I'm like, oh, it's all online now. I'm like, okay, then why are we paying for the book that everybody throws in their recycle bin the second it arrives? Um. And so we got out of that. And then we ran a test with a test phone number, a trackable phone number um, on their digital ads for six months and guess how many calls we got? None, zero, no clicks whatsoever. So I was like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. And they really had no. They're like, okay, I guess we won't.
Catelin: Um like they were upset about it.
Rich: Well, I mean, they didn't really have any recourse, right Like you've put tracking on something and nothing is happening, so you stopped doing that thing.
Catelin: That's true, yeah, oh, my god.
Rich: Yeah, okay, well, so Yellow Pages, third party, small marketing budget for years seems to be true and never goes up. And like.
Zac: Just like the wrong phone numbers too, like it was literally like so awful.
Catelin: Yeah, it's bad.
Rich: Yeah, I mean especially for like a mom and pop business. I mean it's. It feels to me like it was maybe a restaurant. I don't know if they said that for sure, but they didn't clarify but that's kind of where I was going, but still like a small business. You need that information to be right.
Catelin: Right.
Rich: Like probably not updating their hours for holidays or anything like that.
Zac: Yeah, it's probably even more that was happening.
Rich: That was bad, but this next story, oh sorry he didn't do a follow up, like to come back and be like hey, well, I'll have to look into that.
Zac: I didn't see any.
Rich: I think it's usually on the thread there's an update.
Zac: Yeah, I think it was just like he commented on the thread and then there was like no, I kind of scrolled it, but I'll check back in the picture.
Rich: I hope he fired them quickly. We can only hope.
Zac: This next one is, from the agency's perspective, so kind of just like bad clients per se.
Rich: They don't. Bad clients don't exist. It's a fake thing. True, true it could be.
Zac: They are good and bad on the sides of the equation.
Rich: We all know that Yep.
Catelin: Yep Takes to the tango, true.
Rich: He's been a bad client at points in my life. Yep, I am reformed. Okay, so Reformed Agency point of view on a client horror story Gozak.
Zac: I had one client who already had a difficult product to market. It was a medical product for a very personal slash sensitive issue. We worked hard to find great ads to create in ad words. I know it's Google ads now, but it was ad words at the time. Things were running smooth at first but one night I went to check ad performance and saw almost all zeros across the board. Panic mode set in, checked the good old a change history and noticed an employee of our client went in and removed all of our ads and added their own. Ad performance was far worse than the ones we created in all metrics. When approaching the client with this, they expected us to redo the ads at no additional charge and blamed us for performance. This was even after it was agreed in the beginning They'd be hands off in the account. Yes, for everyone wondering, we stopped working with that client pretty soon after.
Catelin: Hmm, and so it's a hard one to explain.
Rich: It's hard to explain the clients as well, though, but we get really, really clear that if you're going to be like you want, view access to it, absolutely you can see everything that's going on in there. We can have conversations about it, we can talk about it. We're not hiding anything.
but if you want to be able to make changes on the fly yourself, Then we want us for we can't be held responsible for any results, because what you do could tank everything, or I mean, or it could, you know, shoot everything you know through the roof in a really good way. Rarely does that happen and I think that you know most clients get that and the ones who don't, I think that is a red flag because one there's no trust, right, if you want to be managing stuff yourself and turning stuff on and off yourself, you can. There's obviously a trust issue. We have to be able to kind of discuss that and should be communicating regularly when you've got a campaign going on, what you, what we see and what you see and how we can improve and change and edit who.
Zac: I think it's important to like share stories like this, though, because, like it's important to know how to like have like a healthy relationship both ways.
Catelin: So agency therapy are we doing?
Rich: We might be To charge more. No, it is good because it has to be healthy on both sides, are to be trust on both sides. And same thing, like if they're giving the client access to the account, like they're trusting that client not to, you know, delete everything and do their own stuff. So yeah, I mean. And also like you could just Delete it.
Right, just turn them off and add, then all it is is then it's like a minute, if that like turning their stuff off, turning your stuff back on, but you also screw up the algorithm, though you're going to reset back and have to build everything that you built again. Reminds me of clients who want to do like Google ads, like we want to do it for three weeks and then we want to be off for four weeks, and then we want to be on for four weeks and then we want to be off for a month, and it's like that isn't how it works. It actually builds and ramps up and when you shut it off, you lose at least half of the momentum that you had and you've got to regain that. You're much better off finding a consistent budget that you can Keep on. Then up down, up down, but that's a whole other issue. At least that's a conversation before we get into it versus before Just deleting all of our stuff.
Explode it just like what an idea.
Catelin: Also, the ones where, like I don't know if this- is in there anywhere but where a client like deletes their own website and then like it's really mad and it's like, well, yeah, we have backups and we'll restore it for you.
Rich: But you know, like that can be rough.
Catelin: Yeah, it's so.
Rich: That's the other thing is like you know we can. We can do a lot of stuff and we've got a lot of safeguards in place. But if you want to be a Super admin of your own site, just know that nuking it is something you could do, and if you do that, we'll have to like get it back up and that'll cost.
Zac: And how long ago was Google ads ad words, because I'd never heard of that before.
Rich: It's been a while.
Zac: I've literally I've never heard of that.
Rich: Well, you're, you're not, you know, four hundred years old. When are we. So July of twenty eighteen Google ad words was Google ad words ads and then became just Google ads.
Catelin: Google ad words ads.
Rich: So five years ago, five years ago right, twenty twenty three minus twenty eighteen is five.
Catelin: Yeah, the math got it.
Zac: That makes sense, and the last story is going to be the last one, by the way.
Catelin: Zac was also .
Zac: I think I was . Wait, wait, wait no.
Catelin: I was , .
Zac: In ? Yeah, I'm .
Rich: Oh yeah, because he his there was a birthday thing.
Catelin: That's right. Yes, I remember this.
Zac: Yep.
Catelin: Zac’s kindergarten class was naughty.
Zac: My mom held me back in preschool, and then I was in my mom's Kindergarten class.
Catelin: Your mom was your Kindergarten teacher too. Yeah, so was mine Nice.
Rich: Was it you and your brothers? She did not think so All got held back, or just you All three of you.
Zac: She used like her teacher, like like knowledge. Vito power, Vito power Well like she, she like I feel like she had like a good handle of like like kids, when they're that young, how they're going to turn out, just because she's like you know well, she actually just recently retired, just this year.
Catelin: But she is what you're saying.
Zac: Basically yeah, but no, she didn't like the class above me, so she or that I was supposed to be- in. So she held us back. Interesting.
Rich: So she didn't think you were going to get a good kindergarten education from who you were going into, so she held you.
Catelin: The students the other students like thought that they were going to be a bad influence.
Rich: Not the teacher. Interesting, Got it. So she didn't want you to be bad boys. Bad boys, what you're going to do.
Zac: Basically.
Rich: All right, that was really cheesy, sorry, I apologize.
Catelin: I was like not your best work.
Rich: I apologize.
Zac: The last. The last story, though, is a little bit of a throwback it's from . And it's from the agency side again.
Rich: So, for perspective, is when Facebook launched business pages, so that was the thing that happened that year, when your business didn't have to have a personal profile. You could have your own business page. I'm sure other things happened in , but I don't remember exactly what.
Catelin: I mean, like Barack Obama's elected.
Rich: Well, there was that, yeah, Other like notable. That was a big thing. He was elected in .
Catelin: He started like Stock went well. Yeah Right, yeah. No, he was elected in .
Rich: He started in . Right, right, right.
Catelin: It's just, it would have been also like the height of Michael Phelps Olympics. And it would have been the genesis of Michael Phelps greatness.
Rich: It would have also been it was also the mortgage crisis.
Catelin: was a wild year, he said. I don't know what else happened in .
Rich: Well, I was thinking in marketing, not like politics and global economics, and you know bank fraud, but all right. So , we're going back to .
Zac: So a client requested a business plan and roadmap for a homegrown end to end e-commerce solution Everything from a website with a secure shipping cart and checkout process to source to pick impact and fulfillment capabilities from multiple warehouses across the country that complemented their existing fulfillment capabilities. No, this was around . So this was no small feat. Multiple millions of dollars would have completely changed the complexion of our agency with just this one project. We spent months prepping, had an airtight solution that was reasonable budget-wise.
My boss, who was fucking brilliant with the entire proposal together, using the legwork I'd done, designed to be about a two-hour conversation, ticked every box they had for us and then some, we were pumped.
So, david, the presentation comes four of us and eight clients, including VPs and the CMO and CTO of this Fortune company. We got two pages into the discussion maybe three minutes tops and the CMO takes his hefty spiral-bound leave behind, throws it down on the table at our team and stands up. Well, guys, you really missed the mark here. Then he walked out of the room, leaving us all to stare at each other. Later that day, he made a call to our president requesting that my boss who, I will repeat to this day, is one of the most brilliant minds I've ever worked with, never be allowed to work on this account again. We found out after the fact that somewhere between the original Ask and the meeting, he decided and told nobody else that what he really wanted was a turnkey storefront where they just sell the product at Wholesale and the vendor takes everything from there. This meeting ever.
Rich: Oh, so you set an expectation and changed the expectation and didn't tell anybody. You changed it, and wow.
Zac: That one was pretty, pretty rough. That's ouchy.
Rich: That's ouchy. So, since you've brought up e-commerce for additional context, shopify launched. You know when Shopify launched?
Catelin: Probably like ?.
Rich: Nope, . What, wow? So what's really funny is the revised ask. We just want a place where we can sell stuff at face value, ship it out and clients can deal with it.
You know we'll throw it at wholesale and blah, blah, blah, Totally. A Shopify website Could have been easy in , even as basic as it was. Pop your products up, let your clients go buy them, you can put a password on it, you can lock stuff down yeah, wow. And how deflating to work on something that's that big for an existing client. You know agency altering revenue coming in potentially. They really want it, they're committed to it, and then find out that they changed their mind before coming to the meeting and, like I would wonder, so just putting on my client hat and clients I've dealt with. If that CMO came into the meeting still wanting the original scope, flipped toward the end of the presentation, saw the price tag and made a decision in that moment to nix it.
Zac: Well, they said the entire conversation was supposed to be around two hours and it only lasted three minutes, so he only got three minutes into the presentation.
Rich: He looked at the back page, saw the price and then decided to get it. That's what I'm guessing. So that happens so often. I've sometimes left that piece off, no way.
Yeah, where they're like well, I don't want this and you've got to like when you're that high up it's like a saving face thing, so you've got to have somebody else who's your scapegoat and so basically saying the agency completely missed the mark and not like I mean it's also possible that he changed his mind, didn't tell anybody and they were all just as shocked as the agency was in that meeting.
Zac: But I would think, like his CTO would know, or you know, it says that all of them were staring at each other when you left the room, so I'm sure that includes all of the other like leaderships.
Rich: Yeah, it's possible. That's just like that's so terrible. Yeah, it's not great.
Catelin: Like I immediately go into like empathetic mom mode where I'm like that boy was mean to you and you don't have to tolerate that kind of behavior. You should find a different job.
Rich: So imagine just putting like that much work into it just for like last three minutes and then basically like I had a client launch a whole bunch of expletives at me over the phone for something that I had nothing to do with. This was early in my criticism. My second agency and I hung up on him because I was like but he was the owner of the business and so it became like a thing. But luckily my boss stood up for me and said like no, you don't have to. And like this is exactly what he said. And she's like oh my God, like that's really awful. I'm like yeah, right, and she's like no, you don't have to listen to that.
And I said I told him, I'm like, I told him I'm going to hang up now. Like it's not, like I just slammed it down. But the CEO was like our CEO was really mad and I'm like they're not even a huge client, like they weren't that big comparatively. And I just was like no, and I said and I'm not working with him. What ended up happening? Like two months later, that person got fired.
Catelin: The Yeller.
Rich: Yes, the Yeller got fired and the owner of the business ended up apologizing and I worked on it again. But and then a couple years later.
Catelin: I mean, I think so.
Rich: I was cheap at the time. I was very, very cheap at the time. So but yeah, like it's just, there's things you can tolerate and things you can't, and that's one of those where you know that's a huge red flag and either you ride those out and hope that CMO goes somewhere else. It's kind of like getting a bad boss and you've been there for years and you're like well, will I outlast this person or not? And sometimes you do and sometimes you don't, and sometimes you're like I don't want to outlast this person screw it.
Catelin: They're out and you're done yeah.
Zac: But yeah, those are the three stories I found.
Rich: They're all very different.
Catelin: Real uplifting episode today.
Rich: I know I feel like.
Catelin: I need another money.
Rich: Well, we got happy hour in like an hour, right yeah.
Zac: I mean it was called horror stories. I think it's good to see like the worst of the worst, to know that you know yeah, it could be worse yeah.
Rich: I mean in there. I'm sure there is plenty worse. Those are like really bad ones, but they could also happen at any time to almost anyone. Like that same type of situation, like the number of small businesses getting like I'm trying to think of a good word for it fleeced by some sort of like marketing, like program. Oh yeah, you get like the cold call email.
Catelin: That's like have you tried this new silver bullet to fix all of your problems? And then I get calls like I want all of my problems to be fixed. That sounds great.
Rich: Yeah, I get all those calls that come from a local number. That's the recording that your, your Google listing isn't optimized and people can't find you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it's like well, first of all, our Google listing is pretty darn optimized.
So I don't think we have a problem there. We actively manage that. Second of all, you're a scammer, so please don't scam me, go away. Oh, I'm trying to feel like I find a way to like end this on an uplifting note. I mean, it was great to talk to you again, Zac:h. It was great to have you in front of the microphone again.
Zac: It's good to be here, for sure. Sorry, I ruined the mood with this.
Catelin: You know, I gotta say too, like to have Zac:h be the buzzkill is really an outlier.
Rich: That is an outlier.
Catelin: He's normally the one organizing the fun Bringing all the yeah, bringing all the chipper party people.
Rich: Wow, yeah, I didn't even know we were doing this, this topic but it's useful. Like you said, Zac, it's helpful to hear what other people have been through, so hopefully you can recognize it sooner or not go through it or not deal with it.
Catelin: It's good perspective. For sure, next time I'll bring some wholesome stories. Marketing, wholesome stories and we'll just have a glass of milk.
Rich: I would challenge you, we could do white Russians. I would challenge you, I know so gross. I would challenge you to find, like the like, best client, best agency stories out there. Find three of those and we'll see. So either this will become an episode or we'll have to call you out on the intro to an episode that you couldn't find them. True, true. I'll get back to that Either way it'll be fun to dive into that.
Catelin: Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Thanks Zac:h.
Rich: That's it for another episode of Cocktails, Tangents and Answers.
Catelin: We hope it was as much fun to listen to as it was to make
Rich: You can find me on Twitter or Instagram at atRich:macky I try not to make it too difficult, it's just my name and you can find our agency at antidote, underscore seven, one that's A-N-T-I-D-O-T-E, underscore seven one. On Twitter and Instagram as well.
Catelin: And you can find me at home sipping a craft cocktail prepared by my in home bartender it's my husband.
Rich: We'll be back with another episode every other week and a whole new cocktail recipe, plenty more tangents and, of course, answers to those pressing marketing questions.
Catelin: And if you'd like to send us a question, you can go to ctapodcastlive to send us an email.
Rich: Or you can call our hotline at -- and leave us a voicemail. Your questions might be used for future episodes of the podcast.
Catelin: For now, like and subscribe and tune in next time.