The 8Bit Podcast – Episode 022

1. Separate the eggs and store the whites for another purpose.
2. Beat the yolks with the sugar and nutmeg in a large mixing bowl until the mixture lightens in color and falls off the whisk in a solid “ribbon.”
3. Combine dairy, booze and salt in a second bowl or pitcher and then slowly beat into the egg mixture.
4. Move to a large glass jar (or a couple of smaller ones) and store in the fridge for a minimum of 2 weeks. A month would be better, and two better still. In fact, there’s nothing that says you couldn’t age it a year, but I’ve just never been able to wait that long. (And yes, you can also drink it right away.)
5. Serve in mugs or cups topped with a little extra nutmeg grated right on top.

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Transcription

Phil: 
All right. Cool. So let’s start. Should we thank our sponsors? We’ve never thanked our sponsors before.

Jeff: 
Sponsors for what? What are we doing?

Phil:   Sponsors for our podcast.

Jeff:  Oh the 8 Bit podcast 22.

Phil:   8 Bit podcast.

Jeff:  Two and two like what’s his name? What was that show?

Phil:  Chuck Willery.

Jeff:   Chuck Willery on what was that show?

Phil:  Love Connection.

Jeff:  Love Connection. What channel was that on?

Phil:  Useless knowledge. I don’t remember that but-

Jeff:  Two and two.

Phil:  It must have been network ’cause I had it as a kid, I remember.

Jeff:  Yeah, I used to watch it myself.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  And I’d laugh and I’d be like, “Girls are dumb.”

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  They’re not. They’re not. Yeah. So what were you saying? Our sponsors?

Phil:  Yeah, our sponsors.

Jeff:  Who is it?

Phil:  We got Pinpoint Love.

Jeff:  What’s that?

Phil:  Goof. Great company.

Jeff:  Oh, that sounds interesting.

Phil:  And Heritage Coast.

Jeff:  What? That sounds amazing. Sounds lake-like.

Phil:  Right. We’re not giving them enough money, or they’re not giving us enough money to explain what they are. We’ll link to them.

Jeff:  All right, we’ll link to them. We’ll let people figure it out on their own.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  We don’t want to give too much away.

Phil:  Right, yeah. up for something.

Jeff:  Yeah. So welcome back.

Phil:  Thank you.

Jeff:  We got back on the horse on the last one. 21.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:  Took a little bit longer to get it kind of ready to go, but I was good. I’m glad we took a little extra time on it. I think we said two weeks we would do it. This is like week three, which isn’t technically a week, because you know, it’s one of those shorter weeks.

Phil:  Details.

Jeff:  Yeah, anyways. But yeah, so it was good. I was glad we got back on the horse like we called

it.

Phil:  Lot of horses around here lately.

Jeff:  Lot of horses, yeah. What did we even talk about last time?

Phil:  Or no, marketing and digital, how it’s all-

Jeff:  Oh yeah, like a little brother.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  Yeah, so that was good. We introduced Kate Rod, last time, our new content and copywriter. Pretty excited about that.

Phil:  Yeah. She took a couple jabs at us.

Jeff:  Yeah. What’s in front of you? What’ve you got going on here?

Phil:  That looks pretty gross.

Jeff:  We got Belly Up. Oh, it’s from our bloody Mary bar, cups. See that?

Phil:  All right, so a year ago, I think today, or very close to today, we made aged egg nog. We’re gonna try it today. One year, right?

Jeff:  Belly Up Buddy Bar. This tastes like a bloody Mary?

Phil:  Well, I hope so.

Jeff:  I like … Is this one of those, what do you call them, you buy them at craft shows where they have the sugar and the stuff, and then it’s got the chocolate chips on the bottom, and then you just dump it all in a thing and you make cookies out of it?

Phil:  Right, right.

Jeff:  ‘Cause this looks kind of like that.

Phil:  Why don’t you get that closer to the camera to see what we’re gonna be drinking here.

Jeff:  So we have some sand. So we got some sand on there.

Phil:  Well, it says not to shake. It says stirring is good.

Jeff:  Oh, this is shaken, not stirred?

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  That’s kind of backwards.

Phil:  This one looks pretty good. This is riveting TV.

Jeff:  It looks disgusting. So it’s a year old.

Phil:  It’s a year old, yup.

Jeff:  What’s all in this thing?

Phil:  All right. We got eggs, sugar, half and half, whole cream … I’m sorry, whole milk, heavy cream, Jamaican rum, cognac, bourbon-

Jeff:  Which is spelled really weird.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  It’s cog-nac.

Phil:  Cog-nac.

Jeff:  The Q is silent.

Phil:  Nutmeg, and kosher salt.

Jeff:  A year old.

Phil:  A year old.

Jeff:  And we’re gonna drink it.

Phil:  We’re gonna drink it today.

Jeff:  What could go wrong?

Phil:  Let’s pour this into something smaller.

Jeff:  All right, let’s not waste all of them. We’ll put this one off to the side. We’ll just open one of them. We’ve gotta keep our logo in front. Product placement here.

Jeff:  Hmm.

Phil:  Hmm.

Jeff:  Well, there’s nothing floating on top, is there?

Phil:  No. It smells good. Oh, we will say that we have tried this in the past.

Jeff:  We as in you. I don’t know if I-

Phil:  Did you try any?

Jeff:  Did I try some?

Phil:  But it’s been quite a while. It’s been many months since we’ve tried this. But it says to age

it.

Jeff:  I think I smell the cognac in it. Wow.

Phil:  Grab a glass, Steven.

Jeff:  All right. Oh, we’re not cheers-ing or nothing?

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jeff:  Cheers.

Phil:  It’s tasty.

Jeff:  Wait, can I have this with my gout? Am I gonna have gouty foot tomorrow?

Phil:  It’s a year old. I don’t think that counts with gout.

Jeff:  It actually tastes pretty damn good.

Phil:  Hey, come here, Steven. Let’s pour some in. Kate, you wanna try any of this?

Kate:  No, I’m good.

Jeff:  This actually is pretty good.

Phil:  Yeah, it’s very tasty. Did you sign that waiver?

Jeff:  Oh, true. Does our liability insurance cover bad egg nog?

Phil:  Well, he’s on his own.

Jeff:  Wow, that’s got a kick to it.

Phil:  It’s boozy.

Steven:  Yeah, it’s got some kick.

Jeff:  What’s in here again? Eggs? Year-old eggs. Interesting.

Phil:  All right.

Jeff:  What’s your favorite part?

Phil:  When it’s over. I actually like it. It’s pretty good.

Jeff:  It’s actually pretty good.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  If I … Yeah. I think I’m getting a buzz, though.

Phil:  We need the little reindeer glasses like in “Christmas Vacation.”

Jeff:  Like in “Christmas Vacation”?

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  It’s good. That’s good. Well, that was interesting.

Phil:  All right.

Jeff:  A year old. So does it get even better if we did this the next year?

Phil:  I don’t know.

Jeff:  Interesting.

Phil:  We’ll post the recipe if anybody’s interested. All right.

Jeff:  Pretty good.

Phil:  Moving on.

Jeff:  Product placement.

Phil:  You sell that stuff?

Jeff:  Yeah. So, we were like, “What are we gonna talk about today?” And I think in our research we found some interesting things. So we thought, “Let’s just make it about that,” right?

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jeff:  So we’ve been looking online about, ’cause we were interested in, ’cause it’s kind of towards the end of 2018. Looking in 2019, what are some things that maybe we should be thinking about or have our clients think about or our podcast listeners, watchers, can think about, as far as their marketing? Well, we stumbled across some pretty cool statistics. I can’t say that word very good. Again, I think the Q is silent on “statistics.”

Phil:  I think the egg nog got you.

Jeff:  The egg nog’s pretty good. This was on hubspot.com, which, every year they do the state of inbound, but this is quite the list. We can publish the link to this if you’re interested, but there are some really cool things in here. We’re gonna get to one of them specifically, but did you know 84% of people will not make a purchase if they’re dealing with an unsecured website?

Phil:  Makes sense.

Jeff:  So like when you’re doing your holiday shopping, if it doesn’t say https so it’s secured-

Phil:  Or show the little lock.

Jeff:  Or the little lock, like if it didn’t say that, you should totally not put your credit card in there, ’cause guess what? You might buy a lot more gifts than you had bargained for, is what that’s saying.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  You got any cool ones? You had some too.

Phil:  Well, I was looking at-

Jeff:  Oh, the … Okay, I gotcha.

Phil:  The next section here that we’re gonna talk about.

Jeff:  Well anyway, there were some really cool … That was just one of them that was kind of interesting.

Phil:  I do know that there’s one thing to talk about was micro-moments.

Jeff:  Oh yeah.

Phil:  A lot of short videos, short interactions with people. And it says people spend an average of three hours and 35 minutes on their smartphones every day.

Jeff:  How long?

Phil:  Three 35.

Jeff:  What about your kids?

Phil:  Well, I think it might be different for us, too, because we’re actually on our computers all day long. But it did say that in 2019, mobile devices will be the medium that gets the most minutes in the U.S., finally surpassing television. And we were talking about that earlier and I said, with my family, I would say that’s definitely surpassed television. There’s a few shows my kids like to watch, and my wife likes to watch, but they’re on their phones way more.

Jeff:  Well, and there’s all kinds of things.

Phil:  I’m not saying that’s good.

Jeff:  No. My kids, they’re okay, but yeah, they’re definitely probably on there way longer than they need to. This is interesting too, since we’re talking about smartphones. More than 46% of Americans will check their smartphone before getting out of bed. Guilty. Even Steven said he’s guilty, behind the camera.

Phil:  Does it count turning my alarm off? ‘Cause I turn my alarm off.

Jeff:  You’re not checking it though.

Phil:  No.

Jeff:  What are you checking for? I’m trying to think, what do I even look at?

Phil:  I will check it as soon as I’m out of the shower every day to see if I have a meeting that day,

or-

Jeff:  Meeting, so I know how to dress.

Phil:  Yes.

Jeff:  Yes, I do that a lot.

Phil:  Sometimes I’ll check the weather to see how I should dress also.

Jeff:  I don’t do that, and sometimes I get really mad, ’cause I didn’t figure it out.

Phil:  What else do you do in the morning?

Jeff:  Well, Phil, let me tell you. Well, that’s cool, and here’s another thing that’s kind of cool. Not cool, but … What is it? Over 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product while conducting a search on their smartphone. That’s from Google, 2018.

Phil:  Eh, what do they know?

Jeff:  True. They don’t know much.

Phil:  Google.

Jeff:  They don’t know much about you at all, Phil. Yeah, there’s all kinds of good ones on here. There was some really interesting statistics, which, we could just keep going here, but I think the one that we were talking about beforehand I think we’re gonna start talking about more, and this kind of ties into some of the things we were doing for some of our clients lately in content development is voice search. 19% of people use Siri at least daily. Did you know that?

Phil:  I did know that ’cause you told me that earlier.

Jeff:  Oh. Did you know that 37% use Siri, 23% use Microsoft’s Cortana, and 19% use Amazon’s Alexa at least monthly?

Phil:  I was waiting to see if Alexa heard you.

Jeff:  Which, I feel like that’s kind of a … Wouldn’t you think Alexa might be a little bit more? I feel

like-

Phil:  Well, Siri’s in everybody’s hand. Or, not everybody. Everybody that has an iPhone or an iPad.

Jeff:  True. What do you got? You had found some cool stuff too about that.

Phil:  Well, I think we’re just diving into this voice search and smart speaker marketing and everything, and I think that’s gonna be a topic of our next Power of Play. Do we wanna explain Power of Play first? I feel like we’ve done it in the past, but maybe rehash that?

Jeff:  Yeah. Part of the culture that we strive to do, and I would say sometimes we’re not always the best at, I’m just being totally transparent, but we strive to do and we’ve done a lot in the past, is we meet regularly to … And the Power of Play, meaning we think that we do so much for our clients and for ourselves, but there’s times where we have outside interests, we have things that we need to constantly be learning about. That’s how we started getting in the drone piece a little bit, is just curiosity about

Phil:  Podcasts.

Jeff:  Podcasting. Good example. We just did it to see if we could do it, and we did it, and we’re gonna keep it up, right?

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jeff:  So we have it scheduled on our schedule with our team where we try to get together I guess at least every other week and take turns in presenting something or sharing something cool or actually doing an activity. The Duluth Crate Company and stuff that we had talked about before, Pinpoint, those all came out of some thoughts and ideas.

Phil:  Our sponsors?

Jeff:  Our sponsors.

Phil:  Oh, okay.

Jeff:  Yeah. Well, they’re on their own now, though. We sold those off to other people.

Phil:  Self-sufficient now and they’re sponsoring.

Jeff:  Yeah, they just wanna keep supporting us. No, but so that’s kind of Power of Play, the idea that we take time to scratch those creative itches, learn some new things. Sometimes they find its way into the work we do, sometimes it doesn’t. But yeah, I think that would be a good topic to look into, would be voice and how do we utilize that better, understand it better, and maybe use it for our clients.

Phil:  Yeah. And again, that’s gonna be our next topic for Power of Play. We’re gonna learn a lot more in the meantime. For our next podcast, we’re gonna talk about what we learned. Some of the things that intrigue me the most are, it says 50% of all searches will be voice searches by the end of 2020. I don’t know how they come up with that stat, but that’s pretty intriguing.

Jeff:  And I should make up our own stats, too.

Phil:  100% of me is gonna do a better job of using voice search instead of typing everything in myself.

Jeff:  Sweet. Yeah.

Phil:  20% of mobile queries on Google are voice searches.

Jeff:  Oh, I have that on mine too. We have different sources here, but it’s the same one. That’s another one.

Phil:  Yeah. And 25% of all Bing searches were also voice searches.

Jeff:  Bing!

Phil:  Bing! So I guess what we’re saying is we feel like there’s a lot of stuff in the future here, and we’re trying to wrap our heads around it a little bit more.

Jeff:  Well, it’s not going away.

Phil:  Right. And I think one of the examples they give … I don’t think. I know one of the examples that this article gives is Domino’s is doing a great job of it already, where people can order pizzas through their smart speakers. Is that what we’re calling them? Smart speakers?

Jeff:  Yeah.

Phil:  Let’s go back up here. Smart speakers. Yeah.

Jeff:  Yeah.

Phil:  And so you can order a pizza right through your device and boom, it’s at your house.

Jeff:  And they’ll fix your street for you.

Phil:  And they’ll fix your street for you with potholes.

Jeff:  With potholes.

Phil: Yeah. So that’s one example. I think in the next podcast we’ll have other examples that we’ve found that companies are already utilizing the technology and maybe where do we go from here?

Jeff:  Yeah. I think one way we were also thinking about is, how do we maybe use, create … ‘Cause as we create content for some clients, maybe there’s a way as to take that to that step and include those types of voice recognized pieces of content in different ways on their behalf. So that’s something too that’d be fun to learn how to do and figure out.

Jeff:  That’s the thing, a lot of times, a lot of the things that we’re doing as things keep coming up, they’re trending, is we have to learn new things, and that’s, again, where Power of Play I think is helpful, that we give ourselves a chance to try and stay fresh with things, because there are so many things all the time. How do they interrelate? How do they work separately? We gotta know that stuff.

Phil:  Right, and what I’m … Again, when we dive into this, we’ll learn more, but I feel like maybe there’s a way to optimize all of your content that would fit in these various forms, including voice, and how do we tweak that? How do we … I don’t even understand the technology of it yet, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Jeff:  I think it was kind of cool, now that you say that, too, is that when you think about, it’s almost like … I think part of branding in general is times when you’d least expect to find a brand and it pops up. So you think about, you do so much for all the normal channels, and if you had happened to do a search for something, a brand that you maybe wouldn’t expect, like how they might be using it, would pop up, that would be pretty awesome.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  Yeah, you’re right. It’s kind of cool to think about how can you extend that even further into something else now.

Phil:  Well, and I know some of the stats you were reading earlier talked about how good they are at recognizing voice now. What is it, like, 95% accuracy?

Jeff:  92%. Google claims its voice recognition accuracy is now at 92%.

Phil:  You know, we laugh around here because we have an Echo and a Dot, and we laugh because it doesn’t always recognize my voice, but I’m also the farthest one away from the machine, so.

Jeff:  You are blandly handsome, though.

Phil:  That’s true. That could be part of it. What’s going on here? Earthquake?

Jeff:  What happened?

Phil:  I think Jan’s phone was going off.

Jeff:  Well, that’s cool. I’m excited about that too. I think that makes sense, especially when you think about so much online content to be found if we can make that, again, go to that voice piece, that makes a lot of sense.

Phil:  And I’m just looking here at a couple examples, and I think there’s one thing that I use a lot would be directions to places. This one’s given an example of directions to Six Flags. I think a lot of people use it in that way. They’re also giving, “What are some Thai foods that deliver in my area?” “What movies are playing at the movie theater?” Things like that, where I don’t think it’s that outlandish, but it’s like instead of typing that stuff in now, I think a lot of it’s going that way. And it’s not just with your phone. It’s with these other smart speakers. That’s all.

Jeff:  Yeah. That’s cool. Well, that’s gonna be fun. We’ll try and figure more of that out, share that on the next thing, what we found out. Maybe we even actually get to work. That’d be kind of cool.

Phil:  Yeah, do an example.

Jeff:  We could have Alexa on as a special guest. Set her right there, and then ask her a bunch of questions and we’ll just interact with her.

Phil:  Right. I think the most important thing-

Jeff:  We might do that anyways.

Phil:  About the smart speaker, though, is playing jeopardy.

Jeff:  You like that a lot.

Phil:  I do. I’ve got three days built up that we can play today.

Jeff:  My kids hate Alexa, by the way.

Phil: 
Do they? Oh yeah.

Jeff:  They call her my girlfriend at home. “Ask your girlfriend.” ‘Cause I’m the only one that likes to actually use it. They think it’s dumb, but I don’t know. Cool.

Jeff:   So we’re gonna do that for next time. Did we … Yeah, we talked about #AskCA. last time.

Phil:  Yup.

Jeff:  And we had a question, I believe, about inbound, or content marketing, is it effective, how do we sell it to leadership? I think we talked about that last time.

Phil:  Yup.

Jeff:  We had, on the opposite end of the spectrum this time, that we just wanna talk about, which was Sarah from Ely. “We still use print ads and television a lot, but feel we are doing fine without online marketing. Should we just be online, like for the sake of doing it?” I think that’s a good question. I think we talk a lot lately, even before we took our little hiatus, we talked about I think content marketing a lot, just online pieces. Definitely important to be there, but also the idea that for some, depending on where they live, maybe depending on the mediums that are working for them, should you still be there? I don’t know. Maybe not. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Phil:  I would say on the flip side of that, this specific question, talking about being on TV, to me that says they already have video assets created, and I would say it can’t hurt you to put them online as well.

Jeff:  Sure. Right.

Phil:  So whether that’s YouTube, Facebook, things like that. I would definitely take advantage of it. You went through the effort of creating the video, so you might as well use it.

Phil:  And I think too that, I think it’s working not, but being able to be nimble like that or have it out in other sources, maybe you’ll be doing even better.

Jeff:  I’d say too, it’s a matter of your target audience, so yeah, if television and print ads work for a specific group, so say baby boomers still, which I think it’s easy to say they’re gonna still respond to the newspaper and television because they’re probably doing a lot of that still. Of course, they’re also on social a lot more. Your parents and grandparents are probably on Facebook, et cetera, to see the kids’ photos and that. So those are still good opportunities, but I think yeah, when you think about the majority, especially when you think about even budget and stuff, you only have so much money to spend, so if print ads and television make it work and it’s not broke, yeah, I think it’s fine. But yeah, to your point, if you have certain elements you can easily convert and put online doesn’t hurt.

Phil:  I would say too that maybe it’s about the capacity you have. So if you’re selling a product, can you sell more widgets? If not, if you’re at capacity now, then maybe you don’t need to market anymore.

Jeff:  Yeah. I like widgets.

Phil:  Yeah. If you’re a service-based industry, can you take more appointments? Can you service more people? Can you expand? Are you looking to expand or just stay the same size? I think there’s a lot of goals and questions, and I think that’s one of the things we like to do with our clients is what are your goals for the next year, the next five years? And maybe you’re just sitting pretty and leave it alone.

Jeff:  Yeah. The one thing I would say too, and yeah, on the flip side, is sometimes television and those types of more traditional or outbound things can be expensive. When you think about all the things to do them correctly, that maybe if you could shift those dollars to digital or online means, you could maybe save yourself some money or reach more. And obviously there’s the measurement part. But there too, though, if you’re comfortable and depending on what your business is and it’s doing all the things you wanna do, like he said, and maybe hit the goals you’re thinking about, yeah, then I don’t, it’s not necessarily like those are bad things if it’s working for you.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  I think it’s a good question, though, ’cause I think there’s some pressure sometimes that I have to be online. So if you’re not, it’s okay.

Phil:  So yes and no.

Jeff:  Yeah, yes and no.

Phil:  Maybe.

Jeff:  Yeah, maybe. Just like drinking egg nog. Maybe. Maybe I’ll be okay.

Phil:  Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.

Jeff:  Maybe I won’t die. So far so good. But we’re only what, 15 minutes into this. So anyways, that was a good question. So #AskCA, just a reminder, #AskCA is just a way we can find it quickly again on social media, but if you wanna call us on the phone, we talked about this last time, you wanna just email us or something, that’s fine too. But if you’ve got questions related to design and marketing, online, offline, let us know. We’ll try to answer them as best we can.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jeff:  That was a good one.

Phil:  True.

Jeff:  And real quick, too, we’ll probably post the link to some of these stats. This was Hubspot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018. Very interesting. Covers all kinds of things from voice search to mobile search to podcasting. Just a lot of good aggregation of just some stats around trends and things like that. And I know you’re looking at Single Grain.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jeff:  That was an interesting … That’s a good blog. It’s a company, I believe they’re an inbound marketing company too, that does a nice job.

Phil:  Yeah, and I actually the article of this one was 11 something.

Jeff:  Okay.

Phil:  11 Digital Marketing Trends You Can No Longer Ignore in 2019.

Jeff:  2019. That’s only a month or so away.

Phil:  Yup.

Jeff:  You can’t ignore it.

Phil:  No. We can ignore it now.

Jeff:  Yeah.

Phil:  But not in 2019.

Jeff:  No, six weeks or so and then we can’t ignore it no more.

Phil: Right.

Jeff:  Cool. Anything else going on lately? Anything we gotta update about?

Phil:  I don’t think so.

Jeff:  Okay. I’m still alive so far.

Phil:  Yeah?

Jeff:  Yeah. Might have a little bit more. This is my-

Phil:  The eye twitch I had earlier is gone, so that’s good, right?

Jeff:  It actually is pretty tasty.

Phil:  Yeah, it’s not too bad. Let me try a little more-

Jeff:  I’d Belly Up more of this.

Phil:  Yeah. All right, well, cheers.

Jeff:  Cheers. Till next time.