AGENCY inTELL: Joel & Brian from iMedia

Welcome back to the Agency Intel, the show where we deconstruct the brains behind the

world's most successful digital agencies.

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Robbie, we have to start with the elephant in the room, or should I say the AI in the

room?

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I don't know.

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The hype train isn't just moving, it's at a full on sprint right now.

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It really is.

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mean, this year has seen some crazy headlines about AI, feel like, like between Matt

Schumer's latest post that was like, I mean, people were in a frenzy.

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I think when I saw it, it was at 72 million views already.

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And I was like, and that doesn't count all the reads that went direct to him and from

other places.

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But you know, it was about, you know, the new stuff with Claude and all that and

everything running over the competition.

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And I mean, we're just seeing some crazy headlines coming out.

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I feel like the intelligence part of our show name is more relevant than ever, or maybe

it's chaotic.

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I'm not sure at this point.

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uh Total agreements.

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It's easy to get lost in the tweets and the benchmarks, but at the end of the day,

agencies still have to build things that work for real enterprise clients.

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They need uptime, they need scale, and they need strategy that lasts longer than a model

update.

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Exactly.

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And you know, I think that's why our episode today is going to be very timely because

we're going to get past all this little hype and we're going to talk to a team that is

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literally navigating major projects.

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And they've been doing this for over 25 years or the last 25 years.

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And you know, they're making it look easy.

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So this will be interesting.

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Absolutely, absolutely.

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Today we're gonna be talking with two heavy hitters from iMedia.

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We have Joel Maculso, partner of Development Services.

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Joel has seen the industry evolve from the first lines of code to the modern composable

stack we're seeing today.

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He's the guy who understands the why behind the tech.

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Yep, and we're also joined by Brian McGovern, who is in the trenches and is making it

happen.

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So from building like experiences for the San Francisco Symphony to their incredible 3D

engineering that they've got behind the SeatMe platform for venues, it's you know, like

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for the LA Opera, Brian really knows exactly what it takes to deliver at high levels for

these projects.

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Absolutely.

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We're going to be talking about legacy.

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We're going to talk about 3D infrastructure and all the edge caching involved there.

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And we're going to see how top tier agency stays ahead of the curve when the curve is

moving at a hundred miles an hour.

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Hello, today on Agency Intel, we're gonna be speaking with Brian and Joel from iMedia.

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And hello, both of you, um I would like to have you guys tell us about your agency.

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We'll start with Joel and then I'm gonna have, Brian, you're gonna follow it up.

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Sure thing.

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Roger and Robbie, thanks for having us.

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uh iMedia is our company and we are a mid-size agency in the US.

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We create results-driven digital experiences for brands that turn business challenges into

opportunities.

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So what does that mean?

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We typically build websites for companies and our clients are traditionally mid to large

scale organizations, Fortune 500s and the like.

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and I would just follow that up by saying that we are a, uh you know, we're a really

strong technical agency with a good design focus as well.

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But overall, we're a relationship company.

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We establish relationships with our clients that are typically, you know, really long

term.

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And it allows us to kind of have a long term impact over the years from a relationship

standpoint.

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So uh being the trusted advisor is something that think that we get a lot of enjoyment out

of because it allows us to build value over time.

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Excellent.

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And thanks for the introduction.

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And again, also thank you guys for joining us on the Agency Intel podcast.

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We're really excited to dive into a lot of what you've been up to at iMedia.

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And I mentioned before we started recording, I'm really curious to hear about this because

a lot of the technologies that you all are working with are totally new to me.

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And so I'm curious to hear how you make those decisions while you're going into these

projects.

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you know, before we get too far into that, I'd love to hear kind of about the legacy of

iMedia.

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Joel, you've been doing this for over two decades at this point.

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And, you know, looking back on the early days, what's the one core value that's remained

unchanged while the technology around it has completely transformed?

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Sure, I'd have to say user experience.

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We really focus on our user experience as Brian mentioned with what we do for our clients.

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And when we do a capabilities presentation, there's one slide that I don't think we've

changed in maybe 15 years.

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And that's the one that demonstrates the importance of user experience.

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In that slide, we demonstrate our chief creative officer, Carlos Alcalo, who typically

runs with that slide.

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He'll show our clients a little chart that has the customer or the visitor as the hub.

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And then there's three spokes around that.

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then the spokes are the content, the functionality, and the interface.

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And what we describe is the total satisfaction that the user has between each of those

three, combination of those three spokes makes up what we consider user satisfaction, of

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user experience.

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Or could be, if handled improperly, you could become a poor experience.

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So it's why all three are equally important.

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Yeah, no, I was just gonna say the site performance is embedded in there, right?

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There's things like site performance.

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If you don't have a good performing website, if it's slow, if it's just not responsive,

you're gonna have a poor experience.

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If security is a problem, obviously you're gonna have a really poor experience and then

nobody's gonna show up to your site because you're gonna be in all the news about how

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secure, know, a secure website is.

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And then really it's about the content being findable still, you know, and today, even

with AI, you you have to have content that's gonna be fine, even more so, you're gonna

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need content that is found on the internet.

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And then once they get to your website, it's what are they gonna do with that content?

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So the usability, the functionality is embedded right in that.

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So really that hasn't changed since we started building these things.

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That's always fascinating.

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And because yeah, if people aren't interested or can't use the website, then what's the

point of any of the work that you've put into it?

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And I like that the three approach, the tripod approach, you know, content, the

experience, or, know, you had the content in there, you have the user interface.

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And then, remember the third one again, functionality.

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Absolutely.

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And a lot of times it feels like clients.

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will maybe lean on one more than the other.

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Do you have any advice or tips that you've used to help them make sure that they're

looking at all three equally?

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Yeah, I mean, it's definitely user testing, right?

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going through and having your customers look at in your target audience, what are they

looking for?

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We use a lot of tools like Hotjar and things like that to understand before we go into a

site redesign effort, what are people focused on and why are they focused on it?

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Sometimes you might argue that your visitor is looking at this so it must be so important.

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But then you step back and you say, it's because that's the only option you're giving

them.

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And then when they get to that section, it's a poor experience.

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So we do a lot of investigation beforehand using tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics for

sure, understanding where people are really focusing.

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But then take it and flip and say, well, why are they doing that?

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Why are they there?

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Did it get your goals?

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Traditionally, a lot of our clients' goals are conversions, right?

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That's the name of the game.

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And then your customer's goals.

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And then sometimes we go into focus groups and use third parties.

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And AI now is certainly, you can't say that anything now, right, without including how you

can take advantage of AI tools to help you oh identify some gaps in your performance.

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I know I think we're going to have to start a little counter on this show.

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Roger, how many times AI is mentioned because, you know, it's everywhere now.

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It's everywhere.

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And everyone can't even answer a single question.

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It feels like anymore without having to include that.

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I mean, it's just our world, right?

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I'm going to pass one over to Brian now.

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And Joel, you may want to also input on this, but we're going to, we're going to start

with Brian and, you know, you guys have been in the industry.

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We started with some pretty simple websites back in the day.

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um But now things are very complicated, very integrated with other systems.

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You've got internal apps inside of websites.

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You've got brand experiences.

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What are the technologies that you guys are leaning on right now?

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And how are you picking those technologies for future proofing?

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That's a question.

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So we are, we describe ourselves as a CMS agnostic agency, meaning that we don't come to

an engagement with a of a pre-canned solution that we think is the right CMS for the job.

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And most oftentimes, if you're talking about a web build out, you're talking about

something that's built out on some sort of CMS digital experience platform.

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And there's many of them out there.

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Because of our client base is very diversified, we have a lot of different solutions that

we've done over the years.

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And we try to be as agnostic as possible.

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Some of the technologies that we have found a lot of efficiencies with are some

technologies, Kentico was one, uh Kentico CMS.

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For clients that have a...

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a large set of needs, whether it be personalization, A-B testing, uh even some marketing

capability like direct to consumer marketing right inside the CMS.

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Kentico is a great performer for its price point.

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And then also there's other clients that have a need where they have more digital channels

than just one, and they need to have more of a composable approach, in which case their

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platform like Contentful uh would make more sense.

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But as you think about the technology itself, that's really more about mapping the user

needs to the technology and making the technology work for that particular end client.

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There's no one size fits all that we would be recommending.

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So that's how I think about it in terms of just how we view ourselves in terms of our role

as being ambassadors of technology for our clients.

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And Joel, do you want to add anything to that?

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Yeah, I mean, think again, I'll give you another counter click on AI.

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We're looking at AI assistance as another way to augment websites.

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So, the days of Chatbot, which quite frankly frustrated a lot of us more than anything, it

was just maybe the quickest way to find out how you can get to a person.

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We're really seeing success now with AI-based digital assistance.

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We work with a company, AI1 to Z.

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and they provide us as an agency the ability to integrate a digital assistant directly

into the user experience, but not just to help answer questions, which obviously is very

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important, but also to guide the user to even purchase, to purchase path.

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Think about booking a golf outing on your vacation through a digital assistant and having

it be a

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you know, it's seamlessly integrated.

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First you start by asking questions.

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What's the weather going to be like when I'm there?

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Which day might be the best day to pick off?

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What's the most busiest and all?

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And one of the things that it does is it's able to anticipate what we couldn't do with

traditional search engines.

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You know, we had to think about what kind of questions are the typical visitors going to

ask?

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And then you built it around, you know, those questions.

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So your search engine, your faceted search may...

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you know, for product and or trip planning, like I'm talking about, maybe uh something

that uh you can, you can really get maybe 50, 60, 70 % of the questions, but it's that 30

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% when people ask a random question that you didn't anticipate, but it's in your content

somewhere, but you didn't build a search engine around that.

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We're able to use AI now to really dive in at that level and bring out that content that

might be buried, uh but still usable and important for.

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10, 20, 30 % of your questions, and those are the ones that are gonna revolutionize how

you're gonna take your business to the next level.

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Really cool.

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And so getting into this personalization that we're hearing about, you know, with AI

making the website very unique experience.

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so it's, it's interesting to hear that you're diving into all of this.

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when you're talking about reducing friction for visitors, it sounds like that.

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plays a big part into there as you're seeing these advances.

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you measure reducing friction?

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Like how do you show a client, we've been able to make it so the site is actually easier.

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Is that just in terms of conversions or what metrics are you usually looking at with

clients for this?

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It'll vary.

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Conversion is obviously is a big oh concern.

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But when we talk about SEO and site visits becoming really fragmented and dropping as a

result of geo or geo or however you want to say it, general engine optimization, it's...

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it's more important to have it be hyper-focused on conversion when they get there, right?

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So how we measure it is not necessarily gonna change at the end of the day.

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I mean, we're gonna use interaction.

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The actual AI assistant will have a good data logging and things like that so we can go

back and look and see what kind of questions were asked, did it answer them correctly?

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If it didn't, you could prompt it with additional information to make sure that you're

iteratively getting better at it.

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But at end of the day, it's not just through AI.

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we're going to look at how you're being viewed.

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And we go through GEO workshops with our clients to see how you are now being served up

through LLMs.

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And what are you going to be?

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If you're first of all, if you're not being served up, there's a huge opportunity that has

to be fixed.

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know, so we will do a lot of technical things there.

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And so we'll look into seeing, do you have the right schema?

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Do you have the right information on your site?

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You know, are you heavy in FAQs, things like that.

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And then when you are being accurately voiced in LLMs, when the person does eventually

make it to your site, is your site enabled for directly converting that user?

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know, we used to...

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take you through the journey and we still do, we still have to.

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There's a perception of the audience that is not gonna use the tools, right?

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But now the journey is happening outside your website.

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I don't know if I answered your question, Brian, maybe if you have any other topics on

that.

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Yeah, no, mean, I think that there's two ways to look at it.

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One is like, you know, from a holistic standpoint about like how the content is getting

out to the user and how the user to the site.

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Once the user makes it to the site, obviously, you know, Roger, like you mentioned,

conversion is kind of the number one factor that we would measure, but it's beyond just

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increased conversion, right?

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It's about if there is, let's say there's a site redesign and the conversion went up by

like a percent or 2 % or something like that.

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pages per session that I like to look at that tell me if we have a reduced number of pages

per session on a overall higher conversion, then that means that the users are getting

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through the site faster, thus reducing friction.

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So we always like to see that.

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When we do a redesign, we usually tend to see a significant drop in pages per session

because we're consolidating a lot of content, we're presenting the content in a more

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streamlined fashion, and then if you see that along with an increased conversion, then you

know that there's actually less friction.

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And I think that friction has to be thought about.

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in both sides of the site, the front end for the users of the site, obviously, but then

there's a whole editorial experience on the back end.

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The owners of the site, the ones who are managing it, they have to be able to edit it

quicker.

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that honestly, that just comes from client feedback, right?

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We're just hearing that like, we are really loving this new C Master, whatever it happens

to be, because it's reducing our time to do tasks.

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And that frees up everybody's time, pocketbook, et cetera.

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Awesome.

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Well, and Brian, kind of looking at that, what you guys are trying to do by helping the

user experience on both sides.

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I love that.

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The users as well as the visitors, right?

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Can you tell us a bit, I know you said you have some pretty high end clients and I think

the San Francisco Symphony was one of your clients.

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Can you tell us the kind of, it sounded like it was a success story.

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What kind of combination of technologies did you have to use and how difficult was it

working with a very well established brand?

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Yeah, it's a great question.

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So the San Francisco Symphony, first of all, they're a great team.

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They are extremely easy to work with.

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And the product is really interesting because as you know, they sell tickets to a fixed

seat venue.

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It's like 2,500 seats, right?

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And there are 150, 160 some odd shows throughout the year that they put on.

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And so basically they're selling a fixed quantity of assets to individuals that

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all may see slightly different pricing for those seats.

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So from a technical standpoint, you've got that factor.

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And then you also have the factor that at different points throughout the seasonality for

that organization, they're gonna be offering subscribers a certain time window so that

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they can come in and renew their subscription.

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and another time window for new subscribers to come in and buy.

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And all that underpins the single ticket buyers who are just buying one show here, one

show there.

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And so from a technical standpoint, what we have to do is sort of balance being able to

represent the site on a temporal fashion throughout the life cycle.

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And it's top of mind because their renewal season for subscriptions is coming up in about

a month.

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And so we have dedicated environments that

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Represent that system at that particular point in time because it's going to have

different flows and functionality It's gonna have different pricing.

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It's gonna have totally different way that it manifests itself for the user base as it's

doing its job getting subscribers to Subscribe and renewers to renew and then over time it

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will convert to single ticket buyers once all the subscriptions are are done and in the

arts the performing arts That's a very common

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kind of set up, but to your point, to your question, it leads to some certain technical

challenges.

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One is demand, right?

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So there's going to be a, typically there's a very large direct to consumer blast and on

that single ticket or on that subscription start day, there's gonna be a huge spike in

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traffic.

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So there are some technologies that we use.

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One is called QIT and it's a queuing system.

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because remember we're not selling an unlimited supply.

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of goods like Amazon, right?

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Where you have to like kind of scale horizontally.

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We're selling a fixed number of assets, right?

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Once you sell those 2,500 seats for that show, you've sold those 2,500 seats.

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So Q-IT is a technology that allows folks to come in in order of when they got in line in

a queue and they come in in an orderly fashion and they leave in an orderly fashion.

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That's just one example.

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And Q-IT is a technology that allows you to throttle how many folks come in on a, every

second basis so that you can govern the inflow and the outflow.

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uh And then obviously there's also a whole bunch of different edge caching mechanisms that

we're using to make sure that like we're offloading assets and serving up things as fast

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as we can.

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But what I love about that outside of the technical aspect of sort of the challenges that

we have to kind of overcome, the seasonality of that particular client and clients like

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that allow us to get in front of the client on a periodic basis and iterate.

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iterate every single year, so every subscription season, every single ticket season.

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So there's three times a year that we're going through the same flows and improving and

modifying and making small changes and watching how those changes kind of impact the

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bottom line.

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So yeah, that's how I kind of think about that.

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Really fascinating to hear, you know, working through these, you know, really high profile

ticketing type situations.

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And this kind of leads into my next question, talking about iMedia seat me technology,

which really seems like a game changer.

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you know, I've bought tickets online before.

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Usually, you know, you're like choosing these seats and you have no idea what that

experience is going to be like.

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But with the SeatMe technology, you literally get to sit in the seat and get an idea for

what you're gonna be seeing, which, you know, when you're spending serious amounts of

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money is really helpful at making that easier.

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From an engineering standpoint, how do you ensure that resource-heavy drawings like this

are always performing and responsive when you've got your high ticket events and Joel or

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Brian answering this?

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Yeah, no, that's a good question.

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And there's a multiple sides to it too, right?

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Because first of all, Seat.me as a product, you're right, it does allow you to kind of

virtually experience every single seat in every facility, which is a game changer, you're

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right.

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That all drives on APIs, right?

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So the 3D renderings are all delivered through APIs.

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The interaction with the...

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basically the ERP that's behind the scenes is also driven through APIs.

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So there's caching, right?

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There's caching on both, on both ends so that we're making sure that we're like caching

certain objects for the duration that's needed.

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And then there's also like the real time aspect of pricing, like what, you know, what you

probably already know when you're selling, you know, seats to, uh,

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you know, to a live event, the pricing is variable and it can change during the on sale,

right?

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So it can change in that hour, the pricing can go up and down.

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So we have to make sure that when we architected the app, that we're cashing the things

that we need to cash and hang on to for the right amount of time and that we're not

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cashing things that we need to have absolutely to the second real time availability for.

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And that's sort of that balancing act, but we did put, you know, three, four years of R

and D into the product.

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And so far, I think that we have had a pretty uh good result.

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And by the way,

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I'll mention too that if you've bought tickets to any major league baseball, you know, or

many major league baseball teams, you are going to get that 3D experience.

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And so what you've seen is you've seen this pattern in high-end sports.

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It's in, it's a lot of soccer in Europe.

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It's making its way into MLB here.

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And we've actually partnered with a company that provides those 3D renderings for those

institutions for this one.

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So like we have kind of the pedigree of high demand.

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know, major league baseball, you know, high end sporting.

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And we're taking that to the arts as the first and only, you know, seeding application

that allows 3D virtual reality in the arts.

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So we're hoping what we're doing with that is we're making sure that the experience that

the patrons are having when they're buying other tickets, they're actually having when

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they're buying tickets for the arts.

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And what that helps us do, it helps us lower the age of the target consumer because

younger people are going to be biased against not.

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wanting to buy a ticket if they don't have that like visceral experience of like, what's

it going to be like for me?

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Whereas more legacy buyers or elderly buyers have been going to the opera or symphony for

a number of years or number of decades that they kind of don't need that experience.

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So it serves a couple of purposes.

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Cool.

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Joel, do you have anything to add to that?

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No, know, me as Brian's baby, right?

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So you can see how jazzed up he gets by talking about it.

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throw this one to you and Brian may wanna interject some things into this one too.

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And that is when you're working with one of your clients like this, and it sounds like to

me you're integrating a lot of different things, right?

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Kentico, maybe WordPress, some custom app that you're building for them.

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So there's a ton of integration that's gonna happen there.

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So when you're starting that project, do you have a performance stack that you like best

that you think is gonna be fast, efficient, secure, and work with all the different?

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technologies you're gonna integrate.

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Yes and no.

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um It depends.

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If you're talking about certain stacks just lend themselves to being on, uh they are what

they are.

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For instance, some stacks are gonna be on the .NET platform and we're gonna build on

Microsoft Azure and we just know we're gonna be locked into .NET, .NET Core, and ah that's

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okay, that's fine.

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What some of our team is really...

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excited about in addition to all that, because we've been doing that for many years, is

you take a platform like Versel.

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We are able to do some really cool things on that hosting platform that for some of our

projects like Contentful builds where we can do JIRA ticket-based builds for specific

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updates.

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So it's not like typical...

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QA, staging, production, test environment, we can fire off a build in seconds to test a

specific ticket and then deploy that live and roll it back if it failed and do so many

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cool things there.

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So we're pretty jazzed up about that platform and that really allows us to do, we always

talk about continuous optimization for our clients in a real...

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sophisticated manner using that technology.

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As far as other stacks go, mean, it really depends on the product.

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mean, a lot of the products that we talked about over the years, the CMS being very

monolithic at times, and now we're talking about omnichannel, you know, omnichannel CMS

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and omnichannel websites, and what does that all mean?

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Reality is we've always done...

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systems where we've pulled into, as an agency and most people in our space, we're pulling

in from ERPs, we're pulling in from marketing automation solutions and CRMs and things

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like that.

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So even if the platform quote had all the bells and whistles, a lot of times we're still

using third party tools because it's best to breed capabilities.

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so that's really, you know.

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I guess your question was, what's our favorite?

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And a lot of times what we wind up having to build on is not always our favorite too,

right?

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So it's where the client has been, what they've invested in, and sometimes they're not

ready to rip everything down, but we're okay with that because we understand sometimes

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where we can bring in certain pieces and help make things a lot better, faster, and

cheaper in the long run.

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Fantastic, yes clients do dictate those platforms for you quite often, I know.

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So fun little segue in there, you you're bringing up Vercell and talking about like

composable methods and you know, this whole concept of, you know, choosing different

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technologies and, know, with Omnichannel and having to deliver in different places.

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How have you found that the shift to a decoupled web has really helped with a lot of these

situations where maybe

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you know, the clients bringing in certain technologies, you're having to plug into

different ones here and there.

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How have you navigated that change?

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Yeah, I mean, so a couple of years ago, it was a lot of education.

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You know, we would say, all right, we think this platform is going to be great for you for

managing your content.

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And it's SaaS based.

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It takes away all of the hosting needs, the requirements you have there.

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It can be served up for your editors across the world.

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No matter where they are, they're going to have a very fast experience, edge experience

for getting to the content.

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It's also going to potentially some of the platforms will also serve up in a CDN manner.

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So again, your clients are not just reading content, right?

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It's asset driven.

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So it's almost damn like in nature.

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So that's helpful there.

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But then they would say, well, you know, what about our search capabilities?

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we're going to.

343

We're gonna introduce Algolia.

344

What about, we need a more sophisticated dam that's not only gonna serve the website.

345

Okay, we're gonna have to introduce a dam for your business.

346

And what about, does this product have commerce?

347

Well, no, it doesn't.

348

We'll put big commerce in there as well.

349

And that's great because now you're talking about best of breed where they're not

necessarily.

350

sold on a single platform that said it could do all that, right?

351

So they saw a demo from the vendor.

352

They said, wow, look at this demo.

353

It's great.

354

It can do X, Y, Z.

355

It does digital marketing.

356

does content.

357

It does commerce.

358

Great.

359

This is awesome.

360

And then it can't do couponing because it's not really part of the feature set, but that

may come in the future or something like that.

361

So we were able to then in those scenarios, when we do a, an evaluation, system evaluation

for our clients, we're able to ask the questions.

362

Well, what's important?

363

What's not important?

364

uh

365

And then you get them jazzed up and then potentially sometimes the CTO comes in and goes,

I don't want to have 20 different relationships that I have to manage at different times

366

of the year.

367

And some of these products are going to be sunset and now I have to find a solution for

that.

368

So, single monolithic CMS still has its place.

369

It's great um and it depends on the need.

370

But we, you

371

having uh content be the king and really the hub of everything, we're able to really say

like, okay, let's focus on what's gonna be important.

372

What do you own?

373

It's your content, your assets, and then let's build around that.

374

And sometimes a monolithic CMS checks all the boxes and does it really well.

375

And other times we're able to bring in several different platforms and really have fun.

376

And so Brian, you talked about caching, Joel also talked about edge caching, things like

this, auto scaling.

377

How much does that affect your projects with clients?

378

Are there walls that you hit where you're like, we can't build this because the

infrastructure underneath is just not good enough for those things, for caching and auto

379

scaling.

380

How does this affect your projects or do you find that it does or do you always start out

properly with everything in place?

381

which we know doesn't happen in a real world.

382

Yeah, I mean I from my perspective I think the good news is that our experience has kind

of allowed us to to make the right recommendations kind of from the start and technology

383

solves a lot of problems.

384

So let's say it's a let's say it's a play where the CMS is monolithic and and it's and

it's play where let's say Versailles is not in place.

385

So if those things are taken off the table then you still have

386

the entire virtualized world.

387

So like you've got Azure.

388

And then as you kind of go back from the life cycle of like what used to be metal became

virtualized metal.

389

What was virtualized metal is now cloud-based virtualized metal.

390

And now it's cloud-based virtualized metal is cloud-based scalable everything.

391

Everything is up in the cloud from your WAF to your switches to your network to the

networking components.

392

And it's all redundant and it's all geo redundant.

393

uh It's great, right?

394

So we can inject as much or as little

395

horizontal scalability as we want.

396

And that's kind of the benefit of technology, right?

397

If you're in app services, they can scale up horizontally.

398

You can tune them to either do it or not do it.

399

And then it becomes a conversation with client.

400

Like this client have budget to take that, right?

401

Do they have a need for that?

402

Or in the case that I mentioned before, are these fixed assets?

403

And if they sell out in five minutes versus six minutes, does it really matter?

404

Not really, right?

405

So the ability to have

406

all the technology at our disposal in terms of like either Amazon web services, Azure web

services, they are sort of interchangeable.

407

It allows us to do a lot of things and to leverage the automatic scalability at the

application level, at the database level, and honestly even at the networking level if we

408

need to get to that level of redundancy.

409

But we try to make sure that we understand demand before we go into an engagement to make

that recommendation.

410

And Joel, I don't know if you kind of like agree with that or have another opinion or

what.

411

I with everything.

412

think the one thing I would add is that sometimes the CMS vendor offers their SaaS hosting

uh and sometimes the clients will buy it slightly undersized or they'll grow, right?

413

So now they've got an engagement where when we signed up with the client and they signed

up with the platform, whichever platform it is, most of all of them have the same scenario

414

where they're providing them

415

based upon the metrics that they've given them a hosting solution that can be scalable but

can also then cost money to scale.

416

So we've had scenarios where we've helped clients grow tremendously and then they have a

problem with, now our hosting costs are more from our CMS vendor because we're doing so

417

well.

418

And I have to remind them, well yeah, you're making more money.

419

So that's good.

420

But now we have to plan and budget for that.

421

So sometimes we get...

422

We don't have the ability to necessarily auto scale.

423

It's driven by the platform agreements they've had in place.

424

And then we have to get creative.

425

But that's a good problem to have.

426

your site is being monetized well and all the metrics are showing you're gaining traction

in your space and your numbers are bad, you're great.

427

Let's add a little bit more horsepower to prevent that from going the other direction.

428

But just planning.

429

Excellent.

430

So kind of diving into that a little bit, you're bringing up something that's near and

dear to my heart is partnerships.

431

And as an agency, you know, there's times where, you know, maybe the clients bringing in

their technology, bringing in their preferred vendors, there's times where you're

432

recommending vendors and it becomes a partnership, right?

433

Because iMedia is not supplying the infrastructure.

434

How do you choose partners to work with?

435

And then once you're working with them,

436

How do you help your client feel that the partnership is a good one and that they can be

reassured that everything's gonna be taken care of?

437

Yeah, that's a magic question.

438

you know, in all honesty, we used to do a lot more best of breed CMS evaluations and

really have the sheets that kind of walk through all this pros and cons for vendors.

439

A lot of our clients now have a platform that they've...

440

been on for a while and they're okay with it.

441

the problem happens when that platform does a major update release, right?

442

So the platform is now headless first and it used to be, you know, .NET driven platform.

443

So now we, now they're looking at things like, well, what stack are we gonna need?

444

And...

445

One of the equations, believe it or not, that we run into a lot is, or one of the pieces

of the equation is a lot of our clients have an internal team that we work with.

446

So they may have two or three internal developers that do some of the day to day block and

tackling that they might not want an agency to do and still keep some of the knowledge in

447

house.

448

And we work really well with, with companies who have an internal team.

449

And maybe they are specifically, you know, engaged in a particular solution that we then

have to, um,

450

You know, they step back and say, well, now it's time for you to do a migration to another

platform.

451

can your team learn, next JS or, or react and, and, it, they engage with it?

452

And what are the benefits of switching potentially to, to a platform like that?

453

and then also give them the other side of the equation, which is if you don't, here's

platform that you, that you'd be perfectly happy with one.

454

You know, one of the things we made a strategic decision many, many years ago was to not

be,

455

partnered with any, we do have our favorites and people that really we work great with and

we're happy to build on the product, but we've not ever in our history uh aligned with one

456

single vendor.

457

we would always say that we are deeply knowledgeable in whatever platform that the client

wants us to work with, but we can recommend a lot as a result of being very nimble and

458

working with.

459

basically all platforms that are out there now.

460

And there's something to be said for clients, for companies that have a platform and

they've aligned with it.

461

uh They're gonna know, quite frankly, in some cases, a lot more about the inner workings

than we might or agencies like us might.

462

But it's really allowed us to focused on what is it that the client needs, what's the best

solution out there, how is it going to get them to where they need to go without all the

463

sizzle.

464

Brian, if you...

465

Yeah, no, think that all of that resonates.

466

think that what I would add to that is that outside of like the core stack, which is going

to be.

467

like the content management system, like there's all the decorative stacks around that.

468

Like, how are you going to establish search?

469

And a lot of times, like to your question, how do we pick the best, how do we pick the

technology?

470

How do we recommend it?

471

And how do we make sure that the client is satisfied with it?

472

We've actually had a lot of success with Algolia where it bolts on as a faceted search.

473

like front end delivery very quickly and very easily and allows clients to achieve faceted

search with very different product sets.

474

if client A sells cameras versus client B who sells like ticketed shows to an event, the

underlying technology is the same and we've been...

475

uh We've been able to kind of uh wield that technology in a way that allows it for like

super fast delivery, super fast search results.

476

And that obviously makes the client, you know, kind of engaged and happy with it.

477

And another one, just if we're calling a few of them out, another one that I've loved for

a number of years is called Imgix.

478

And what that is, it's an image delivery system, call it like a damn.

479

But what it does is it allows you to serve up multiple images.

480

You can do things like change color, add color, drop color, remove people's faces, focus,

zoom in, zoom out.

481

And you do all that through URL parameters.

482

And what we do is we weave that into the CMS experience so that editors can have certain

defaults that they use.

483

So they upload one master image for whatever it is that they're promoting.

484

And then they can have hundreds of different ways that that image is represented in terms

of size.

485

you name it.

486

And they're doing all of that just through the CMS controls.

487

And what that allows them to do is to take all the burden off the art department and

they're not creating multiple images that are having to make sure that like, did I create

488

this thumbnail?

489

In the old days, we used to have clients that had like six, seven different versions of

thumbnails and sizes, and they had to kind of manage all that and remember where all that

490

was.

491

Those days are kind of over.

492

And when we're adding value back to the client, reducing friction, like we mentioned

before, in terms of like their time, that's how we measure the success.

493

And that's kind

494

what drives our underlying thinking when it comes to recommending some of these ancillary

products around the platform.

495

And so what you guys have said in both of your answers here to me, your agency is very

broad based.

496

That's what I'll call it, right?

497

So you're not just a Drupal shop or a WordPress shop.

498

So you didn't put all of your toys in that one little play bin.

499

You have spread that out.

500

If there are other agencies out there that are like, you know, maybe they do need to, they

want to expand their technical services.

501

What would be your suggestions to them as to how to start doing that?

502

Great question.

503

it's because you know, the hardest thing right is, is when you get into an RFP scenario,

you can't hide how many of you done in this platform before, right?

504

So you have to leverage and say, but, but I would say it's easier.

505

I'm not sure there's a secret answer to that question, Robbie, but I think it's easier

today than it's been because of things like GraphQL and how you get in, you know,

506

typically can work with these products.

507

You don't have to necessarily be as deeply knowledgeable in the inner workings of how to

best work with the content and make sure you don't do this.

508

would come to us and say, hey, we had this platform built out by previous agency and it

509

went horrible.

510

And we would say, yeah, you can't hire somebody who's only done a couple of those and

expect it to be great.

511

We've done 50 of those and we know how to do it.

512

It's still true.

513

There's still inner workings of it, but you can, you know, you can be less afraid of

getting involved in a platform because a lot of the, especially the headless ones, you're

514

going to need some, know, you need a team that knows react, knows next JS, whatever the,

you know, underlying stack you want to do work with is, and just understands fundamentals

515

of integrating to other slot scenarios.

516

And

517

And that's quite frankly what we tell our clients, right?

518

When we say to them, you're gonna go to this platform if you don't wanna work with iMedia

anymore, you're not bound to us because we don't necessarily have as much domain knowledge

519

that we used to.

520

So we just embrace that and say that it's okay.

521

But if you wanted to go about it, I would say get to the partner networks, talk to the

partner managers, see if there's a way in, see if they have...

522

clients that are working, uh or prospects that are on a platform, if you're a big Drupal

shop and you can say, hey look, knowing the side that they're coming from is equally as

523

important as knowing where they're going to.

524

We'll make sure we get people certified, but we know Drupal and we want to go, then you

have clients who want to go to Kentico, but they need the people to understand how to get

525

the data out of Drupal, how to make sure that they can understand what our code looks like

now and read it.

526

and be knowledgeable about it, I think that's where you can start to get uh your wins.

527

Focus on what you know and focus on the transformation projects when they're there.

528

I love that partnering, partnering with other agencies and partnering with contractors too

to help you with that transition.

529

Brian, do you have something to add to that?

530

The only thing I would add to that is that, you know, every agency is going to have some

downtime and staff and, you know, making sure that you allocate time for when some of your

531

folks are like in that downtime for R &D.

532

The great technologists that we have at our company are at their sometimes most happy

place when they're implementing something brand new or investigating something brand new.

533

So just honestly, just kind of like allowing that space to breathe

534

Instead of just trying to make sure that every single second is billable, it will result

in over time adopting a wider technology set, which is going to pay off in the long run.

535

I dig it.

536

All right, so we got through the grilling questions here.

537

You guys have done well.

538

You've withstood the heavy interrogation.

539

To close things out, let's have a little bit of fun.

540

We've got some rapid fire questions.

541

Joel, I'm gonna start with you.

542

What's one piece of old technology that you actually miss?

543

Yikes, I'm gonna date myself here now, right?

544

I was a pretty good developer back in the day.

545

Brian and I both have similar backgrounds.

546

We were technical people.

547

We still get involved in much of the dismay of our team sometimes that we'd get involved

in coding and all, so that's never gonna end.

548

in the...

549

550

So I was building interfaces for plant floor automation.

551

And then this whole internet thing came about and that was pretty cool.

552

But at that time too, I bought a Palm Pilot.

553

It's a digital assistant, right?

554

And a different digital assistant now, I guess.

555

And I was building a lot of cool Palm Pilot games and apps and, know,

556

and chess and checkers and selling it from the server that I had in my ISDN line at my

house and I come back from work every day and say, wow, we just sold another 50 copies,

557

that's great.

558

And doing some really cool development for uh a green scale device that had so limited

memory and getting frustrated with how I can do as much as I could.

559

And just the entrepreneurial part of that type of system led to obviously the...

560

the phones and everything else, but it was Wild West back then and that was pretty fun.

561

That's excellent.

562

You're taking me back in time.

563

Just to butt in there for sure, but yes.

564

yeah, little Palm pilot, little Blackberry, Brian, what is the most underrated tool in

your dev stack right now?

565

That is a good question.

566

I would say, and this is going to be a really boring answer, but there's a platform that

we use for browser testing called Browser Stack.

567

And it allows you to fire up any version of any device, Android, going back, you know, 10

years, 20 years, like no matter what, every browser, every OS version, every break point

568

in size.

569

And you can fire it up kind of at will.

570

And that allows our developers to actually see what problems, you you're to get a CTO or a

director of marketing that's like, Hey, there's an issue on my phone.

571

See?

572

And they show it to you on the screen.

573

They're like, no, you got to tell me the version.

574

Tell me the exact, exact OS version.

575

And I can replicate it.

576

And in a world where you're not going to own like, you know, thousands of different

phones, that's kind of a, kind of a basic boring answer, but it is, it is certainly

577

underrated.

578

Now I love it and it brings us back full circle to the user experience and the testing

that you brought up in the beginning.

579

I don't think people can do enough testing or too much testing and that ties in there

perfectly.

580

Last rapid fire, this is for both of you.

581

What is the next big friction point that you're excited to solve for your clients?

582

Generative Engine Optimization.

583

Everybody's gonna say that, but it's really what people need to understand.

584

Many years ago, search engine optimization and SEM were things that people didn't know

about.

585

And I spent a lot of time selling that and being successful.

586

I built platforms that would help clients do automated bid management on their, so.

587

understanding that our client wanted to be second place and spend no more than $2 per

click or $10 per acquisition.

588

And every time we had, and that was a great lead in for us to talk to people back then

about rebuilding their website.

589

Well, so let's talk about search, how you're handling search.

590

A lot of people don't really understand the impact yet.

591

I mean, most people are understanding the impact.

592

And I wanna sound like, and again, two months from now, this answer will be completely

updated, but.

593

It's, know, generative engine optimization is really what we're starting to see a lot of

conversations around.

594

And it's really making people understand how we're going to, um, you know, we've had

comments with our clients that say, well, we don't have to worry about, you know, titles

595

and description anymore because Google handles all that for us now.

596

And they do a great job.

597

And I'm like, all right, well, you know, you know, it's, it's no longer just Google that

you're thinking about.

598

So, um, so it's, it's amazing.

599

Every time you think something is kind of, um,

600

taken care of, something new pops in and changes the game a little bit.

601

So yeah, that's a big one that we're looking at right now.

602

Yeah.

603

And I would say that in general, it's helping our clients understand how to harness AI and

geo is part of that for sure.

604

uh But just at that relationship level, just understanding the client well enough to kind

of help them think through what AI can do for their business and how to actually take

605

advantage of it and harness it.

606

It's a very new technology.

607

There are a lot, there's a lot of questions about it.

608

There are a lot of, there's in some cases a little bit of fear about it.

609

Hmm.

610

I'll give you one like tactical example.

611

Like we are, building a chat bot through our partnership with AI one to Z, but we're

integrating it to, to Salesforce so that this particular client can have the phones ring

612

less and talk about reducing friction.

613

Like if, if I'm able to go check out the status of my case and, and this is like a large

like manufacturer of, of, of electronics.

614

And if I can reduce the amount of phone calls that I'm getting to get people their case

information.

615

and those same users can get the case information quickly and they can do that directly

with this little chat bot.

616

AI is allowing you to number one, reduce friction on both sides of the equation, client

and customer.

617

And then also, the technology is allowing us to do things like personalize the responses

so that if I'm talking about, let's say it's a microwave that I have an issue with that

618

I'm trying to get service on.

619

Well.

620

did you know that we are offering a sale on this particular microwave which replaces that

old one?

621

So now you're talking about using AI to knock down that first friction point and then

create more revenue on the other side of it, which is just kind of seamlessly done.

622

You can do that through a number of different ways that technology can have a page behind

the chat bot to change and all of a sudden you're interacting with a chat bot but you're

623

actually seeing the sales page for like a particular microwave.

624

know, these little things can start to like really make a huge difference on the bottom

line.

625

and makes everybody happy, right?

626

Because customers are getting satisfied quicker and maybe there's gonna be some more sales

out of it and ultimately there's less phone calls.

627

So these are ways that AI can help reduce friction.

628

That's just like one out of the millions of different things that AI can be starting, can

start to do for our clients that I think it's really exciting inflection point for us and

629

our business.

630

Fantastic, fantastic.

631

Well, Brian, Joel, thank you both so much.

632

You gave us some really good information for our listeners out there.

633

know, actionable tools you've given them to go and check out.

634

So I truly appreciate that.

635

And it sounds like you guys are producing some amazing work out there.

636

So we'll definitely have to have you guys come back on later on to see what other big

projects you guys have done.

637

Awesome.

638

Well, thank you both very much for having us.

639

This has been a lot of fun.

640

ah

641

if someone wants to get in touch with you, they can just go to iMedia's website.

642

Absolutely, imediainc.com and we're just gonna find Brian in one of the places he hangs

out at.

643

Excellent.

644

Thank you guys both so much.

645

This has been really great and yeah, look forward to speaking with you again in the

future.

646

Wonderful.

647

Thank you very much.

648

All right, so that was Brian and Joel from iMedia.

649

And I'm telling you, there were some legit gems in that conversation.

650

100%, the thing that really struck to me was how they've kept the same core focus for over

two decades, user experience.

651

But the way that they define UX in a way that's bigger than most people do.

652

Yep, know, Joel's hub and spokes idea, that was really cool.

653

I really liked that.

654

Visitor in the middle of three spokes or content functionality interface.

655

And if you do have a weakness in any of those, the whole experience is in trouble, right?

656

It's all going to wobble.

657

Yeah, totally.

658

They made a great point that UX includes what people forget, performance and security.

659

If it's slow or sketchy, it doesn't matter how pretty it is.

660

Yeah, and I will say, I really loved how they're not just guessing on that when they're

going in.

661

They're using tools like Hotjar and analytics and testing, user testing, figuring out what

people are actually doing, and then asking why.

662

You know, the one example he gave where he's like, why are they always clicking on this

one?

663

Maybe that's their only option, right?

664

They don't have the right option.

665

So I like that.

666

Absolutely.

667

And you know, I like how they're intentionally CMS agnostic and you know, really

technology.

668

They're about matching the platforms to the needs.

669

Kintiko here, Contentful there.

670

So they're acting like true advisors, not just a one stack shop.

671

Hey, we're going to force this brick into whatever you're trying to do.

672

They're really listening to the client.

673

They're trying to figure out what's the best solution.

674

I agree.

675

And you know, the friction piece was strong as well.

676

Measuring reduced friction isn't just, know, conversions went up, right?

677

That's not the only thing.

678

They're thinking of it from both sides, the front end, the back end.

679

So user, visitor, they're looking at all of the experiences to find where friction is

because friction on the user side could be just as frustrating and detrimental as friction

680

on the front side.

681

Yeah.

682

And you know, I wanted to interject during that part of the conversation and say, thank

you as a user for reducing the number of clicks that I need to take.

683

That is just all that I want.

684

you know, but I thought was exciting is, you know, future looking takeaways, right?

685

AI generative, experience optimization.

686

The buyer journey is totally shifting.

687

People are discovering brands through LLMs before they even hit the website.

688

How are you thinking through that process?

689

And it sounds like they're really on top of their game.

690

which is the new game for everyone out there, right?

691

I mean, the new game is trying to figure out how you're going to be findable in all of

these AI answer tools out there.

692

I can ask my phone, I can ask my browser or whatever, and I've got AI tools everywhere to

answer.

693

And so, you know, how are you getting those answers to show your site and your brand and

make it clickable so that you're getting that traffic?

694

Overall, just a great conversation.

695

I totally agree.

696

And I love that they shared the tools they were using.

697

That's so cool.

698

And I hope that some of the agencies are listening or going out going like, wow, I didn't

wait, let me check this one out.

699

I mean, there were a couple I was like, hmm, haven't looked at that in a while.

700

I probably should go look at it again.

701

Well, that was a great interview and we've got some more coming up on Agency Intel.

702

So keep listening.

703

Hey y'all, it's the Roger That segment.

704

I hope you're doing super great.

705

You know, last time I talked about networking events and getting out there and meeting

people in person.

706

And I know that a lot of times uh people are very introverted, especially in this

profession.

707

Agency owners can, you know, be a little intimidated by going and putting yourself out

there.

708

And one of the things that I wanted to talk about this time is public speaking, which

arguably is one of the most terrifying things for anybody to do, let alone an introvert.

709

But it really is important, especially as an agency owner, learning to public to speak as

an agency owner, learning how to speak publicly is a skill that you can utilize in so many

710

different ways, whether it's getting the team to rally and get to work and do a really

good job to giving a great uh sales presentation to a client or a prospect to getting up

711

on stage and actually becoming a subject matter expert and talking to people effectively.

712

And one of the best ways that I've found for getting over my fear of public speaking has

been participating in Toastmasters.

713

Toastmasters is an international organization.

714

It's been around for, it's like a hundred years at this point.

715

It started in the U.S.

716

It's spread all over the world.

717

And you can probably find a local meetup or chapter in your area.

718

Just go to the Toastmasters International website, put in your location.

719

and you'll be able to find meetups near and around you.

720

And the great thing is that you're not only going there to work on how to speak publicly,

but you're going to meet other people in your community who are doing the same thing.

721

Maybe they're really good speakers already and you're going to be able to learn a bunch of

stuff from them.

722

Maybe they're at the same level as you.

723

Maybe they're even more shy than you are.

724

And that's going to help you in a lot of ways.

725

A, it should give you the confidence of, wow, if these people can do it, so can I.

726

But then the other great part about Toastmasters is giving back.

727

So you do a lot of reviewing of other people's work.

728

You're an evaluator.

729

You learn how to give feedback and criticism to people in a healthy and helpful way.

730

And it makes you a really good listener when you're evaluating somebody's speech, because

you really need to pay attention to them.

731

You can be a grammarian and help people with their us and ums and likes and filler words.

732

There's table topics, so you've got to learn to speak on the spot.

733

You get a topic right then, you need be able to speak for two minutes.

734

That's going to help you when you go to those networking events, so you have something to

talk about.

735

So again, my Roger that for you this week is start speaking publicly.

736

And if you have any concerns about it, join Toastmasters.

737

And even if you're a good speaker, join Toastmasters.

738

You can help other people become good speakers and we can always become better at our

speaking.

739

So that's what I've got for you this week.

740

Roger that at you.

741

I'll see you next time.

742

All right, it's time for another segment of Robbie's Radar where I share tools that I'm

actually using in my day-to-day work, tools that have earned a spot in my workflow because

743

of the value that they add.

744

And so today I'm gonna talk about a tool that I was allowed in the early access phase of

745

And since then I have been using and speaking about this tool as well from Google, it's

called Notebook LM.

746

Now, when you first look at it, you might think, well, it's just another AI chatbot, but

trust me, it is not.

747

It is something very, very different.

748

And honestly, way more useful for certain applications.

749

Notebook LM will let you upload your own content, documents, PDFs, Google Docs,

transcripts, meeting notes, just...

750

copy text in, website copy, and then it builds this AI assistant that knows only that

information.

751

And you can even link out to pages that are on the website and everything that are public

information and mix them in with that pool of knowledge.

752

So instead of asking AI these general questions and hoping that it guesses correctly,

you're asking an AI that's trained specifically on your stuff.

753

And that's the magic.

754

So for example,

755

We've actually used Notebook LLAM with our agency, Intel Podcast Transcripts, because we

can upload those transcripts and then we can ask it things like, what were the top

756

takeaways from that interview?

757

And summarize this into a 60 second debrief for us.

758

What themes keep coming up?

759

Or even, you know, if the guest comes back on, what follow-up questions should we ask next

time?

760

So all of the answers are based entirely on what our guests actually said.

761

It's not guessing, it's not looking for general advice about this topic, but real insights

pulled directly from the conversation.

762

And it has kept that conversation private until we're ready to release it, right?

763

Because we don't have to put it out there publicly yet to get that information from like a

chat GPT or Gemini.

764

So it's great.

765

So it literally is like having a research assistant that has perfect memory of everything

that you've recorded.

766

uh Now, I know the next question that a lot of agencies and owners

767

and clients are going to have and care about is privacy.

768

And Google has been very clear from the beginning that Notebook LM does not use your

uploaded documents to train their global AI models.

769

So your content stays private to your notebook and it's only used to answer your

questions.

770

Now, unless you explicitly submit feedback into Google to ask for them to use their

information, your data is not being used to train anything else.

771

So it makes it one of the few AI tools where I really feel comfortable uploading client

internal documentation, transcripts that I don't want public yet, real working materials.

772

And one of the best parts to me is that when you start looking at that information and

asking questions about that information, every answer that it gives you includes

773

footnotes.

774

And that takes you straight to the source.

775

So you can immediately fact check and see.

776

exactly where it got that information.

777

So you can see if it was misinterpreted or not.

778

Now there is another feature that I'll talk about that it has.

779

It's a little wild, but there's some really cool use cases for this.

780

um And it is their audio overview feature.

781

um So Notebook LM can actually generate a podcast style conversation between two AI voices

based on your content.

782

So you can upload a document or sets of documents.

783

And then it'll create this back and forth discussion that sounds eerily like two people

breaking down the material.

784

Very realistic.

785

And it's perfect for like when you want to absorb the information while you're doing other

things.

786

And really, honestly, it does sound amazing.

787

The hosts feel incredibly real.

788

But I will give you one warning.

789

Every once in a while, it can misinterpret something.

790

So I would never use it as my only source inside of there to listen to my information and

to

791

read the information, it's always going to be best if you pair it with reviewing the

information as well, Asking a question, seeing the footnotes.

792

Now, from an agency standpoint, the use cases for Notebook LM are endless, in my opinion.

793

So like you can upload a brand guideline for your client, generate on-brand content.

794

Now, and if the client doesn't have formal brand guidelines, as some don't, you can point

the Notebook LM to sources on the public website or other content that they might have

795

that they've already written.

796

And from that, it will learn the voice and tone of that client.

797

Basically, it's kind of making them a little brand guideline, the voice and tone part for

you.

798

And then from that, you can upload internal documents and have it rewrite to match that

same voice without ever exposing your private materials.

799

So your internal docs stay private, but everything internally still comes out perfectly on

brand.

800

You could also upload discovery notes and turn them into proposals.

801

So if you're the one who's having to have those client meetings and build proposals,

802

Also, if you've got internal SOPs, you could put those in or you could help a client do

this.

803

And so then when you are asking Notebook LM about things, it's only looking in your SOPs.

804

So you're not having like...

805

dig through documents and folders and things like that to find this information.

806

You can have Notebook LM have all of that knowledge base in there So then you can also

share your Notebook space with other team members.

807

So now everyone has access to that.

808

So it's great.

809

It basically turned your knowledge into this searchable conversational interface.

810

For me, it has become one of the fastest ways to go from large amounts of raw data and

information to some usable content.

811

As with any AI, I always tell you, you're not gonna take it directly out of there.

812

You're going to do some rewrites, but it just gets you there so much faster.

813

And so instead of rereading massive documents and just, you you can just go in there and

ask questions and get exactly what you need in seconds.

814

So this is one of those tools that

815

genuinely changes how you work, feel like.

816

And if you haven't tried notebook LLM yet, I highly recommend checking it out.

817

Upload something you already have.

818

Maybe it's a transcript, maybe it's some meeting notes from that discovery meeting and

just start asking questions And I know you're going to see the value immediately in this

819

tool.

820

this has been a Robbie's radar and I'll have more Intel coming your way on the next agency

Intel episode.

821

All right, we are here for another segment of R &R.

822

And again, it's not just Roger and Robbie, although, you know, that's important too.

823

But life work balance is what we are normally talking about in our R &R.

824

And so I think we kind of might have a little hint of what Roger's going to talk about

that he does for some relaxation.

825

Talk to us about it, Roger.

826

Yeah, absolutely, Robbie.

827

You know, I love that the R &R works out on so many levels here.

828

And, you I think the work-life balance is something that people, we talk about, we give it

some lip service, but we don't, I feel, give enough, like, exact practical things to do.

829

So today I'm talking about one of the things I love to rest and relax doing, and that's

snowboarding.

830

I live in Colorado.

831

So there's a good amount of opportunity for that here.

832

And so, you know, I think that you should find an activity that you enjoy doing.

833

I I've been doing snow sports since I was a little kid, grew up in Colorado, so it just

fits.

834

But I think there's also an appreciation moment to have.

835

So we're having a really bad winter here in Colorado.

836

And by bad, mean, we're not having a winter.

837

It just hasn't been snowing very much.

838

And so recently we've had some storms and

839

I had like, had storms last week.

840

And so then it was like, okay, well, we need to go Saturday and Sunday snowboarding and

take advantage of all of this.

841

And so, you know, I think there's this, there's this feeling sometimes where we're like,

you know what, I'll get to that later.

842

Um, you know, right now is just not a good time.

843

I'll wait.

844

I'll get to that some other day.

845

You know, sometimes that other day may not come.

846

And I know that that's a little bleak to say, but take advantage of what you've got now

when you're healthy, when you're able to do stuff, go and try new things, push yourself.

847

And I'll tell you what, when I'm snowboarding, I'm not thinking about work.

848

I can guarantee you that.

849

So, Robbie, I'm going to throw it back to you.

850

What do you got?

851

So, okay, now mine's not as sporty spice as you with your snowboarding.

852

uh Mine was a little more meditative.

853

So like this weekend, I went to a sound bath meditation.

854

I've gone a couple of times.

855

It's, get, a lot of people are like sound bath meditation, whatever that is crazy, Robbie,

but you know, hey, this is a sound bowl.

856

So in case someone doesn't know what the heck I'm even talking about, the sound bowls,

you've probably seen them though, but they ring out and they send out a tone, right?

857

But what is sound, what are tones?

858

Vibration.

859

What does vibrations do?

860

Moves water.

861

What are we made up of?

862

70 % water or better, right?

863

And so they have seen it does help with lymphatic system drainage.

864

It helps with relaxing the vagus nerve.

865

So if you're a really high tension, stressful person, this is something that might be

something that you find helps relax you.

866

If nothing else, you're sitting there laying and listening to some really cool tones.

867

So it's like a cool drum episode is what I'll call it.

868

So, um, but it does, it's very relaxing and there is science behind it.

869

So it doesn't have to be sound bath meditation though.

870

It could just be yoga.

871

It could be anything like that, but something that

872

they they know scientifically helps you to relax.

873

That is what, especially if you're an agency owner out there, it's just, it's, it's a lot

of tension all the time.

874

And it's a lot of voices in your head coming from a different, you know, your team, your

customers and all that.

875

And so going to some sort of meditation that is quiet and like gets those out of your

head.

876

Like you said, when you're snowboarding, you're not thinking about it.

877

When you're sitting there, starting to listen to these and you're getting more and more

relaxed, you don't think about those things as much.

878

Or even if you do, they're more quiet where you can be more contemplative about what you

are thinking about.

879

You know, the, the people talk about, you've got to clear your mind to meditate.

880

No monkey mind is a real thing.

881

You have to learn to calm your mind is what I tell people.

882

It doesn't, it's not going to be quiet.

883

Our brains aren't designed to ever be quiet.

884

They're calm though.

885

You can make it calm.

886

So anyway, I like it.

887

Like I said, it may sound hokey, but I think it's good and find something like that and

maybe try something like that that you've never done before.

888

because that also can be relaxing that it's just such uh a deviation from what you've

tried before.

889

100%.

890

I think that maybe there's our connection is find something new, push your limits.

891

Maybe it's getting on top of a mountain and going crazy, or maybe it's just sitting in a

nice quiet room and listening to some cool sound.

892

Yeah, absolutely.

893

Cool.

894

All right.

895

Well, we'll talk about some more next time.

896

See ya.