How Categories and Positioning Options Might Change

David and Blair follow up their previous discussion about how marketing firms have evolved, going deeper into how different service categories and positioning might look in the near future.

Links

2Bobs episode 142, “The Evolution of a Marketing Firm”

2Bobs episode 64, “Can We Learn Anything From the Consulting Firms?”

“The King Gets Hungry” by Philip Morgan

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, This is one of these episodes that we're going to regret in a few years' time, maybe a few months' time, because this is where we try to predict the future, right? Is that what we're doing here?

David C. Baker: I am so bad at it too.

Blair: I don't think you have to be good at it.

David: Well, thank God.

Blair: I don't think that's the point of trying to predict the future. Some people say--

David: Some people say, which means you've done absolutely no research, you just made shit up that some people say. There's a report--

Blair: [laughs] Let me back up. I have often said that if you see yourself as an expert in your space, and you should, then you should see yourself as having an obligation to try to predict the future.

David: No obligation for it to be right.

Blair: No, I've heard other people say don't even bother. It's a stupid endeavor, but I would double down on that and say your obligation is to try to predict, it is not to be correct.

David: Thank God.

Blair: I'm rarely right in my predictions of the future. The idea is to be provocative to give people things to think about.

David: Oh, I can do that.

Blair: Yes, of course, you can.

David: Yes, but I mean, if practice makes perfect, I'd be a lot better at this, because I have predicted the future so many times and been so poorly accurate.

Blair: Hey, this reminds me, last night, my wife and I were going to bed, we're reading, and I forget how it came up. She said, do you remember like three and a half years ago, I went to this woman and I had my birth chart read? It was a gift to my daughter so the two of them went and had this birth chart reading. It's an astrology thing, so it was this fun thing to do.

Then this woman said, "Hey, tell me about your husband. Give me his birthday." [chuckles] She gives her my birthday and it's like, "Oh my God, he must be incredible." Was like, "Okay, there's a big recession coming and your husband needs to take his business and put it entirely online. Something big is coming." I'm like, "Yes, I have a vague recollection of this. Was this just after the pandemic started?" Then she gave me the date. She said, "No, it was like nine months before." She said, "I have the recording of this somewhere so we're going to find this recording and listen to it because talking about predicting the future." Your first inclination is to go, yes, okay. You can phrase anything so that, "Oh, yes. Nostradamus predicted that."

David: Yes. Make a lot of predictions every day, you're bound to be right about something.

Blair: Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, so I'll let you know. If it's eerily prescient, if it's eerily accurate, quite specific, then I'm going to go back to her and look for lottery numbers or whatever. Whatever it is people do.

David: You know how you talk about investing in the sale where you've spent lots of time and maybe some money, and you just can't let it go so you just double down, and then you make all kinds of concessions because you don't want to throw away all the effort you've put in?

Blair: Sunk cost bias, yes.

David: That is exactly me in predictions. I am going down with this ship. I have been so wrong. It's like betting on the super bowl. So far, I've got everything wrong, but I am going to bet everything. I put all the chips forward. I'm going down in flames, baby. I'm going to enjoy it.

Blair: [laughs] All right. We're talking about category trends for creative firms, and I say creative firms in all the related digital marketing advertising spaces.

David: Yes.

Blair: What was the impetus for this? We did an episode recently where we were going to talk about this and we decided, no.

David: Yes, you were droning on and on way too long.

Blair: Oh, yes. As I'm want to do.

David: We didn't have time to finish that, so to salvage people's schedules, we said, we'll just do another one. Then we just broke off the last chunk of that and then built it out into an outline. I will raise my hand here and take responsibility for most of this. If you think this stuff can't change, well, of course, if you haven't been around that long, then maybe you still think that, but I remember very different ways people used to make money in this field, where a newcomer would have no recollection of this. I do remember you'd make money on separations, on type setting. Not only would you charge for this, but you would upcharge it. There'd be some markup and remember printing, and media markup, which has almost disappeared or charging people for color proofs. I remember the first color printer I bought was $19,000.

Blair: Me too. It was like, holy shit. We can actually create color proofs in-house and we can charge a dollar a copy, or whatever it was at the time.

David: So proud of that are faxes.

Blair: Yes. The first ad agency I worked at, they had just got a Mac. It was the first digital, in the art department, there was one computer, and one guy could operate the computer, and this changed everything. I remember walking into edit suites to do television or radio commercials to edit them. You'd walk in, there'd be banks of equipment. You didn't know what any of this equipment did. Then one day, I walked in and there was a guy at a Mac.

David: On an avid system.

Blair: On an avid system with a digital beta, I think they called it.

David: The Sony beta deck. Yes.

Blair: Yes.

David: There's a $2 million video editing suite that collapsed down to a $90,000 Avid suite with a Sony beta recorder. Crazy.

Blair: Point is things change.

David: Things change. This is me slathering meat tenderizer all over myself and diving into the shark pool, but you remember how it was verboten to do anything around alcohol or gambling or tobacco, and now it's other things like fossil fuels and maybe a conservative publication or firearms or something like that. I'm fascinated and I have no idea what's next, but how is that going to change five years from now? What are the things that this industry can't touch? I just find it interesting that the taboo things keep changing over time and it's hard to keep up.

Blair: Yes. Let's talk about the substantive changes that we see coming, the big trends. You're citing two big trends here.

David: Yes. The first one, I see it everywhere. In fact, I can see it in my client base. I'm working with way more consulting firms where you have people who come from a classic media, creative, digital advertising experience that they really should think of themselves as advisory services, consulting firms. I haven't figured out why it's happened. I think it's all good, but it's pretty interesting that what keeps dragging us back to traditional media stuff is our own lack of confidence on the consulting side when many of the firms listening to this thing who've come from a traditional, again, media, advertising, marketing, design background ought to really quit thinking of themselves that way. They ought to be thinking of themselves as consulting firms, advisory services. This is the biggest one for sure. Do you see that?

Blair: Oh, yes. It's like somebody said to me about a year ago, it's all professional services now. In the recent episode, I think I explained that we describe our market as creative firms, but increasingly, there's just this overlap between consulting and software engineering and design, and then you get all these other permutations and all these fragmentations, and then these fragmentations recombinate into these new combinations. I think that last episode was on the evolution of marketing firms.

David: Right. Because in the past, you would have a pure PR firm and it was big news if they decided to add a design department, and then later, it was big news that they decided to add a paid digital department. Now, nobody thinks about that. There's just less purity across all of these things, a lot more scattering, and the pure categories in the past are just not all that useful. That's a big trend that's coming too.

Blair: Yes, and we did an episode a couple of years ago, I think it's what agencies can learn from consulting firms. We talked about the relationship between creative firms and consulting firms. I think a lot of what we had to say back then is still relevant. To your point that we really need to think of ourselves more as in the consulting business and we need to draw less of a distinction between the thinking that we do and the thinking that consulting firms do.

Now, most of our listeners are also in some form of implementation business. When you start to sell more strategy, you're faced with the decision of, well, should we even be in the implementation business, and some firms decide to drop the implementation and some don't. I think you need to be careful in the decision to drop implementation altogether because at that point, now you are a pure consulting firm and the distinction between you and other classical consulting firms has dropped.

I think the ability to hold onto some implementation, especially the early implementation, is a really important distinction, but I really do see our listeners, these, what I continue to call creative firms, as in the consulting business with some very specific application. I think I've talked before, probably in that episode, about the distinction between convergent thinking consulting firm versus a divergent thinking consulting firm, and I think I credited Jack Skeels from, is it AgencyAgile-

David: Yes, AgencyAgile, California.

Blair: -who I first heard talk about this, the idea that creative firms and classical consulting firms just think differently and bring a different style of thinking to problems. I've been waiting for a few years now for somebody to take this idea of creative consulting to the market. I'm surprised, and maybe there's nothing really there, it's just in my mind, but I'm surprised we don't see firms calling themselves creative consulting firms, and the idea that, okay, you've hired a consultant, how did that work out for you? Now bring in the creative thinkers.

Maybe it's just a banner, a moniker for [chuckles] a generalist creative firm that charges lots of money. To me, I don't know, that'd be a pretty good specialism I think.

David: I wouldn't have a problem with that. Consistently the one thing that consulting firms cannot seem to do from a homegrown standpoint is the creative. They're buying other firms or they're trying to hire high-level creatives to build out that department. That is the enduring difference that you have, the advantage you have from a consulting firm. You've got some disadvantages too but that's the enduring advantage is the creative side.

You're thinking a lot about the whole inefficiency thing, and somehow not going completely in the consulting direction or completely in the creative direction but a really thoughtful wedding of those two things, seems to me to be a massive advantage. I've never seen somebody actually pull that off well. It probably has happened, I just don't know about it.

Blair: Do you remember about maybe 5 or 10 years ago, there seemed to be a trend towards innovation agencies or innovation firms. You never heard of it. Agencies never used the term and then they started to use it. In hindsight, I see that now as an attempt to move into that creative consulting space but that's largely gone too. That was a fad that passed.

David: It did pass. We were a little bit late to that. It just felt like we were borrowing language that already had some imbued meaning in it and we were just borrowing it, and we didn't really pay it off all that well. There are still firms that are really strong innovation space that come from a creative background but, yes, it didn't take off like we thought.

Blair: We still have a lot to talk about here. That's one big trend, more consulting and advisory services. What's the other one?

David: Well, the other one is just less separation, and I just touched on this earlier, we don't need to talk too much about it but the fact that there are very few pure PR firms, there are very few pure Comms firms, and those distinctions are getting gray and I think that's really good. Now, so what are you? I think you are largely a consulting or a marketing firm that has particular expertise in these areas, but that's still the bigger umbrella that I think covers most of these firms. The main point here is just that the dividing line between these different categories that used to be so prevalent 20 years ago is just not there anymore.

Blair: Yes. Okay, now you're going to make some predictions here about in the future we're going to see less of these services and more of these services. Do you want to define the future?

David: The same thing I've been saying for decades. Hopefully, if I just keep saying it, there's a chance it'll be true.

Blair: Statistically. [chuckles]

David: I can't believe we're still building basic brochure-like websites. I just can't believe we're still doing that.

Blair: What do you mean? Companies need websites and some simple companies need simple websites.

David: Yes, but do we really want to build businesses where we're building $15,000 or $30,000 websites? It just seems like a dying corner of the industry without much value and tons of competition, and the tools themselves are getting so much better to do that. If you just look within HubSpot, for instance, or you look at Squarespace or Wix, whatever, these are all super, super basic, but it just strikes me as odd that somebody's paying somebody $15,000 or $20,000 for a brochure-like website when they could have somebody on staff build it and it's 80% as good for about $2,000. I just keep wondering how long this is going to happen.

I'm not questioning the $200,000, $1.2 million websites that are built on a much more robust platform, that have to be very specialized, a lot of backend connections, a lot of particular plugins. I'm not questioning that, I'm just questioning the basic building of websites. It still surprises me that so many firms are doing that.

Blair: I needed a basic brochure website last year. I said I'm not going to hire our marketing firm to do this. It's too simple. I said to one of my kids, "Hey, build me a website." He said, "Well, I've never built a website before." I said, "You'll figure it out. It's easy. Squarespace, YouTube," and he did, and I'm really happy with it.

David: Is that all you're going to say? You're not going to tell people what the site is?

Blair: No, no. It's a secret.

David: Okay.

[laughter]

Blair: It's a secret website. Nobody's allowed to go to it.

[laughter]

David: Okay, the next one is this is where, oh my God, I can't believe I keep saying this but I just can't believe SEO is a thing.

[laughter]

Blair: You know what, I'm still a little surprised it's a thing too.

David: Oh, well, that's good. So there's two of us.

Blair: It keeps getting bigger.

David: Yes, and I've got tons of clients that I love that do SEO. I just talked with one. They're in London. That was just two hours before this recording. I'm thinking, okay, people, it's like you've got a good business right now and half of it is really technical SEO implementation that I don't even understand it. I mean I kind of do, but, and then the other half is just trying to outwit Google which last year changed their algorithm 187 times last time I looked, and we're just trying to find holes in this algorithm. Every two days we've got to change something. At some point, is this really going to continue? This is where I've been wrong every time I've said it, but I'm just going to double down. I just can't--

[laughter]

David: Are you going with me, buddy, or do you want to stay on the shore while I poke holes on my own ship?

Blair: Predictions we've been making for years that have never come true.

David: Such compelling listening.

[laughter]

Blair: What's next?

David: Traditional media relations. That's the next one on my list.

Blair: Got to be less of that in the future. There's less traditional media.

David: Right, but there's still a lot of traditional media relations. To me, when I look at all the things that really great PR firms do, traditional media relations is at the bottom of the pile. If I ask a question, how much of your work is traditional media relations? If you tell me 80%, I'm just having an internal groan to myself.

Blair: I'm shorting your stock.

[laughter]

David: Yes, but it's still there. This is all under the category of, I think we're going to see less and less of this. Building basic websites, SEO, and traditional media relations, and I'm probably wrong on all of them.

Blair: All right. What are we going to see more of?

David: We're going to see more accessibility.

Blair: I remember when you first started talking about accessibility like 5, 10 years ago. I was like, what? You're saying, oh, yes, the ADA, and being a Canadian, I didn't know what the ADA want.

David: You've got your own version of it and you folks are way ahead of us. Like you can't build public-facing websites without a pretty strict attention to accessibility. In fact, the manual is some like a hundred thousand pages long. Down here, huh, it's like, nah. Until somebody starts getting sued for it, it's just not a big issue, but it's starting to crop up and I think that's good. In other words, not just the building of websites but a specialization of building them that are widely accessible to everybody who might need it.

Blair: If you're hearing impaired, there's a version, or if you're visually impaired, there's a way to experience the website. Whatever impairment or disability you have, you can still access the website. That's what you're talking about.

David: Yes.

Blair: Do you actually see that growing? Do you see that trend being validated?

David: I do, yes. I'm working with two firms right now where that's the focus and I think it's fantastic. It's tough to pull off because it's a horizontal specialization so it often has to be tied to something else but I think eventually, it could be it's own. It's not quite yet.

Blair: Well, if you go far enough out into the future, if it becomes its own thing, then eventually, it'll become baked into- it'll have to be a capability of anybody who's doing websites.

David: Yes, for sure. Right. CRO is another one that's growing.

Blair: Conversion rate optimization.

David: Yes, and that's tied for sure with the growth of eCommerce. Employer branding. That's instead of externally to customers, it's internally to the team, that's called employer branding and it's been around for 15 years and it's getting bigger and bigger.

Blair: Is that really a thing?

David: Oh, it is.

Blair: I know people say it, but what's the difference between internal comms and employer branding?

David: Oh, it's just, one's more exciting.

Blair: [laughs] Which one?

David: If you're working for the marketing department and you can call it employer branding, it's a lot more fun than internal comms.

Blair: The parties are better.

David: Then change management is big. Seeing the power of whether it's media plans. It's not likely that but it could be, or say, we only work with organizations that are trying to create change in these areas. We're not just putting ads up for them or thinking about how to phrase something, we're actually driven entirely by the theory and the science of change management. I'm working with a firm right now called Marketing for Change. It's a great example. I've worked with a dozen of them. I think this is becoming bigger and I welcome it. I think it's fantastic. We're really holding ourselves accountable and every time we do that, I think that's great.

Then I don't know how I feel about this next one, but CRM consulting. You'll see a lot of firms that are popping up to basically hitch their wagons to say, Salesforce would be the obvious one. You have all these organizations that come from the background or the firms we work with who are saying so much could be done if people are maximizing their use of a CRM.

What used to be just maybe a lead generation play is now let's get inside your CRM. Let's unite all these data towers and let's create dashboards. Let's make decisions that are more data-driven and let's hold ourselves accountable for it. Let's view it not as a cost center but as a profit center, and it's pretty interesting and pretty sophisticated.

Blair: I've always liked the CRM space. We've talked about this before, but to me, it's the area in an organization where sales and marketing overlap and I think there's a lot of opportunity for marketing firms there. I do feel like maybe that has peaked. Our mutual friend, Philip Morgan, has written a fantastic piece. It might be gated, but if it isn't, we'll get the link and we'll post it in the show notes, maybe ask him to ungate it for us because it's a brilliant piece.

I think it's called When The King Gets Hungry and it's about tying your fortunes to a platform, like going all in on say, Salesforce or, HubSpot wouldn't be the right example but being a consulting firm that does implementation of a platform in the early day. It's really lucrative and the platform loves it because you're doing something that they can't do, and at some point, they look at your revenue and go, "Hmm, we need to grow. We've plateaued." I think we'll just take what you are doing, make your business immediately obsolete so that's always a bit of a threat, but if you understand the cycle, and Philip does a really good job of explaining it, then you get a sense of when to get in and when to get out. I can't say too much about it, it wouldn't be appropriate, but I have a friend who got in at the right time and got out at the right time.

Okay, so more accessibility, more CRO, more employer branding, more change management, more CRM consulting, and then you want to talk about what you see as some specific, exciting new positioning options, is that right?

David: Yes maybe I shouldn't say exciting, but at least positioning options.

Blair: Because at the top of the list is staff augmentation, yawn. [laughter] Nice little business though.

David: Well, and there's more and more pressure for that, especially as it's harder and harder to find people, especially find people that are really, really good who would never go work on the client side so they reach out to you. The whole staff aug thing keeps rearing its ugly head. The idea of standing up entire teams for clients, there are quite a few firms that are doing that now so that's different from staff aug. Staff aug is buy the person rather than buying the whole team and the team is still working for you, but it's assigned to a client so that's something else.

Then the whole fractional CMO side is going to be big. There are going to be many of you who can provide fractional CMO services to the right mid-market options. They're too small to afford their own CMO, but they still need the advantage of somebody who thinks like a CMO, who's been a CMO at many companies, and then eventually they'll outgrow you, but they need a fractional CMO. All those three things together, staff aug, standing up entire teams and leasing them, and fractional CMO, that's something that's coming as well.

Blair: Those are all labor arbitrage models, right?

David: Right.

Blair: Where the margins can't be that high like you can run nice tidy little businesses. They're not going to be super lucrative business models, are they, or am I thinking about them incorrectly?

David: With scale, they can be very, very lucrative. If you're selling a team of three people for say, $22,000 a week, you can make good money doing that, right? Or if you have a fractional CMO and you're paying somebody $120,000 and they're a fractional CMO for four different companies, you can make money. It's not like it's easy, it's a completely different model, I'm just saying that we're going to see more and more of this. I think the market is asking for it.

Blair: Got you. Okay. Well, what else is on here that's maybe a little more provocative?

David: Do I dare mention this next one? I haven't seen this happen.

Blair: If there's an area where we should be making predictions, it's right here, so go for it. Take the big swing.

David: Okay, so I think some of you who have decided for your own reasons that you're not going to be a completely remote team, nobody's going to be strict about this. The most not remote I've seen work is, okay, we've got an office, everybody's roughly within an hour of it, and we want you to come in maybe Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday. We want you to be here part of the time. If you can't be here Monday and Friday, no problem, and we make exceptions all the time, right? That seems like a pretty reasonable policy.

Compare that with a completely remote team. I think that we're going to start to see it. I know we're going to see a difference in terms of career paths that are going to be harder to maintain with fully remote teams unless they've been doing it for 10 years or five years but I think there's going to be a difference in terms of collaboration and creativity and innovation around teams that are together regularly. I keep waiting for that to pop up. I haven't seen it yet, it's sort of the anti-movement. It wouldn't surprise me if I start to see firms that say you ought to hire us because we're a real company, we're not fully remote. Now, I don't believe that myself but I just could see somebody saying that.

Blair: Oh, yes. If everybody's going in one direction, you have to be thinking this opportunity going the other way. I think this idea of a sweatshop. A generalist creative firm where you have all of these young junior people, poorly paid, the firm is basically selling their hours cheaply. They're working them hard. I worked in one of these firms at the beginning of my career, the owners would probably cringe at the idea that it was a sweatshop, but it was effectively a sweatshop. It was a great place to be when you're young.

There's lots of young, relatively poorly paid people who are there getting their experience. They're working hard and the owner works hard, pushes everybody hard, doesn't charge enough because it's not the best clients. That's a great environment for a young person to learn because you get so much experience because you're asked to do all of these different things and you have no experience in any of them-

David: The poor clients.

Blair: The owner doesn't really care, eh, whatever. They're not paying us that much money. Just take a shot at it and we'll sell it. There's a place in the world for sweatshops like that. They're great training grounds for young people where you get lots of reps, lots of different things. You learn what you like, you learn what you hate, et cetera. That's where you want to have these young people mixing with each other. I don't know. Why am I craving the thing that I used to rail against?

David: I don't know. I'm getting ready to report to you to the Department of Labor, everything you've just described, [laughter] but it's true. The corporate bro, growth hacking digital will 10 X, your firm, that kind of thing. That's really full of a lot of younger people who often are learning on the job. It's that sort of an environment. I don't know where that's going to go, but there are so many new things coming around that, I guess we don't have time to get into all of them, but AI and machine learning, you talked about the IoT stuff, blockchain, legalized, whatever, marijuana that's already overrun with marketing firms more than they need.

Blair: God. How many firms have you met that just work in the cannabis space?

David: Now, if you'd asked that are doing well, I would say zero-

Blair: Really?

David: -but oh, way more than a dozen. They're just finding that the early entrance feel like they don't need the publicity. It's like it carries itself and they're not sophisticated. This just needs to settle down before we view it as an appropriate path. I have a 130-person firm that only does work in TikTok for goodness' sake. In the past, you'd stand up in front of a group and you would say, all right, folks, there are three big areas, you need to choose one; tech, healthcare, or financial services, and now there are 250 of them and you don't necessarily need to pick one. The landscape is changing so quickly it's just almost mind-boggling.

Blair: We got a little bit of time left. Let's talk about some tired or crowded positionings.

David: Right, where we're probably going to have to either think of something else or be narrower. To me, eCommerce is one, and that's purely because of the pandemic. There's so much more eCommerce happening. A lot of people have jumped on that. Ecommerce is not a tight enough positioning, so that's one. We could also say the same thing for healthcare and financial services, things I referenced just a minute ago. It needs to be tighter.

Blair: Have to be more specific within each of those.

David: Right, exactly. The other tired positioning to me is the affinity-based versus expertise-based focus on, we work for companies doing good or purpose-drive. Instead of talking about how we know how to market your movement or your product, it's more we love your product, let us work for you. That's what I mean by the affinity-based thing.

Blair: That's a great label for that category of firms. They're just everywhere these days. I always cringe slightly when I hear somebody who's so well-intentioned. We work with purpose-driven organizations, so to call it an affinity-based positioning versus expertise-based positioning, I think that just brings some nakedness to it all. That's exactly what it is.

David: All of these firms started, the furthest they go back is the Obama years and elections around 2008 and so on. The positioning is not wearing well. It just needs to be tighter, more expertise based, and not affinity-based. Then I look at the areas that haven't changed much at all, and that's the whole CPG fast-moving consumer goods stuff. Some public relations, a lot of public affairs is exactly the way it was before in terms of what you're doing, traditional brand identity. I guess what we're saying is just lots of change. You can't have a positioning for 10 years. You got to review it every couple of years and probably make an adjustment every three, I would think.

Blair: Let's just recap here, so change is a constant in this business. We went back to the beginning and reminisced about 20, 25, maybe it was 30 years ago now, separations and typesetting, and how all the technology changed. There were some untouchable categories have changed, but the big trends are more towards consulting and advisory, more fragmentation, and then recombining of those fragments, less separation between the classical PR, comms, design, and advertising. You identified some services that you think there'll be less of. So far, you've been wrong on SEO-

[laughter]

David: You had to throw that in.

Blair: -and then more of services like accessibility, CRO, employer branding, change management, and CRM consulting.

David: It's a great time to be alive, right? Because there's just so much opportunity. It's not a lack of opportunity, it lacks focus but it's fun because if you are nimble, you can win this game, and it's fun to be a part of it.

Blair: You saying that has really just struck a chord with me. It's a great time to be alive because there are so many of these fragmented opportunities where it used to be, okay, you're a designer, you graduate from design school. You want to open a design business, you say I run a design firm. What do you design? Well, what do you need designed? It's a great time to be alive because we could design anything. The only difference now is these niches are becoming so delineated.

You can't just say I'm a designer. You have to take this skill that you have that is design and you have to apply it to a certain set of business problems that a certain set of businesses or organizations, or even individuals have. You have to define it for the market so the market can find you and make the distinction between you and people who design all kinds of other things.

What's changed is you have to make this declaration. Everything is so fragmented, but the number of fragments and segments is infinite. They change, some of these things are going away and these new things are coming. I really like your takeaway that your positioning is not likely to last 10 years, where 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I know I said this for sure, your positioning statement is carved in stone. Maybe you said that too, but it's more like carved in wood now.

[laughter]

David: Oh, let's not play this one back in a few years and learn where we were wrong about everything.

Blair: Let's just promise each other that we will never revisit any of the predictions that we ever made.

David: All right. I promise.

Blair: In our minds, we'll always be right. Thank you for this, David.

David: Thank you, Blair.