Rory Sutherland on Why Advertising Is Optimizing for the Wrong Thing | The Bottleneck Podcast LIVE

[00:00:10]How's everybody doing?

[00:00:12]>> No, that's not good enough. We're not going to start the podcast until we get the decimals up. How's everybody doing?

[00:00:20]>> One more time. How's everybody doing?

[00:00:24]>> All right. H. Um, so my name is Alfred S. from the co-host of the Bottleneck Podcast alongside Rory. I I firmly believe We Should Start a Podcast is the modern day version of We Should Start a Band, right? And that's exactly how it started. Rory and I were at WPP Beach uh um uh uh in no stream a couple of years ago. We had a conversation. It lasted about an hour and a half and we said that this should be a podcast. And then we looked at each other and said we should start a podcast and here we are.

[00:00:52]So without further ado, we have an amazing guest today. This is what our second live episode and we have Joe that's here with us. In true bottleneck form, we don't own the narrative of the guests. We let the g own the narrative.

[00:01:04]So, it'll be great for you to give our guests an introduction to yourself, tickle, and some of the bottlenecks that you've been solving across your >> Actually, very quick question. How many of you have heard of Tickle?

[00:01:17]Uh, okay. This is interesting. How many of you practice digital marketing in some shape or form?

[00:01:23]Okay. Right. There's a job to be done.

[00:01:25]So, okay, here we go. Go on.

[00:01:29]>> Yeah. Thanks, Alfred. So, basically, Tickle is a savable ads infrastructure.

[00:01:34]So, we enable any ad across any format to be saved for later directly into the mobile wallet, whether that's Apple or Google. That in itself creates a direct channel between the consumer and brand based on intent with 100% human attribution. It's essentially a third state of advertising in a current advertising world where everything is binary. It's like you click or you don't click. There's no in between. So we create that third state for people who are interested but not at that time.

[00:02:09]>> Okay.

[00:02:10]This fascinated me because it struck me that a very large part of digital advertising effectively has the wrong call to action because every single piece is measured on act now. Now half the time you're exposed to that ad when you're trying to do something like renew your car road tax. Okay, you're in the middle of accomplishing some completely different task and the ad is not irrelevant in terms of who it's targeted to, but it's completely irrelevant in terms of the moment at which it reaches you. And I've my whole career started in direct mail, which has one magical property uh in terms of its value, which is keepability.

[00:02:54]You might get a piece of direct mail. I think the average piece of direct mail is kept in the home for about six or seven days. you deal with it at a time of your own choosing when it's relevant to you. And so we were just talking fun enough backstage. I said about the third most irritating thing online after cookie permissions and uh and pop-ups that cover the button that you're trying to press. The third most irritating thing effectively is when someone sends you a ticket to something without an add to wallet button, right? Because you go, "What the [ __ ] am I supposed to do with this?" Okay, it's rather like those people who when you have a conference, okay, they send you the directions three weeks before. Okay, you go, look, I'm not Rainman, right? I'm not going to actually memorize this [ __ ] now. What I want to do is save it up to a moment when it's actually necessary. Now when you think about it in terms of a lot of advertisers and a lot of people who spend a lot of money on digital advertising, it always struck me that the consumer package goods businesses were getting a raw deal because they're selling a low margin product which isn't an impulse buy which isn't bought immediately.

[00:04:04]They will always end up getting outbid for the high high value inventory for people who are the opposite high margin products that you buy immediately on impulse. Okay. And it struck me that I and I actually asked Mark Reed the same question. I said, "Do you actually see many Unilver ads online?" And we both said, "No." And yet they spend a lot of money.

[00:04:29]And our suspicion is that they're getting second rate inventory that people like us don't see. Now, if you change the call to action to save to later, what you've done effectively is you've taken an ad that would be uh good idea, wrong time, and you've effectively turned it into a retail ad. You've turned it into retail advertising. But you can explain more. It's much more than just save for later. You can actually make the thing in your wallet do clever things later on.

[00:04:58]>> Yeah.

[00:04:59]>> Tell us more about that.

[00:05:00]>> No, exactly that. And CPG is a great example because they don't have necessarily a lot of data on who their end audience is. So one of the things that we look to do is give control back to the brands in that respect as well.

[00:05:12]But then so we've just run a campaign um on our rails with a large CPG and directly 21% of the people who clicked through the ad took an action. So 21% postclick action rate. That in itself they were love they were in love with.

[00:05:32]The stronger point of that is that I mean we talk about doing things for later and to your point earlier about getting uh the address 3 weeks early right humans innately forget stuff. So even if you screenshot an ad which is where this all started um or you save an ad into the wallet you're going to forget about it. So what we've built in the background is an engine that prompts people, reminds people they've saved the ad, can deliver new information, new updates. And what that's done, even with a CPG and with nappies, 54% of the people who saved the ad over a 4-week period went back to the wallet in their card, clicked out, went to site, took an action. The consumer has complete control on that. They're not being forced into anything. That is them putting their hand up in the first instance saying, "I'm interested, but I'm too busy right now." And that's how people shop. It's one of those things and actually you can go back to newspapers where people are clipping out ads and articles and saving them in their physical wallet for later. This is just the progression of that. And yet the industry has somehow missed this. Um >> it's extraordinary actually because there was tons of data. Yeah, there's I mean there's a very simple finding from direct marketing which is if you sent identical creative to the same list two weeks later, you got 50% of the initial response. So in other words, time even if the second time was just as irrelevant as the first, still effectively accounted for a very large part of why people weren't responding.

[00:07:06]>> Absolutely.

[00:07:07]>> Okay. Now, if you make that second encounter actually relevant and consumer selected rather than just random, it's likely to be a lot more than 50% and may well be 100 or even more.

[00:07:18]>> Yeah, this is it and this is what we talk to brands about and I guess this is the problem with the industry in general is that everything right now is built and engineered and optimized for the point of delivery, not for the point of decision. And there is a big difference in time and space between when somebody sees an ad and then when they actually want to take action on it. Nothing accounts for that. Um and that's one of the biggest things that we're trying to do is close that gap because it conforms to how people actually shop today.

[00:07:51]>> And just to jump in there, um before tickle there was Snatch. What's the connection between the two? Other than the ridiculous names, um, Snatch was Snatch I launched in like 201617.

[00:08:06]>> Just to be clear, this is as snatch as in Grab. Okay, I just just in case anybody's thinking we're suddenly promoting hardcore porn apps.

[00:08:16]>> Okay, I had good fun pitching that in the US.

[00:08:20]Um, so basically what it was, I thought it'd be hilarious if I let people steal off each other in a fun way in a digital environment. So in like 2016, we basically got a bunch of brands, we took their ads, we created an augmented reality treasure hunt, called it Snatch, and we hid ads all around the country.

[00:08:42]We let people find them, snatch them from each other, and then after six hours, basically what they're finding is a a parcel. They don't know what's inside exactly, but then after 6 hours, it opens up. They can redeem what it is.

[00:08:56]And actually, what it mostly was was affiliate offers, but what we did, what was smart about that, and I guess that what leads to tickle is we asked the right question. Like actually, it wasn't even asking the right question. It was allowing the consumer to give us the right answer, which was, "Are you interested? Do you want this ad?" So, every single day in the morning, people were trained or engineered to wake up, they check their phone, they'd probably see what parcel they had, what they'd won, etc. But then they'd have seven new ads, and if they were interested in that product, they'd like it. And then that ad becomes part of their game. They go out throughout the day, they find the parcel, they defend it. Um, but what it actually does is, to give you an example, like Nike, I live in the US now, so I have to say Nike. Basically, they might give away 10 pairs of trainers, right? 100,000 people would say, "I'm interested in that. That will go into the game for that day."

[00:10:00]Only 10 people win those trainers. So your 99,990 people don't win anything, but Nike know who they are. They have a direct route back to that consumer who has shown intent that said, "I want that product."

[00:10:16]So then Nike can go back and we called it a secondary offer. And they can go back and go, "Well, we know you didn't win it. Um, here's 10% off if you purchase in the next 24 hours, etc." And that is pure deterministic data coming from the platform. And that is essentially what we're looking to do or what we are doing with tickle but at kind of DSP scale.

[00:10:35]>> I mean actually both of them are based on a similar in a sense a similar insight which is what people dislike about advertising and brands is not necessarily uh what they are. It's how they show up.

[00:10:48]>> Oh 100%. Yeah. I always say people don't hate advertising. They hate being interrupted. So, if you can get an ad to not act and or look and feel like an ad, people will engage with it. Because naturally, as humans, we crave new information. We want to know what our favorite brands are doing next. We we always want to know if there's a good offer or a deal that we can get.

[00:11:11]>> But if it's just being blasted at us uh every single page that we turn, we're trained to ignore it. The analogy I always use about this about the importance of timing and context and of course as you know being interested in behavioral science we're obsessed by context partly because the effect of context is often invisible or not properly measured is that those moments when you've had a hard day and you're traveling home on the train and you see the person who you probably like more than almost everybody else in the whole world board the train and you're actually disappointed because you are looking forward to spending 45 minutes on your own. Do you see what I mean?

[00:11:50]We've all know, you know, you all know what that feels like. People who you really, really love but who show up at an inopportune moment.

[00:11:57]>> Yes. And so I think what you're doing there, which is that actually personalization, targeting by time in a sense, I suppose that's one of the insights of behavioral science, which is me now and me in 4 hours time are actually in a way more different than you and me are now.

[00:12:14]>> Yeah. And it's it it I think that that importance economics doesn't understand mood. Fundamentally doesn't understand mood. It doesn't understand mode. It doesn't understand context. It just understands transactions and utility maximization.

[00:12:29]And actually when you look at a huge amount of consumer purchase behavior, but also in interaction, engagement, attention, one virtue which everybody missed about direct mail was that it was keepable.

[00:12:42]Yeah.

[00:12:42]>> And one virtue everybody missed about press advertising was that it tended to appear when you were reading anyway.

[00:12:49]And so you were in the right frame of mind to consume a press ad by dent of the fact that you were reading a newspaper already. You were in the right frame of mind in a sense to consume a TV ad because you were sitting on a sofa watching stuff. Okay. So much online advertising. I mean I I have no financial interest in this. I'm simply an enthusiast because this approach strikes me fundamentally as courteous to the consumer. That a lot of advertising strikes me as fundamentally a discourteesy in terms of how and when it shows up and what it asks people to do.

[00:13:23]>> Yeah. We always talk about the fact that modern day advertising is more obsessed with the content than it is with the context, right? Because the context actually matters and if you can marry the two up together, that's when magic's created, right? And Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the fact that most brands should be prioritizing jabs instead of hooks, which means jab, jab, jab up front, which means give, give, give up front, and then you ask, not take. And I think a lot of the times what brands are doing, and going back to your whole um uh statement about interrupting is they're all going to everybody and trying to take, take, take and not give.

[00:13:58]>> That that was actually the point of snatch. It it was to create a value exchange between a consumer and a brand because we all know I mean going back to Cambridge Analytica everybody is now fully aware that we are the product right we are what's getting monetized so if consumers are more and more aware of that the brand needs to do more to be able to give something back for the time and attention when a brand really all they want to know is who's interested in their product. So I guess what we try and do or the the the companies that I've built are about bridging that gap but asking the the right question. Um which is even more interesting now because of AI and everything else which personally I feel is is the right answer to the wrong question because it doesn't fix for engagement it doesn't fix for attribution. There's still two huge gaps in the industry and I think the industry itself is actually starting to come around to that and that was probably my biggest takeaway from K. I know you guys were there as well >> this year was talking more about how they can get engaged with first party data use that to create trust and authority and everything else.

[00:15:04]>> I mean I mean your bottleneck to bring this back to the theme of the um uh I think you have an inarguably good idea what your bottleneck will be is clients who are effectively bonused around old-fashioned and inadequate metrics.

[00:15:20]And if you're being really cynical about digital advertising, it's only secondarily in the business of actually selling business growth. What it's really doing is selling self-serviceving metrics to junior clients in order to justify their own existence. So, you know, what is the relative importance in digital advertising of producing genuine lasting, rewarding results and relationships versus allowing someone to produce a nice spreadsheet or a chart which shows they did 6% better this year than they did the year before. And if one's being really really cynical, you could say a large part of digital advertising is actually about defensive decision-making. It's not really about uh discovery or, you know, or G. I mean the most extreme case I heard was someone who was asked to turn off their retail advertising and they said well why it's getting people very successfully to buy very high margin um sorry very high profit premium products in this category and the person said I know it makes us a lot of money unfortunately my bonus is paid on percentage margin not overall profit and we make more percentage margin selling our own brand lowprofit product than we do selling the premium product. So, I need you to turn off this advertising for three months so that I can actually meet my target and get my bonus.

[00:16:41]Intriguingly, Greg Jackson at Octopus does not pay bonuses.

[00:16:46]And his argument is once you actually pay once you have a formalized bonus structure, everybody pursues narrow gives not broad objectives. That's the first problem. The second one is they start gaming the system.

[00:17:01]>> Yeah. And it always happens. Basically, metrics will always end up getting gamed. And yet, weirdly, finance people have some sort of naive faith that everything simply needs to be immediately quantifiable or it doesn't count.

[00:17:16]>> But we also have a responsibility as a as a marketing and advertising industry.

[00:17:20]I think we forgot what the what industry we're actually in, right? We're in the trust business. We're not in the content business. We're not in the ads business.

[00:17:30]We're in the trust business and ads and content are all symptoms especially if they're engaged of trust, right? And we often talk about the fact that uh and let's start with the conversion funnel that was basically a road map to a marriage between um a a brand and its audience. This was the the route to the altar, if you will. That's half the story. We know to be able to have a happy marriage and the biggest form of trust is belonging and long-term and tenure. But let's just race to the altar for a second. Before brands would make themsel aware, so awareness, so you'll make yourself known. You'll make yourself like liked and considered and then you'll get married. Whereas now, because of those performance metrics, you're not like racing to the altar.

[00:18:13]Everyone's basically running an escort service, right? Straight to conversion.

[00:18:17]I don't even know you. I don't even like you. I just want you to buy from me.

[00:18:22]Right? And we basically need to unlearn that short-term thinking and start to think a lot longer term in terms of like the race to the altar between the brand and its audience.

[00:18:32]>> Well, this is my little gag, which is marketers are trying to create a successful marriage, whereas finance people think they're running an escort agency. Fundamentally, they're only interested in aggregate individual transactions. They're not interested in progressive value exchange over time.

[00:18:50]>> Yeah. Yeah, >> because because that's all that shows up on their measure. Okay, because you have a metric for transactional value, you don't have a metric for relational value.

[00:19:00]>> Actually, funny enough, this actually brings us back to the conversation I had with John at Leyon.

[00:19:06]>> Yeah.

[00:19:06]>> Which is it's very very easy for people to overscale a fast food restaurant concept. You think you're doing really well because lots of people are visiting you once out of curiosity. And so as far as you're concerned, for the first six months to a year, you're growing really impressively. The problem is that eventually none of those people come back and actually what it is is you've you've measured the transactions. You haven't measured propensity to repeat.

[00:19:34]Then you wonder why you're Hugh Hefner, right? That's effectively what happened.

[00:19:38]The love goes once, the money goes. And then really once you raise to the altar, it's all about advocacy. getting your customers to get other customers on board because of the experiences you've given them. Then it's about defensibility. Can you survive cancel culture? Do people come to your aids just like Beyonce has the beehives? Have you got your own beehives to be able to defend you when times get tough? And then effectively then it's belonging. Do you have the same pull that a football team has with its fans? Have you got people that are advocates for you and that you're ingrained in their identity?

[00:20:09]Basically, have you got swifties? Right.

[00:20:12]And that's the long that's the alter first to marriage and the altar to the uh race to belonging.

[00:20:17]>> So almost everything you need to do to create that kind of relationship uh is something that your finance person will find deeply unattractive either because it's unquantifiable or because it seems like discretionary expenditure or in your case because it makes something that they want to be fast slow.

[00:20:36]>> Yeah.

[00:20:37]>> Yeah.

[00:20:37]>> Exactly. I mean, we've had that already.

[00:20:39]Like, so we had one company selling time shares of all things. Um, we did a social media campaign. 7% of people who saw their ads saved it. Like, that's insane data for them. And we were like, that's amazing. So, we were all excited to present it back to them and they were like, yeah, we're not going to use it again.

[00:21:00]>> So, seriously, you have killer stats like that.

[00:21:03]>> Yeah. Yeah. We were like, what? and but they're not allowed to. Now, this is a really interesting philosophical question.

[00:21:09]>> If you do something with the aim of obtaining one metric and it instead achieves a remarkable different metric, is it cheating to say that's still a success? Right? It's a bit like saying if you go to a party to cop off with somebody and actually they don't turn up but you buy a winning lottery ticket on the way home that makes you £20,000 you're supposed to say that's a bad day.

[00:21:34]Do you see what I mean? Because it's per my view is it's perfectly legitimate to achieve success through means which you didn't intend to begin with. Now I'll give you an example of this. John Roberts at AO someone's looking up scandalized by this. I think it's per it's perfectly legitimate to get lucky.

[00:21:53]Okay. Okay. Yeah. Actually, profiting from luck rather than intention is a totally legitimate way to be successful.

[00:22:01]Okay. And yet, weirdly, we only deem it as successful to the extent that it was what you plan to achieve in the first place. Now, AO John Roberts justifies the bears. Do you all know that if you order a washing machine from AO and there are children in your home, they have a box of bears in the back of the van and they give your kids a a branded bear. Okay? And they asked, "How do we justify that?" Because you can measure the effect. You could have a control group who you didn't give a bear and you could have a third control group. You said, "Here's a bear, which I'm not going to give to you." Okay? You know, um, now you could measure it, but it take about five years. They noticed something completely different, which was every single person on Trust Pilot who mentioned the bear gave them a five-star review. Okay, now my viewers, that's okay. Keep doing it. Okay, just because it's not a standard metric, just because it's not, by the way, and what's happening with all these metrics? What are the metrics you're using? They're the same as all your competitors. So, what's going to happen? You're going to come I I think there was someone talking about Suzuki, wasn't there, before on the stage before us. When you have the same metrics as everybody else in your category, oh surprise, surprise, you become more and more similar. Okay? So now you have no distinctiveness. You have no differentiation because you've created this thing called corporate isomorphism where every company in a in a in a in a category starts pursuing exactly the same metrics as everybody else, which by the way have often they're not your metrics. They've probably been devised by Meta or Alphabet to make them as much money as possible, right? Okay. And you're becoming more and more similar. You're now engaged in head-to-head competition, which means that surprise surprise, Meta and Alphabet make all the money because it's now them deciding who gets to effectively see you and who doesn't get to see you. And it's weird because lots and lots of things are perfectly rational at the narrow level. which become utterly stupid when everybody else does the same thing.

[00:24:08]And we don't actually have a word for this, but that's exactly what's happening in digital advertising. Now, what you've done is you've provided people with an opportunity to say, let's pursue a different metric, which will now make us completely different in the marketplace and will probably appeal to people whom nobody none of our competitors are currently appealing to.

[00:24:30]Yeah, >> it's highly likely to be incremental value and people go, "Yeah, but that how does that help me get my bonus?"

[00:24:35]>> Well, this is this is it. So, if it's not a media, it's not for everybody, but over time, like we've there's a long road map in terms of what we're doing because obviously we're on the disruption stage and this is a big industry to try and disrupt, but there are people that care.

[00:24:50]There's a hell of a lot of people that don't really care and they do just want to get their bonuses.

[00:24:54]>> Yeah.

[00:24:54]>> But in in the companies that we're working with, there's always somebody who wants to affect some change. And over time I mean we fully expect the savable mechanic to become a standard because of the data that we are getting.

[00:25:06]So those who we are working with are seeing the incremental benefit of going from an an impression which is taking seconds and nobody's doing anything with it and is utterly actually useless in terms of any kind of learnings from a brand and we're turning that moment into months of engagement straight off the bat. And I think from our perspective having that kind of third state where you don't have to lean everything onto the impression or even on the conversion itself, the industry can actually start finding a way to adjust and move more towards a value exchange with the consumer because they don't have to push absolutely everything straight away. You see the ad, you must buy now otherwise it's a failure. Um, and that's something that we are starting to see in the movement. So like we're integrating with DSPs to do this at scale because the other thing to your point where everybody's using the same metrics now everybody's using the same AI effectively is table stakes.

[00:26:02]>> Yeah.

[00:26:03]>> So it's the data that the that's going to make the difference and having intent data that you can feed back into any campaign is you know we're reducing CAC by like 66%.

[00:26:14]So everything for us is moving as lightning fast as it is for everybody else. We're just learning with it but there are people who care. So there is hope.

[00:26:22]>> Just for interest, how many people here have used Heathrow pod parking?

[00:26:26]Okay. Do you love it? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:26:29]Everybody. Okay. This is a classic case of metric where you become imprisoned by pre-existing metrics. Okay. Because the really fascinating thing about the Heathrow pond parking is that it's about a mile away from Terminal 5, but the prices they charge are only a couple of pounds a day less than short stay. And the reason is people really enjoy riding in the pod. Okay? Right? I don't know if anybody knows it. It's a car park about a mile away from Terminal 5. And you park your car and a little pod drives up and you get into it and it drives you to the terminal. Okay. Uh on little tracks, okay? And I always ask, this is obviously a brilliant form of transport, okay? Which deserves to be more widely adopted. Why has it not been more widely adopted given that people will clearly pay a huge premium over a shuttle bus to ride in a pod? Okay. And the reason is that the people who make transport decisions have metrics that are all about time and capacity. Okay. And cost and they don't have a single metric around enjoyment or actually around human behavior. It's a totally utilitarian way of measuring things entirely based on engineering properties, not psychological properties. And and and fundamentally what has happened I think in business is that I mean by the way you've got to be quite old to realize how weird this is.

[00:27:50]I mean who here is over 50? You don't have to admit it but okay it's a tiny percentage of people. Okay. Genuinely, okay, 30, 40 years ago, business people did business and finance people measured how they were doing. Okay. What has happened over 40 years is that what you're allowed to do in business is determined by the convenience of finance people in terms of what will fit into their spreadsheet or their metric. It's a complete reversal. Now, if you think, by the way, this is this is totally widespread. So, I was talking to Michael Gove, okay? And he got annoyed when he was a government minister because the Treasury wouldn't let him do anything.

[00:28:31]There was a guy, I was talking to another MP who said, "I couldn't get permission from the Treasury to spend £60,000 as a government minister." And he went to see Kenneth Clark who some of you will remember um as a brilliant actually very good chancellor of the exjecker uh back in the late 80s. And Kenneth Clark said, "I don't understand what the [ __ ] you're talking about." And he said, "No, no." He said, "When I was chancellor of the exjecker, we gave a minister a budget and then at the end of the year, if they spent it pretty well, they kept their job." Okay? It was a loose fitness function. We didn't micromanage every minute of their existence. We allowed them to make broad decisions and then we measured at the broad level how effectively they were achieving their objectives. What's now happened is literally the need to quantify trumps the need to succeed.

[00:29:21]it's more important to improve it to produce convenient numbers than it is actually to grow a business. And that's happened over the so it's actually it's actually something that happened in the Soviet Union much earlier which is they started off with five-year plans and targets and what actually happened was that instead of measuring how well they were doing something everybody simply acted to meet the target. What actually happened in the Soviet Union, by the way, is the people who made chandeliers were measured by the weight of the chandeliers they produced. Okay? They weren't measured by the number of chandeliers, the beauty of the chandeliers. There was this massive spate of ceiling collapses in the Soviet Union. Okay? Because everybody making chandeliers said, "Actually, I found a way to make a [ __ ] chandelier weigh two tons. That means we've only got to produce 50 of them and we meet our annual target." And there was this massive spate of building collapses caused by these two-ton chandeliers because the metrics were [ __ ] But then what happened is people gamed the metrics. Now we thought capitalism was immune from this problem. It turns out it isn't. Okay. That actually people would rather meet a target than be successful.

[00:30:32]I I I genuinely mean that. Okay. In a survey, 80% of managers said they would cancel a project they believed to be definitely profitable in the medium term if it meant they met a quarterly forecast. Okay, that's literally what's happened. And finance people think this is [ __ ] normal. Okay, when I started in advertising, there was a bloke in the corner who read the Financial Times and there were like five people sitting around who were called things like bought ledger, right? You know, look at the finance department. You can see the [ __ ] curvature of the earth, right?

[00:31:07]These things are enormous, right? This is not natural. It's a kind of corporate cancer. And yet, nobody's doing anything about it because oops. Who decides how many people work in the finance department? [ __ ] me, it's the finance department, right? Who who decides who WORKS IN HR? OH, [ __ ] ME, it's HR. Okay.

[00:31:28]So, you literally end up with like the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse. Okay, there are far more of these people than there are copywriters or art directors and advertising agency.

[00:31:39]David Oglev said, "Who on earth would run a dairy where you had more milkmaids than you had cows?"

[00:31:46]Okay, this is what has happened genuinely. Sorry about that.

[00:31:50]>> I love this, but uh uh Joe Rory, you've been phenomenal. Um make sure you check out Tickle and subscribe to the Bottleneck Podcast on YouTube, on Spotify, and everywhere else where you consume your podcasts. Thank you. Thanks a lot.