This is Ryan Alford he's your host of the Marketing Made Sense podcast 

Ryan Alford [00:00:00] Hey, guys, happy Thursday to you. It is Thursday, the 8th day of February. Wow, where's the year going? I feel just yesterday it was New Year's, then suddenly we're almost halfway through a short February. I'm getting through the week here.  I wanted this podcast to be a little open-ended. Some things that hit my radar this week that I thought would be interesting to get some dialogue around. First, fitness tech is taking off. It's the year for fitness technology. We've had wearables take off in the last few years, and then it slowed down just a bit.  I have an Apple iWatch and I use it, but I've been a little disappointed in the functionality. The pulse settings never seem to work when I'm doing high-intensity workouts and it drives me crazy. I take one of these high-intensity classes and when I'm running and want to check my pulse,  to see how fast my heart is beating, to make sure it's not one hundred and eighty beats per second.  I look down and it's just thinking. I haven't worked it into my normal process yet and I don't ever use Alexa on it.  I use it for time and if I am too far from my phone to check the weather. I haven't worked on all the apps yet for the different experiences on the watch.  I bring this up because I'm seeing Peloton News Daily, and we've had an opportunity with a client that does yoga classes online through an application,  I won't name the brand, but it's of interest to me because of the engagement.  This is insight across categories that I want to touch on because you get to work out wherever you want. You get the peloton, you jump on the bike, they now have a treadmill and, there's this gamification going on between multiple participants across cities, and it's cool. I keep seeing news about it. And it brings me back to it from a marketing standpoint of what those opportunities will be through yet another screen on the peloton bike or treadmill. So you've got another screen there and you've got all that going on. What are the marketing implications there? Are there going to be ads in between the workouts?  Are they going to keep it ad-free? I guess if you charge five thousand dollars a bike monthly, they baked it all in. But, you know, there's going to be marketing within those but I think it's more the trend of convenience for consumers and, spinning it all back around. We work with several restaurant categories and sales are flat and they're not happy about that or sales are down in some industries and our clients are down. We do have a handful that is flat and a lot of that is the people want convenience. They're picking up prepared foods from the grocery store or they're doing the at-home cooking delivery meals, whether that's plated or FreshDirect. There are some names out there, but everyone's wanting to stay home. So you're not going to the gym, you're staying home and working out with other people in your basement. And you can pretend you're in New York working with the best trainers in the world, and you're at home eating the meal that you cooked yourself. And what that all come back down to is convenience. And, you know, either a lot of introverts don't want to go out and about, or it's another sign of people wanting to do things and engage with things on their own terms, be it a meal, be it fitness, or be it anything they're wanting to do when and where they want. It just happens to be a lot of that happens at home. I think it's all boiling back to that convenience thing. And we've done several studies for clients, and I've been involved with several larger clients over the years, and even in the automotive space with dealerships and some of the proliferation going on, convenience always ranks high, and consumers, whether it's announced so they can know how to respond when asked, it always ranks high, but if you look under some of those secondary measures and questions and you get underneath the data a bit, it comes back to that notice of the need and want desire for convenience. But I think there's also this thing of people spending a lot more time at home and shopping online. And that's going to be kind of the second phase of what I wanted to talk about today.  Automobiles;  This week we've been doing demos on several online buying platforms for our dealerships, as they call it, digital retailing or transactional retail online, a lot of fancy terms for you to buy the car online.When You think about all of the research and the shopping that's taking place online for the last 10 years, how that's replaced all the traditional mediums and radio out there. All that's gone down and all the online has gone up, and we do have a ton of digital clients. But now there's this end in approach from search to purchase it can all take place online. We've been evaluating those platforms. What is that about? I mean, that's about convenience. It's also about the fact that customers just hate going to the dealership and spending half the day there,  obviously with cars and being considered for purchase, you're not going to do away with test drives, but they are trying to bring in AI and different things to replace that. But that's unlikely to happen before we are in the self-driving car phase, dealerships being completely out of the picture.  Consumers will still want to drive the car, particularly on preowned. Having done a startup in that space, I know firsthand trying to sell cars online, sight unseen is very difficult without the test drive phase. People just aren't sure about it. And even new cars, they're wanting to try them out. But it's still back to this convenience aspect. Can I order and manage,  five hours of the process from the comfort of my home, from search to features to financing, all of those things? And we've looked at some platforms and the one this week that we are working with was a good partner. Chris Vestry owns a dealership in North Carolina, several dealerships of a group, and we looked at his platform, Gogo Cars, is the name of it. It was very impressive. They've really thought through this, from the dealers perspective, what would be needed through that shopping process online, from the financing and all the terms and linkage with banks, you can even appraise your trade-in and get real-time offers just loading up some pictures and the VIN and it's a guaranteed offer. And so they've thought through this process. But as I was saying there's this convergence back to convenience, back to being at home where you do things now. On your mobile, you can do the process from anywhere. But I still think it's this convergence back to being the home. We want to cook at home. We want to exercise at home. We want to order cars at home. And so I think there's a theme here that to play with just some of the things I've seen this week, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about those things and would love to get your feedback on the podcast as we want to grow this thing organically and intermix some of the verticals and some of the marketing things that we're seeing out there, we'd love to get engagement in through any of the social channels, whether that's following me on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook, some of the channels out there. You've got the Marketing Made Sense podcast, which is now on iTunes. You may be hearing that year or on Angkor where I'm putting the content. You can also find snippets of different things as well as videos on my Instagram channels. I also want to do one shot out.  I talked a little bit about practicing what I preach with the voice app platforms and anchors and doing this podcast with the proliferation of voice. Also want to do a shout-out to the VayNer media team who put together; Agent twenty twenty-one. They're doing a voice COevent on May 22nd. Its Voice CON. And it's all about voice marketing and I'm pumped about that and trying to make it work with my schedule, and I think it's on an off day from an event.  I'm also doing some speaking at a dealer event in Florida and I think it's going to be around that. But more to come on that. But please go check that out. Our good friends at VayNer Media and I would look forward to meeting or seeing anyone there, but I think that's all for today. And I'll talk with everyone soon. I hope everyone's having a great week and have a great weekend.