Ryan Alford [00:00:07] Hey guys! Happy Monday to you. It is Monday, May 21, 2018. I am Ryan Alford, your host of the Radical Company podcast. I hope everyone had a great weekend and a great start to their week.  I wanted to get a podcast out there talking about a couple of topics. An interesting 60 Minutes segment last night on Google – the monopoly that may or may not be, depending on where you sit. Also to talk a little bit about Radical Company, the business consortium that I have started marketing, consulting, designing, video, and doing some side projects with several brands. I also started an official consultant business and I am quite excited about it. 

I want to talk about the title and the name of the business, which is Radical Company. So, why Radical? If you are an 80s aficionado you may remember the skateboarding and BMX bikes in the movie Rad. RAD is short for Ryan Alford Digital, which is the acronym for which I'll be doing some of my consulting. I wanted it to be an impactful name for the consulting business because it takes impactful ideas and marketing initiatives to move the needle these days for both small and large brands. It's about driving radical ideas for brands. Thus, the Radical Company was born. I will be doing several things, everything from digital marketing and social media to brand consulting and development and research. A little bit of a one-stop-shop for brands of all sizes that need a little extra to get up and don't want to go the large agency route because they want to get more personalized service and more personalized hands-on marketing consulting. 

So, I'm excited to bring that to life via my content. It will be on all the channels with which people interact with me, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other channels where the podcast gets picked up. We will be coming up with a lot of content under the Radical company name and bringing it to life. What does it mean to live radical, go radical and be radical?.  Yes, I will be saying Radical a lot. 

You have to stand out in today's landscape. There are so many channels, so many opportunities with which to touch your consumers. Whether that's B2B or B2C. It is about taking radical approaches. Some people will say, "Oh, I don't want to be radical. We don't need Radical all the time." No, it's not always about being so far out in the left field. Sometimes radical is the simple steps, not overthinking your next play, not getting caught in your undershorts with attribution models when you just need a real tight creative brief around your brand idea. That's radical alone, becoming radical in your thinking, both in simplicity and sometimes in complexity. I'm quite excited about the content, excited about the name, and the opportunity to work with some friends and several brands. 

There are several ways to get in touch with me. If you want to follow me on Instagram @radical_results or Facebook, you can look up Radical Company or follow me personally @Ryan Alford on Instagram. I do most of my content there and some articles on LinkedIn.

Venturing off that into the marketing topic, I watched the 60 minutes interview last night that focused on Google. I think it was self-serving and pandering by CBS to go after marketing. They are just a corporate watchdog playing watchdog journalism, as I like to say. I'm not here to advocate for everything that Google does and everything that goes on with the duopoly or triple threat with Amazon, Facebook, and Google. 

They're indeed giving consumers the experience that they want. Google has developed a search product that people like to use. It delivers results. It gets them what they are looking for. It's an experience that they like. You go to Amazon, it's an experience where you like to shop. It's easy, shipping the next day or within two days. It's brilliant. They've taken consumer demand and consumer desire and delivered products that offer great results. 

When we start pointing fingers and start having issues with those capitalistic fibers of our economy, I get a little bit of heartburn. I won't pretend to be naive that some things go on or don't go on Google's platform. They developed the search engine. They do the algorithms. I don't know how much. I would veer to say no government control of that algorithm. One might say who's policing Google? I think that was the end of the argument in the article. No, we're not naive to think that some things don’t happen, but at the end of the day, they've created a product. They've delivered on that product. They've invested repeatedly in those services that they deliver to their consumers. 

They give away a lot of stuff for free. I use Google Docs every day for free. I use Gmail every day for free. I do have a business account now. But, they deliver a lot of products and services that we agree to use for free by giving up some data rights. So privacy concerns aside, there are a lot of benefits that Google does bring consumers in using their products. You don't pay for their search engines. You don't pay for their apps. You don't pay for a number of the data sources that they have or you pay just a minuscule amount, a dollar or two, for terabytes of data saving. Before we start throwing too many darts, we have to remember that some of those services come back to us that they reinvest in for our benefit and for the usage of getting our jobs done every day. 

I'd like to halt the bus before we run it over Google too hard. At the end of the day, they've developed a product. They sell advertising to make that product work and to reinvest in R&D to make better products and services. These are some of its outcomes. Now, whether or not they're diminishing competition, that's probably happening in some ways. But why doesn't someone step up and beat them to the punch, develop something better? It can and will happen. I think we'll start to see those things. But I do think you'll start to see more and more of these pieces that try to tear down the fabric of these companies because of how big they've gotten, and it's fair enough. I understand the arguments here. 

This podcast, and my point of view, is not meant to stand up for one or the other. It's meant to just raise arguments for all sides of it and to be careful what we wish for, being capitalistic, being some of the services that we get and use for free from these conglomerates. I think we need to be careful there, but it will be interesting to see where it goes. I continue to use Google every day, whether that's on my phone or at home doing searches. It's pretty much in the fabric of what we do now. We'll see where it goes, but a fascinating topic nonetheless. 

Looking forward to more content. Going to be posting at least a couple of podcasts a week here under the Radical company name. I am excited about all the content, all the special guests, and way more marketing topics and several other things as we delve into more things about living radically and radical ideas for brands. 

Thank you, guys. I look forward to talking with you soon.