This episode we’re taking things back to basics as the marketers look at the fundamentals of your marketing strategy, and discuss how Covid-19 has impacted face-to-face interactions, four years on.

To kick things off, the team picks apart the fundamentals of digital marketing strategies to emphasise the importance of strong foundations – you don’t want to be building on a layer of sand! They give actionable advice to help you plan your first – or your one-hundredth – campaign, so definitely be ready with a pen!

Sticking with our focus on the fundamentals, our second topic looks at the benefits of face-to-face networking. With the pandemic came the opportunity to move more meetings online, but some of the best work is still done when you can look someone in the eye and feel the energy that only exists when people are together in-person. And, depending on what stats you believe, in-person events might bring better conversions too!

Timecodes

0:00 Introduction

1:31 Unpacking Dove's no-AI commitment and the impact of social media on mental health

18:52 How to make your marketing more accessible

33:16 Outro

--

Auto-generated transcript

Alice

Because it is surprisingly difficult to understand what's going on. If you watch any video that's been kind of auto-captioned, turn the sound off and try and follow it, and a lot of the time it gets quite complicated and quite difficult to follow. So, yeah, definitely not what we want when thinking about wanting people to have the same quality experience as somebody who doesn't have a disability.

Haydn Woods-Williams

Welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe. This month, may, is Mental Health Awareness Month. I think it's Mental Health Awareness Week from the 13th as well. Our first focus today is going to be all around mental health. We will look at one of the most prominent mental health campaigns around right now and break that down along with some other kind of mental health insights. Our copywriter, tom Innes, will be leading that conversation. We will then be chatting to our first ever external guest. Alice has joined us from the Adaptivist group, who are our parent company. She'll be giving us an introduction to ensuring that your marketing is taking accessibility seriously. That is going to be a really great back to basics session. There will be a lot to take away from. So, without further ado, let's get on with the podcast.

Tom Inniss

As Hayden said, my name's Tom Innes and I am a copywriter at Brew Digital. With May marking Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to discuss the subject of psychological well-being and the role that companies can play in safeguarding it. But why would corporations care at all? So mental health refers to our psychological, social and emotional well-being, and it dictates our ability to complete everyday activities and our resilience in the face of adversity, and stats recently released by the mental health charity Mind show that one in four people will experience a mental health problem each year in England, and one in six will experience a common mental health problem in any given week. So this is manifesting in what our government is super sympathetically describing as a sick note culture. But if we ignore the politics of it, the reality is that we are facing a mental health crisis, and it is impacting the workplace. So, according to the Office of National Statistics, over half a million people aged 16 to 34 are currently jobless, and over a third of those cite mental health as a reason. Which does bring us to today's discussion, which is what can we, as marketers and individuals, do to turn the tide on this growing crisis?

Tom Inniss

One company who has been beating the drum of self-esteem is Dove, who for over 20 years, have been campaigning for real beauty in ads. They've pledged to always use real women, not models, in their adverts and to portray women as they are in real life. Now this is really important in delivering their mission to help girls build body confidence and self-esteem. And that mission is actually crucial because a study they commissioned exploring social media's impact on girls aged 10 to 17 found that over half of respondents felt toxic beauty advice caused low self-esteem. Worse still, 56% felt they couldn't live up to the beauty standards set on social media and a shocking 90% follow an account that make them feel less beautiful. Their latest advert, the Code, focuses on AI and announces their commitment to never use it to create or distort a woman's appearance.

Tom Inniss

So joining me to talk about this campaign and, more broadly, about the role of marketers in promoting positive mental health are three of my wonderful colleagues from Brew Digital Mark Bundle, senior Email Marketing Manager, danica Walpole, senior Full Stack Web Developer, and Saufi Noor, who is a Social Media Manager. Thank you all for joining me today. So, before we talk about marketing, I wanted to get started by getting your response to the numbers found in the Dove survey. Um, have any of you ever felt the effects of social media on your own mental health?

Mark Bundle

I think it's difficult to to not feel it to some extent, whether it's to the the massive detriment of those dove numbers suggest, or even just as you're scrolling through, and there is so much doom and gloom that of course it's going to have some, some impact on you.

Saufi Mohd Nor

It's, I guess, whether you can compartmentalize it away or if it does have a you let it have an impact on you, which is the difficult part selfie I would definitely agree, definitely has some effects, I think, on my end because, um, we've had discussion like at the end of the day, b2b, b2c, promoting to people.

Saufi Mohd Nor

But I've kind of I work as a social media manager in kind of both aspects. So when I was more in the b2c, I was kind of seeing people like, oh my god, you have so much money traveling and stuff, all those kind of like sponsored posts. And then when I'm like doing on the b2b, seeing all these linkedin posts, seeing how like oh, wow, people my age, already a ceo, and stuff, so it definitely like affects at a personal level. But I think, because it's also my job at some point, I do feel like it's kind of my responsibility as well in anything I do, to kind of not giving like a false impression of stuff. So it kind of goes both sides because I'm not just like the audience, I'm also working behind the scenes as well.

Tom Inniss

Excellent, thank you, and yeah, we will sort of come back to our role as marketers within that as well. So, danica, as somebody who works in development rather than marketing, I suppose you have a slightly different perspective towards social media. What is your lived experience of social media and its impact on your mental health, if any?

Danica Walpole 

I think it's interesting because for me, social media, from a dev perspective, can be this cool tool to see what new pieces of tech people are embracing and such. But I think at the root of it and similar to what Salphie said is that there comes a point in which you have to look at the root cause of the issues you might have with social media, because I could easily look at people embracing new tech or you know the plethora of screens that they have for their desk setup and look at that for a lens of comparison. But I could also look at it and be like that's really cool and oh, maybe I want to try that rather than beating myself up for it. But I think we all have that responsibility in how we portray ourselves on social media and how that could affect others.

Tom Inniss

I'm just looking around at the one, two, three, four, five screens that I've got facing me at the moment and thinking is this a problem? And no, probably, hopefully not. So what do you think, danica, we'll stay with you. What do you think of dove's campaign and specifically their commitment to never use ai? Is it helpful? Is it performative, like? Where do you stand on that?

Danica Walpole 

I think it's. I think it's nice. I mean, I've grown up seeing dove campaigns. I think one of the first, earliest ones I remember is when I was a child. They had this campaign where they got people to sit down and talk about themselves and they got someone to do a portrait of them, and often the portrait was completely different to how they saw themselves. I thought that was quite powerful and impactful.

Danica Walpole 

But I think, moving with the time and then having this, the code advertisement, where they talk about not using AI to distort women's image, is really great and it's a it's a great thing to set out, to intend to do. But I feel that AI is so widespread in that I can almost see immediately, let's say, that Dove decide to do a campaign where they're like oh people should submit images of themselves and we'll put them in this ad campaign. How are you going to vouch for the fact that someone hasn't used AI on one of their own photos? And I think the issue is that AI has become so ingrained in society that you can't almost trust that someone hasn't employed it on themselves or how they want to portray themselves on social media, and that whilst Dove is setting out to do this and not use it themselves. I don't think they can necessarily 100% get away from it.

Tom Inniss

That's a really great point, mark. I'll come to you next. Do you think that Do dove are fighting a losing battle here, or are they still fighting the good fight?

Mark Bundle

or sometimes even losing battles worth fighting. Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's wrong, as dalek says. Yeah, people are probably gonna use ai on their own things. I mean even things like on the new pixel phones. We can do the best take feature is technically ai. It's not altering appearance or anything, it's just picking the best of a proper photo. But to say there's going to be no AI in their campaigns at all, I think it would mean sacrificing user generated content. They can say, yes, we ourselves are not using AI, but as they historically have brought other things in, I think they'd be limiting themselves from doing that unless they want to put a caveat on it of our content. We'll not include this.

Tom Inniss

We can't vouch for that user content. Salvi anything to add.

Saufi Mohd Nor

I think I would agree with what Danica and Mark said, but I think just kind of twist it a little bit more. I guess, on like the company side, I like what they're doing yeah, it is still a battle worth fighting for. I like what they're doing yeah, it's still a battle worth fighting for. But of course as a business you can't be promoting that and as just like a quick google search, you can kind of see like how daft got in trouble as well with some of their products on promoting people like people of color, about lightening, brightening their skin and stuff, you know. So it's a little contradict when you're trying to kind of promote something really good like that, but on the other hand you do have some other campaigns that does the opposite of that. So I think as a business it's important to kind of stay cohesive and focused with what you are trying to promote.

Tom Inniss

So I'm going to sort of take us in a slightly different direction here, sticking on the theme of mental health and social media's impact on it. Do you think that it is the responsibility of corporations and businesses to consider users mental health, or are they there ultimately to promote a business? And if ai generated images are the way to get eyeballs on products, then it's fine uh, it's a fine line, isn't it?

Mark Bundle 

yes, ultimately, businesses need to make profit to survive, but more and more the drive is on doing that ethically and morally. So I think there is a responsibility to consider potential recipients mental health. If you're creating content which is going to like affect people in a negative way, chances are that's going to spread and it's going to affect your reputation. So, purely on a pragmatic basis, I think you have to acknowledge what your, what your content is doing now and making sure that you're you're on the kind of the right side of that ethical line great.

Tom Inniss

Thank you, uh, selfie. I'll come to you last as a social media manager. Danica, how do you feel about companies considering their impact on users?

Danica Walpole

mental health similar to mark, it's a fine line. I think it also depends on what you're selling. For instance, if you are marketing a beauty product and I'll use mascara as an example if you are using an AI-generated piece of imagery or video to show these drastic effects that you're getting from a product that you're selling, that's unethical and also you're setting people up for failure and that they're never going to attain those results. But if you are using it to maybe enhance an image and just make it brighter and more livelier in terms of, let's say, we're talking about a car, vehicle, commercial and you're making the trees look greener and just overall more pleasing to the eye, as long as you are not augmenting the actual product, then I don't think there's necessarily an issue. And that comes into what businesses need to do to survive market it's enhancing without altering essentially.

Tom Inniss

The crux of the product needs to remain the same 100 yeah okay, and then finally, selfie. I suppose how do you approach social media, uh, with mental health in mind? Or do you, in fact, just post out what you're told, and the consequences be damned?

Saufi Mohd Nor

I do believe, like I'm certainly on in terms of like the work side of stuff at first, I would say, definitely a lot of stuff being put into it, and I think, like here at Adaptive East Group, we do have our brand team and all to kind of make sure it's aligned with our brand identity, what the company stands for and not putting out anything that's against our values.

Saufi Mohd Nor

Also, as a user, just like a normal person on the planet using internet these days, I do feel like I'm just kind of going on from that previous question. I think, yes, companies do have responsibility 110 agree with that but also, I think, at the end of the day, we are all the consumers. So why support companies that are not promoting anything positive to the society when there are companies that are like producing content and all that are actually good for like the society and consumers of all, and we kind of can you know, change like the support, like go support those companies instead? So I think it's a matter of balance, like Mark said, you know, because it's not like a one-sided kind of thing. Companies have to do their part, but we all, all as users, also have like our own responsibility. Keep the internet like a positive space for most people.

Tom Inniss

You took the words right out of my mouth there. It sounds like we have a responsibility to ourselves and others to ensure good mental health. I want to finish on that, which means I'm going to change some of the questions around, but are there any examples of companies or other companies that are meaningfully advocating for improved mental health in their campaigns that you're aware of?

Mark Bundle 

it's not so much product. Basically, the tv channel dave are really good at it. They are partnered with the campaign against living miserably calm and they promote that really heavily across tv channel itself. For social media they'll regularly kind of change it up and do different campaigns with them and they'll even do content with some of the performers they have on contracts and so they really try and drive home that kind of reaching out to people, building connections, building bridges and making sure that people are looking after themselves as well as just enjoying their content and danica.

Tom Inniss

Are you aware of any great campaigns out there?

Danica Walpole 

Yes, the one that comes to mind is Bumble, which is like a relationships platform really, and on their blog space they've actually teamed up with another platform that advocates for mental health and just sort of having the tools and stuff that you need to mentally be healthy and well. So they talk about redefining personal failure in terms of whether you have a successful relationship or not, and then also follow that up with some free resources for meditation and just being more mindful generally around the topic of relationships and life, and I think that's a great example of they're still marketing what their product does, but also having that caveat of it isn't always easy. And here have some tangible things that you can use to work on your mental health I think bumble generally is an example of a really positive company.

Tom Inniss

He says without having seen if there are any dramas, but like, the way bumble was set up is just such a fascinating story and, um, yeah, I do encourage everybody to go and check them out. Thank you, danica Salfie. Any positive campaigns?

Saufi Mohd Nor

I would say there's like a lot, but I think I just kind of touched on not to like complimenting our own company, but just to kind of like give like examples, I think, other than like the big campaigns. Of course that's always good, but just something like like Adaptive is Grow. I think we had like the Adapt-a-Con session last year, end of last year, and we do have people presenting about their imposter syndrome, about their you know, autism like disorder and stuff. So just kind of like sharing those kind of out to the world. I think that's another like good example to discuss. Sometimes it doesn't have to be a full-blown campaign, but just kind of sharing it out, the information that does a lot to as well, to kind of show that at the end of the day, yeah, mental health is like physical health. Everybody's struggling in some ways, so it's not something to be like negative about. So, yeah, I would say that's another example. Instead of just the normal campaigns, something more like in smaller scale but more consistent, would be good as well.

Tom Inniss

Great, thank you, and I feel that leads us very nicely on to top tips. So, safi, we'll stay with you. What are some of your top tips for looking after mental health, both for yourself and for colleagues?

Saufi Mohd Nor

I have a long list, but I'm just going to give like a short answer. If it started to piss you out, just go out and take a walk or something, because at the end of the day, that's like, that's like seven billion people as a planet, you know, like that's just so much negativity. I do my screen time is bad, but sometimes when I do feel like oh, this is there's nothing like at this point, just yeah, go out, take a walk, go out with your dog, go out with your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, friends and stuff. Know, just kind of go outside. Basically, I would say just a very simple tip when it pisses you off, go out for a walk.

Tom Inniss

Great, thank you, danica. How about yourself?

Danica Walpole 

I love that selfie. I think it's similarly Just stop. Sometimes I think of the gut reaction to everything that we experience is to share it online, and sometimes you just don't need to. It can be really powerful to have a space for yourself where you allow yourself to not always be on a stage performing for a virtual audience and give yourself that space to fail, try new things without that virtual feedback of whether someone thought it was good, great, liked it or wanted to comment on it. Just stop posting.

Tom Inniss

Just take all the power out of social media's hands altogether and just stop giving them free content and, in the process, make yourself feel better. Mark, wrapping this up, what are some of your tips for mental health? I believe you're mental health trained as well.

Mark Bundle 

Yeah, I took a mental health first aid course a couple of years ago, which is really useful. The first thing I'll say is find what works for you. Um, we can share all the tips, we can say what works for us and what we found working for other people, but your mental health is your responsibility at the end of the day. Um, so make sure that if, if you want down a gallon of ice cream, as the americans do it, if you want to go and get a baseball bat and beat up a pillow, make sure it's just a pillow, but do it. Find that release or that quiet time or whatever it is that you need, and make sure you find time to do that, that thing that's going to make you feel better.

Tom Inniss

Excellent. So there you go. You've heard from three experts at Brew Digital. Stop Think. If you need to post it, go and touch grass and then take a baseball bat to an inanimate object. Please do look after yourself and take the time to just ask each other how are you doing? Sometimes, even just asking that simple question is enough to lighten somebody's day day.

Haydn Woods-Williams

Our next topic is looking at an introduction to accessibility in marketing. Our guest today is from the Adaptivist Group, who are our parent company, and this is actually something that we first started talking about at a conference back in December in Athens, and Alice did an internal presentation talking around accessibility in marketing and I thought it was so good that I was desperate to get her on. So, yeah, we have Alice from the Adaptivist group here to talk to us. Welcome to the podcast, alice.

Alice

Thank you. Thank you for having me on to talk about this. It's something I'm really passionate about. There are some things at the Adaptivist group that we're still working on. We're still working on, you know, our accessibility standards, but I think I said in my internal presentation, the way I see it is, we have to start somewhere. So you know, the more that we talk about it, the better we can get it. I hope. No-transcript accessibility guidelines, which is something I'll touch on later on. Um, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how many people are considered to fully meet those guidelines. It's really, really important to just try and get as many people on board, especially with kind of the basics that we're going to talk about today, and I definitely do have some stats for you on the numbers of people that are potentially affected by content not being accessible, and I think that's pretty mind blowing to think about.

Haydn Woods-Williams 

Let's start with just a quick introduction to accessibility in marketing and why it is so important as well, if that's all right.

Alice

I mean in terms of kind of an introduction to accessibility overall. I actually went and looked up the dictionary definition of accessibility just out of curiosity. Really, there were two points, sort of two points, in the definition, the first one being the quality of being easy to obtain or use and the second one being the quality of being easily understood or appreciated, and I think those are two things that marketers would all agree. We want that, we want that for our content. But yeah, I mean it goes further than that really, because that's a very basic on a basic level. That's the literal definition of accessibility. But usually when we talk about accessibility, we mean in terms at a disadvantage for having a disability or doesn't lessen the quality of understanding or the experience that they have interacting with your content, and I mean in terms of why it's important.

Alice

Like I say, there are some quite amazing stats about you know how many people are affected globally by disabilities that would benefit from content being accessible or would need, would have different needs in terms of the accessibility of content. So a stat I found from the WHO is that 430 million people globally have disabling hearing loss. So that's the, that's the terminology that the WHO use. Is disabling hearing loss, so significant hearing loss. Overall, apparently, hearing loss is over 1.5 billion people. That in itself is huge.

Alice

There's also a stat from colorblindawarenessorg that 300 million people globally have color vision deficiency, cbd, which is more commonly known as colorblindness, and there are several different types of colorblindness as well that affect how people see different colors. And then a stat from the IAPB, which is a leading global eye health organization as of 2020, there were 43 million people globally who are blind. So I mean, just to summarize, that's a lot of people that you're not reaching if your content isn't accessible, and I mean we're only scratching the surface there as well. You know, talking about blindness, hearing loss and colorblindness, there are many, many, many different facets to accessibility, but I think you know to just start with the basics and make sure that when we're creating content, you know ultimately we want to appeal to as many people as possible, right? You are missing opportunities if you are not reaching some of those people.

Haydn Woods-Williams

That's incredible. Those stats are amazing. We all have our ICPs and our customer personas, and the people that are affected by those things that you've just spoken about are still going to be in those customer profiles. You're just going to be missing them by not taking a proactive approach to your accessibility. With that in mind, what are some of the basic things that marketers can be doing when it comes to improving the accessibility in their own marketing?

Alice

One of the first things I would always say to people is captions, captions or transcripts. It's probably the most basic thing and yet it's something that I see people get wrong really, really often or just not do, and I don't think that it comes from any kind of not caring. I think people do care if they know that it's important, but I just think a lot of the time, like you say, people just don't necessarily think about it because it's not something that they've come across before, it may not be something that they've ever needed. But, yeah, you're absolutely right, the people that have those accessibility needs, they are in our target audiences, they are our demographic. You want to make sure that you're reaching those people. So, yeah, captions or transcription would be my first thing. So any audio or video content should be properly captioned or have a link to a transcript somewhere. So, for example, a podcast. I understand that this does get transcribed, which is great. You know, obviously, with a podcast most audio only platforms you don't have the option to add captions, but you do have like an episode description somewhere or maybe a landing page. That's where you can add in your transcript. And, interestingly, leading on from the discussion of AI and the first topic, something that I've come across a lot more is AI transcription and AI captions, and I have to say they're getting better and better, but they are still not quite there in a lot of cases. So I would definitely say that, you know, there's nothing wrong with making use of those tools to make your life easier definitely but it still does require a person to go through and make sure that everything is accurate, because it is surprisingly difficult to understand what's going on if you watch any video that's been kind of auto-captioned, turn the sound off and try and follow it, and a lot of the time it gets quite complicated and quite difficult to follow. So, yeah, definitely not what we want when thinking about wanting people to have the same quality experience as somebody who doesn't have a disability.

Alice

I think, leading on from that, another thing that is super simple that a lot of people can do with kind of minimal effort to implement is doing good alt text for images. So a lot of marketers will be familiar with alt text for the purposes of SEO. It's obviously something that helps a search engine to understand your content, but it actually is also really, really important for people who are blind or low vision and might be using screen reader assistive technology, so that technology will read out the alt text of an image to the user so that they can understand what it's showing, even if they can't see it. And of course, it's not just blind and low vision people, it's also people with old devices or a really slow internet connection. They might just not be loading the images and if you haven't got good alt text then they're not understanding what you're trying to show them either. So, yeah, my kind of rule of thumb for alt text is does it actually describe what you can see? You know, if you read it or if you say it out loud to somebody, they should be able to picture what's in your picture from the alt text alone, and if they can't, then it probably needs a bit more description.

Alice

There's also colour. I mean, I could go on and on and on. There are so many different things. Just the basics picking colors that contrast. Well, so you know a high level of contrast between your foreground and background color when you're thinking about a color scheme for you know, a rebrand or a color scheme for a particular campaign For people with color vision deficiency, colorblindness or low vision. That high contrast is going to really, really really help them to be able to still read your text, for example, on a coloured background, or actually see your design. But yeah, as I said, you know, this is something that we're constantly working on within the Adaptivist group. We've made a lot of improvements recently on this, but I really think that this is just something that we need to start talking about more and yeah, and kind of try and design things from the start with accessibility in mind.

Haydn Woods-Williams

You've nailed it with that last sentence there. I think it can be quite intimidating to go back and have to look at everything you've done and go, oh, how do we make this accessible? Actually, if you're considering this, when you're building things, that's going to be massive Now. I know marketers, I know people. These things are great to talk about, but actually going and putting them into practice is different. How do you have anywhere that people can find more information, or do you have any recommendations on tools that are going to be really useful to people who are having to go and proactively make those changes?

Alice

I think you're right. Yeah, finding good information about this is is important. So I mentioned earlier the I think I mentioned the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It's also known as WCAG. That is the ultimate guide. It's the gold standard, not just for marketing, but for everything digital content across the web. It's constantly being updated and it's essentially just a huge, huge encyclopedia it's probably the best way to describe it of different standards that and I said earlier about sort of compliance being the word that they use they give you criteria as a sort of pass fail as to whether something is accessible.

Alice

Obviously, that sounds quite intimidating. You know an encyclopedia of information. Yes, it is quite overwhelming. I have to mention it because it is the gold standard. But yes, it can be a little bit of information overload if you go and look at something like that. So I would always recommend people go and look up something on there if they're curious to find out what is the gold standard, what is the ultimate guide to this? It would be that, but one of the places that you might not expect to find useful information about this, but a resource that I found really good, is actually the UK government website. Not many things I'll praise the government for. But the govuk website actually does have some really good resources on accessibility and it's a lot easier to follow than WCAG. It's very user friendly and you can Google Gov UK digital accessibility very user friendly and you can google gov uk digital accessibility. They've got a bunch of stuff on there that is very it's a bit like open source, I guess. In software terms it's essentially it's the stuff they do internally, but they share that so that other people can benefit from it and kind of see their processes when they're creating content, because obviously a website like that has such a huge audience, it has to be right everybody.

Alice

And there are also a number of actually free tools that you can make use of as well If you are a marketer, content creator, designer. There is one called WebAIM, so Web A-I-M. They have a contrast checker where you can actually get a contrast threshold score between a foreground and background color that you're intending to use and it will literally give you a pass or fail mark for the contrast. So you know, if you want to test out a color scheme nice and easily without committing to it, that's an amazing resource. There's a free Chrome extension called Colorblindly as well, which I use a lot, and that simulates different types of colorblindness. So when you're looking at a design or again thinking about color schemes, you can actually simulate having different types of color blinders. It just puts a colored filter on your screen. But it's amazing and I think it really brings home that understanding of how other people might be seeing and interacting with your content in a way that is just it's not possible to imagine if you've never experienced that.

Alice

And then, of course, I mentioned, you know, there's for captioning, transcribing. There are a multitude of paid services out there where a human will do that for you. So, obviously, yes, there's free AI captioning, auto captioning, transcription on a lot of platforms now. But if you do want to kind of have it done by a person from the start, a lot, a lot, a lot more accurate there are yeah, there are a lot of places where you can do that and it really for me anyway, as you know, I've done some uh, some manual captioning before. It's. It really does take a long time, but these people are very skilled, they're a lot quicker and it is worth the money, particularly if you've got kind of longer form content that you are wanting to make accessible. I would 100 recommend going and using one of those revcom is big one. Other other services are available, of course, um, but I definitely would recommend that one, having used it a lot there's so much brilliant information in there.

Haydn Woods-Williams 

I feel like our copyright tom is is going to have fun making sure he pulls out all of those uh links to post in the description just before we wrap things up. We are, we're pretty much at time, or almost at time now is there anything that we've not discussed, that that you think is really important to mention when we're talking about this kind of stuff?

Alice

now I think we've. This is kind of like I say you know, this is just an introduction. There are so many other things that we could go into. We'd be here all day. That's why there's an entire encyclopedia of this online. But, um, yeah, from a marketing point of view, I think those are things that hopefully, are fairly easy for people to implement. Make content accessible from the start, build it into your design and your content creation process and, you know, something that everyone can do really easily is test things as well.

Alice

I really try and stress this to people. You know, if you're producing a video, watch it with your screen turned off. Can you still understand what's happening? Have you got all the key information? Watch it with the sound turned off. Ask yourself the same thing are the captions good enough? Read your alt text to a colleague who hasn't ever seen the image you're describing before. Things like that are things that absolutely everyone can do and they will improve the quality and the accessibility of your content. So so, so much. I would encourage everyone to try and start today.

Haydn Woods-Williams

Really, I guess, is my message really, I guess, is my message Now. That is all we have time for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you found some useful snippets from this session. I know for me I'm going to be taking a lot of that information from the accessibility talk and making sure that we are doing that. We love that you've made it this far through the listen. We hope that if you've enjoyed it, you can go and recommend the show to a friend or a colleague that you think would enjoy listening. Thank you so much, alice from the Adaptivist Group for your knowledge today, and also to the Brew Digital team for their research and input. Make sure to go check out our past episodes. Subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts and we will see you on the next one. I've been Hayden and these guys are the marketers of the universe. Thank you.