How to evaluate and test new digital ad channels

Wondering if emerging ad platforms are worth the risk? Learn how to test channels like Reddit, Threads, and AI search without burning your paid media budget.

Are you feeling pressured to test every new ad platform that hits the headlines? While exploring nascent ad networks can offer valuable early-mover advantages, jumping into unproven channels without a strategic framework can quickly drain your marketing budget. In this episode of Marketers of the Universe, Senior Paid Media Manager Michele Raffaelli joins host Tom Inniss to break down how B2B marketing leaders can evaluate new ad channels responsibly.

From conversational AI interfaces like ChatGPT and Perplexity to programmatic physical display networks—such as McDonald's new drive-thru order board network—Michele explains how to assess platform readiness, manage speculative ad spend, and establish a multi-month testing framework. You will discover why traditional search metrics do not always apply to contextual AI platforms, how to protect your brand reputation on emerging channels, and when it makes commercial sense to walk away from an experiment.

Key discussion points 

  • Assessing business readiness How to determine whether your business has the tracking maturity, creative assets, and clear conversion targets needed before branching out from established channels like Google and Meta.

  • Managing speculative budgets Why testing unproven ad networks requires a controlled three-month testing window—and how to set realistic benchmarks when historical account data does not exist.

  • Understanding contextual targeting in AI How conversational AI models serve ads based on user intent and browsing context, requiring a fundamental shift away from traditional keyword-matching strategies.

  • Protecting brand safety and alignment How to conduct a thorough risk analysis to ensure new ad inventory aligns with your corporate values and target audience expectations.

  • Knowing when to scale or walk away The operational signals that indicate whether an ad experiment is ready for wider rollout across your target markets or if it should be paused to preserve capital.

Episode Transcript

Tom Inniss • 00:08

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Inniss, and I am the Content Marketing Manager here at Brew Digital. And I am joined once again by Michele Raffaelli, Senior Paid Media Manager here at Brew Digital. Welcome back, Michele.

Michele Raffaelli • 00:22

Hi, Tom. Thanks for inviting me. It's very good to be here again.

Tom Inniss • 00:26

It's always a pleasure to share a studio with you. So today we are going to be talking about new and emerging ad platforms, something I know that is very close to your heart. And I want to find out from you in this episode, what are the platforms worth testing and when is it worth testing a platform compared to when it's worth sitting back and waiting. So let's dive straight into it. Okay, Michele, new ad platforms. I'm just going to jump straight into it because I know you're keen. So where is non-traditional paid spend actually heading right now?

Michele Raffaelli • 01:27

So one of the reasons why we want to talk about this today is that we've seen more and more requests coming from from our clients because they've seen somewhere that ads are available. They just ask us to run them. We have to deal with a lot of these requests. But the reality is that some of these clients are not ready. So if you are here listening to this podcast because you are considering to launch a specific new platform, he's going to be maybe helpful, hopefully helpful for you. So the thing starts when. We do paid media, organic type of marketing. We do tend to use the traditional platform. what we've been using for the past 10 years or more. So we do have our search campaign on Google. We do have our organic or our paid social ads on Facebook, Meta, Thread. We do advertise on TikTok. Some clients think that if you are not on TikTok, you don't exist. What we know, what we saw is that you need to use the right platform for where your audience is. You can't go on TikTok thinking to click a magic button and immediately have millions of viewers and start selling. You need to have a strategy. So to answer your question, what is growing as non-traditional paid spend is going into type of platform that are fairly new. and they are not used as they should be.

Tom Inniss • 03:18

Before I follow that up, you mentioned that we have clients that are asking us to trial all of these new platforms. What is the role or where is the line in the client and the digital marketer relationship where you push back and tell a client that they aren't ready? So like, how do you balance doing what they want, but also doing what's best for them?

Michele Raffaelli • 03:43

asking the right questions. When you have a good relationship with a client, you ask them the right questions and try to check if they thought through these requests. When you notice that they don't have the answer, it means that they're not ready. If you ask, for example, what type of users are seeing your ad on Chargipity, or what type of action people can take on a Reddit ad, which is not so new, but is underused at the moment for most. You will see from the writer, their answer, that actually they are not sure. They don't know exactly how to match the objective that they have, the product they want to sell, or the service, with the type of audience and behavior that users have on a different platform.

Tom Inniss • 04:39

But is that their job to know, or is that your job to know?

Michele Raffaelli • 04:43

No, it's our job. Because we do have that experience, we need to guide them and do what's best for them, especially when you have very strict budget or very tight CPA, for example, target. You can't just launch a new platform and ruin, let's say, the work that you've been doing for years on a specific account. What we offer them is to do eventually control test, set a very specific target, what do we want to achieve with this campaign? What do we expect the outcome can be? Once we identify a clear target, then we can set up the campaign and see what's the result. These can't be done overnight. These shouldn't be a campaign that, "Oh, I have 500 pounds spare, let's try it." No, that's something that needs to be pre-planned and created in a medium term. And that is what really going to give you a decent results that you can then use to scale it up or just switch it off.

Tom Inniss • 05:51

So would you say that you lean more into the cautious conservative type of paid media manager?

Michele Raffaelli • 05:56

For the way the platform, the new one are working, Yes, I'm very cautious because it's very easy to burn money quickly if you don't do your homework properly.

Tom Inniss • 06:08

So have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are pitching speculative ad spend to cautious clients?

Michele Raffaelli • 06:15

I've been in both situations. I've been to a client that didn't want to listen to me. They had this budget. They want to use it. We tried to dissuade them saying looking at the forecast that even the platform is giving us, you shouldn't do that because that's not the right platform for this specific objective that you have. But they've seen a post somewhere that was saying that it was working very well for them and there was no way to convince them. So the only way was to run it and show them the results. Taking since the very first step the notion of there are two ways this can go if it goes wrong which is what the forecast is telling us it will go wrong so don't come back and say oh but this didn't work because we started with with this this notion telling you there is very little chances that this can work as you are expecting but it did happen anyway the other one accepted our suggestions So we did a controlled test. The objective was clear. What they wanted to test in this specific platform was an outcome in order to increase their brand awareness. This very specific case was selecting two cities with a similar demand. So they were distant cities, so we didn't risk to cross-contaminate the campaigns. Similar size, similar behavior in the users. We added to the marketing mix the new platform, we run it for two months, and then we started looking at the results. In the city where we saw brand awareness demand increasing, we could quantify that there was an uplift connected to this very specific activity, where the other similar city that wasn't exposed at all to this platform didn't grow. So in that case, we could measure and say, yes, this new platform works for this objective. So because we were happy with the results and the cost that we were investing, we just roll it out, targeting the full region, and then went back to the full country.

Tom Inniss • 08:28

And what in your mind counts as an appropriate speculative ad budget? Because you said you can't just chuck £500 on something and hope it works. how much should a company anticipate spending to be able to get decent results from a new platform?

Michele Raffaelli • 08:44

That's where you need to have some level of trust in the platform. So in any, any, and all the platforms available out there, you do have forecast systems. So based on the audience that you select, the platform can already tell you more or less how many users you can reach and what is the forecasted spend, the CPC of those, or the engagement, or the potential conversion coming. Now, because we are talking about new platforms, there's no historical data. All the AI and algorithms that are based on machine learning, they need existing data in order to create an outcome. So we are talking about a situation where we don't have historical data, We don't know what a converter look like, so it may take more time. But the platform itself is telling you with this amount of budget in this specific country, with this specific audience, this is how much you may spend at the end, and you have to trust those numbers at the beginning. Then when you go live, you can make adjustment and see if, how accurate was this forecast, but you still have the manual touch in order to adjust the trajectory of their campaign.

Tom Inniss • 10:04

That all makes sense, but with these emerging networks, they're often like measurement black boxes and they have very inflated CPMs. I remember when OpenAI announced their ads, their CPM was crazy. So how do you actually structure early testing to avoid paying such high rates on platforms that lack that mature attribution?

Michele Raffaelli • 10:30

Usually in this specific case, you need to create a campaign that has the right number of ad variation and you need to feed as many alternatives as possible. And within the same campaign, you have the opportunity to have different ad sets. So what you look for is not your ideal CPM or CPA. It's what's the least worst of them. And then based on the winner, you just keep working on that as a standard. And you always work to improve that number. But it's not something that can change daily. You need weeks and weeks of data in order to keep improving it and bring the CPC down, the CPM down, the cost per view down.

Tom Inniss • 11:19

So it is very much like a multi-week or perhaps even multi-month commitment.

Michele Raffaelli • 11:24

The recommendation is at least three months with controlled budgets. If you have a higher budget, the learning phase should be faster, but it's always risky, too risky to just drop lots of money in something that you have absolutely no historic data to back up.

Tom Inniss • 11:43

But someone's got to be the pioneer and dive in. But it should be someone else.

Michele Raffaelli • 11:47

No, it's fine if you really want to try it. If you are in a flat situation where nothing else is working, you need to try and change up without waiting for others to pass them first. Sometimes being the pioneer, being the first one who tries something is very rewarding because you can spot opportunities that people will take one or two years to find out. I remember when the LeadGen campaign came out for the first time on Meta, we were the first one trying it. And the first Cyber Month that we did, we had lead costs that were like one or two pound. If you do a lead generation now, I can tell you the average for an e-commerce company could be up to 10, 15 pound, and it would still be low, considered low, but because we decided to test it when it was available back then it was actually a good idea.

Tom Inniss • 12:51

That is crazy. But that also just talks to how expensive these platforms become as they become entrenched.

Michele Raffaelli • 13:00

That's something that we can't control. And there are elements that are just given. You may find the cheapest solution for you, but there's the average, the benchmark of the prices is international. Um, especially it does change between country to country, platform to platform. You may need to try different platform if what you're using now is too expensive, but those are the prices. I do feel it's like just to stay recent to our time. It's like the cost of petrol. You can go around and find something cheaper, but that's the market price. You can't really go against it. That's what the platform are doing. And that's what you have to pay.

Tom Inniss • 13:49

Let's go back to new platforms. When you are evaluating a new ad offering from a platform, what are the technical baselines that you demand from them before committing budget? Do you have hard lines where you are like, I am not paying any money into you until you have got this?

Michele Raffaelli • 14:10

That's something that you should always do when you are in digital, in the digital world. Elements that you can't accept are a company that doesn't let you have access to those data, a company that doesn't let you connect the platform to your data sources. You need to be able to see what a conversion, you need to be able to create the conversion that for you is important. If they don't let you do that, then it's really not worth it. If you can accept a limit in visibility, mainly because these platform, because they're young, they don't have the same transparency that the older have. If we go back to, I don't know, performance max, four or five years ago, you couldn't see anything in it. You couldn't know what search terms came through. You couldn't see which product. where now it took five years, but we do see those things. We can exclude brand from performance max, which was one of the main issue at the beginning. So these new platform, they may not be able yet to give you these. But if you can accept that, then yes, go on and try.

Tom Inniss • 15:33

What about things like negative keyword controls or tracking pixels, for instance? Is that a bigger is that a big deal for you? or is it just sort of budget controls and visibility?

Michele Raffaelli • 15:46

No, ideally we want to see breakdown of the audience, where they are, what type of category they are in, search terms, if we talk about OpenAI ads, it would be nice to have access to this detailed information, but again, fairly new. I'm sure they will be able to share this information soon, but at the moment, it's, as you call it, a black box where all the information are in and you just have the outcome. But you can at least track the outcome. You can create your own event and you can decide what do I want this campaign to do? Do I want it to use it for lead gen? Do I want to use it for conversion? Do I want to use it for awareness? You can create, you have enough at the moment these type of targets.

Tom Inniss • 16:39

I wonder how easy it actually probably would be for these LLM companies to give you that information because how do they actually... because traditionally paid media is done on keywords right and when you're talking with an LLM you could be having just like a full broad range conversation and at some point something has to trigger that advert and is solutions? Like how do they actually decide at what point to present you that ad? And then how do you as the paid media manager get the data? Because I can't envisage them sharing that whole conversation with you. Well, I can, but they shouldn't. In principle, you shouldn't be able to see what they've typed in word for word.

Michele Raffaelli • 17:25

I don't think they want. I see what the IMAX is doing for Google, and that's the biggest advertiser for search or for keywords. The way demand is moving now is not based, is not focused anymore on the keyword itself. It's moving based on contextuality. The context where you are doing your search is what has the priority. This was something that they started doing when the cookie apocalypse was announced. That was averted. So we still have cookies, but the measurement put in place in order to overcome the lack of cookies were based on context. So they will be able to understand based on your historic data on your own browsers, last 30 days, I think, what type of website you visited, what type of ad you interacted with, what type of content you consumed. Those will give a context about your search. And if you think about the way we do search things online, it actually makes sense. If I go and read four blogs about making, I don't know, vegan pancakes, I will finish into the context of vegan group, but also pancake related. So when I will make a search, the LLM will know that I've been visited these things. So the outcome that they will propose me will be more likely to be related to the context where I come from. So they won't offer me, they won't, if I go and look for alternative pancake to make, they won't propose me the pancake with sausage because they know that my context was related to vegan. So probably there's the high possibility that the outcome that they will give me is a vegan pancake or an alternative non-meat solution. This is what I meant for context.

Tom Inniss • 19:32

The face I'm pulling is, not that the audience can see it. That's a deeply worrying prospect if we're starting to give LLMs access to all of our web browsing history. Obviously Google already has it, but I think you can opt out of Gemini using that data across accounts. But for instance, giving Claude or Grok, anything is terrifying, but if Grok or ChatGPT or anything like that suddenly had access to all of your web browsing history, they could build up such a terrifying profile of you once you also build in the conversations that people are having with them. Because people treat them like they are people. Like you're chatting with a friend or a person and they will input all of their life problems into this chat box in a way that you perhaps wouldn't have traditionally with Google, or well maybe you would with Meta because you used to in the days of yore, you'd post every live drama on Facebook for instance, but like it just feels like a very different world now and that's a very terrifying prospect giving this machine that sort of knowledge on you.

Michele Raffaelli • 20:39

It's already happening. It was predicted years and years ago. There's lots of literature and and TV series and films that they were telling this would happen. So we shouldn't be surprised. We shouldn't be disappointed. Well, that's our choice. But it's just to explain how these could work in an open AI. But there are other new platforms that are coming. So they will all work slightly differently, probably. If they will make profit, they will continue. they see that they won't work, they will be the first one to just close the project and focus on

Tom Inniss • 21:19

something else. And that is the positive. Shall we talk about some of these new platforms then? What has got you excited, Michele? And it doesn't have to be AI. I know there's a couple of different surfaces that you're excited to stick some ads on.

Michele Raffaelli • 21:32

I still don't know if it's confirmed, but it seems that McDonald's is launching their own ad network.

Tom Inniss • 21:41

So that could be exciting. And for the listener who might not know what that entails or what that looks like, could you give us your understanding of what has been announced?

Michele Raffaelli • 21:53

I've made some researches and basically what McDonald's want to do, or started already doing in certain parts of the world, is to use placements available in their fast foods, where you can buy the placement and put there your own display ad. It's similar to what Google did they created the GDN, Google Display Network. So when they started buying from anyone that give them the authority, buying placement on web pages, where they can add a banner, and McDonald's will do it in their physical stores. And what's your gut reaction to that announcement? It's in a way very smart, using the food in the end as an excuse, because that's not what the money, but using all this visibility to actually make profit on this placement, that's fun. Again, it's very early stages, so I can't imagine what type of ads we could do, but if I have to be honest, instead of watching an ad before, during, in the middle, and before the end of a film, I'd rather see an ad at McDonald's.

Tom Inniss • 23:09

I have no response to that, fair enough. I'd rather not see an ad at all.

Michele Raffaelli • 23:12

Sorry, that's my personal... I'm an Amazon Prime customer and I still get 1 minute 34 ads before I watch anything. So my question is why do I pay if you keep still showing me ads?

Tom Inniss • 23:27

Well, that is the question, Michele, isn't it? Why aren't we paying when you continue to show us ads, especially since you've changed the terms of the contract because it used to be ad free? And you still pay for it. And you still pay for it.

Michele Raffaelli • 23:38

This is not a dissing against Amazon. Definitely not. But I don't even know how much the placement could be. I don't even know what type of tracking they will put in place. I think being on a display, it may be similar to what connected TV are doing now. The values, Sky, AdSmart, or Netflix, or national television, allowing you to advertise on the digital side of the platform, they let you track and choose a specific audience. So if anyone out there want to try McDonald's let me know and I'll start doing more researches and test it for you.

Tom Inniss • 24:22

Okay so we've got the fast food McDonald's advert, are there any others that have already kicked off the sort of nascent platforms that we're already starting to explore that have got you particularly hopeful.

Michele Raffaelli • 24:35

We are still in very early stages, but the one that we mentioned already today, the OpenAI ad, similar to what Perplexity is doing, it's just a way to have places to reach the right user. For me, what I like is the fact that you can get these ads in places that are out of the noise. When you are scrolling on your TikTok or on your Instagram reel, you see I've seen an ad every three organic posts. So that's a lot. These different types of placement, they are more clean. So you can have a better experience with the ad that you are being served. So hopefully they will give us positive results and we can try to shift budgets or try to change strategies,

Tom Inniss • 25:26

having more platforms available. I'm going to go back to McDonald's because this has opened up a line of questioning for me that I've been sort of mulling over for a while. And you know, it goes back to Disney, it goes back to Amazon, it goes back to Netflix and everything else. And ultimately, is advertising the only profitable business? Bear with me here. So McDonald's, I've just done some Googling in the background here, their profits are declining, they're facing profit pressure, because people are cutting back on dining. Amazon, again, their profits aren't necessarily declining, but they are starting to see revenue pressure because they are spending so much on AI. Disney is a very underperforming stock, typically, but all of these big companies that originally started off by selling us subscriptions for ad-free content consumption have now learned that actually content creation is exceptionally expensive and people churn, So they have all started pushing adverts. Is adverts the only way to make money in this world?

Michele Raffaelli • 26:31

I think it's not the only way, but I think it's one of the most profitable ways to do it because the costs are paid by the advertiser. The placement shouldn't have a lot of maintenance cost. It is just a very smart idea to use at this stage.

Tom Inniss • 26:52

But what does that mean for the consumer experience? Are we destined for things to just get shitter?

Michele Raffaelli • 26:59

Well, if you remember at the beginning, I think it was episode 10 or 15, the head of digital marketing, Rich Harper, came to us with a verified source stating that in average, every day we are exposed to 10,000 ads, 10,000, 15,000. I don't see how that's going to affect us much. but new placement, as I was saying before, could have a different visibility. If we see ads in places that we didn't expect before, we will pay more attention probably. It may decrease the quality because well, now we remember ads because they are well done, because there's a storytelling behind, because it's funny, because it's well executed. That's the reason why we remember now. We may need to remember them only because we've seen them in a place that we didn't expect, but it doesn't mean their quality will be better. That's where I'm worried really, not about seeing 10,001 ads instead of 10,000.

Tom Inniss • 28:03

And is there any sort of reputational risk to companies buying advertising space on these nascent platforms like your McDonald's billboard? Would you view Adobe less favourably, for instance, if they started putting their branding on McDonald's boards?

Michele Raffaelli • 28:20

I would think that only if the company value is against McDonald's values. If I'm green friendly type of business and I decide to advertise on McDonald placement, that could be a backlash. If I, I don't know if we can say names, but if I see a Patagonia ad on a McDonald billboard, I will be disappointed.

Tom Inniss • 28:44

So you have got as a marketing manager for a company or a brand strategist, you have got to continue to think about where you are placing your adverts.

Michele Raffaelli • 28:53

Yes, you should.

Tom Inniss • 28:56

And I suppose that is a conversation that you would take to any company when they are coming to you and saying, I want to explore a new platform. Do you have to stop and do that risk analysis of if you do this, not only is there a financial risk from investing the money into the adverts, but there is also potentially a a brand risk.

Michele Raffaelli • 29:13

Yes, that's something that we always do. It doesn't happen often, but there has been in the past cases of clients that were pushing for placements or platform that were actually not ideal for them.

Tom Inniss • 29:29

And I also just want to very quickly check in because I recall you telling me that I was drastically wrong about how threads was going to thrive. How do you view that now as a platform for advertising on? 'Cause I know they've switched ads on.

Michele Raffaelli • 29:42

Yes, so if you are not careful, Meta will automatically serve ads on threads. Now do it, but check the results. So when you download the data, you can break them down by placement and check what's happening there. One thing that is a limit, so I have several clients that we're recommending them not to do it is because they don't have customer service or social media managers that have the capacity of go and check comments there. That's one of the reason why you shouldn't. But if you have enough capacity, go and do it, always monitoring results because it's very easy to spend lots of money there, exhaust your budget and have no results.

Tom Inniss • 30:28

That's a really interesting point you bring up. I haven't really ever thought about before about the need to monitor the platforms that you are then advertising on and having that sort of eye over what people are saying about your adverts and how they are interacting and responding to it. That's an element of it that I would never think about. I would just say button on, ads are running, money spending, job is done. Hopefully it's converting.

Michele Raffaelli • 30:53

Well, if AI was doing a good job, it would be probably like that, but they are not ready yet. They're not ready yet.

Tom Inniss • 30:59

Okay, so I'm conscious that we have been talking for quite a while here, so I'm going to wrap it up. Firstly, at what point does an exploratory ad campaign move from a promising experiment to an operational dead end? When do you decide to go, "Kill it, it's not

Michele Raffaelli • 31:18

working"? When after several changes you still don't get your results. One thing that is good in this time is that you can have direct conversation with account managers in each platform. They are more than happy to help. Even if you have small budgets, use them to explore solutions that you wouldn't think of. Try and test, but if after the three months we mentioned and making several changes, you see that there's nothing coming out, then you should seriously consider to stop it or to completely change the strategy. So post the campaign, launch another one with completely different objective that will maybe make it work. But don't insist if something is not giving results in the medium term.

Tom Inniss • 32:09

And are you more patient or less patient with these newer platforms to get results? Or do you want to see results quicker?

Michele Raffaelli • 32:19

No, my patience is directly related to the pressure that the client is putting. Whenever I launch a campaign, I tell them exactly when we could start looking at the performances. For example, in the first 30 days of learning phase, most platforms 30 days or 30 conversions. Yes, you can start making minor changes, but you can't analyze and judge the performance because it's too early. So once we agreed that at least for 60 days, don't bother me every five minutes asking me, did we have a conversion? Did we have a conversion? Did we have a conversion? Then yeah, it's fine.

Tom Inniss • 33:07

My God, I wish in my job, I could just go, don't bother me for 60 days. I'll get back to you. be great. Now I'm completely distracted myself with the thought of just 60 days of silence. What was I going to ask you? At what stage do you feel that companies should start experimenting on different platforms? If you've got somebody who's in the initial growth phase of their business life cycle, should they be experimenting or should they be investing in your tried, tested, and true platforms like Meta and Google? Or should they start to branch further afield?

Michele Raffaelli • 33:39

You need to look at your full marketing power. How many channels are live? How many monthly visitors do you have? How fast are you growing? Um, if you see that there's no traffic, you need to start generating traffic. So you go from the traditional, um, platforms and you start building those. And then the rest is an add on. If you use one of these, let's say, niche platform and you expect them to work in the same way platforms with 20 years of data are working, that's not possible. Physically not possible.

Tom Inniss • 34:22

Yeah, that's fair. Although if you're testing these platforms on LLMs that have scraped basically the whole of the internet and all of human creativity, they might be better at targeting question mark?

Michele Raffaelli • 34:33

It may be better at targeting, but what is your objective? Is it to reach as many people as possible? Is it to make them convert? If it's conversion wise, LLM still doesn't have access to conversions data. Of course, the first thing that every platform now asks you to do is to upload immediately all your clients' emails, whether it's legal or not in the countries you're based. I agree. Yeah, because most of these companies are based in the US and they have different regulations. So their preset recommendation are actually not always aligned with the rules and laws that we have in Europe, for example, or in most countries of Europe. So you can't just go and upload all the emails and feed them all the data that it took you a lifetime to gather. So you need to find a balance with that. But these emails type of the converter, and it's not on a laminate. You can buy something, but it's never from the AI platform. You have always to go into a product page and then that's where the action happens.

Tom Inniss • 35:50

OK, and then finally, Michele, you have a client. They have a decent budget and they want to experiment on a platform. what are you going to encourage them to try?

Michele Raffaelli • 36:05

Um, what they should try, but you mean we want the name of the platform or?

Tom Inniss • 36:10

Yeah, what's what's what are you excited by at the moment that's currently operating that you think is perhaps underutilized?

Michele Raffaelli • 36:17

Something that I don't see many companies using at the moment is Reddit. Because it's again, at the beginning, it is fairly cheap. there's not enough competition to make it expensive. So when you look at standard KPIs, they are way lower than a LinkedIn, for example, campaign or similar platforms. So Reddit's definitely something to start exploring. The LLM, we can't stop them. So if you can't stop them, join them, but always read the caution. then we said McDonald's. Can't wait to advertise on McDonald's. I'm sure you can't. Do you even

Tom Inniss • 37:02

eat McDonald's, Michele?

Michele Raffaelli • 37:03

No, but I like the idea and if they will sell ads, the first ad I hope will go up on their screen is if you use the drive-thru, do not throw your empty packaging in the grass once you've finished.

Tom Inniss • 37:19

I would love a system where every McDonald's packaging had like a unique barcode to it and it would scan the barcode and it would be tied to the license plate of the car so then if people throw their rubbish out you could scan the barcode to see who it is he's doing the littering.

Michele Raffaelli • 37:39

I was thinking the same but instead of the car I was connecting it to the credit card or the payment method.

Tom Inniss • 37:46

Yes, could even be credit card payment method, I love it.

Michele Raffaelli • 37:49

because that could be... and they will print anyway a ticket to stick on the order, so if you include a code, a hashtag or something that can identify the buyer of that thing, it would solve the biggest problem that you have in our time.

Tom Inniss • 38:08

And then the biggest problem of our time is the littering of McDonald's takeaway boxes. Yeah, I mean it introduces significant privacy issues, but at the same time you don't deserve privacy, if you are littering our streets and our countryside. Vote Tom 2029. Yeah. Right. And on that somewhat dystopian note, I'm going to wrap this podcast up. Great. Well, thank you very much for Kelly. It's always been a pleasure to talk to you.

Michele Raffaelli • 38:35

Thank you, Tom. It was really good time. If you want to know more about these, keep listening to us.

Tom Inniss • 38:41

Yes. And if you want to know about marketing in general, keep listening to us or visit brooddigital.com/resources where we have got years of content, a back catalogue of podcasts, a myriad of templates and blog pieces and thought leadership pieces. We have got it all for free available for you. So do visit brooddigital.com/resources and check all of that out. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I know it was a little bit of a I always enjoy them, as I said. And if you did enjoy this podcast, please do give us a follow, a subscribe and maybe even a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever it is that you do listen to podcasts. Thank you to everybody at Brew Digital for making this podcast episode possible. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Until next time, I've been Tom Inniss, that's Michele Raffaelli, and we have been marketers of the universe. to the gulag with you and back and back.