Black Friday: A Blessing or a Curse?

Listen to this episode of 303 Radio here.

Olly Fawcett: Hello and welcome back to the 303 radio podcast that gives you an insight into the world of small business and digital marketing as well as anything else that somewhat sidetracked us along the way. I’m Olly, founder of 303 and I'm joined by Jamie, the digital director. How are you?

Jamie Vaughan: I'm doing well.

Olly Fawcett: It's been a while.

Jamie Vaughan: It's been some time.

Olly Fawcett: I know, it has been some time. As I'm sure a lot of people can imagine that working in our industry, in any industry, it's been a very busy couple of months as we're now in December, for the second week of December, and yeah, it's been a great couple of months just a quick round up from our side, it's been very busy, we've made some great new hires in addition to the team which is fantastic as we continue to operate out of our Fulham office through this second round of lockdown which was somewhat tricky, but it was only a month long. So, we got through it and here we are. And also, in terms of the podcast, we obviously haven't recorded an episode in three months, August?

Jamie Vaughan: Too long.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, too long but we have we've got a bit of a structure and a plan and I feel like everyone that owns any like platform says: oh, we're back again, and then you come back again, and when you come back again numerous times.

Jamie Vaughan: It's just an excuse for the second series that no one else will.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, exactly, but that university does happen, so, our goal with this is to try and keep bringing you some content but yeah, if we're busy and we're trying to grow our business sometimes, we get distracted, that happens. The topic of today, Black Friday, which is very exciting, Jamie’s favourite topic of the year, and for those that don't know about Black Friday, obviously as an agency, we have a very busy time, it's probably the busiest time of our year I would say.

Jamie Vaughan: The most sleepless weekend of maya for sure.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, apart from Christmas obviously which we're kind of going into now, but Black Friday is an opportunity for a lot of our clients to do some great things and we'll go into that in a bit more detail, but we thought we'd jump on here do a bit of a round up of this year's Black Friday answer a few questions, we feel need answering, and give or take on the Blackberry Saga which is why I'm joined by Jamie because Jamie is Mr Black Friday in the office, being the digital director and looks after the browns. So, I want to start at the beginning here because I think like Black Friday especially in the U.K, it's kind of grown over the last five years, well, like five to ten years, it's got bigger and bigger and bigger, this year was obviously big and small in very, very many ways because of the Coronavirus, because of other areas and we will touch upon that, but let's start off with why is it called Black Friday? because I don't think anyone really knows this answer if you ask them, even in our industry. So, yeah, Jamie, why is Black Friday call black?

Jamie Vaughan: I was actually told this as well before someone just goes, you're reading the Wikipedia page, but you can also find it on the Wikipedia page, it just actually goes back to like, it's the first Friday after Thanksgiving, it's kind of a timely amount of weeks before Christmas. So, everyone does their gifting but in the 60s, in America, it was the first time that a lot of retailers went out of the red in terms of a loss into the black of a profit. So, it wasn't this kind of mass discounting fest that it has now become this kind of circus of things, it originally was just an opportunity for brands to get a lot of their units out the door pre-Christmas and post-thanksgiving in the states, that has now turned into a kind of yeah, total beast that we all now know as this kind of discounting machine, but it's been going on in America since yeah, I think 1961 or something. So, that is the reason for it.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, and in like in the U.K, I remember probably 2012, 2013, you used to see these like images on the news of people having absolutely like arguments and fights, in like stores over TVs, PlayStations which I think a lot of people that don't really. I think I feel like the last two years especially the older generations like my parents, slightly older people that now understand what Black Friday is, I think get it a lot more whereas before, it's an American thing where everyone just does a fight in a pc world, if they have pc world in America. But I suppose now, for us, I suppose we can go into a bit of a 2020 review, now again, for those that don't know at 303, we have a bank of clients who obviously have online stores and we manage those and operate them and do performance marketing for them and Black Friday does give a lot of opportunity for them, especially this year where sales might have been down or it's been a slightly tricky time, obviously with Covid, the beginning of Covid, when it first hit, everyone was online, so, a lot of our clients had a really successful time, but as we've gone through the year, there's been a few peaks and troughs, I think we can say definitely. So, Black Friday was a great opportunity to kind of either work through some stock that they still had or tried to hit the targets that they needed. Obviously, the one thing I think we should all really keep in our minds which I'm always trying to do is Black Friday is great because you can hit a sales target or revenue target, but you are at a discounted rate. I think a lot of people, sometimes gOlly Fawcett: oh, we’ve hit this target which is great, but then look how many orders you've gone through, which is sometimes a bit of a like a yang type thing, you know what I mean, like it's got kind of two sides to it. So, I think, from my perspective, I always think Black Friday is amazing opportunity for getting the product in people's hands, hitting those sales targets if you need to hit them, but also really understanding Black Friday is going to be a really busy time and we need to make sure one we've got the right stock, and also we've kind of in a place where we're not losing money on Black Friday, because I feel like a lot of people do end up in that pit a little bit where they've either run out of stock because they weren't prepared which happens every year. But also, they kind of realize actually the discount they're given is the whole margin and the marketing spend as well which hasn't happened to us ever, but I know it's happened to people and brands and businesses. So, why don't you give us a little bit of a round-up of 2020 for us Black Friday.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, sure. So, well, I think you touched on earlier saying it has been big and small in some ways clearly with the second lock down in the U.K, the physical retail side of Black Friday was down. So, that's the sense in which it's down, but I think they're obviously still sort of totting up the numbers a little bit, this is what a week after Black Friday that we're recording this, but it looks as if conversion rate and order quantities up by around 30 in the U.K on last year which is huge growth given, how big it continues to be. I think everyone was expecting that, what's the amazon one called? Prime day?

Olly Fawcett: Prime day, yeah.

Jamie Vaughan: Prime day was also massive but like a lot of our clients were in amazon.

Olly Fawcett: Do you want to just explain primarily very briefly like in terms of why, I mean that's kind of amazon going outside of black?

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, it's essentially amazon giving themselves an opportunity to do a pre-Black Friday sell sales point. So, their way of kind of stretching out another retail focused event that just drives huge revenue again for them and this year's was easily the biggest they've ever had. So, that was kind of a good guide to say that Black Friday was also going to be up there, but in terms of our clients, like there was some pretty mental growth, one of our biggest clients went up 200 on the year and they had a pretty huge Black Friday last year, which is awesome. Then, there were huge amounts of our clients were quite fledgling brands and as you say, that's like this opportunity to get product in hands. So, from that perspective, order quantity was the same sort of the main thing, I think people assume as you say that people are trying to hit sales targets here or do that this that or other a lot of the time for small brands that need their product out there, they just want to shift a ton of product get it in people's hands, give them an opportunity to try it, tell their friends, family and really push on that word-of-mouth marketing, that's obviously free and very, very effective. So, in that sense, it was a really, really successful year from us, from our side, we had I think six or seven brands under our kind of can our umbrella and control for that weekend. It was quite an interesting time on Facebook and paid media generally, the US was basically not worth touching.

Olly Fawcett: And why is that? why was the US for us not worth it?

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, like Facebook being an auction platform essentially, your bid has to win to get the ad served someone. So, as an example, one of our luxury clients, it was the cost per acquisition in the U.K was around 20 quid and, in the US, it was 300. So, you know, we took a sort of decision on the Saturday going, is this even worth trying? should we just do this in a few weeks? there's just so many luxury consumers in the US Facebook knows how good their targeting can be if you've done it well, which I think we had and how many luxury brands over there. So, it was just really, really difficult to do in the same vein, fashion brands are obviously at the mercy of the big, big players in the industries, you know, going against them which is a small brand, you're going to struggle. So, yeah Facebook and google as well, the cost per meal, cost per thousand people reached absolutely spiked, that was up about seven times I think across the world for us. So, yeah, a really interesting year, I think it was pretty much like as we expected it to be if not better, but it felt like there was good momentum online going into it. So, I think everyone was expecting, a solid performance for the weekend.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, and what would you say is kind of from an agency perspective, our biggest lesson this year because every year we do Black Friday, we kind of learned something quite substantial in terms of just how. And, sometimes it is a bit of a case by case on the year, so like I think one thing we say to people sometimes, like what you learned this Black Friday? might not apply next year, depending on how things are done and the economy and all the other things.

Jamie Vaughan: So, question any findings that you take from this year being how anonymous.

Olly Fawcett: And it's not as easy as just going well we'll spend more next year, we double, no it's digital, doesn't work.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah. So, well, I think one of our biggest success stories was one of our alcohol brands, they did a pre-Black Friday, sort of buy X get Y sales, which was a bit of buy a bottle of the booze and get something else with it for free or, you know, at a discounted rate or whatever it was, the pre-Black Friday sale which launched on the 20^th, I think it was the Friday before, that was as big as Black Friday for them. So, I think we'll touch on this in a moment because I think it's, yeah, there are some strong views, certainly on my side of the room on Black Friday, and some people's views on it, but this kind of ever-growing extreme sort of lengthening of the event which was as we were saying earlier, like a day in America, where it was a sort of sales drive, has now become this circus.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, let's talk on that because I feel like when we talk about Black Friday, we are basically talking about the Monday before the Friday, up until cyber-Monday which is the Monday after the Friday. That week effectively is kind of the big, you know, the big time to be doing any online activation. Now, looking at the data that I've seen across the board from our side as an agency, we had some clients whose best day was actually on the Sunday before cyber-Monday and some clients, like the one you just said, were having a great time up until Black Friday, and Black Friday was good but like, as a percentage from the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of that week, like, you know, huge growth on that week. So, I think that's one thing I suppose I always do say to people especially when we're asking clients who some of our clienteles are not doing, we're not operating their ads, we do either doing their content or we're, you know, operating their organic or whatever and we consult on their hands, I think I always say when you think about Friday, it's a week-long, like it's the Monday to the Monday. Why do you think that's getting so is really stretching out? and do you think it will stretch out further?

Jamie Vaughan: I don't think it can get much worse than like what a lot of brands did this year which was effectively black November, like I don’t think it could be.

Olly Fawcett: Do you think that's because you covered?

Jamie Vaughan: Not necessarily, I think this year ecommerce has become so competitive because everyone has to have gone online, and I think what people do is try and get to the consumer first because say consumer X has a thousand pounds to spend on their Christmas gifts, and they start getting served ads on the first of November for really heavily discounted stuff that they want, and they part with that cash in the first, you know, the front half of November, clearly by the time, it gets to Black Friday and say one of our clients that, you know, is just doing something on Black Friday, they're not going to have consumer X's pounds in the bank, anytime soon because they've already gone. So, I think that is a like in the most simple terms, clearly, it will be more nuanced than that generally speaking but for a lot of people and especially small businesses, what we try to do is bring out strategies that help them to get in front of their consumers before it's too late. So, if it's just waiting for Black Friday, if like for some of our brands it works great because they've got a good really solid following.

Olly Fawcett: This is massively on the product, isn't it?

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah.

Olly Fawcett: The product of the brand is like, again we just said on that, Sunday like that plant of ours, sort of low ticker item, it's a bit of a stocking filler for Christmas, it's under 50 quid like the average order baskets, probably 18 pounds on average, they have a few cheaper products this year for Christmas, they're kind of stocking for the esk, we don't like mentioning our clients’ names but gives you a bit of flavour there. And, the Sunday was massive for them Black Friday was okay.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, the Friday before like that was our strategy there, like they were going up against all the other booze brands and again, I don't know, you know, everyone's sort of awareness of this but the world's biggest booze supplier, now is amazon. So, if you're competitive with the Diageo brands, the Ob and Bev brands, all these huge alcohol brands whether it's from beer, wine, you know, spirits, whatever, you're going up against some serious firepower in terms of outspend. And so, with that Brandon.

Olly Fawcett: And how serious you…

Jamie Vaughan: Sorry to interrupt, how serious do you think that firefighter is just for anyone who's got a business, small business, medium-sized business in that space, like amazon is probably spending eight to ten times the amount that you probably think they are on average, like a lot of our clients we have to go against amazon on, like, google search, PPC stuff like, you know, it's very hard to ever get above amazon, they basically just keep continually get, you know, upping their beds until they're winning. So, the firepower is like immeasurably different to what any brand of like kind of SME size, or start-up size even, is ever going to have. So, you've got to be crafty and like one thing that we did for most of our clients is we try and build up very sort of loyal and strong brand champions we love saying, because it's the people that, you know, sort of linger on every word and really tell all their mates and all that stuff and they just listen to what your brand is up to and what we try and do there; is get them into a mailing list because not only are they massively susceptible to email marketing and, you know, something like the booze brand, giving them a pre-release by ex-get while before Black Friday, that just worked so well and again, you're sort of taking the pounds out of the consumers before they're being absolutely barraged in that Black Friday week, you're also not having to go up against such firepower as we've just said, in terms of Facebook ad spend because your CPAs being cost per acquisition, going to be really hard to contend with. So, all of our clients where we've got that real sort of we normally call it try and call them something along the club of that client and make it feel a bit exclusive, make it feel like there is quite a lot of love being dished out there and hitting them with an early offer that feels exclusive and special to them and bespoke, and not just using a generic like BF20 or whatever is.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, that’s my biggest pet hey Black Friday is the BF20. It’s just like come up with something more, like we’ve actually seen, I don’t know if we’ve got any data but when we got more personalized Black Friday discount codes, so, not personalized per customer but something like, you know, the brand name or the brand slogan or something like that people just love it more.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, this year the most effective discount code that we've had, is like the automatically generated ones which are like for X, Y, Z, two, one, three, blah, blah, blah, like just a completely randomized code because people do think it's a personalised code, even though it's just Shopify is auto generated, whatever it is but yeah, that can work really well.

Olly Fawcett: I've got a question for you, this is mainly thinking of anyone listening who is currently in December because we're probably going to get this podcast up pretty quickly and I think it's a conversation we've had across the board with a few clients, a few meetings I've been kind of dipped into I've heard this a lot. You've got your Black Friday which is effectively a sale, you're not going to do a sale around Christmas but the classic January sale which is a very old school, kind of retail approach to sales, what's the best approach to having your Black Friday and then also having a January sale? would you have a January sale? and how do you differentiate between the two being as they are so close together?

Jamie Vaughan: It's tough, I think like black boxing day sales are another thing, so, there's Black Friday sale or the cyber weekend, then, there's boxing day sale that's literally almost exactly four weeks later, then, two weeks after that, there's January sales. Clearly, this is a hugely different thing like three or three is kind of client rosters pretty evenly split between luxury and like health wellness sort of food and beverage stuff like for the luxury clients you've got to be seriously careful, there's something I think we'll come on to, but Black Friday is kind of a weekend where no questions asked, you can just slash your prices and it's not, I mean you don't see Louis Vuitton and Valencia doing it in terms of like the most valuable brands in the world, not yet but like and I don’t think you will, but for smaller brands that aren't, you know, the most precious brand things in the world where brand equity is the most important thing for their share price like we're talking about people making more cash in terms of sales and then profit, like it's an opportunity just to slash your prices. I think it's a slippery slope if you do Black Friday and you kind of get away with that scot-free but then you start doing a boxing nozzle and a January sale like that is obviously a slippery slope. One of our clients we're doing, I think you've touched on it a couple of times but Black Friday is an awesome opportunity to get rid of a load of stock and clear the floors in time for the new year or if you've got a new product coming etc. So, we're doing like a factory outlet, kind of vista village-esque sale.

Olly Fawcett: And just for clarity. Again, sorry for interrupting, but just for some clarity there, the getting rid of stock, you're not getting rid of the stock at below cost price or are you in terms of is that the strategy just to get it out? or is that just it’s been sat around for a long time, it's not selling normally, it's an opportunity to get out the door and get the money back for the cost? or as an opportunity to get out of very much case by case?

Jamie Vaughan: It's case by case, I think it's rare that you dip below cost like if it's just a case of like you need to get rid of stuff to make space. I think there's probably other stuff that you can be doing to do that, like if it's a sample sale. I think a lot of this comes down to and like people won't like hearing this as consumers but like a lot of it comes down to effective language like if I go to you huge January sale like clearly, you're going to be like that isn't very luxury, but if I say to you: factory outlet sale, that is the same thing but you're going to buy from one and you're not going to buy from other, like Gucci, Moncler, like all manner of brands have an outlet at Bister Village and you don't question it for a second but it's massively discounted prices on last season's stock. So, like and you don't really question that in terms of luxury because they put it in this surrounding of disability.

Jamie Vaughan: So how you wrap it up?

Olly Fawcett: Exactly.

Jamie Vaughan: It literally goes back to like gift wrapping doesn't, it's just how it looks and how it feels.

Olly Fawcett: If you should sugarcoat it a little bit, so like I think in summary, like January's clearly going to be a pretty testing time for a lot of brands like, I think I've been saying all year just wait until January because I've been scared, I think like vaccine news and all these sorts of things with people getting out about more is great.

Jamie Vaughan: When you say you mean kind of cautious around the strategy to make sure it's the right approach, you know.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah and I sort of thought that like because, well, my hypothesis was essentially that this year online's been mental all year, prime day was huge, Black Friday has been even bigger than I thought it was going to be yeah, Christmas is already shaping up super well for all our account brands, and then and the stat, my one of the most interesting stats that has come out this year from my perspective is that consumer saving as a percentage of GDP of the whole camp like the countries at GDP has never been higher in the history of the U.K like ever, I think it's 7.7% basically. So, people have cash.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah exactly, for people that don't know what that really means is that there is cash in banks, it's just not leaving them in some way in some cases.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah and of course, that doesn't apply for everyone and we're not saying that in a distasteful fashion like I think the point is that as much as this year has been really tough, a lot of people have still not been on holiday, they've not done all the been out to restaurants, they've not been on, you know, spending in hotels, blah, blah, blah, they've not been spending in the same way that they have, and a lot of them have still been working, a lot. So, you know.

Jamie Vaughan: There's probably a lot of them have probably got a few more percent on what they would normally have each year to spend in, you know, they haven't spent.

Olly Fawcett: And my hypothesis for the year was that consumer spending power was going to build, Black Friday would come, Christmas would come, it would be world beating and then, depending on what the coving situation was in terms of vaccination and everything else, January and February were going to be miserable. I think that's looking like ever more hopeful because of the news but I think still there's going to be another school dip off especially a lot of our clients are quite gifting focused.

Jamie Vaughan: So, yeah, the kind of the winter months are always a little bit depending on the brands of the clientele, they're always a bit kind of like up and down depending on the year I think, you know, our overall strategy as an agency and as a business is to be like. Well, one thing I love most about what we do probably is the fact that we try and take care and support our clients. So, we try and inform the decision that we think is the right one, not what we think is going to hit the target that they want to hit is really just being realistic, and I think the word realistic kind of goes around quite a lot within the business, is that look we all want to hit the target that we want to project, we need to hit but at the same time, let's be realistic and make sure we're actually on the strategy that fits in with so many unknowns, and there's a lot of people who know this year is really unknown and there's been a lot of like.

Olly Fawcett: It's been unprecedented.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, big old word that. It has been like that and I think going into the kind of 2021, it's really about making everyone a bit comfortable, and I think that's what I always from a business owner perspective, I don’t want to be like I want to remove the stress as much as possible, especially when you're trying to hit those sales, is like let's just be realistic, let's kind of drop our target. Just so we know where we think we're going to hit, and, you know, two months ago, we didn't even know when the vaccine was going to hit and now we do know and now there's progress but the progress is still very slow, and it will be slow and it's now just about coping, you know, our line of work, it changes every day even outside of Covid, you know, our business change every day, one minute is Brexit, when it's this thing, you know, there's so many variables to online even from the platform perspective, like we've said this before, Instagram changes every week like it does.

Olly Fawcett: Like now on e-commerce platforms since we’ve.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, exactly. It's now got the shop feature, it's now really pushing that and there's so many great opportunities, but I think from my view, it's always about being as realistic as you can, and if you're, you know, marketing executive within a small business or you're a business owner small business owner like really just going right where do we want to hit, cool, we have our goals and ambitions and everyone has that, but actually what's going to be realistic with what's going on and if you have that realism and you really understand that, it means that you're a lot more, you know, comfortable going through it. It's even with our own business, you know, we plan for this year as much as we can, we've taken a few risks which have been great and we've developed and we've employed a lot of people this year which is great, but at the same time, we're making sure that we're not over stretching and over delivering and I think that does apply to a lot of e-commerce brands.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah, and I think also the power that you gain from that like the realistic word you use like especially our luxury clients, that obviously have a great time at Christmas and gifting times, the word realistic is really useful because with them, you can sit down and go right well John and Feb's clearly going to be an absolute car crash in comparison to December and November.

Jamie Vaughan: And it always is really.

Olly Fawcett: However, we can do x, y, z to try and do something, so like this factory outlet example was really like nice example of like how we're going to try and flatten that sort of tanking of revenue, there's a very consistent trend for them which is essentially it ramps up around sort of Father’s Day, it wraps up around valentine's day, it wraps up massively then September, October, November, December and then, just goes back to when you left off.

Jamie Vaughan: Yeah, and January 3^rd March, if you're a more seasonal brand, you hit March and April and you go summer and that's when it all starts and I think to be honest, my view depending on some of the vaccine news again, you know, like we don't want to keep talking about covert so much, but it is really important is that, I think summer will probably be a longer summer, I think people will go away as soon as they can and that will that will be an impact, you know, like if you're selling swimming shots, you probably know your season's, probably going to start earlier because people have the opportunity to do that. So, actually, next year, the summer stretch that we normally have for a lot of our brands which is great because it's sunny and people go out and do things, it's probably going to be longer than it was last year, but definitely last year but even the year before, probably because people are going to be doing a bit more and going out, you know, if you're a restaurant trainer or you're a food business or you're a booze brand, you're probably going to have more opportunities next summer than you have in the previous couple of years outside of Kobe, just purely because of that fact.

Olly Fawcett: And Black Friday going back to the original topic like that's basically a nod towards, exactly what you're saying, like hopefully that should be, you know, this growth year on year, despite everything, should be a nice sign that hopefully that next summer, the buying power will still be there and all those things, but, yeah, new year is for sure going to be interesting, I'm really interested to see what happens in January for all of the brands. Something I want to bring up, a big part the reason I was so keen to do this podcast, I have a strong view shock, the LinkedIn warriors that have emerged from Black Friday has rustled my Russell mud feathers slightly.

Jamie Vaughan: Hasn't been wrestling. Yeah, you have mentioned this to me a few times.

Olly Fawcett: I haven’t started actually calling them out on LinkedIn with my exact point but no.

Jamie Vaughan: Before you go into this, it is purely an opinion on your knowledge within your space, like in terms of like it's very much your view, I somewhat share part of your view but I also think that a lot of it's down to education of the widerpicture.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah. Well, I essentially think so, my view is essentially that when people as of being so critical of the kind of mass consumerism that Black Friday promotes which I don’t disagree with in totality, it's quite often people and like however many hundreds of thousands of connections on LinkedIn like were inevitably going to disagree with people but obviously that's kind of pretty huge, and that is the beauty but there is a lot of discourse there which I enjoy, but what this year sort of brought up, in a sort of really negative way for me was people going on about how they were like disenfranchised from Black Friday and how they'd sort of got on this slight ethical high horse of like not really agreeing with Black Friday or what it's about anymore, and actually, those people almost always were working for big brands or were in a lucky position that they'd had a very strong year this year, especially with Covid in mind. So, an example of this is someone going like I'm just so like talking about big brands, like pretty little thing or Boohoo which clearly just do obscene revenue or like Jim shark that has like the most eagerly anticipated sale of the year. It's very easy for people to go, I'm very critical of that, and start just potentially slagging off Black Friday in its entirety. Whereas all of the people, you know, people we work with, so many small brands as I said, it's the only opportunity they have all year to discount their prices, drive huge revenue, drive huge brand awareness, drive all the quantity which again is just such a key metric for so many of these small brands where like: yeah, the revenue is growing year on year but like, you know, we've got clients that have grown in over 200% this year in order quantity which is just like if you think about what that actually materially means in terms of product in hand, people trying it, people seeing it, it's just out and about a lot more.

Jamie Vaughan: And massive growth.

Olly Fawcett: When you're online only, it's very difficult to do that. So, I think my essential, my sort of summary of it was, it's very easy when sat in this kind of ivory tower of a big brand that isn't so reliant on it to suddenly start staring, you know, snooty stare down your nose going like, it’s all just promoting mass consumerism, really unethical stuff why doesn't everyone go and like reduce, reuse, go to, you know, a second-hand shop whatever. For small brands, it's such a key moment in the year that can be, it can be a real turning point like we've got a couple of brands, I would say, are in an entirely different league after that November month.

Jamie Vaughan: Oh yeah, 100%.

Olly Fawcett: Which is pretty mad. So, I just think…

Jamie Vaughan: It's really about understanding. Yeah, it's about really, I think going back to what I said before for your wide statement, is that I think it's just the educational thing point of it like and I think that's what a lot of opinion comes down to for me always and like the communication, education for me, especially on mountains like that is just all, it's really about, you might operate in a space where that doesn't apply but like I've seen people talk about on LinkedIn where like I know they've benefited from Black Friday in the past.

Olly Fawcett: Yeah.

Jamie Vaughan: If you look at it, like Jim Charles is the one that always comes to my mind like, Jim Charles awesome brand followed it for many years like familiar with a lot of the guys that worked there and have sort of followed that journey pretty closely. Like Jim Charles, definitely unquestionably have benefited from Black Friday, there isn't that I just can see no argument, not saying that like it's a bad thing that they have or like I'm pro Black Friday for growing brands, but it would be like I can sort of see it happening, I don’t think they will do this because they're very good at guiding the brand, but like if next year they suddenly went, we're doing an anti-Black Friday campaign. I would like not, don't forget where you've come from but it's a little bit like how much did Jim Charles grow in terms of a lot like if you extrapolate out the growth of like those thousands of other customers they get on that weekend, how much have they benefited from that in the long term actually, I would argue really massively.

Olly Fawcett: No, super interesting point. Cool man. Well, I think that 30 minutes in, I think that's a really nice roundup of Black Friday especially this year. I think next year we're planning on doing a pre-Black Friday podcast which is going to probably come out in, I think we're going to do august September next year which is a little bit early I know, but we know the preparation needed for Black Friday. So, we're going to pull together a bit of a podcast which would probably be quite lengthy, possibly get some other experts in different fields from email marketing to high performance too.

Jamie Vaughan: So, media.

Olly Fawcett: 100% yeah, to get those guys in and do a bit of a big dive into some strategy for Black Friday. So, definitely stay tuned to that. And yeah, thanks very much for listening, really appreciate, Jamie thanks for joining us, appreciate it, I know you are busy man as we all are. And, if you haven't left a review or a rating on the podcast yet, please do, it really helps us, the aim for this podcast is to sort of help as many people as we can, especially in our industry and give our two cents on a lot of it. So, yeah thanks very much for listening, see you guys soon and yeah, Jamie back to work.

Jamie Vaughan: See you soon.