Before we jumped on, you were saying you had a controversial marketing topic. I do want to go back to that. I want to hear what is this all about. Love to hear your opinion on this. Okay.

I know this is going to be triggering for some and I want to be careful to say this so that I'm not overstating my point. But if I have access to 500 analytics accounts and I'm inside of GA4 accounts several times a day and if you look at the path exploration starting from the end point of the thank you page and look at the pages through which you're converting visitor flows. Your next prospect, what pages did they visit? They often go from let's say the home page to the service page to the contact form to the thank you page. That's the most common path for conversion. In other words, your visitors are skipping your story. Most visitors on most analytics accounts do not read stories. So I think that strangely, so my point here is that storytelling is actually not as imperative as the marketers make it sound. Most of us do not know stories from most of the brands that we consume or companies that we hire. Yes, stories are helpful. They help you get referrals. They help you become more memorable. They help create emotion and connection. I get that. Elements of stories are critical, right? You need to have people and conflict and resolution and success stories in case that either a powerful format. But storytelling actually, I think you can grow a giant business without telling a single story. I know that's true. I can see it in the data. It happens all the time. So the triggering controversial statement is that actually it is true. Storytelling and marketing is a bit overrated.

Where do you think it started from that marketers believe storytelling is the most important thing?

Well, marketers love frameworks and storytelling is insanely powerful. Of course. I grew up playing role playing games. I'm going to see Doon tomorrow. I love stories. I read, but yeah, I'm a fan. I love them all. I'm an avid storyteller and reader and I have little kids and stories all day. So it's a framework. It's a way of thinking and it's a way of teaching and it's a useful thing. Of course, it's a useful thing. But where that came from, I think it's just so easy for someone to say this is the main thing and everyone kind of starts saying, yes, that's the main thing. And Storybrand, and I get it, it's true. It's good. It's good to do. But weirdly in analytics, yeah, go look at your last 10 leads. If they touched you're about us page, they might have been there for 20 seconds. So tell stories, but don't be surprised if nobody listens to your story. Visitors care about their problems much more than you care about your

story. So is part of that you need to make sure you're putting them inside the hero's journey and they're the hero, not you? Is that part

of this? That is the classic recommendation, right? That's Anne Handley. That's all the people, the, the, the greats that I've learned from over the years would it would say that. Yes, definitely that. But if there's a useful framework here, I think it's that there are elements of stories that are super powerful with or without the arc characters. Every page on your website should have people, the step faces of your team. That's differentiation. That's good. There's a conflict in the life of your visitor, right? They're problem and solution aware, right? That's why they're on your website. So that conflict, that's an element of story that you can leverage. You know, Nancy Duarte and, you know, the secret structure of great talks, you know, her like describing the new bliss, amplifying the gap between their current reality and status quote and where you're going to leave them when you're done, that amplifying that difference and she describing almost helping them visualize the new bliss. Very powerful. So all those things are good and they should be used. But think of them as elements and look for opportunities to include those elements in showing the difference in the impact of your work or showing your humanity and having people around on your in that experience or, you know, identifying with their problem, understanding their problem deeply. But it's not necessarily put together as a story. I don't know. It sounds like I feel super strongly about this.