Welcome to this special edition of The PPC Show where JD Prater and I take a break from the regular headlines and discuss 2019 trends and predictions for PPC.

Tune in to hear about these top predictions, among others:

• Snap gets bought by Google
• Facebook has best year on record
• Marketing tools don’t consolidate but proliferate

As always you can find us on: Apple Podcasts , Stitcher , Overcast , & Soundcloud .

Listen to Episode

Show Transcript

Paul Wicker: Hello everyone. Welcome to the PPC Show brought to you by AdStage. I am Paul Wicker.

JD Prater: And I'm JD Prater.

Paul Wicker: And today is January 4th, 2019. Happy New Year and instead of the news we are going to do some trends and predictions for 2019 so hold onto your butts because we're about to talk about how the world will be changing in the next 12 months.

JD Prater: Happy New Year Paul.

Paul Wicker: Right, Happy New Year to you as well. We intended to do some shows over the break then we didn't because we got lazy and drank too much eggnog.

JD Prater: Yeah it's the holidays. You know, you got pies and cakes. You got family visiting. It's hard to keep up with the news.

Paul Wicker: You got babies.

JD Prater: Babies. Less sleep. Seven hours last night. We are very confident that by month three he's going to be sleeping through the night. So that's a huge win.

Paul Wicker: Very nice. I don't know if this is a trend but you just got me thinking to an article you shared on Quora space, the digital news and marketing trend space or something like that, about addiction and raising kids in today's social media landscape.

JD Prater: Yeah, that was an interesting one. I thought that was a good answer. I'm glad you brought that one up.

Paul Wicker: Well what is it? Summarize it for the good people.

JD Prater: So the question was like, is social media harmful for like today's youth, right? And that's a question that I think about all the time. Not even youth, I mean like for myself or my family so even going down a further rabbit hole my mom was visiting over the holidays so she came here for a week and I've never seen ... She's glued to her phone. She loves Facebook. It's such a timely question. It's like, "Is this harmful?" "Is this good?" Should we be spending this much time on phones, on Facebook, you know, is there other things that we should be doing.

JD Prater: Anyways, there are a lot of different answers. They are six current answers up there. If you have an opinion on that feel free to go check it out. Yeah, I think a lot of it was they were blaming parents which I thought was really interesting to blame parents. I don't know. What do you think?

Paul Wicker: Well you're a parent so prepare to get blamed. I don't know. I always say this is like every new technology goes through this curve, and I mean technology in a very broad sense like books. When books came out I saw some ads back in the day, I think Boing Boing which is this weird like alternative ... Cory Doctorow website thing. Anyway, he posted these vintage ads, and I think it was on there but somewhere you see all these articles and posts about not letting your children read too much and how it rots their brain and they are going to turn into hermits if you let them read, you know, after books and science fiction and all that stuff.

Paul Wicker: I think there's always a part of the world changes and then we get roped into this new thing and then everyone looks at it and says, "That's unnatural and different," and people aren't doing what they used to do and that doesn't feel right. Like, your staring at your phone, you should be staring at a television screen for six hours today, not a tiny little square and we still want everyone to run outside so I don't know. I think a lot of it is society doesn't like new things and then of course, as usual, yeah, if parents ... I mean kids will do whatever is easy and video games and your screen are additive. They are addicting things so if you give your kid an addictive substance and then just say, "Hey, good luck with your underdeveloped brain and poor decision making skills," then you're probably going to get someone who is addicted to video games or heroin or smoking or alcoholism, you know?

Paul Wicker: I do put in that category. I think digital consumption whether it's news or video games or television or movies, like they can be very addictive for people and you need to manage it like you would manage smoking.

JD Prater: Predication number one from JD is I actually think that we're going to see, I would say like a subset so I think there's going to be people and I'm going to place myself into this prediction that we have realized how much time that we are spending and we're going to pull back a little bit so I think we're going to see numbers come down on the social media ... Like pretty much all social media meaning how much time we're spending on each app or how much time we are spending on Facebook or spending on Instagram, Snap, whatever it is. Twitter, LinkedIn, name them all but I think there's going to be a slight pull back in 2019.

Paul Wicker: I think it will be like smoking. It will take a very large concerted enough to truly cut back social media usage. I think we are addicted, and we are not stopping. There will be some folks like yourself, which probably rebel, you know, just like, I don't know, the 60s some people were like, "Hey, this smoking thing might be bad for you. I'm going to quit."

Paul Wicker: I can't see the world changing that fast. I think we're going to be glued to our phones through 2019, possibly beyond. One thing we won't be glue to, I believe, is ... This is my first prediction for 2019, is an independent Snap. I think this is the year that Snap snaps. They just had more bad news. They lost their head of sales. Their CEO Evan Spiegel is like, you know, the more you read about him, and the more you see what he does, the more you wonder if he's just like this totally unqualified ... I don't want to call him a kid but like, just that mentality of ... I'm going to make up words. Let's just say he doesn't seem like he understands the sophistication of running a business. The way he acts, and the way he surrounds himself with people who are all seemingly clueless.

Paul Wicker: So he prompts this woman to like chief something officer, chief sales officer or something and then two days later he changes his mind and un-promotes her and promotes someone else. Great demonstration of leadership and decision making and then of course that person goes onto quit and now just yesterday or a few days ago, another one of their top sales people, who came from Viacom, who is another one of the adults, which is a new phrase that we now use because of Trump, she quit. Their stock is still below $6.00 after IPOing at $26.00.

Paul Wicker: If you read the financial analyst, they all say they are burning too much money, they don't have enough money to keep paying for all those snaps. Every time you upload a video, you know, it gets stored in the cloud and Snap has to paid a fortune for all that video content, so I think this is the year Snap sees that they are going to run out of money, and they go to Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon and they say, "Hey, we're for sale." Happy to get that two billion dollars we got offered five years ago or whatever it is but I don't know.

Paul Wicker: The question is who buys them though?

JD Prater: Yes. I like that one. So who do you think?

Paul Wicker: I think Google because Google failed miserably at social media and young people don't give a crap about Google, outside of YouTube. So I think if you took SnapChat from a social media engagement and communication aspect and then you plugged into YouTube which introduced stories a few months ago, that's really powerful so I think Google will pony up a few billion bucks to buy SnapChat this year.

JD Prater: Interesting.

Paul Wicker: How about you?

JD Prater: I'm still going to lean towards Amazon and Disney. I think those are my two picks.

Paul Wicker: Okay. I guess we've had this conversation before. We did talk about this a lot, right. You're a big Amazon or the wild card, Disney.

JD Prater: Yeah.

Paul Wicker: Alright, we'll see whose right or if neither of us are right.

JD Prater: Maybe we'll have to revisit this in December.

Paul Wicker: We also thought Twitter was going to plummet and die and Twitter did a total turnaround and they have been pretty stable.

JD Prater: Yeah. Let's talk about that. What are your thoughts for 2019 on Twitter?

Paul Wicker: You know, I don't know because Twitter, I feel like, we've said this before too, they have the best advertising campaign possible with the President of United States using Twitter as his communication tool, must have created millions of new users for the Twitter platform in a demographic they probably wrote off. We're never going to get these conservative, over 50 old white men and now they are on Twitter, you know, yelling at everybody to build a wall. They got all these new users. I can't imagine how you get something else as good for your brand as the President using it. I can't see a way for them to sustain their active growth. I think they've done a good job monetizing their product, simplifying it, selling to the TV crowd. TV budgets are getting moved over so I feel like they did really well with what they had but they need more eyeballs. They need more usage and I don't know what rabbit they have up their sleeve for 2019.

JD Prater: Yeah. I think for them, I guess I'm with you. I wonder who they are getting, right? I think they started out going for the everyday marketer and advertiser, right? They started out really performance driven and now they've really gone towards the branding and the video people. Whenever they reported that 50% of their revenue came from video ads I was like, "Whoa!" That's a lot.

JD Prater: I think what I am going to look for them in 2019 is really new ad units. I don't know, mix it up. I mean, if you look at all the other platforms and different ad types and the different iterations and innovations that they have, Twitter is the one that's really been the most constant as far as its simplicity. It's here it is, do you want it or do you not? They only have a couple different types of ads, could different types of targeting and that really hasn't changed in five years.

Paul Wicker: And in 2017 I feel like they tried a lot of new stuff in terms of product, like consumer product. They launched Moments, I think that was 2017, if not last year. So Moments was a big thing. They did this whole like business communication app where they wanted to be like the customer service tool so if you wanted to bitch about a company on Twitter, they could respond and then manage that conversation. That never went anywhere. To be fair, Facebook tried the same thing and then you had companies like Intercom spring up and basically take over that market.

Paul Wicker: They tried a few things that were pretty creative but this past year, 2018 was like pretty stagnant. It was like, "Okay, newsfeed, Twitter, pretty much what's going on," so I'm looking for them to throw out at least one or two big consumer product initiatives to try, you know ... Moments was kind of like stories, maybe the re-brand it and launch that as stories or I don't know, something otherwise Twitter is going to be pretty flat. I think there is only so much you can do selling to the TV crowd although you can sell a ton. TV is still huge. They have gigantic budgets.

Paul Wicker: I think we just saw maybe a few months ago, digital just passed TV in ads spent, like all digital just passed television. There's still a lot of money wrapped up in TV for Twitter.

JD Prater: Yeah which is a good segway. I think Instagram and Facebook will continue to go after TV budgets as well when you look at Facebook watch, you look at IGTV. I mean, that's exactly what they are going after. You can even lump YouTube in there as well. Everybody wants that TV budget.

Paul Wicker: Yeah. As the technology barrier comes down for just live streaming video, high resolution video, you know, your phone battery can last long enough that people are going to stream all day and watch video all day. I see the move to video content doing nothing but speeding up and even if you look at stories, you know, that's another trend that we've already seen, is that stories are everywhere and this kind of narrative storytelling is coming back and video is great for narrative storytelling.

Paul Wicker: You're seeing a lot of these seemingly successful brands on Instagram. They are all video ads that are pretty interesting. If you just put up a generic commercial style ad that you would run on TV, they don't seem like they get much engagement because you've seen them disappear on Instagram and SnapChat and now you see vert funny, the kind of purple mattress approach or you see people, you know, kind of really like aesthetically beautiful scenes so people are really kind of investing in video as creative. I think we will see more and more and more of this kind of narrative storytelling spill over as in video and all that fun stuff.

JD Prater: A quick add on to that one is, 5G. So 5G is set to roll out and there will be select cities, and your phone has to have it. I think Apple said the iPhone won't have it till 2020 but with AT&T and Verizon rolling out 5G, I mean that's going to make your phone really fast when it comes down to downloading this stuff or the latency for communications. I think it's ... Yeah, that one's going to be a game changer when you think about digital video content.

Paul Wicker: I live in Marin County, California which is like, you know, the hippies and the tree hugger's and that's where we all live. I'll put myself in the category. I'm vegetarian. They don't like 5G because they think its untested technology that's going to fry your brain and give you cancer and I went to some speech from some person who, you know, is very convinced that like somebody in their family got cancer because of cellphones so I'm now afraid of 5G. I have all these people telling me 5G is going to kill me and then I also, you know, I didn't have a good signal for about 13 seconds on the business today and I was pissed off and I was like, "Give me the 5G."

Paul Wicker: I'm torn, I don't know. I think most places in the world are just paving over this 5G, no one is stopping them but up in hippy dippy land, we might not have 5G for a while.

JD Prater: Quick segue, I was up in Marin over the break. I went up Mount Tam.

Paul Wicker: No 5G radiation up there.

JD Prater: No man. Nothing but cold wind. It hurt.

Paul Wicker: Marin is beautiful. The people are lovely. It's extremely liberal and extremely environmental.

JD Prater : Yes.

Paul Wicker: It's great.

JD Prater: Very beautiful.

Paul Wicker: Okay. What else is going to change in 2019?

JD Prater: This one I would say is more of a pulse and I wouldn't say every advertiser but I do think advertisers are looking for diversification of ad budget and by that I just mean, they are getting smarter to where their customers are; meaning, I don't really care where you are, I just want to be in front of you. I think that's where a lot of advertisers are kind of moving towards and so I think we're going to see other platforms other than Google and Facebook.

JD Prater: Google and Facebook by far are going to get the line share. Google number one, Facebook number two. Amazon for E-Commerce people, number three but everyone else I think is now fighting. I think that is now about 60% of all ad spend are between those three so the other 40%, when you think about [inaudible 00:14:45], you think about LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, you know, whatever it may be. There's a lot of other platforms out there and it's like, "How do I get in front of my customer?" I'm looking for results so I think that will be part of it. The [inaudible 00:15:00] and then a coupling of branding and performance merging so that will be a second prediction that I'll throw in there but they are closely related.

JD Prater: I'll get your take first on diversification.

Paul Wicker: Yeah, I mean, I think marketers are lazy, so they always say they are going to expand to other channels, and they don't.

JD Prater: True.

Paul Wicker: What happens is like, over time the channel gets on auto pilot but like, you know, unless you are a big company that's got a whole team of people doing Google Ads. You know you get your Google Ads campaigns kind of tuned and they do some experiments or write some new iCopy every few weeks or whatever and then you're like, okay if that's going well then I'll go touch Bing and then if I'm also doing social, I got Facebook. If I have some time I'll try Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest and so I think as the tools get better and they enable marketers to spend less time clicking buttons and doing obvious, you know, moving budget around from one campaign to another, that's not hard work, it's just tedious work, they will have more time to say, "Okay, even though only 10% of my customer base is on Pinterest, I want to be in front of them," and it's probably cheaper. It's just that time benefit analysis they are doing.

Paul Wicker: As tools, like AdStage and others get better, it should free up more time for marketers to spend more time moving beyond Google and Facebook and spending more budget on good old Quora.

JD Prater: I think it. You snuck one in there too. I think MarTech, AdTech is going to be heavily adopted. I think we're going to see a couple of things. Let's dive into that one too.

JD Prater: Like AdStage, AdStage ... Would you say AdTech is AdStage? Would you lump into MarTech?

Paul Wicker: You know, we're kind of moving ... We definitely came from AdTech. We used to create Facebook ads through us but then we started doing more and more data and kind of connecting conversion data from various marketing systems like Salesforce. So now a big part of our business is more in the MarTech kind of stack because we're connecting Salesforce data with Facebook, LinkedIn data and then letting people build reports and automation on top of it. We've been talking about that. We might reframe this as all the news in MarTech instead of AdTech for the podcast moving forward.

JD Prater: Yeah. I think we're going to see, again, more adoption. I think marketers are on board for software that is going to help them. I do think they are going to be pickier and choosier of what they pick and lastly within all of that, I think there's going to be more consolidation in 2019 so I think we are going to see a lot of big brands buying smaller brands or we're going to see more merging of two to become greater. I think that's going to happen in 2019 for sure as there's what, over 7,000 companies now in this MarTech space and the only way to really kind of move and become a big player is to really merge or get acquired. That's what I think is going to happen as well.

Paul Wicker: I did see a counterpoint to that. Basically just making that argument that, hey, every year we say there is going to be consolidation because Scott Brinker's chart goes from 1,000 to 2,000 and everyone goes, "Oh my God," and then from 2,000 to 4,000 and this counterargument was look, it's just going to keep getting bigger. This is just the evolution of software and there's going to be more and more choices. It will never consolidate.

Paul Wicker: So there is a counterargument out there that consolidation is old school and it's just a matter of millions of millions of tools.

JD Prater: I think with the millions of tools as it gets more like niche but I do think that within the subsets so lets just say the subset is data analytics, right? I do think there will be a consolidation within data analytics but maybe not across an entire MarTech, you know ... What do they call it now? The ecosystem, right? So I don't see Salesforce buying up. Salesforce is going to buy up companies no matter what but I think they will be smaller acquisitions within it.

JD Prater: AdStage buying up people, you know. That's what I am saying.

Paul Wicker: Yeah. We're gobbling them up left and right with our giant budgets. I have no idea. We have looked at two or three companies in the past like year or two for possible acquisitions. Often like people start these startups, they build the tool to really niche and it does one thing really well but there's a limited audience for it and then they found out like they don't really like being a software company and they're really more of an agency or they're really just kind of the ... An entrepreneur.

Paul Wicker: So we've talked to a few of them who are looking to get out over the years but we haven't made any moves yet. Maybe 2019 we will make our first acquisition. I will not predict that though. Insider info. We don't have any lined up.

Paul Wicker: I did want to mention Twitch as another-

JD Prater: Oh okay.

Paul Wicker: ... Trend in 2019. By the end of 2019, you misses or mister marketer will know what Amazon Twitch is and you'll understand the advertising model in Twitch. That's a prediction. Amazon as we know is like growing their ads business pretty tremendously. Most people think of it as shopping ads and getting traffic to buy crap on Amazon but they also own Twitch which is a very weird marriage but Twitch is where like gamers stream what they are playing and people watch and there is this whole ecosystem around it how you can get paid with the virtual/digital currency in Twitch if you watch ads so you can earn these things called Bits and then you can use Bits to kind of give them to the streamers that stream their games and that's how they make money.

Paul Wicker: They are building this really nice ... I don't know about nice but this fair ecosystem where it feels like the value is shared a little bit so if you watch the ads then you get a little bit of payment for it that you can then give back to the communities so there is a little bit of value exchange for Amazon using your data to show you ads.

Paul Wicker: There are some problems with it and I don't know if it's rolled out everywhere. I think its US only and not everybody can watch ads for Bits. They've tried it in different markets but if that does become the standard model, I really like. Even if not, Twitch is huge streaming service and it's going to compete with YouTube. It's going to be the number one competitor for YouTube and you're going to see a lot of, especially young people consuming all their digital content over on Twitch instead of YouTube.

JD Prater: Oh wow! Instead of, wow! Not in addition. Okay.

JD Prater: Paul, I just realized, how did we make it this far and we haven't really talked about Facebook? Or really even Google. We got to talk about those two.

Paul Wicker: Well Google is going to be busy buying up SnapChat. Facebook, I don't know. The question is does Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg survive 2019?

JD Prater: That's the question right there. I think Zuck will definitely survive. I'm really curious to see how he stands by Sheryl. It seems like Sheryl's really been thrown under the bus like the last, I'd say two months as far as the articles go. I think she is taking the brunt of it. I'm curious to see if she stays around.

JD Prater: My guess is that she will and I think ... Jimmy Marvin over at MarketingLand, wrote a really good article over ... Late December. It was really about marketers. No one really likes all of the data privacy issues that Facebook is having. No one really likes that they keep getting hacked and they get rebuilding it and whatever, whatever, whatever but at the same time, I'm not going to pull back on my advertising and I think that's the conundrum that we're kind of all in.

JD Prater: I think that will continue to be kind of a trend. I think Facebook has to dig itself out of a hole. I think they will and eventually gain back that trust. That said, what's going to be new for them? It's got to be WhatsApp, right? WhatsApp ... They got the placements out now. I think they are going to go heavy on monetizing that because they want it to be their next Instagram so that could be interesting.

Paul Wicker: Yeah. I'm with you. I think it would interesting if Facebook had a Twitter like year where in terms of new products they don't do much. So Facebook, they have this new Facebook Home product, they have Facebook messenger they invested a ton in. I wonder if like Twitter, they kind of say, "Stop, let's so some foundational work, focus on what we're good at, make sure our customer base is being served, make sure our advertisers are being served," and not just keep throwing up all this new stuff because it does create more opportunity for exploit and more opportunity to screw up.

Paul Wicker : I think it will be wise for Facebook to step back and say, "Okay, what do we want to be and how can we focus on delivering that with high quality and reliability," and rebuild our brand and I honestly think it's going to be very hard to do with Zuckerberg and Sheryl at the top. I never think it's fair that you blame two people for a company of, I don't know, 60,000 employees, multi-billion dollars. It's not them but they are the leadership, they are responsible so I do think you have to change one of them, it worked for Uber. It worked for Microsoft. In some areas you just need to change our public face that people associate.

JD Prater: Yeah, I agree. I think that's definitely a fair assessment.

JD Prater: If I had to pick between the two, I bet its Sheryl.

Paul Wicker : Yeah. They also need to get a new face is the saying. They need someone that is not ... Because Zuckerberg is just not charismatic person. Everybody watched the Social Network movie that came out and thinks he stole the idea from the Winklevoss's, that's hard to say.

JD Prater: The Winklevie.

Paul Wicker: Right. Plural of Winklevoss.

Paul Wicker: I feel like Facebook just needs a new public face that is much more compassionate and empathic than the uber nerd Zuckerberg. The uber nerd tech thing sold well in 2014 to 2018 but I think moving forward that like, a bro tech guy is not going to be good for your public image. Somebody new. Maybe a new CEO or new COO that takes the face of the company.

Paul Wicker : I think Google is going to be fine. Google's just been quietly just pumping out money, doing fine. I think their CEO change was also a great one. Just a very calm, smooth transition. Eric, their old CEO and then Larry Sergey had a lot of history and there's always like, is there in-fighting and Eric is kind of the outsider and Eric was kind of, again, like a hard nose nerd type and now they are just more chill.

JD Prater: It's true. It is true. I think what will be interesting for them is how do they respond to Amazon. I think that's their big challenge for 2019. With their shopping ads, you know, how do they incorporate those. You've already seen them in Google images. We've already seen them kind of getting into more YouTube so I think that will be their biggest challenge. How do they do that? How do they make it easier? How do they expand upon it? That's going to be something that I am going to watching for them.

Paul Wicker: Yeah I think Sundar ... Back to the CEO. He's done a great job. He was just in Congress testifying. He was cool and collected and calm and he like was condescending without being condescending which is a tough skill to be like, "Congressmen you are aware that we don't make the iPhone," but not in kind of like a dickish way. He really pulled it off.

Paul Wicker: I think for him its about how do they keep their quarter search brand super strong. They are always trying a million different products and things. Google Home, they announced a new radar patent or I don't know. They are using radar now to track hand movements so they are trying to come up with a new [inaudible 00:26:52] so it's not just voice or typing, you can now motion with your hands to do stuff.

Paul Wicker : They are invested in the future for sure. I cannot see Google going anywhere but staying at the top three if not jocking for position to be number one company in the world. [inaudible 00:27:08] might even get valued as the number one company in the world.

JD Prater: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely see that happening.

Paul Wicker: Prediction 2019, Google will make it to number one as the most valuable company in the world.

JD Prater: I agree.

JD Prater: What are your thoughts on recession and the impact to advertising spend in 2019?

Paul Wicker: There was an article about the government shutdown. Apparently the government is the fifth largest ... Just kidding. The 46th largest spender on ads which I mean, that's almost a billion dollars. They spend $949,000,000 on advertising in 2016. It usually goes up about three percent a year so it's probably over a billion dollars now in advertising.

Paul Wicker: They say a large chunk of that was spent on digital and you know, with the shutdown, they are starting say, "Well bills are going to start to go unpaid." What does it mean for all the agencies that do work with government. There is some direct relationships between the government shutdowns and marketing but in general, yeah, I don't know. I can't keep up whether we're in a recession or the economy is doing great. It depends what day of the week I read the news.

Paul Wicker: If the market keeps flopping and interest rates go up and the economy cools, it's going to be bad for anyone in marketing because we sell stuff for a living.

JD Prater: Yeah, that's true.

JD Prater: I think it will happen. I don't know. I read another good article this morning and of course it changed my mind completely on people just being reactive because if you actually look at the numbers, the numbers are great. Jobs were a great number. The December numbers just came out but then you couple that with Apple going, "Hey, actually wait, you know, I don't think we're going to hit our target." Delta said the same thing. They are both losing stock. How good is the economy? Are people just being overly reactive? Are we to see a correction? We've been in a bull market forever.

JD Prater: I'm excited to kind of see what happens for even like personal investing but also as an advertiser. I don't think we will see the effects of it unless it's like hit really hard. I think it would have to be kind of what we saw in 2008/2009 to really have an impact. I do think it would be wise to start having that conversation though so that way you are ready in case it does happen.

Paul Wicker: I need a recession to hit so I can buy a house because I can't afford one right now but I think if there is a recession and home prices come down about $200,000, then I could probably afford one that is somewhere remotely close to San Francisco.

JD Prater: Yeah.

Paul Wicker: I'm waiting for it. Put your money in gold and just ... Then at the end of 2019 when the market crashes you can laugh at all your friends and buy cheap houses.

Paul Wicker: That was a very sad way to end it. Never laugh at your friends, I don't mean that. You can come back and thank me and JD and give us 10% of whatever you've managed to save but moving your money into gold.

Paul Wicker: Any other final predictions? I don't think I have anything else. Anything else in 2019?

JD Prater: No. I think ... I mean, just internally as far as Quora goes, I think Quora is going to continue to do well on a my trend that we're really going after. That [inaudible 00:30:31] money so all you LinkedIn advertisers, feel free to come check us out. We're much cheaper.

Paul Wicker: Hey you know your audience. That's the number one knock on LinkedIn. It's too expensive.

JD Prater: Too expensive.

Paul Wicker: Nice. I don't want to make this a political podcast. There's a lot of things with the current president, with the new house coming in and seeing what actually happens this year. Does anything change or are we just going to stay in gridlock? Are they going to try and impeach the president? Or is it going to continue to be the status quo and nothing gets done? How long are we going to shut down? Is this going to be the longest shutdown in US history or is it going to stay at like number four right now, for the longest shutdown?

Paul Wicker: Final predictions, what do you think? How many days will this shutdown last?

JD Prater: Today is Friday. It's going to last at least until mid to late next week. I think it will get resolved next week. I think a week from today it should be resolved.

Paul Wicker: Another seven days. Okay.

JD Prater: This will be my prediction. I don't think Trump is going to get his border wall funding. I think he will concede. Yeah.

Paul Wicker: What is the thing? It's not a wall now, it's like a gate or a barrier or whatever you want to call it.

JD Prater: Yeah.

Paul Wicker : And then we stop talking politics but what's genius is the house ... Apparently this is the Senate spending bill and then the house just passed it. They didn't change anything. Democrats didn't change a single thing so this is like the Republican Mitch McConnell lead bill and the Democrats are like, "Okay, looks good." You're Republicans, you have a Republican president, you can now pass it and of course it doesn't include funding for the wall so now there's this big kind of damned if you, damned if you don't moment for Republicans where if Trump ... He's admitting he's not getting his wall funding and if he doesn't sign it then its like, he's admitting that he doesn't give a crap about any of the Republicans even though it's their bill.

Paul Wicker: He won't even sign a bill from his own party.

JD Prater: Yeah.

Paul Wicker : We'll see.

Paul Wicker: Alright, you enjoy ... Oh, weren't we suppose to say something about Luke Alley's class? Our buddy, fellow marketer out there in Utah, I believe. Luke Alley at Brigham Young.

JD Prater: Oh man. I definitely dropped the ball on that one. I completely forgot to sneak in some references for his class but hey class, if you are listening, bonus points if you tell him that you listened to Paul and JD.

Paul Wicker: Right, you just have to tell him ... What's the secret word? Twitch. That's the password or the secret word. You get an A for the entire semester if you just go up top him and casually, in his ear, whisper, "Twitch," and see what happens. He's expecting it so it won't be weird at all and you'll definitely get an A.

Paul Wicker : Alright, if you're not in Luke Alley's marketing class at Brigham Young University, I apologize for confusing you but if you are, I hope you enjoyed our trends and predictions for 2019. We will do headlines again and if you want to hear more headlines, you can always head over ... Or get more headlines, you can always head over to blog.adstage ... Goodness. 2018 is behind me, 2019 is a rough start.

Paul Wicker : You can head over to blog.adstage.io and sign up for our newsletter.

Paul Wicker : Alright, enjoy 2019 everyone.

JD Prater: See ya.