Going back to what we said earlier, like influencers are being used and the reality is some people are influencers and don't even realize it.

Welcome to the Empire Show. My name is Bedrose. That is Craig Valentine. He is back in the studio.

This is an awesome episode because every year about this time we give you the predictions and the trends that you might want to look out for in terms of business, making money and of course growing your empire for the upcoming year.

So 2022 is around the corner of Craigie and obviously we're coming off a crazy ass two years with 2020 and 2021. We saw industries shift and businesses go out of business.

I read somewhere that at one point Yelp reported that 62% of the restaurants on their platform had officially shut down and gone out of business.

That's crazy. Looking into the new year 2022, what predictions and trends do you see for entrepreneurs who really want to crank up their business to the next level?

I think that we're going to see some crazy advertising stuff. Crazy is almost going to be creepy advertising. Just the other day somebody spent a lot of money with us and they said they felt it was really weird how our Facebook ads showed up.

I was talking to my marketing department just yesterday and they said the ads are going to become so specific. They're going to be referencing your name. They're going to be referencing something that you just did with all the data that's getting fed to it.

That it's going to seem like your phone has been watching you and reporting back to the advertising. And so as an advertiser, you should be making sure that you're staying on top of everything that you can and can't do.

The best way to do your video ads, the targeting, the geo placement, all that sort of stuff because if you don't stay up with it, other advertisers are going to come across and they're going to be more specific than ever.

And they're going to be showing up almost like the phone is reading the consumer's mind and the person who does that is going to get further and further ahead.

So you've got to be super updated with your targeting and your video content and your ads.

To that point, four days ago, I texted Joan and I said, hey, Joan, I want to buy custom pens for the project instructors as a Christmas gift.

And that was that. And then about a day and a half later, as I'm scrolling through my Instagram feed, I see these awesome pens that have these tridium little inserts at the back of it, which emits light.

But it's like a nuclear thing. I'm a jig. So no batteries required and will emit light for like 10 years.

And I was like, holy crap, Joan, these are the ones that I sent her the link. And I'm like, wait a minute. I've never been advertised pens. Right.

Pretty like I know if I was advertised pens. But in reading my text message, it wasn't even a DM. It was a text message, but not an email through Gmail.

Yeah, not through Gmail is exactly straight up text message to Joan. And then I realized that I was being targeted very specifically based on what I was typing onto my phone.

Now we've always known our phones are listening to us. And I do remember telling my wife one time, like, hey, I'm going to go take your car for an oil change the next day I saw.

I said, I'm going to go take your land Rover for an oil change. And next day I saw an ad for land Rover dealerships.

But nailed it on the head. Oftentimes people find themselves behind the eight ball. They're like, well, I'm not going to do geo tracking. I'm not going to do this kind of, you know, text follow up or email follow up or specificity in my marketing.

Not realizing that you're getting getting left behind and someone in your industry is doing it. So it's a very valid point to make.

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