[00:00:00] Welcome to the Professors Podcast, where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.

[00:00:21] Hey everyone, Hurricane Liz here, back for another Professor's Podcast. And with me as usual, the man, the myth, the legend, Howie Thai.  And, Howie we’re going to go to you in a second. But this guest that we have on today is a second time guest. Now people absolutely went crazy over his last speech at PPE 1.0.

[00:00:39] And so as a result, we have brought him back. And let's face it, Howie, I talked about this in another podcast. But every single month in Amazon with what's being, what's happening and what's evolving, it's almost like a dog year. Is it seven years as a dog year? I mean, so much has changed since we last saw him, which was almost maybe a year ago.

[00:01:00] I want to say Howie. So was that about right. Is that how you see Amazon evolving as if it's aged in dogs? I mean, I'm actually, I it's exactly, almost a year, a year, a little bit since the last time I saw Tarik in Prague. So that was almost a year. And then at the last time we saw him or were with him on the PPE 2.0, he was the analyst on, we're talking about AI and how will it affect Amazon selling in the future.

[00:01:32] Right. And he spoke at the PPE 1.0, which was way back when. But would you agree with what I said that Amazon evolves almost as quickly as a dog ages? I would say probably like, probably it's quick. It's quick. So, I don't know exact date, three to six months, stuff changes. Definitely got a lot to talk about with Tarik today.

[00:01:57] But before we get into with Tarik, I want to remind you guys, we are about to hit PPE 3.0 on February 15th and 16th, and that will be live from the comfort of your own home. I will give more details about that at the end of this. And also remind you guys that PPE 1.0 and 2.0 were a huge raging success.

[00:02:15] Thanks to speakers like Tarik and a lot of other Amazon sellers, including sellers that have made upwards of as much as $50 million a year. We've had two $50 million a year sellers so far, and this time is going to be an absolute, just mind blowing experience for the simple fact that Howie, you went above and beyond.

[00:02:33] And this time recruited $150 million a year seller as well as a $20 million a year seller, who we happened to interview yesterday and then Alleluia, glory be to whoever it is that you believe in, but he finally got a female speaker and guess what? This is no slouch. This lady makes upwards of $20 million per year.

[00:02:52] And she's going to be talking about some terrific things, which is primarily more than likely going to be about really scaling a business. So we had a brief conversation with her yesterday. Howie, how pumped are you for Lana’s talk coming up at PPE 3.0 on February 15th and 16th. Well really pumped because she actually learned a lot from the $700 million seller that came over to our event in Las Vegas that one time.

[00:03:18] And I guess what, our Lana was there listening to how he actually scaled. So she probably used a lot of the stuff that she learned in scaling her business now to $20 million. Yeah, which is the amazing part of this actual mastermind is the people that you get to meet will impact your business greatly.

[00:03:38] And this gentleman that we're about to talk with today, we're going to chicken wing it with him as well. Since he's been on here twice, we don't want to ask him the same thing. Like I said, Amazon is constantly evolving as well as the knowledge required to be able to be the best. So without further ado, let's introduce Tarik.

[00:03:52] Who is the primary person, that leader of an agency. It's a PPC agency, focused on machine learning and artificially intelligent type things. And who knows what else he's got up his sleeve. So we'll talk to him today, but Tarik, I always get your agency name confused with the actual central intelligence agency of the UK, which is  MI6 correct me if I'm wrong.

[00:04:15] It's something to that effect, but it's that sexy, it's that intriguing in terms of the way that it sounds. Let me know a little bit more about what you do. Let the people who weren't able to see you on the first interview, know a little bit more about your background, as well as what you've been working on for the past year and how much Amazon has evolved, particularly in the PPC field, since that's your area of expertise.

[00:04:36] Yeah. So thank you Liz for this great introduction. So as you said, our name is kind of mysterious. It's M 19. So it's Modular 19. We, our company is basically, is not an agency. It's a software that is doing AI optimization for a PPC, for advertising on Amazon. So our tool is managing all ad formats on Amazon using

[00:05:01] our client's data to optimize and to scale their sales. And of course reduce the ACOS when it's possible and when it makes sense. So, I’m one of the co-founders of the company. My background is mainly engineering. So like Howard, I'm a geek. Like I, I studied computer science, machine learning and all these things.

[00:05:25] I worked many years in the research and development lab in a big famous advertising company here in France for six years as a machine learning engineer. So basically I was spending all my time improving and building algorithms to improve mainly search algorithms. And I, we decided to leave this company, leave the research and development department with some colleagues that are micro founders now in M19 to build this engine and use it on Amazon.

[00:06:00] We used to do it on Google before. We say, okay, so we know how to do it. We did it before. Let's do it for ourselves on Amazon. And after four months we had something, the first version of our engine. Now it's very different, but after only four months, because it's a topic that we did with many years before we had something up and running and we started already optimizing for one account.

[00:06:28] So basically this is my background. It's a super technical background. Now my role in M19 is a bit different. I'm more focused on data analytics and at the same time, some of the business side, since I'm talking to a lot of sellers to understand more their needs, to see how we can use all other areas outside PPC to improve PPC.

[00:06:55] So it's super interesting to have this new role that is not, that is not any more, 100% tech and machine learning development, but it's only 70% now the machine learning and development and the rest is trying to translate the business needs into our system. And Tarik in the past, since we last saw you, which was about a year, how much do you see that PPC has evolved.

[00:07:20] Oh yeah. So a lot of things change the first and big thing that has changed is competition. So we can see that competition is way harder than we are ago. Different reasons. The two main ones are first like big brands, like big corporate brands did. Now, they are aware of the importance of being present online and especially on Amazon and the potential that is there. Because of COVID they had to do the digital switch and now they're investing more and more online.

[00:07:56] And a piece of this investment is on Amazon. And because they're throwing budgets there, it's making advertising more expensive. So the first reason is this having big corporate investing more. The second reason is the fact that there are more and more FBA acquirers. So instead of having a lot of moms and dads centers like small service spread over, over the world, now we are starting, having seen some big corporations that are acquiring these small brands

[00:08:30] Operating them professionally with experts putting money and advanced tool to operate. So this has created competition as well, and this is injecting more and more money in this ecosystem. And the last thing is the fact that just. Amazon is evolving also like all what they are providing, like the different ad formats, the different ways of optimizing the different things that you can play on and change either through the API that all service providers or tool providers are using like us, or even directly in seller central.

[00:09:07] And as we were discussing with last time, now they're like one of the big focus of Amazon is to give a big push on the DSP side. And they're trying to, to put more and more GSP sites and feature in self service directly in seller central. So just, the difference between today and last year, there are more ad formats that are eligible for like accessible for everybody.

[00:09:35] People can invest easily on them without going through a third party service providers like us or agencies or whatever. So it makes it easier to invest. And this is a big change compared to before. Right. Absolutely. Howie anything to add on that since you kind of always have your ear at the cusp of what's going on with Amazon in terms of PPC?

[00:10:00] Well, Amazon, of course, I think a lot of people will know that Amazon is going to actually making a lot of money off of the PPC or sponsored products and all that ads that they're doing right now, they're always expanding their ads network and they're doing a lot more video, video ads and stuff. So I see a lot in regards that they're going to push a lot of the DSP

[00:10:22] Like what Tarik says over to the self-managed side for the sellers, which would probably be easier for them now for the attribution side, because it's kind of hard for right now, sellers, to be able to attribute the exact sales by which venue of ads that they kinda use to push, push the products using like DSP and sponsored.

[00:10:47] You can actually co-mingle the sales. Yeah, exactly. As you said, there are more and more ways of doing a sponsoring. So it's making, it sales attributes and even harder, and maybe this is why they are pushing also harder. The sales attribution site, and by the way, as we were discussing again, also on this topic, there are even now opening there's attribution between Google ads

[00:11:14] and Amazon, where you can be doing your Google ads and tracking your sales on Amazon. And this is the first step toward what Howard was just describing the fact of having multiple channels of advertising. And you want just to know exactly which channel you want to attribute to attribute the sponsored sales to, and because of all the, it's making it more and more complex.

[00:11:39] And yeah, so there is more and more tools to, to develop on our side as service providers and also on agencies to, to help and bring expertise. To brands who don't in-house this expertise, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a super exciting year that is in front of us because of all these changing things that are happening.

[00:12:04] Yeah. You know what Tarik, since you had a lot of experience working on the Google side of things, and now you're obviously back you're in the Amazon side of things and there's been a lot of, it's very apparent to the people that work with Google. And then now with Amazon, that. Amazon has mimicked a lot of what Google's done with their algorithm in terms of indexing and all that good stuff.

[00:12:23] And they've kind of mimicked exactly. What's Google, Google's done with all that, but do you feel that they're doing the same thing in their algorithm with the advertising that Google's done since you have the background of both Google and Amazon? Yes. They are kind of following the steps of Google, but they are.

[00:12:43] Way behind them. In terms of years Google, they start basically like more than, I don't know, eight or 10 years before Amazon in this area, but the main and big difference between the two that is making our life harder as a tech guys or agency service provider is the ability to do AB testing. So Google from almost day one, with all their, their APIs and the services they were provided, it was feasible and easy to do AB testing where you were using their advertising.

[00:13:24] So you can create different campaigns and you can decide this group of campaign will be in one population, the other one in the other population. So as you can run and test two different strategies and you can scientifically assess and be sure when a new present, which strategy is better than the other.

[00:13:41] The main difference with Amazon is Amazon is not providing that. So you cannot do that type of a clean split testing. And this is, it might seem not that important, but when you are developing strategies, working with strategies, it's really crucial. And without that, it's almost impossible to assess 100%, which strategy is better than another one.

[00:14:07] And it's also very hard to reverse engineer how the algorithms they're algorithms are working. Because in my past company, we were working on internal algorithm for this company and this equivalent to me working on Amazon site, and these algorithms are so complex and are using so many inputs of data that are evolving all the time and they have internal team that's working on them all day.

[00:14:39] Or week or month. So it's super hard to follow what these algorithms are doing because first they're evolving, the algorithm itself is changing. The inputs that are in it are changing. Plus the definition of how they work is these algorithms learning every day. So everyday the output of these algorithms, these models

[00:15:02] Are different, but the main, big difference is the ability of doing AB testing that is not feasible on the Amazon site that was in the AdWords site and it was helping a lot do developments and check what's working on what it's not, when you, when you are developing strategy. And do you ever foresee Amazon doing that?

[00:15:24] Allowing people to AB test? No. No. And we are always asking, asking that we are discussing with them at least once a month, at least with some Amazon reps that are in charge of taking care of all software providers like and are asking for it all the time for the more, there is no signal to something in this direction, but we will keep asking.

[00:15:51] Yeah, it kind of seems a little bit disappointing. Howie, would you have any additional questions to add for Tarik about any of that? Not at the point. Okay. Tarik, you know, one of the things that was talking about is like obviously evolving and Google Amazons, emulating the way Google has evolved. How about on the spin side as a consumer or as somebody that wants to run ads on Amazon?

[00:16:15] How, how expensive is Amazon getting in that respect? And is it making it difficult for brand new sellers or mid-level sellers that want to scale more to be able to compete with the big guys? Do you see that ever capping out? Like, you know, when Google capped out, you saw a lot of people run away from Google and then jump into Facebook, but obviously on Amazon, all you, the one real big choice you have is Amazon, but do you ever see them catching Google in terms of prices are kept out already?

[00:16:43] Yeah. So basically these Amazon and Google are using the same systems. It's second price auction systems where you pay what's the second price that your second competitor that is bidding just below you is willing to pay. So basically it's not Google or Amazon kind of decide the prices. It's just a competition.

[00:17:06] And I couldn't what we said before, since this competition is getting harder and harder, prices are higher. We are not today. Doing Amazon advertising is not as expensive as doing AdWords. As we see in AdWords, we know there are some categories where if you are not paying more than $7 a click, you want to be displayed in page one.

[00:17:31] It's not yet the case on Amazon. It's very rare initials where the PPCs are that high in the categories, but I think we'll come to it. But overall it's increasing the way it is inquiry. It was increasing in Google because of competition, not because of their internal strategies, because they just put a second price auction.

[00:17:54] And the more demand and people participating in it, the higher cost, it will be for everybody. And as you said today for small sellers, with limited cash flow and limited capacity to take risks and to invest before getting returns, it's getting harder and harder to make it work, to make a product launch without spending and wasting some money at the beginning.

[00:18:20] And, you know, that brings me to another question is that the bigger sellers obviously can afford to pay for software such as yours and be able to even pay for managers, PPC managers, which, you know, it could be a coin flip, whether you get a good one or bad one, some of them could be using your software.

[00:18:36] Some of them could not, but what kind of advantage do people have using some type of machine learning or artificial intelligence while with running their PPC? Yeah, this is a, this is a cool question. Just a first disclaimer, like a PPC expert. Working manually can do a super good job. Like it's not today.

[00:18:58] It's not, you don't have to go through machine learning or an automated tool to have a good PPC strategy in place. So manually you can do something very good if you know exactly your landscape, if you know the most important keyword, the most competitors, and you have some time to spend on your accounts.

[00:19:17] So it's feasible. But what's the advantage of the tool over a guy is that the tool will be working all the day, every day. The tool will be fetching with data, adjusting everything, not based on their gut feeling. Or what they think will be work or not, but based on the data itself, its performance, how it's converting and with a statistical significance.

[00:19:45] So it's just Maths, it's equations. We compute if it's a noisy signal or a true signal, if we have enough data or nuts to react and readjust. So basically this is, these are the two main. Important things for a machine handling based on machine learning that is just math or the fact that the machine is working.

[00:20:09] Seven days, 24 hour and is not overreacting. And the machine is taking all decisions based on statistics and not gut feeling that sometimes might be good, but at scale on thousands of keywords, it might not work all the time. So these are the main differences, in my opinion. Right. And how he let's, let's take the same question to you since you obviously deal a lot with PPC, you've put your ear to the wall and you follow almost everything that happens.

[00:20:38] What kind of advantage do you think a seller has when using these tools in comparison to your standard tools or just a PPC guy doing it manually? Well, it might be a, I might be kind of very biased on, but I don't know what to say, but because I'm all into automation and everything like that. So when you have this PPC, AI learning machine learning, that's kinda like, more like it's cruise control, you know, you got, yeah.

[00:21:10] Manually, you could do it, but how many people do you need? To have in order to be able to scale something really big, you know? So the, the machine itself is, could be scaled. You could have a hundred products, a thousand products, a hundred thousand products. It just works the same way. And it's not going to ask you for more, you know, more pay or, or anything like that because.

[00:21:32] It's just that a human, you would need a lot more people to do the same thing, you know, with so many accounts and so on. So if we were trying to we're, we're in the process of linking where keyword research to PPC, AI with launching products all in one system. So that's what we're working on right now for.

[00:21:55] Or are a signal that exciting is it signals and PPC is part of it. Yeah. You know, one of the biggest concerns Tarik that we've been talking about in the past couple of podcasts that we've had so far, this, this run around was the influx of Chinese sellers coming into Amazon and it seemingly not stopping.

[00:22:15] Right? What do you see? And this is why to me it's so fascinating because when we were in. One of how he's last masterminds in China. The one thing that I noticed going into the actual event into the factory that we were at, Howie, the office there were over 3000 people in this office and it seemed like the Chinese while their way of scaling was manpower.

[00:22:42] I'm curious, have you seen an influx of the need for Chinese sellers to want to automate or use some kind of software for their PPC versus what I saw, which was pretty much a company that was just hiring as many Chinese as they could to sit there and type things out. But have you seen an influx of these people that are using this type of software?

[00:23:03] So let me share an experience we had internally in 98, we had the, we had a client. That I think, yeah, I think he's the brand is, is Chinese and the client is Chinese and he was operating from China and it's not like most of our clients where it's at most 20 people work in between one to 20 people working in the company.

[00:23:30] There were a lot of them. So we can see that he has some, a lot of manpower available. It was a big brand. And what we noticed is these guys, they see and they understand what the machine learning can do, the value it will bring, but at the same time they are so micro-managing and they have so many people to do even.

[00:23:54] Thousands and thousands of operation, a days with the SOP and everything that it was almost incompatible with these two systems. You have a system that can do thousands, if not millions of operation on your own, on your behalf. And you have the teams, the structure, the culture, the issue is to do massive work.

[00:24:15] When you try to mix these two, you, you will have interference and competition between the two and sometimes it leads to non optimal strategies. So yes, if you want to do like perfect PPC, you need to spend a lot of time and a huge amount of operations need to be done. And when you want to do both, a lot of manual work with an automated PPC tool.

[00:24:43] It's not the best thing to do. So. Yeah, we, we felt, and we, we, we, we had that experience before with one of one Chinese clients that we, that we have. Same question for you Howie, Because I know you also have a lot of experience working with Chinese sellers, but do you see any of them ever attempting to adopt this?

[00:25:03] Or do you see them already adopting this? Because like I said, what I saw in the factory and you were there with me as well. Just 3000 people doing things that could have easily been automated, but yet they still chose to go with manpower. Every that's a culture thing, culture thing, where they're used to managing a lot of people.

[00:25:22] So for them to let go of the whole entire PPC and let the machine run, they're probably not used to and maybe in a way that they, this is still kind of new technology. They can't fathom how it really works. So they think that is, there's a lot of loopholes that is not a lot of bugs or a lot of things that the AI is not really looking at.

[00:25:45] So that's why they kind of macro manage. And then they ask questions here and there. And how does, does it look at this part? Does it do this? Does it do that? You know, so there's a lot of trust factor I would say as well. What do you think Tarik? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. There's also, as you said, it's culture and there's also this trust factor where it's super hard for them to delegate 100% to a machine.

[00:26:11] If they don't trust it 1000%, otherwise, as you said, they are, they are keeping asking again. Well, what if, what if, and try to check that there are no books, nothing which is. Which is good. When you are developing software, you need to always check all the corner cases and, and everything. But when you have a system that is working, so you just need to take.

[00:26:33] Get this. And of course, a system by itself, won't be doing all the jobs. So you need to have a system that is doing automation, but with a human on top of it that knows the business and the strategy to guide the system. So I think the problem with that type of maybe, yeah, maybe there is some of the culture, but I think we can find non-Chinese

[00:27:00] Sellers that have that type of profiles. And for these profiles, they just need to understand that automation, AI is there to do this huge work of selecting keywords, adjusting bids by every cent, but the strategy structuring the guidance, it's always on their side. So it's always on the agency side or on the brand manager side.

[00:27:27] So, this is what they need to, to keep in mind. Yeah. Anything to add there, Howie or any other questions that came up for Tarik? No, I, I, I'm not really. I kind of feel like I talked to him every day. It seems like I talked to you yesterday. Tarik.

[00:27:45] Yeah. I bet a lot of people would love to be a fly on a wall to hear one of you guys' conversation. So I certainly do not have a shortage of question. People know that out there that well, Howie's a man of few words. I can make up for those words with my mouth. So let me go ahead and continue asking Tarik a couple of questions that I'm curious about in Howie, if you happen to come up with anything, just go ahead and interject anytime you want.

[00:28:08] But Tarik, my next question for you is let's talk about the opportunities available on Amazon advertising as a whole. I'm sure there's so many of them, and that's probably a very broad question, but which ones spark up interest in your mind and which ones would you like to kind of talk to people about?

[00:28:26] Okay. So to be completely honest with you, there are less and less opportunities. So even when I have heard people talking about sponsored brand video as a huge opportunity, DSP as a huge opportunity, where there are a lot of free ads get easily. We are working with hundreds of clients. So I have access to the data.

[00:28:49] I see the strategies. I see the results. I don't think it's true. So let's just be honest. There is no easy opportunity left there on Amazon, especially on the advertising side. So today in my opinion, the best, you just need to have a good strategy, a good strategy where you are sure about your coverage.

[00:29:14] Either you are going after the important keywords or only the long tail or both, you should be sure about what you are covering, how you are covering it, but what type of matching you are using, making sure that all your matching types and your coverage is clean with no. Overlaps and you make sure that you are using all ad formats.

[00:29:38] So as you increase your chances to occupy more space, Because no, not all the ad formats are eligible for all placements on Amazon. So maybe if you are using only some formats, for example, sponsored products and that sponsored brand and display, you want to be eligible for some placement. So you reduce your opportunity.

[00:29:57] You might get so just make sure that you are covering all this. And there are different strategies to do that. And as long as you are piloting everything, Performance-based like based on ACOS or on your profit, you don't care. So the best opportunity for me is just to make sure that the coverage is perfect in terms of keyword and controlled, and there are different strategies to have.

[00:30:26] And also in terms of ad formats, What are the different available as from us, either the new ones or the already existing old ones, both. They are very good at working. And for the DSP side, it depends. I wouldn't recommend it as an opportunity unless the account, is super big, super big. I mean, making more than 5 million a year.

[00:30:53] And in this case, yes, maybe we can, you can, you could consider going for DSP to go find you other opportunities you can get from PPC. Anything to add there while I do agree with Tarik is just getting harder and harder. It's like when I started 2009 on Amazon, it was pretty easy. You just throw some products up and it would sell, and now it's getting harder.

[00:31:18] Now when you throw a product up. You might be lucky if you get one sales because you still have to rank those products now. So ranking it is costing a lot more before you had to, you could do a promotion codes. Now you're doing rebates, a lot of rebates. That's 100%. And then now, like there's all these PPC is now getting costs more and more with big brands.

[00:31:40] Like what Terry was saying before, you know, you're going to cost more and then it's going to the second bid price, you know? You know, everything is going to drive upwards as well as more and more people coming in. You're talking about Chinese coming in. You're talking about everyone, everyone, because of the pandemic, everyone has been putting out courses saying, Hey, go to do Amazon.

[00:32:00] You know, if you go in Tiktok, they say, go do, do Amazon. You know? So it's kind of hard too, not like before. So if you guys want to start. And make some money, at least not lose as much money to, to, to rank the same product, to sell the same product it's best to do as soon as possible and do it with if he could do it with a lot of money.

[00:32:22] So your resources. So you could do it all at one time. Right. And absolutely that's, that's some good, good opinions from both of you. I kind of agree with you. It gets less and less opportunity as time goes on. The barrier for entry gets higher and higher, and people just don't understand that they think, or they're sold the fact that.

[00:32:39] Amazon is still the biggest e-commerce platform out there. And it's pretty easy to sell, but that certainly isn't the case. And nowadays is how he said 2009. Those days are long gone. But Tarik, let's talk about, you've already spoken about PPC at a previous event. It was a lot of little details about PPC and I saw the talk twice.

[00:32:59] I just didn't. I just don't recall the name of it, but this time around what have you planned out to potentially talk about on this PPE 3.0. So there are a lot of very trendy subjects nowadays. One of them is same as mentioned, so the more and more formats you have available. On Amazon, plus the more and more channels you are using, you need to understand perfectly how says attribution is working on Amazon and understanding that can help.

[00:33:33] Not looking at your only your sponsor products as possible. It says you will be looking at your sponsored sales. Your organic sales is the mix of the two and linking that to the profit. So by understanding how the sales matching is working on Amazon, you will have a better understanding on which format to use, how to use them, how to do the math, to decide which targets you want to have.

[00:33:58] And this can be good subject to cover during the PPE. There are other subjects we discussed before with Howard, other related to different types of managements, different types of strategies you can have in PPC and, and other different other topics. Awesome. Howie is there anything that you've thought about Tarik potentially talking about?

[00:34:22] Or what is it, did you like something that he just mentioned? Well, I'm also like I'm thinking about maybe having a panel where we have some PPC experts that are doing agency without using a system like AI and comparing it with an AI. So maybe have a panel and let them talk. I think Lazar is here on this PPE 3.0, and we have

[00:34:48] Oh, terrific. Maybe they, we can communicate and see how maybe some kind of a discussion on, on both sides of the spectrum. Yeah, that sounds amazing. So I certainly for one would be looking forward to that, but, I think that wraps it up for everything that I have, unless you have anything to add Howie, let's get Tarik's final words.

[00:35:07] I'm trying to think about, I think last time when we were at the PPE 2.0 Tarik wasn't speaker, he was mainly a panelist on, on, on the subject of AI. It blew everyone's mind away because it's like Tarik is so technical and stuff like that. It was so smart. Everyone wanted to ask some questions I'm hearing there and then get kicked out of his brain and, and.

[00:35:29] Learn from him, but we always, I always talked to him about like ranking using AI to rank products and stuff like that. Not with, not with PPC, but in the same sense, learning the algorithm, learning Amazon's algorithm, but we're using an AI. So there's a lot of stuff that we go into detail and stuff. So there's, I'm not sure what else do I have to ask, but I'm sure that we're going to come up with some good topics that everyone would probably enjoy.

[00:35:54] Absolutely. And I just do want to remind everybody that Tarik did speak at PPE 1.0, so he did have a presentation there, although he did, And he was on the panel at PPE 2.0. And as I said before, he was crowd favorite at PPE 1.0, he was one of those and at PPE 2.0, people had so many questions for him. So I'm looking forward to hearing him on PPE 3.0, Tarik,

[00:36:14] Any final words from you before we say goodbye. Yes, my I just wanted to share how excited I am to participate to this event because there are always super good discussions. And also the audience is usually super technical. So the question are super technical. So I guess that the network networking there between the audience between people can be sometimes even better than the knowledge you can grab from some talks, at least mine.

[00:36:42] I'm not saying that. So my point is it's always a pleasure to do that. There are smart people asking questions. So if you participate. Take the time to talk to these people as well. In addition to the questions you will be asking. And my last final, I think I want to leave you with is 2021 will be so different because things are really changing on Amazon.

[00:37:08] And one of the biggest changes that I already mentioned is the fact that there are more and more people that are there to acquire sellers. So it's a good thing for all sellers because it makes the exits more feasible and maybe easier because at least there are more and more buyers. It will make things harder because of competition, but at least there's always this way of selling.

[00:37:36] And this will have a huge change in what will be happening in Amazon in the next year. Right. Absolutely. It digs so much street for being part of this. As I said, like you said, there are some very smart people asking some questions and there's a lot of shy people that don't ask questions, but like, I usually don't be afraid.

[00:37:53] We don't bite at least not virtually. So I look forward to seeing you and. To being at PPE  3.0, which is February 15th and 16th. So Mark your calendars and get that early bird pricing right now, which is 50% off the usual price. And this is the price that the usual brotherhood slash sisterhood of Amazon's most elite sellers pay for this.

[00:38:14] So once you pay that price forever, you are locked in at that 50% off deal. And trust me, when I say we've got people that re-attend these things, we got some people that have attended almost every single one of them. So I’m pretty sure that they will be at this one or at least they will be replaying it as you do get the replays forever.

[00:38:31] So you get to keep the replays forever. And that's the exciting thing about it. How he, any last words before I say the URL where people could get that early bird price at. Well, this time we're going to do a lot of really crazy, we call it like more of the networking side, right. Where we're actually designing the whole entire PPE 3.0 on a new concept of more of them than networking.

[00:38:54] It's kind of similar to what we what's out there right now for clubhouse. But in a, in a sense where you can actually virtual see each other and talk to each other and stuff like that. So it's gonna be pretty interesting how it will turn out, cause this is going to be our first time doing it. And we really think that this new technology and this new presentation and style.

[00:39:14] Will really be very attractive and very educational. Absolutely. So thank you, Howie for that, we finally got some words out of Howie didn't even have to buy him a shot. That's the great thing about Howie, sometimes he can surprise you. So to learn more about PPE 3.0, head on over to howardthai.com/PPE3 and again, early bird pricing.

[00:39:35] You've got about a week and a half to lock that in 50% off the usual price again, howardthai.com/PPE3 and on behalf of Howie, as well as Tarik, this is Liz signing off. I'll look forward to seeing you all there on February 15th at 16, have a great day. Welcome to the professors podcast, where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape.

[00:40:03] Your host Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.