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The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential.
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The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.
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When is the last time you researched something on a website? If you're like most people, AI did that work for you? And that raises a question. If AI is doing the work, what is your website really for? This behavioral shift means AI bots are becoming your most important new visitors. A challenge our sponsor Scrunch is taking head on. Scrunch is the customer experience platform that helps you understand how AI agents experience your site, when and why they show up, and what's blocking them from being retrieved, trusted or recommended. Scrunch shows you the content and citation gaps and technical blockers and helps you fix them so your brand shows up when consumers Start with AI because your most important site visitor might not be a human for our listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website audit that uncovers how AI sees your site and how you're showing up in AI versus the competition. Run your site through it@scrunch.com CMO welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company. And what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite? I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com and I'm here today with my guest Pete Imwalla. Today's topic Agency Economics in the age of AI now Pete worked at RPA, one of the largest independent agencies in the US for over 32 years, most recently as the CEO. RPA has over 500 employees and some notable clients including Honda apartments.com and La Z Boy. He also served on the board of the four as full disclosure, I work with Pete during my time at Farmers, which included the Professor Burke, We Know A Thing Or Two since we've seen A Thing or Two campaign. Probably the creative I am actually most proud of in my career. Welcome to the show Pete.
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C
Thanks Mike. It's great to be here.
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A
It's nice.
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C
I've been looking forward to this discussion I also regard that Farmer's campaign as one of the favorites of my career and I'm sure you heard that it recently won the sustained Effie for 10 years of effectiveness excellence. Creative people love Clios and can awards and all those things, but I think as business people, we love the EFFIE because they demonstrate effectiveness, not just creativity.
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A
Now you actually have to have business results attached to the creative to win an effie. So, yeah, that campaign did win a lot of effies and I am super proud of it. And I want to start by saying congrats on a great run through 32 years is an accomplishment for anybody. And I think you're in the catbird seat to be able to track the agency business through all the technology transformations including digital, mobile and now the age of AI. Give our listeners the cliff notes on how things have changed over the last three decades and then we'll drill down into a couple of these things.
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C
Yeah, it's funny, I think my career and a lot of yours hit it just the right time for the biggest change in a 30 year history of marketing. If you look at this period, all that happened with digital has changed everything we do in the way we do it. I started at RPA in 1993 and it just happened to be the year that we actually added the Prodigy network to the media plan. And when you think about it, the early days of the Internet, people think, was the World Wide Web. But the early days of the Internet for most consumers was one of three flavors. Prodigy, AOL or CompuServe. And each of them was basically a walled garden that you could get into and look at their content. But it wasn't until later in the 90s when the Netscape Navigator came along. And all of a sudden there were browsers that let the average person go to websites. In the early days, if you think about it, we used to call it web surfing because it was a hobby and curiosity wasn't core to anything we did for business. I always think that things that become core to business are the things that actually change consumer behavior. And I don't think consumer behavior really changed in the digital space until two things happened. One, Google came along and made it easy to find what you were looking for. There were search engines before that, but they didn't work quite as well. The other thing that happened was in the mid-90s to 2000s we started to get more and more broadband, and it wasn't until everybody could just turn on their computer or pick up a phone and be on the Internet that It changed the way people actually behave. Before that, you had to dial up and get information. It was faster to get movie information from the newspaper than to wait for your modem to connect to aol.
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A
Paul used to make that. And now. So we'll move from the Wayback Machine will move up to. And then mobile first. So the game changed digitally and then mobile comes on and changes everything. On top of that, I think that's the next big wave. And then. Yeah, yeah.
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C
And I think when mobile came along, a couple of things happened with clients and agencies. There were a lot of clients and agencies that didn't jump into that first wave of digital.
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A
Right. Because you were like, oh, my gosh, we can't. Someone else will figure it out. It's really slow.
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C
Right. I don't want to make the mistakes. I don't want to learn on my dime. Let somebody else do it. The funny thing is, over the last 30, 40 years, that's completely changed. Now everybody wants to be first and be early adopters because they want to get credit for that. But in those when mobile came along, there were a whole bunch of marketers who said, I got to be first at this. We got to be. We're going to have a mobile first strategy. I hate the idea of a mobile first strategy or an AI first strategy, or your strategy should be about your product and your market situation, not whatever's trending right now. And if you really look at it, mobile changed a lot because now that computer that you used to connect to the Internet on was in your pocket and available. And you talk about always on. Now it's always on and always with you. So I think the biggest changes have happened since that.
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A
And then obviously we're in AI, which we'll talk about in a minute, but you got the agencies on the other side of this, you got the marketers, companies working on all this stuff and now put us in the seat of the agencies. How did they adapt? And when you look back on the strategic and executional wins and losses agencies made during these revolutions, what goes through your head?
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C
Well, to me, I think that the biggest key to success in those early days of digital, and it continues to be as every new technology comes along, is you've got to have ownership and leadership that has a willingness to adapt and change. I always had a little bit of a techno geek in me, so I love the digital playground. But I think when I look at the people who helped build the early days of digital, they weren't all geeks and nerds. They were Just curious and open minded. They were people who weren't satisfied that the status quo was going to be the best way to do it forever. There were people who dug in and saw the opportunity in new things and embraced them. I think the agencies that adapted best had that tolerance for experimentation and failure.
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A
And there was, there was all kinds of pressure on the creative and then the cost and then the speed and then the can you actually keep up with the marketplace? What made the agencies that kept up, the ones that kept up versus the ones that disappeared or got bought up, what were the big differences?
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C
So I think it was basically that idea of the leadership being willing to invest in things that weren't paying off yet. For me, I always looked at the idea of the Internet and digital advertising as when I went to our owners Jerry Rubin and Larry Poster and wanted to make an investment. I would say we think this might be a huge part of our business in the future and that becomes both an offense and defensive play. You need to be there for the growth with your current clients, but you also need to make sure you have those skill sets so that your client doesn't need to go hire the next new digital boutique to do those things that might become core to the business. So in retrospect, I think it was pretty sound to look at what might be and invest along the way. What I don't like is the idea of trying to guess where that next thing will be and build everything and put all your chips in on that. Those kinds of decisions can turn against you in the long run. But digital really changed so much when you think about it. The early days of Digital, back in 1993, where I started talking about it, we could reach 40% of America by being on Cheers. Right Today, the only place you can get 40% of America is the Super Bowl. And how many marketers can afford $7 million for a 30 second commercial? Or 14 million if you actually want to get noticed with a 60. We are taking a short break for a word from our sponsor, Scrunch AI.
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Over the weekend I asked AI to do dozens of things for me. Please help me make this dishwasher start working. Settle a debate between me and my partner. Is it safe to sleep at 80 degrees?
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It's not.
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Please help me find a robotics kit for a five year old operating at a middle school level. And even help me compare the Scrunch Agent experience platform with Adobe's LLM optimizer. In every one of these interactions, I never once visited a website. In this day and age, what's your website actually for the truth is almost everything on your website is now for AI consumption. The Scrunch Agent Experience platform helps manage, optimize and deliver content directly for AI to retrieve.
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C
Now back to our show.
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A
Yeah, and you're wasting a lot of reach there too usually unless you are a very, very broad reach brand.
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C
So.
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So now we get to AI and you're watching agencies deal with this like so much change at so much speed and then we'll talk about the economics in a little bit. But when you look at AI and how it's impacting agencies and also the headcount structure, the creative changes, tell us what's going through your head.
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C
Well, there's a number of factors that are making life difficult for agencies right now and AI is just one of them. I, I think the biggest challenge for agencies, I think financially is the one that you've covered extensively, which is there are fewer and fewer people on boards and in C suites who actually believe that advertising is an investment. They think about advertising as an expense. And I think that's partly because there are more lawyers and accountants on boards and fewer people who came up through the product and marketing side. And I think it was much more common to have people who believed in advertising. The other challenge is that we're in this short term financial model where everybody's looking at this quarter and when you think about it, this quarter, really if you're thinking about what do I have to do to make this quarter good, you're making short term decisions. VCs are always looking at not what's the best thing to run this business over the next decade. They're thinking about what do I do to make this property value up. So when I flip it to when.
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A
I do the next round, I get, I get another round or I get out or I do an IPO and then I'm out.
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C
Right. So there only existed in existence is about maximizing the valuation of the company, not building a product or service that's better. Private equity does the same thing. They just try to maximize the valuation so they can flip it either to an IPO or another private equity. They trade them back and forth. There are fewer and fewer people running companies who are actually trying to create the best product and service and more people trying to make a good earnings call this quarter. If you're a CMO or a CEO, diverting dollars into brand advertising is a really difficult thing to do. Brand advertising is like infrastructure. If you have it, it's really easy to market. It's really easy to sell. It's really easy to build. If you don't have that infra, infra structure of brand advertising and you put all your money at the bottom of the funnel, you're going to juice things for this quarter, but it's going to get more and more expensive. You need more sales, more incentives. Brand building will help the next cmo, but not necessarily me.
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A
Well, and it's like trying to get fit in one quarter. If you're out of shape and you decide I'm going to get fit in one quarter, it's really, really challenging to do it even though we know Rocky did it. But, but, but I guess the other thing we had, we've had a couple shows on this and I'd love your thoughts on it. The first was performance marketing is one of the biggest brand misleading things in history because all marketing should be performance marketing. But it actually squeezed out, you know, a lot of the brand money. And then the second thing we had the head of the Marketing AI Institute, Paul Raitzer, come on and talk about. AI is going to be an extinction event for a lot of agencies, particularly the ones that are wed to the branding stuff. Tell us your assessment of all of that stuff. I just popped out.
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C
Well, first off, I thought the interview with Paul was great and it's funny looking back. That was a couple years ago. Yeah, and a couple years ago his predictions were pretty right on. He talked about the idea of agencies needing to adapt or die in this model. And we talk about adapt or die all the time in business. But this is one of those ones where I believe it's true in my opinion that transition to AI powered workflows and agentic solutions is the answer to many of those challenges I just outlined. Labor pools keep growing as the digital expansion happened. We've got so many bodies that are required to do all the different tasks. When you talk about performance marketing, when you talk about programmatic search, they're all driven by data and teams of resources. Those teams of resources are growing faster than media budgets are growing. So clients can't afford all the labor that it takes to use all these new tools. We're using agents. Solutions from AI and automation are actually potentially the solution to all those things that are ailing the agencies. We're having trouble making money because we've been growing faster from a body count point of view than we have from a financial point of view.
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A
And one of the biggest, if the biggest expense at agency is headcount right.
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C
It'S by most agencies are 60 to 75% salaries. That's the, that's the whole story.
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Yeah. So this adopt or die thing, which everyone says they're going to do, but this adopt or die thing means you have to cut that line item. And that is really a challenge, right?
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C
Yeah. And I think the biggest thing to me, I, I've been really excited about the AI opportunity for agencies because for me one of the problems is there's always a way to do it with fewer people than the best way, the way that takes all those bodies. But generally that way was cutting corners. It was finding a way to limit exploration or ideation. The thing about AI is it's going to take away a lot of the blocking and tackling and the time, you know, the really, really time intensive tasks, if those things can be shrunk, then there's more time for the thinking. If you, if you think about it, there's so much work that's done in media and strategic planning before we ever even buy or huge amounts of work. Those, those days and hours that are taken up. A lot of it is just pulling all the information that a strategist or planner needs so that they can make educated recommendations. If you can create an agent to pull all the sources that you generally tap into for a strategic plan, you could create an agent to do that. It would put you on third base. You jump right to the part where I use my brain instead of pulling data. I'm just looking at it.
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A
But this is, this is a dramatic change for a huge amount of agencies because it says you have to be able to do this with the new tools. You have to have faith in the new tools and you have to lose the heads at somehow simultaneously while you're doing this. Because your clients expect you to do all this, right?
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C
Yep.
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So this, the agents. Oh, go ahead.
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C
No, I think that's, I mean, clients are expecting it. And it's funny because I think clients are getting directions from their board, CEOs and lawyers saying two things. Get us the savings that will come from this cheaper workflow and cheaper production, but don't do anything that will risk our IP or data. And so they're hesitant, but hopeful. And I think that we're at that point where we really can give clients more work for the same or less money than they've already paying because we really can shrink that work. One of the biggest challenges though is that almost all client agency relationships are based on FTEs. Yeah, procurement people love FTEs. The problem with FTEs in an AI transformation, and that's full Time equivalent.
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If you're keeping score.
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C
Right. You're deincentivizing efficiency.
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Yes.
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C
You're saying the bigger your team is, potentially if you can sell that big team, you make more money. What we really want is a way to say let's pay for the outcomes, let's pay for the deliverables, not let's pay for the bodies and the head counts. There's always a tension between the agency wanting more people, both to do the work, to make the work easier to do for the number of people they have, and to make more money so they can grow their teams and people. I believe that AI is the way that we can do all the work that our clients need and keep those costs manageable and down.
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A
Well, inherent in what you have just said is agencies that don't do this will either have a massive profitability squeeze because the clients will be shopping, or they'll go out of business. Is that a fair way to look at it?
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C
I believe so. I think your conversation with Paul was really interesting in that he broke it down and said there's three kinds of agencies in the future. Ainative those agencies that are new. They're built from the ground up with AI at their core. They have high margins, small headcounts, they move fast. AI emergent. Existing agencies that aggressively adopt AI to transform their services and business models, they'll survive and potentially thrive. And I think that's where the majority of agencies will be. Some more emergent and faster than others. And then there's the obsolete. The agencies that ignore AI or wait too long to adapt. They will quickly see that their scope of work is it can't be done at a competitive price to their competitors who are using these tools. That's the biggest challenge we have right now is the labor means your price is higher. So if you want to do things by hand, you can, but they're going to cost more. And then no one's going to choose you.
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A
And give me a breakdown for AI Native versus emergent versus out of business. When you just look at the whole agency landscape, go out like four or five years and say how many will be in each category, like what percent of business or anything like that. Could you give me?
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C
Just, I don't know, it's hard to say. But I would say there will be no big and successful agencies that are doing it all by hand that aren't using tools. It takes too much labor to do the work today. So there are so many teams of people that are taking existing data from one source and Pasting it into another source and then running analysis of those tools. All of that can be shrunk into an agentic solution that automates. So I think that there's a couple of things here. There's a lot of agencies that are waiting for the big new AI tool that comes to them. Like the office suite, right where you hand me the tool. And now I just have to learn the tool and use it. And I've been saying for the last three years, we developed a task force three years ago and said, okay, start experimenting, start learning, start educating the rest of us so that we can stay up on this and make the investments where it makes sense. The biggest place that I see investment opportunities turn into better business right away is in the low hanging fruit of what are the repetitive tasks. Media planning is thousands of hours of data from. It's thousands of hours of pulling data from known resources. And I don't mean that there's no human intervention or value add there. What I mean is there's so much data pulling and grunt work that's done before. The human intervention and value add, that part can all be shrunk. If you're not shrinking that right now, you're not going to be here in five years. You won't be competitive, you'll just be too expensive in the way that you work and you'll get to faster, better solutions with these tools that give your people more time to think and ideate.
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A
And then when I look at the landscape, I think there's been, you know, just we hear from a lot of our listeners, that publicist has been doing pretty well and is moving pretty hard on this front. The merger of Omnicom and you know, that may not be, it may not work as well as as hoped or on paper. And a lot of this is open field for, you know, bidding on business and moving stuff around. How do you, how do you look at that landscape?
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C
Yeah, I'm, I'm really curious to see how the holding company model changes. I do think Publicis by all measures has done the best job of the major holding companies in integrating these tools and selling clients on their solution. Agency valuations are down dramatically over the last five years. And part of that has to do with the other things we've been talking about.
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A
COVID But when you say dramatically, is that like what percentage is that?
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C
So if you look at just pure evaluations, a lot of them are down 40% over a five year window. Now if you, the only one that's actually up over a five year window is Publicis. And that has mostly to do with media buying investments. If you look at where their business growth has come, it's mainly been around media and data investments. So those media data investments they made and they have been able to capitalize on those better than the other holding companies. I think that one of the challenges though, and one of the interesting things about this is there's this. I saw an interesting article the other day that was talking about in AI, there may be a second mover advantage, which I love that we create terms for. I wasn't first and I wasn't last, but being second is probably. I've always thought that being inside the bleeding edge of development was a safe, smart place to be. And I think that's what the second mover thing is. When you think about it, the AI tools, like the early days of web browsers, you'd build your website for Netscape 2.0, right? By the time you finished it, you needed Netscape 3.2. And today we're in the same thing where people that built all their agent tools and AI solutions two years ago, good, you were ahead of the game. Bad news is the tools to do all those things today are readily available right out of the box. You don't have to build all that stuff. And the people trying to build it to catch up have an easy task ahead of them.
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A
Because we just had a venture capitalist on talking about no one knows how much compression is going to come on this and the circular trading of money and investing may all be for naught if you find a whole new technology for processing. So there's lots of, lots of things to watch. So what should our listeners be thinking about as they evaluate their agency or the. Or do their pitches or they're working with their agencies or vice versa? How should the agencies be talking to clients?
- [26:54]
C
Well, for me, I think the most important thing you can do when looking at these new tools is there's a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of expectation, there's a lot of fear that you're going to be doing things with AI and charging me for labor. There's a lot of fear that people will be in housing. To me, the most important thing in any good client relationship between agencies and clients is just honesty, integrity, sharing where you're at, looking at the challenges, sharing some of those expenses, sharing some of the learnings. One of the things that's good about an agency for a client is that generally an agency has this same experience and learning curve going on with 15 or 20 other clients.
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A
Right.
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C
That learning can benefit you. So being open to the idea of, hey, we did this for farmers, that might work for you, we did this for somebody else, it might work for you, or we saw that this didn't work for apartments.com, i wouldn't want you to make the same mistake. Those are all good things. But I think there's legal challenges, there's development challenges. So to me, the thing that I would look at first is that low hanging fruit of build agents that replace the repetitive labor intensive work that you do. Be open and honest about it. Find a pricing model that works. The agency should be able to build an agent and use it for less than they're charging for all the FTEs right now. If it's truly done well and replacing a lot of labor, at the very least, let the agency keep the same fee and start replacing people with tools. Now I know that sounds Machiavellian, that we're just getting rid of jobs and we're going to replace them with people, but the reality is the agencies and the client structures that replace people with tools will protect most of their people. The agencies and clients that don't want to replace any of their people with tools will protect none of their people from the future. So to me, we've got to keep finding that balance.
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A
And this to me is the marketplace. You can't, the marketplace is going to do this whether you do it or not. So you, you probably, it's like gravity. You, you, you know, you touched on something here that I want to follow up on, which is a lot of companies are thinking about in housing, a lot of this stuff saying we'll just do it ourselves. The agencies aren't fast enough or we're not big enough to do it. Talk about in housing and your thoughts on that.
- [29:28]
C
So in housing has been really interesting for the last five years. I think every ANA event I've been to, they talk about in housing. And I think where the pressure to in house is coming from is goes back to the earlier discussion about advertising is expensive and if it's looked at as an expense, not an investment, we definitely want to figure out how to spend less. So I think there's this sense of if we did these things ourselves, we could save money. Now I think there's two points of view on that. One, there are some things that clients can do themselves that they're paying outside people for. But I do think that CFOs and boards and CEOs that are pushing this are sometimes forgetting that it's not just the programmatic or performance marketing team you need. You need the data analytics team that comes behind it, and you need the licenses for Simmons and MRI and Nielsen and all these tools that agencies have that they share and amortize over many clients. I would say the place to take things in house are those things that you can own where you're not missing out on the skill sets that agencies amortize over. Lots of clients, there's lots of production work, there's lots of versioning work, there's lots of data management work that clients can take in house. I think there are some clients who can take all their marketing in house. I would say look at those places that you think you can actually replicate internally for the same or lower cost. And look at that. But just remember, some of those things that you invest in, you might build a team for Programmatic today, and Programmatic today might be completely AI driven next month.
- [31:12]
A
Yeah, everyone was buying all their own ad servers a number of years ago.
- [31:17]
C
Right. So if you build those tools, you're going to have to rebuild all of them. Even as an agency leader, I always looked at, is this something we should build or something we should buy? If it's something that, like Media Ocean is the big one, or NetSuite big programs that lots of agencies buy, well, you buy them because even though you probably have the technical skills to build those things, it's this much of what you do. Some other company that builds that tool can amortize those development costs over thousands of clients. So they're going to be able to keep investing in it and stay at the front of the marketplace. If we build it ourselves, we're going to build it and then it's going to degrade over time and we're going to have to build it again or then buy it. So I always think that build it versus buy solution is a good one.
- [32:03]
A
And I think that's a good one. And beneath that, I hear you saying, look, there's economies of scale here where a lot of the things you may have to build give you no edge. They're just infrastructure things. And that you should be really aware of when it's just that infrastructure economy of scale versus some kind of thing you think you have to own because you're going to drive the cost down.
- [32:26]
C
Yeah. And I think it's interesting. I was just doing some research on consulting in this space and one of the things that I've seen with in housing is that it's frequently driven purely by efficiency. And again, Back to our earlier conversation. When you and I look at marketing investment, we're thinking about what's the best return on investment we can get for this dollar. You know, if you look back in the early days of geico, Warren Buffett bought that company and said, what's keeping you from growing? And they said, well, every time we advertise we see spikes, but we can't afford to keep advertising. So we get this up and down whenever we can advertise. And he's like, okay, well here's a hundred million, you know, more, advertise more, and let's see how it goes. Well, those spikes kept happening every time they advertise. So they went from $100 million to $1.3 billion in investment before they actually saw a lack of return on that additional investment. Right.
- [33:27]
A
Sadly, I was playing against them then and they were just like they were, I mean, the most expensive category, I think, in the, in the marketplace with insurance. Hey, so. So, Pete, before we get to our traditional last question, and you're talking to all the agencies and marketers out there, what should people test by the end of 2026 or a list of things they should absolutely test so they have a better view of 27.
- [34:01]
C
So I think the thing to test is first off, if you're not already deeply involved in this digital transformation to AI tools, obviously that's where it starts. I think the thing that people have to realize is we need to look at it from top down. You have to have senior management involved in AI and indoctrinating and pushing people, because what you've got are lots of different people who adopt to new innovation differently. And you have some people who think, I have this curiosity, I want to learn about it. What can this tool do for me? You have other people who think, will this replace me? Yeah, the most valuable people are the people who think, what can I do with these new tools? And the biggest lifts that we've gotten from AI and the places that I've been involved is from people figuring out how to adopt AI in their current workflow. Just look at the current workflow. We started by asking people, we went on, had an off site and we asked everybody before the off site. Spend the next three weeks asking your teams what their biggest pain points are for work. Just work in general. Don't tell me what AI tools you need, tell me what isn't working. Tell me where you're spending a lot of time and labor that doesn't seem valuable. And they came back with almost everything they came Back with was tedious work that automation could solve. Those tedious things that automation could solve are the first wins. You can solve them easily. You can get wins, you can build momentum. And you can teach those people who thought, maybe my job will be replaced by this. Instead of resisting it, I'll be one of the people who learns how to adopt it. So to me, there's a big, big need for culture and change management. You got to get people into the idea that these tools are coming whether you like it or not. So be one of the people that learns how to use them instead of one of the people that resist them.
- [35:56]
A
I think a great way to bring us to our traditional last question. It's a two parter. You have to take one or you can take both. But you must take at least one practical advice we haven't discussed yet and or the funniest story you can tell on the air. Yours to go with at least one of those two things or both.
- [36:17]
C
So there's lots of funny stories. I think the challenge is almost all of them would embarrass somebody and most likely me.
- [36:28]
A
You're okay with that? On CMO conference, I'll go with the.
- [36:32]
C
Practical advice because one term I hear in business, in general, in marketing, and definitely as it relates to digital transformation and AI, is this idea of future proofing. I hear it all the time. And I hate the term future proofing because what future proofing generally means is I have to look into the crystal ball, predict what the future will be, and then build for that solution. The problem is nobody has a crystal ball. We haven't been good at figuring out what's going to happen in 2027, in 2025. So for me, the most important way to future proof yourself is not try to guess and use clairvoyance, but it's to try and appreciate and support the people who are curious. Build a team of explorers instead of a group of people who want to build to what they think the future will look like. And if you have people that work together and are curious and are continually learning, you're going to have a team that can compete with anybody in the future. So for me, future proofing isn't jumping to the future. It's building a team that's adaptive. It's building a team that you can support through thick and thin. They're not always going to get it right, but they're going to get it right more often than they're going to get it wrong.
- [37:48]
A
They're going to get a lot more right. Than the future proofers who, if three and a half years ago had predicted the AI revolution. No one actually predicted that. So a lot of future proofing is, I think, pretty hilarious and sage advice. Thank you Pete and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying CMO Confidential, like subscribe and share new shows. Drop every Tuesday on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. Our catalog gives you access to over 150 shows, including what your agency wants to tell you but won't. Parts 1, 2 and 3 Colonel Mustard in the study with the job specific how poor design is shortening CMO lifespans. Is AI an extinction event for agencies? And is the CMO position the hardest job in business? Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. When is the last time you research something on a website? If you're like most people, AI did that work for you. And that raises a question. If AI is doing the work, what is your website really for? This behavioral shift means AI bots are becoming your most important new visitors. A challenge our sponsor, Scrunch, is taking head on. Scrunch is the customer experience platform that helps you understand how AI agents experience your site, when and why they show up, and what's blocking them from being retrieved, trusted or recommended. Scrunch shows you the content and citation gaps and technical blockers and helps you fix them so your brand shows up when consumers start with AI because your most important site visitor might not be a human. For our listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website audit that uncovers how AI sees your site and how you're showing up in AI versus the competition. Run your site through it@scrunch.com CMO.