← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Martech 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.
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Benjamin Shapiro
From advertising to software as a service
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Chris Golic
to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person
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Sponsor Voice
with the right message and a clear call to action.
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Chris Golic
Then it's just a matter of timing.
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Podcast Announcer
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro
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Benjamin Shapiro
70% 70% of B2B marketing firms can't act on their marketing attribution Data According to Sixth Sense, the struggle to connect business results is a blind spot that renders almost all of our attribution data useless. With more consumers leaning on zero click AI experiences to find research, even buy your products, the hidden customer journey is happening outside of your analytics and it's costing you pipeline, misallocating your budget and crediting the wrong channels for the revenue you've actually earned. So how do you illuminate the dark funnel to understand which of your marketing investments are driving revenue? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Chris Golic, the former founder of Demandbase and the current founder and CEO of Channel 99, a company that is solving marketing attribution challenges by revealing the source of three times the website visitors compared to your industry standards. And today, Chris is going to explain how to illuminate the dark funnel problem that is costing you millions in misattributed revenue. Time for a short break to hear
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Sponsor Voice
from our sponsor, Scrunch. When was the last time you actually visited a website to research something for me?
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Benjamin Shapiro
AI does all that work now.
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Sponsor Voice
So if AI is doing the discovery research and deciding who or what is your brand's website really for the rise of AI bots becoming as important as new visitors is a massive change in user behavior. And that's what Scrunch is taking head on. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results where it doesn't. And what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted or recommended? It's not just visibility. Scrunch shows you the content gaps, citation gaps, and how to fix the technical blockers that matter so your brand is found and chosen in AI answers. Face it, your most important site visitor isn't human anymore. It's the AI deciding what gets surfaced. And from our tech podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps and where you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com martech that's scrunch S C-R-U-N-C-H.com martech Chris, welcome to the Martech podcast.
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Chris Golic
Hi Ben, thanks for having me.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you here. Congratulations on the launch of a new company after the launch of a very successful company. You're a multi time founder and you stayed in the space. Why aren't you on a beach somewhere?
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Chris Golic
I just, I love the torture. I just can't get enough of it.
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Benjamin Shapiro
You know, some of us are B2B marketers for life. Or founders in your case. Let's start off at the top here. I want you to walk me through how direct traffic is misattributed and why that breaks everything else in your marketing data.
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Chris Golic
Sure. So just by definition, Google Analytics, all these different web analytics systems take any traffic that does not come from a specific click and they throw in a bucket called direct and another word or better word would probably be unknown. So it's all the traffic where people have just typed in the website and it typically makes up 80% of a B2B marketer's website traffic. And so to me, if you're ignoring the largest signal on your website, you're going to get the wrong answer from any kind of measurement tool. So we felt like we have to solve for that before we can move on to make investment decision recommendations and leverage AI and do all these fancy things. But solving this direct or dark funnel is imperative.
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Benjamin Shapiro
There's always this is not a new problem. Right. We've been looking at the direct traffic button scratching our head for like 15 years since Google Analytics became popular. Is it a growing problem? Are we seeing more content being or more visitors being counted as direct than before?
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Chris Golic
Absolutely. I mean, you and I both probably click less on emails, don't click on ads. So this proportion of clickless engagement is just increasing and I can't imagine it going back.
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Benjamin Shapiro
We have More zero click happening. Mostly with the rise of AI and people coming direct, there's more information being given. The buyer journey is changing. So what's the methodology to actually make some sense out of this when your last click attribution is becoming less and less valuable. And that's mostly what Google Analytics is looking at. How do you start to figure out and actually do attribution in a way that makes sense?
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Chris Golic
Well, I think it's all about uncovering that data direct or unknown channel. Where is it really coming from? And the answer, it's not a simple one. It's a multifaceted approach where you can look at all the traffic coming from display ads, where people see the ad and then come to the site. Some of that can be solved with tracking pixels, where you look at not tracking the user but understanding this company just viewed the ad and then came to my website within 10 seconds. So you can kind of associate those impressions to website visits. In the case of organic social or LinkedIn, there are APIs now that we integrate with where you can look at the accounts that are reading my social posts and then coming to my website. And again, it's through timestamps that you can associate those and the same thing for even email or events or meetings. You can look at the activities in the campaign object within the CRM system and associate activity on the site immediately following an email or a call. And so all that can get tied together. So the short answer is it's a combination really of tracking pixels, which we call smart pixels APIs as well as ties into the CRM system. But when you put it all together, what you do find is this view through attribution is typically four or five times greater than the click through.
- [07:46]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's funny, I was at ebay early in my career and one of the two teams that I was working on when I first started there was the display advertising team. And so we had this novel concept nobody has ever heard of before, of a view through attribution metric. When we pixel and somebody has viewed the ad, do they end up coming to the site and converting? Oh my God. It was mind blowing. Fifteen years down the road, we're still saying, you know, it's a great way to figure out if somebody actually was influenced by your ad View through metrics. So again, what's old seems to be new here. Is there any change in, you know, we dropped a pixel on somebody's browser when they were served the ad and then when they got to the site we look back and saw if that Pixel was there and said, all right, that person must have been influenced by the ad. Has anything new happened with how viewthrough is calculated?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, I think we look at it from an account centric approach because we're not using cookies to track a person. And so our ViewThrough actually does three things. One are, who are the accounts viewing the ads, number one? Number two, are they in the right target audience? Meaning is my ad technology provider serving the ads to the right companies? And then three is the view through piece, what's the actual engagement? And then roll that up. And one of the things we often find too is that quite often display ads or organic social will be the first impression, but the next action that the person takes is they do paid search and then, and then come to the site and everybody thinks it's paid search that's driving the first click, when in fact it was some other source. So you need, you need to consider all these things together and really parse it out and re. Re. Allocate to the proper.
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Benjamin Shapiro
You've mentioned a couple times that we look at the account level, not the personal level. Is that a privacy concern? You just don't want to be tracking individual users. Is there a reason why the account level is more of the focus when the personal level seems like you can actually be much more targeted by things like job function, title, that sort of deal?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, I think, you know, we sell in the big enterprise. You know, we're working closely with LinkedIn, so we, we always take a very privacy forward approach to everything we do. And you know, we're trying to relate the attribution not to a person, but to a company. And when you look at the account, which is primarily a network ip, but we also look at the user agent, which gives us enough uniqueness to an individual without having to track the person.
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Benjamin Shapiro
When you say the user agent, you know, I think of user agents and maybe this just being in the. The podcast spaces, are they listening in Apple or are they listening in Spotify? Like that's. It's essential. And you could look at the browser. Are you looking at a user agent getting down to the individual device level or what information?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, it's a combination of operating system resolution, computer type. So, you know, typically, not to get too geeky, but I can.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's the Martech podcast. Geek away.
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Chris Golic
Right. So like, as far as network IP addresses, typically 30, 40 people will surf out of the same IP address within a corporation. And so when you add user agent on top of that, you get enough uniqueness to know that this is the person that just saw the ad, came to the site.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I guess that's really what I'm trying to get to is like, you know, for our production business, we want to target mid market B2B buyers, you know, 10 to $100 million. And we're looking for the marketing decision makers. So VP, CMO level titles.
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Chris Golic
Right.
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Benjamin Shapiro
There are individual people that we want at these organizations. They're thousand people that could work out as an organization. I want two or three of them. So you know, obviously I want to understand attribution, but I don't care if the director of finance is seeing our ads, I want the head of marketing. So when you're at the account level, you seem to sacrifice some of that granularity. And that's kind of why I'm like, all right, you're triangulating an entire company. Is that what people really want?
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Chris Golic
Whether they want it, that's what they do need. Too many times people target their way out of business, meaning they think that they're just selling to one or two people. In fact, there's a buyer group and there's all these hidden buyers in legal and procurement and all these functions that if you're not selling to them early up front and building awareness and trust, you're not going to be part of the sales cycle. It's just that's the way the world's going.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So the buying group is large and multifunctional and I understand targeting the entire organization. And then we were talking about the view through metric and how well social comes first and that's generally the top of funnel, the demand creation let's call it. And then there's this mysterious research phase where everybody goes to AI and gets all of their information. And then maybe at the bottom they're either coming direct or they're clicking a, a paid search ad. They're going through some PPC channel which hey, now we can give all the credit to, you know, your, your AdWords campaign. How do you assign value to those different channels? Right, you're looking at a view through metrics to say did the person see one of these multiple marketing channels we have? How do you figure out what gets them to move at least to the next part of the buyer journey or contribute to the conversion?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, at a high level, you know, we look at the amount of spend that's invested in a particular channel and the amount of pipeline that gets influenced. And that's a very common kind of pipe influence to dollar invested in B2B, it might take a while to get that kind of data metrics. So One of the KPIs that we like to use, and it allows us to look at vendors and channels kind of on an unbiased Apple, Apple's basis. And that is what does it cost me to engage a target account on paid search, LinkedIn or you know, demand based display ads or whatever it is. And that's always a very true leading indicator to pipeline impact. And when you look at that kind of KPI, the two kind of hidden things that people typically don't consider is, okay, out of all the companies that are being gauged, what percentage are from my addressable market who could actually be customers? That's one hidden factor. And that can range from 10% to 90%. And so the other piece is all this view through attribution. If I'm not looking at all the visits that LinkedIn is generating from all my organic social posts, I'm probably missing 70% of the engagement that LinkedIn is helping to drive.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It scares me a little bit going by the. And this isn't exactly what you're saying, but if it costs more, it's more valuable, right? Like your percentage of spend to engage a channel. Right. I want the cheapest engagement that has the maximum impact, you know, And I guess that leads me to, okay, I can go through display and put my banner ads in front of people and the cost per engagement or the cost per view is a fraction of a cent. And then I can publish a podcast and try to drive somebody to the YouTube video. And the cost per view is way, way higher. But those aren't exactly the same experience, right? Having somebody consume content and watch this video, it's 25 to 45 minute video. It's a lot different than, well, as they were scrolling through Facebook, an ad showed up and they thumbed right by it. So how do you evaluate not only like what the cost per engagement is, but essentially the weighted value of those engagements and specifically which channels actually drive stronger intent?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, I mean it's in the world of intent, I always kind of, I put it in two camps. One, I'll call it explicit intent, where somebody read your social post or they're on your website, they're looking at your G2 profile. That's pretty explicit intent around your business. 90% of the intent world though is people selling data about this company read an article about this, therefore they're in market. To me that's implied and it's fabricated or manufactured intent. Unfortunately, that's the Majority of the the industry out there. And so we kind of dedicate our focus to what we call explicit intent. And it is things like hey, three people from this company read this social post and then engaged on my website. They're in my target market, really high intent signal. If somebody's going to take the time to read a long article or and then come to the site, that's way more interesting to me than somebody that just clicks on an ad.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, to me I think, you know, if I'm stack ranking the time of engagement is the most important factor to understand how much knowledge they have about you or your content. And I am clearly biased as we record this video with high fidelity and production costs and all the things that go into creating a great podcast. But I think it makes a much bigger impact when somebody is sitting, watching a video or listening in audio only and they're consuming minutes, if not, you know, an hour of content as opposed to a drive by image with a tagline. So you know, your, your media to me is the top of the funnel in terms of the maximum amount of engagement and the things that are scrolling, you know, are the least amount of engagement. Now look, it's much harder to get somebody to watch a YouTube video than it is to scroll by your ad. What do you think is the sort of stacked ranked of impact of the various channels?
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Chris Golic
Gosh, you know, I think it, it all depends on who you're trying to sell or market to. And I, you know, I say this to every customer, every presentation because we'll share a case study comparing the financial efficiency of paid search versus LinkedIn and people think LinkedIn is premium priced but we took 15 customers, did all the data, looked at their addressable markets and lo and behold, for every thousand dollars, LinkedIn was four times more efficient than paid search at engaging potential customer. Period. Now is that true for everybody? Absolutely not. It depends on who your target customer is. So getting to your question, I think it's always a combination of channels and mix time engagement. The beautiful thing now if you have all your data harmonizing, unified at the account level, all tied to CRM system, you can tie it right into ChatGPT and start asking questions and let it do the heavy work.
- [19:31]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's funny, I was just about to ask you that. It's like, okay, so we now have this understanding of the value of channels in some capacity and your system uses an account based approach to go make sure that we are getting to the right people. How do you use AI or what are the methodologies now to make sense of the underlying attribution data. It seems like it's always been a mess and you could throw mmm at me and all these other acronyms like the TLA word salad of like. Well, here's the methodology. We have artificial intelligence. How are people using AI to actually understand attribution better than what we were doing before?
- [20:11]
Chris Golic
Yeah, you know, it's funny, Ben, it's very timely. We, we just created an MCP server which is basically the way we connect all of our data to copilot or cloud or whatever it is that we're using. And literally just last week I was on my phone and I just typed in, hey, if we want to generate $10 million of pipeline from the health care sector next year, what vendors and what should the mix be and how much should we spend? Within 12 seconds on my phone, everything was laid out, why it was laid out, all the key metrics, it was all foundational and you know, it was a lot of time out.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Timeout. Hang on, hang on.
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Chris Golic
Crazy.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yes. In 12 seconds your phone told you a strategy and a media plan, but is it right? Like it's always going to respond with a coherent sounding answer. Why do you have faith in it?
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Chris Golic
Because it's based on how much I'm paying to engage a target account from, from that sector. Uh, it's a lot of it's fact based versus the converse of that is. Okay, I'm gonna have my team go away for a month and come back with a bunch of opinions that are based on who they're friends with, at what vendors and all these other things. So to me, one is I can trust in 12 seconds. And it's a way better starting point that's fact based than what we've been doing historically. And it's just going to get better and better. Of course we got to just keep improving the models.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yes. I read an article yesterday, I forgot who wrote it, about how we've passed the tipping point for engineers and they are now no longer useful and AI is coming for your job next. One of the big doomer articles of artificial intelligence is becoming Skynet.
- [22:08]
Chris Golic
Well, I do think one thing, and obviously this is timely as well. A year from now, you know, are people going to be logging into five different systems or are they going to be their primary interaction is going to be with gen AI and everybody's going to be plugging all their different data and systems in and that's going to be your primary interaction point.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I can't believe how much time I've spent in my computer's terminal over the last month. And so we used to use these beautiful, well designed web apps that had these wonderful experiences and were sort of filtering out all the stuff we don't need to see. And now I'm in this like ugly text box doing all sorts of coding. God knows what happens to all of our jobs over the next six months to a year. But my hope is we can migrate back to some sort of a visual design aesthetic as we're using these new tools. And maybe there is a centralized tool, but it seems like artificial intelligence is dragging us to the root of development as opposed to something that is easy for us to consume, which I hope that we sort of level back into a place that makes our jobs a little easier, at least honestly, a better user experience.
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Chris Golic
Well, I think it's, I think you'll see in future versions it's going to go from, you know, today is primarily text and tables, charts are coming, interactive charts are coming. Like it's just going to get better and better. So why go out and build a software company that has a bunch of charts and tables? And I can tell you, all of our large enterprise customers, they want all our unique data and insights. They don't want another dashboard. They just don't.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, yeah. Yes, there's a unification of how we interpret all of our data and our systems are all blending together with this fortunately, hopefully, single source of truth that has good judgment. And I think we're getting to the point now where we actually have artificial intelligence that can make reasonable judgments on what we mean and so we don't have to be as specific. I still have questions about how marketers evaluate and compare channels. It seems like we've got a unified system that is coming with artificial intelligence. But when I look at the various advertising channels, you know, where I spend most of my time in Google and in Meta, and they're all evaluating and grading their own homework, Right? So when you look at the various platforms, they all take credit for anything that they, you know, they sat next to in class and they said, well, if that person got an A, then I got an A. How do you make sense as you're thinking through evaluation and attribution of the data that's coming in when you know that the platforms are all trying to grab as much credit as they can.
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Chris Golic
Well, that's part of the whole premise of having kind of unbiased KPIs and, you know, just go back to my days at Demandbase when we launched this, you know, B2B advertising technology and customers were judging us based on cost per click. And we're like, well, we're driving so much more engagement, not getting credit for it. And we came up with this metric called Lyft. So if you were going to advertise to 100 companies, we looked at the traffic that you were getting from those hundred companies and then the increase or lift from those hundred companies during the campaign, we kind of held water. But a lot of people were just very non scientific. And the answer to that is it's all view through attribution. And now that can all be substantiated and proven for the most part. And. But people want a third party or a trusted independent source and that's kind of where we come in on a lot of these things.
- [25:57]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. So the last question I have for you here was one of the things that I noticed when I was looking through Channel 99's website is you're able to identify more site visitors than the industry average. I think it's like three times 60, 70% of of site visitors. You're able to identify them on an account level. Why is and how is that possible?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, so we basically use a network solution where we have multiple sources of providers. So think of it as a waterfall effect of using sources to detect bot traffic and then we use public registry data and then we have APIs out to multiple providers, riders. And by doing that, one of the things I learned that actually surprised me, to be honest, Ben, I assumed that there was a lot of overlap between the different ABM companies. The reality is they've kind of come up with their own unique methodologies to uncover. You know, Ben is might be coming through Comcast, but that IP address is associated with his company. And we kind of peel back that veil. And so Demand Mason might have one approach, six Sense might have an approach. HubSpot, clearbutt might have an approach. And when you combine multiple providers, you get something much greater.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's the sum of all parts. All right, Chris, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your career. Attribution, demand generation. We're going to spin the wheel and see what comes up. Are you ready?
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Chris Golic
Sure.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, question number one. We're going to talk a little bit about motivation. You sold your first company for $380 million and pioneered an entire category with demand base. Why are you here and what stopped you from retiring to your lake house in Michigan?
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Chris Golic
Yeah, well, I don't have a Lake House in Michigan, and it's really cold there, but I do like to go there in the summer. It's a beautiful place. You know, it's just passion for the, the industry. And, you know, when I started Demand Based, the initial vision of the company was to be a supply chain solution for marketers. And so that's effectively what channel 99 is. So it's a little bit of unfinished business. But I love building companies, the people culture. I love seeing, like, employees that become best friends and go on. They might go on to different companies. And that's pretty gratifying for me.
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Benjamin Shapiro
And so most of us, you know, we're on the other side not having had this giant windfall. And so we're still earning and working with A, because we have to, and B, because we also have something to prove. After the exit, how did that turn? You're obviously working. You said you have unfinished business, but it's not about the result for you. So, you know, I want a little bit more about the motivation. And again, like, it's the result for
- [29:08]
Chris Golic
the people I work with. It's, you know, result for families. You know, there's a lot more motivation than just a financial one. So, you know, I'd also say whatever you think somebody made out of something, cut it in half step.
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Benjamin Shapiro
We never talk about the taxes after you sell your company.
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Chris Golic
Yeah, that's what my mother would say. Right? Yeah.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, my next question. I want to talk about owning your mistakes. What's the biggest mistake you made? Building a company culture at Demand Base, and what are you doing differently at channel 99?
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Chris Golic
So I would say that was one of the things we did really well at Demand Base. But the mistake was underestimating how much you really have to invest in it to be successful at it. And the reason I say that is, you know, over the years at Demandbase, we became a top 20 place to work in San Francisco for like eight or nine years in a row. But it didn't come easy. It's not about free snacks. You have to invest a lot in the people, the training, how you recruit, how you pay people, how transparent you are. There's doing philanthropic activities. So there's a lot that goes into it, and I underestimated what that would be when we. Because I set out pretty early. Like, I want to be one of the best places to work so we can hire and retain the greatest people available to us.
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Benjamin Shapiro
What do you think makes a great place to work?
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Chris Golic
Well, it's, it's, you know, it's A common theme and thread and the types of people that you hire. For me, I always, I'm more of a collaborative type leadership style. We always did a lot of very transparent meetings. So everybody knew what was going on. There wasn't like anything hidden. And one of the secrets, I think, for our culture is what I discovered that brought us all together as a company was instead of doing just team events, we'd always do a team event around something philanthropic. And that really tied everybody together across department, different people. And so that was thematically, was always something really important to me. And actually everybody that worked at the
- [31:25]
Benjamin Shapiro
company and an occasional free snack every once in a while, never heard anything.
- [31:29]
Chris Golic
I'll get you a bag of chips.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. All right. Underrated or overrated? Is LinkedIn an underrated or overrated marketing channel?
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Chris Golic
It's underrated. But I would also caveat that it also depends on who is your customer because there might be certain industries that aren't active on LinkedIn and it may not make sense, but let the numbers speak for themselves.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so let's pivot it down or click in and B2B marketing. LinkedIn. You're saying underrated? Why?
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Chris Golic
Because a lot of people don't consider all the engagement that's being driven from LinkedIn because it's all sitting in the direct bucket. Back to the very first question and they don't realize that their number one channel for driving or influencing pipeline is organic social and they just don't know it.
- [32:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
I'm glad you said organic social because when you post on LinkedIn, you tend to get some organic reach. There's also the tools where you can do thought leadership ads and sponsored posts and all sorts of other fun tools to get your content there. Is LinkedIn primarily an organic growth channel or do you think that's what makes it effective? Or can you use the promotional tools to help get your content out there just as effectively?
- [32:52]
Chris Golic
Well, I think, yeah, I think it's a combination of both. Right. One of the things that we kind of discovered was, you know, a lot of CMOs and executives will do thought leadership content and they care a lot more about pipeline influence than they do about comments and thumbs ups and likes. That's usually the what they're getting. And when you can show that, gosh, it really had a huge impact on pipeline last quarter. You can't tie it to the member level, but you can tie it at the account level.
- [33:25]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, last question for you. A little bit about the AI hype cycle. You've been through multiple Waves of technology working in mostly B2B tech for 25 years. Is the AI hype in martech justified or are we just in another bubble like the mobile or.com era?
- [33:43]
Chris Golic
I do think it's justified and I do think we'll see more transformation over this next year than we have in the last 10 years. Just because I don't think it's. We're going to have this proliferation of SaaS products and interfaces and I think the interoperability of all these different data sources, you'll be able to create, launch, optimize campaigns right from your Genai solution. As people start plugging in to Genai, it's all going to be interoperable.
- [34:19]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's dizzying to me and I agree. This is the tsunami, right. The previous the iPhone was a huge. And mobile marketing to me was a huge transformative shift, but it took 20 years to roll out. Like this is hitting us so fast and it's the pace of change that concerns me. Not that we haven't gone through change before. Right. Like technology normally takes a long time to roll out. It is happening so quickly and the models are getting so good and we're able to create so much software and we're seeing it in the stock market now with the SaaS companies all seemingly tanking, who knows whether they'll rebound or not. That to me creates the anxiety and the concern is the pace, not necessarily the actual technology.
- [35:09]
Chris Golic
Yeah, well, I mean we have complete visibility into the efficiency of B2B marketing spend. And I don't know if it would surprise you that 75% of the dollars go to marketing and targeting, reaching, engaging companies that will never buy anything. So the upside is massive.
- [35:33]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, we definitely have a little fat to trim. I also think that the concern for me is there's a lot of people that are doing jobs that potentially become redundant. And the reskilling, I feel it already. Like I mentioned earlier in our conversation, I'm spending time in my computer's terminal not thinking about marketing or in front of a camera or dealing with clients. I'm coding stuff and in languages I don't understand because it can be translated into English. And so the skill transformation is happening. It can be painful. It's great to be able to learn. And some people are going to get so super wealthy trying to figure this out. And being a first mover advantage, there's going to be people that are laggards that I think are going to suffer. I definitely going back to the original question, I am of the camp that this is a tsunami. This is the big one. Using a San Francisco metaphor. Earthquake jokes are no fun around here, but the world is shaking, the ground under us is moving, and hopefully we all end up with beachfront property.
- [36:38]
Chris Golic
Well, I think people, it's upon them to educate themselves and figure out, like, how could I really leverage what this stuff is doing to benefit my company?
- [36:47]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. Well, Chris, congratulations on your past success, the success you're having with the current company. I think it's really interesting what you're doing and rethinking a problem that marketers have had for a really long time, understanding if their dollars are actually driving revenue in a coherent fashion. So thanks for coming on and being my guest.
- [37:06]
Chris Golic
I appreciate it, Ben. Thank you.
- [37:08]
Sponsor Voice
And a special thanks to Scrunch for sponsoring this interview. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended. And for Martech podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps, and how you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com that's scrunch S C-R-U-N
- [37:45]
Benjamin Shapiro
C-H.com all right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Chris Golick, the CEO and founder of Channel 99, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Chris, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit his company's website at channel99.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [38:34]
Chris Golic
Foreign.
- [38:45]
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