The one with the founder and CEO of Alembic Technologies, Tomás Puig, about what to do when you just don't know, cause and effect correlation, and what may be the most advanced marketing attribution model today.

Summary

Summary of "The One with Tomás Puig: Unlocking Advanced Marketing Attribution"

Podcast Title: The CEO’s Guide to Marketing
Host: Seth Matlins, Managing Director of the Forbes CMO Network
Guest: Tomás Puig, Founder and CEO of Alembic Technologies
Release Date: July 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The CEO’s Guide to Marketing, host Seth Matlins engages in an insightful conversation with Tomás Puig, the visionary founder and CEO of Alembic Technologies. The discussion delves deep into the complexities of modern marketing, exploring topics such as hidden drivers of growth, advanced attribution models, and the intricate relationship between marketing and financial metrics. This episode is a must-listen for CEOs and marketing leaders aiming to elevate their strategic approach and drive sustainable growth.

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Unlocking Hidden Drivers of Growth

The conversation kicks off with Seth posing a critical question about Alembic’s promise to "unlock the hidden drivers of growth." Tomás responds by highlighting a common pitfall in marketing—relying on generic playbooks and checklist approaches without considering the underlying business operating models.

Tomás Puig [00:24]: "Often people are doing marketing by playbook... At no point do they think about business operating models."

He emphasizes that merely increasing sales volume doesn't necessarily equate to higher profitability, as some products may have lower gross margins or even result in losses. This misalignment can inadvertently decelerate growth despite aggressive marketing campaigns.

Tomás Puig [00:54]: "If you do the biggest market campaign of all time, you can spike the amount of revenue coming in the door, but you can actually lose cash."

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The Challenges of Marketing Attribution

Tomás elaborates on the non-obvious factors that drive growth, stressing the importance of recognizing elements that aren’t easily measurable. The vastness of available data often leads to an overwhelming situation where it's impossible to account for every variable.

Tomás Puig [01:34]: "The hidden drivers of growth are the things that are non obvious... there is so much data in the world nowadays that none of us can know all of it. It is impossible."

The discussion shifts to traditional attribution models, particularly the limitations of last-click attribution, which fails to capture the full spectrum of marketing influences leading to a sale.

Tomás Puig [06:01]: "Marketing has never been able to do this before... Marketing goes. All of our data is either we kind of know, right. Or we're using a proxy metric."

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Understanding Brand as a Friction Reducer

One of the standout concepts introduced by Tomás is viewing brand as the ultimate friction reducer in the customer journey. He argues that a strong brand can significantly shorten sales cycles by reducing the effort required for customers to make purchasing decisions.

Tomás Puig [22:55]: "Brand is the greatest friction reducer on the face of the earth."

He provides an example where a well-executed branding strategy can halve a company's sales cycle from 12 months to six months, highlighting the tangible economic benefits of a robust brand.

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Advanced Technologies in Marketing Attribution

Tomás shares Alembic Technologies' innovative approach to marketing attribution, utilizing spiking neural networks to emulate the human brain's pattern recognition capabilities. This advancement allows for the normalization of disparate data sources and the detection of short-term changes that traditional models might miss.

Tomás Puig [38:06]: "We've built what's called a spiking neural network... it changes it in."

He recounts a case study involving Delta's Olympic sponsorship, where their model identified specific moments—like the medal ceremony ads—that had the highest ROI by triggering emotional responses leading to increased sales.

Tomás Puig [41:13]: "The most profitable thing was actually the in program... When you have a really emotional moment... you sell a lot of tickets."

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Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Finance

A significant portion of the discussion addresses the disconnect between marketing and financial departments within organizations. Tomás critiques the reliance on vanity metrics in marketing that fail to resonate with CFOs and CEOs who prioritize tangible financial outcomes.

Tomás Puig [10:08]: "Never met one [marketer who accurately accounts for amortized costs]. If you are, you're my hero."

He underscores the necessity for marketers to adopt financial metrics that align with the company's economic goals, enabling better communication and resource allocation between departments.

Tomás Puig [20:19]: "Decommoditize the product and protects gross margin. That is a function."

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Predictive Analytics and Forecasting in Marketing

Addressing the forward-looking aspect of marketing, Tomás explains how Alembic's technology not only measures past performance but also simulates future scenarios to predict the ROI of upcoming marketing investments. By permutating historical data and projecting potential outcomes, the model provides actionable insights for strategic decision-making.

Tomás Puig [43:04]: "We simulate if that universe was still in motion for the next set of days... and then we project out what will happen in the future."

This predictive capability empowers CEOs and CMOs to allocate budgets more effectively, ensuring that each marketing dollar is invested with confidence.

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The Future of Marketing Attribution

The episode concludes with Tomás advocating for a shift away from traditional, linear marketing models towards more dynamic and scientifically grounded approaches. He calls for the development of new theories that better reflect the complexities of modern consumer behavior and the multifaceted nature of marketing influences.

Tomás Puig [29:46]: "This is where I say the theory. This is our own fault."

By leveraging advanced AI and fostering a deeper understanding of financial metrics, Tomás envisions a future where marketing attribution is both precise and genuinely reflective of its impact on business growth.

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Rapid-Fire Insights

In a quick-fire round, both Seth and Tomás share succinct insights on various aspects of marketing and leadership:

• Marketing: Growth.
• Brand: Story.
• Sources of Strategic Advantage: Intelligence.
• Hardest Part of Being a CMO: Everyone thinks they're a marketer.
• Hardest Part of Being a CEO: External expectations.
• Biggest Tensions Between CMO and C-Suite: Using vanity metrics instead of reality.

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Conclusion

This episode of The CEO’s Guide to Marketing offers a deep dive into the intricacies of modern marketing strategies and the essential collaboration between marketing and finance. Tomás Puig’s expertise and innovative approach provide valuable lessons for leaders aiming to harness the true potential of their marketing efforts. By moving beyond superficial metrics and embracing advanced technological solutions, companies can achieve more accurate attribution and drive sustainable growth.

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Notable Quotes:

• Tomás Puig [00:24]: "Often people are doing marketing by playbook... At no point do they think about business operating models."
• Tomás Puig [22:55]: "Brand is the greatest friction reducer on the face of the earth."
• Tomás Puig [38:06]: "We've built what's called a spiking neural network... it changes it in."
• Tomás Puig [43:04]: "We simulate if that universe was still in motion for the next set of days... and then we project out what will happen in the future."
• Tomás Puig [20:19]: "Decommoditize the product and protects gross margin. That is a function."

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This episode underscores the evolving landscape of marketing, where data-driven insights and advanced technologies are paramount in bridging the gap between creative strategies and measurable financial outcomes. Tomás Puig and Alembic Technologies are at the forefront of this transformation, offering solutions that redefine how marketing success is quantified and leveraged for long-term growth.

Transcript

[Tomas Puig]

Foreign.

[Seth Matlins]

Here's my first question for you. And it actually comes from something that you guys talk about on the Alembic website. One of the things that you, you say to your clients and prospective clients is that you're going to unlock the hidden drivers of growth. Why have drivers, why and which drivers of growth have been hidden?

[Tomas Puig]

You know, one of the most funny things that occurs is often people are doing marketing by playbook. Feels like they get handed this listicle, right? And they're like checking off did I do this? Did I do this? Did I do this? At no point do they think about business operating models. At no point do they think about what is this? So I'll give an example that we talk about a lot. Just because you sell a lot of things do not mean those things are the highest gross margin things. There are certain things that companies can sell that actually lose money.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

Discounted, etc. So if you do the biggest market campaign of all time, you can spike the amount of revenue coming in the door, but you can actually lose cash. Of course that's a decelerator to growth.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

The other thing that can happen is you have chain reactions of things. Right. We tend to be very fallacy of the last thing we heard. Marketing does that as well. What were the actual things in the past that actually caused it? You know, one of the more interesting things as we deal with this is the hidden drivers of growth are the things that are non obvious. And there is so much data in the world nowadays that none of us can know all of it. It is impossible.

[Seth Matlins]

Well, I'm giving it a pretty good shot.

[Tomas Puig]

Well, I mean, you know, the theory of data that can be known.

[Seth Matlins]

Right? Right.

[Tomas Puig]

But let's say can you tell me every single file that's seen on the computer right there? I cannot imagine that at corporate scale.

[Seth Matlins]

Right, Right. So you know what I'm really interested in is what the phrase you just used, the non obvious things. What are some of the non obvious drivers of growth from your perspective?

[Tomas Puig]

It's interesting, they say as you get more experienced in something, the harder it is to answer a question in simple terms. But the non obvious drivers of growth, the things that matter the most, you would almost consider, I would say that the three things we see most often are going to be this. First off, one, they don't realize the things that actually speak to their customers. They only understand the things they can measure.

[Seth Matlins]

Right? Right.

[Tomas Puig]

Biggest fallacy of growth.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

And then we know that any KPI that becomes anything that comes a KPI that you're obviously measuring to then actually becomes ineffective. It's an old adage.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

Second thing that's a hidden driver of.

[Seth Matlins]

Growth because you plan for the KPI, not for the outcome.

[Tomas Puig]

Exactly. You lose. You lose the plot, as they would say. Yeah, this was, you know, I was a CMO myself. This was one of the things that was the hardest parts because every single time that you were evaluating a system of things, you must look at it and be like, okay, did I miss the point? Did I just build a Lego construction to the sky? Because I thought it was cool. This often gets called empire building within corporations. Right. I built an empire that governs nothing. The second thing I would say is a big driver of growth that we don't often hear about is you can actually reduce friction from the funnel itself.

[Seth Matlins]

So everybody unpack what you mean by that.

[Tomas Puig]

So everybody talks about being like, ah, we need more leads, we need more people walking in the door. We need all that stuff. But you know what's way cheaper? Making sure the people who walk in the door convert better. People are so focused on net new that they don't think about, you know, this happened once when we were doing a study which was we worked with this monstrous retailer that everybody knows that sells drinks and they were spending mid eight figures on advertisements and could not lift anything at all. Was driving them batty. So we go in, do this big thing with all our tech, right? And we're like, wow, you're right. We don't see the lift. And so then what we ended up doing is something a little bit different. We brought in all the foot traffic going in. We brought in the digital ordering system, we brought in the mobile app.

[Seth Matlins]

And when you say you brought in.

[Tomas Puig]

Your talking suck in all the data. Want to instrument and look at it? What we found was they were actually denial of service, attacking their own business. Marketing was hyper successful. They were driving a massive amount in the door. They were driving a massive amount of digital revenue. They were doing all of the orders once you walked in the door and you waited in line, all orders were in the exact order they were received. So if somebody did a whole bunch of digital orders for like doordash or something, you would have to wait till all of those completed before they would serve you while you stayed in line. That's bad idea.

[Seth Matlins]

That's a bad idea.

[Tomas Puig]

So they drove a huge amount of foot traffic the same time they drove digital orders. And thus the entire system. Nobody wants to wait 30 minutes to do anything.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

And they walk straight out the door.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah. Interesting.

[Tomas Puig]

And so that's marketing was working. It was a delivery failure.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

But at what point do you say it's marketing or not? That's the hidden drivers of growth.

[Seth Matlins]

When, when you founded the company, there was. There was a series of, I think, convictions. You'll correct me if. Oh, no, no, definitely convictions that were certain problems that marketing had yet to solve for. Right. Attribution, to use an easy thing, really wasn't measuring attribution at all. It was measuring a last click, at least metaphorically, and not ignoring. But it was incapable of determining all that went into driving that last click, which is the ultimate measure of attribution. Right. What were you seeing and what problems are you guys solving for your clients? And what does a CEO need to know about the problems marketers haven't been able to solve for even the best ones that they now can?

[Tomas Puig]

So a little bit of background because I think it's helpful. You know, I started my career doing technical stuff at Ames Research center, kind of as like a computer science intern almost. Right.

[Seth Matlins]

And That's NASA Ames. NASA's Ames Research Center.

[Tomas Puig]

NASA, yeah. And then after that, after wandering around the universe trying to figure out what I want to do with myself, eventually I became the head of marketing for a company called WP Engine. Went with super small and took it through scale. And then I ended up becoming a CMO fixer for private equity. So when they would buy an entire division of Motorola, Right. Or decide to bring a big brand from Europe to the us, I'd be the poor soul sent in to retrofit it for IPO or acquisition.

[Seth Matlins]

Congratulations and condolences, right?

[Tomas Puig]

And they're like, ah, you get 50% less. Go figure it out. And so, you know, I was kind of forged in the fires of pe. And that gives you a very, very different perspective because they have no sense of humor. One of the most visceral memories I have is I get called up by this amazing CFO really, really late at night. And because he was based in Europe and I was in the US, it's like 11 o' clock. He's like, called me Tomas. I'm like, yes. He's like, you have the highest discretionary spend in the entire company. What do you mean you don't know what it does? I'm like, what do we want me to do, dude? Go to their house and ask, right? And like, no amount of data, no amount of stuff. Right. Everything else in companies, a large amount of it tends to be deterministic. You just know you have double keeping Accounting, you have a server, you know how many people, you know how many people came in, you know. And marketing goes. All of our data is either we kind of know, right. Or we're using a proxy metric. Yep. So the entire rest of the organization has certainty and marketing has statistics.

[Seth Matlins]

Mm, mm.

[Tomas Puig]

One that's broken. Second thing that's broken is the conversation we're just having, right. About profitability and revenue and all these things. Every great marketer I've ever met like understands that they are a part time cfo.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes.

[Tomas Puig]

And you have to be.

[Seth Matlins]

Well, to your earlier point, I think the greatest commonality between a CEO's job and a CMO's job at putting aside objective is the allocation of capital from to profitable outcome. Right. And if you do not operate as if you're marketing investments where you're supposed to stock portfolio investments, you're kind of fucked.

[Tomas Puig]

Agreed. Oh, can we talk like that?

[Seth Matlins]

Yes, we can.

[Tomas Puig]

Oh, I'm so excited. It makes life easier. So the, the way I would say from this is like let's imagine the. So I'm. This conversation happens and I'm like, I go on a tirade where I'm like, I'm going to try to measure all things, right? Because I actually do code and I do this stuff. So I built a whole bunch of stuff, did all these things. I still can do it, right?

[Seth Matlins]

Why?

[Tomas Puig]

Because some of it's literally not physically possible. Like say like I'm sponsoring a sports team, right. A really large one. It's 100 million deal over seven years. That's amortized capital, right. That you're going to do like paying a mortgage.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

And all your marketing and analysis is either last touch or correlative to the last two weeks.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

But the cost is amortized over seven years. What?

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, right. Which one of these things is not like the other, right?

[Tomas Puig]

Or you know, this is actually the reason one of my most controversial opinions is true ROI marketing for a long time was literally not possible. Because if you think about doing the analysis was the fastest you've ever seen a public company close their books, what, a couple weeks? Two, three maybe? At the best cases, sometimes it can be a couple months in the quarter. And so if you're amortizing those costs doing production and say you book a conference a year in advance and you prepay to get a discount, that cost is recognized in the quarter it's used. Do you know how many marketing teams actually pull across all of those amortized costs in their ROI calcs? It's usually one Spreadsheet. Nobody does.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

Never met one. If you are, you're my hero. Right?

[Seth Matlins]

Like, seriously, raise your hand, audience.

[Tomas Puig]

No, seriously. If you have, like, I want to know how you did it. And I would love. You should do a masterclass for, you know, Seth here. But the practicalities of that, you have to understand when a CFO and a CEO think like that, right. They know the whole line costs. So you come back in and there's this second problem, which is the natural doubling the number of board meetings and consultancies I've been in where I've sat and I've been like this CMO sitting at the table and goes, ah, yeah, we got 5 million in value from primary. We got 6 million in value from that. The last touch for Instagram was 3 million. The last touch for TikTok was this. And then the CFO looks over and goes, then why'd I sell 2 million in stuff? You've seen all these marketing metrics, right?

[Seth Matlins]

A different definition of value that's being ascribed and.

[Tomas Puig]

But there's only one value, the dollar.

[Seth Matlins]

Exactly, exactly. They're vanity metrics. And I think a lot of CMOs. I mean, this kind of goes back to the thesis of the show, though. I think a lot of CMOs, for better. Well, it's not for better or worse, it's for worse. Are forced to present vanity metrics to provide the certainty in the absence that the CFO and CEO demand not knowing that, because they do not understand that they can't. That a marketer cannot, at least historically, provide that degree of certainty. Because when you are selling anything to a being as complicated and idiosyncratic as a human being, little is certain, which. And I talk about this all the time, so I hope the audience will forgive me for talking about it yet again. Which always brings me back to the CEO and CFO denying their own lived experience. You know how the shoes got. The shoes on their feet. Got on their feet. The bags in their hands. Got in their hands. The cars in their driveways, which is. It's as if they do not understand from their own experience that. That sometimes you can't, you know, why is that car in your driveway? I don't know. I just, you know, I saw the neighbor. I saw an ad, my dad drove one. That it is a. It is a stew. It is like jazz.

[Tomas Puig]

You know, I would say this brings it back to a really interesting point that you and I talked about before we rolled camera.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Where there are some companies where I actually would say, that is not True. And they actually do a great job. A great job of, of the understanding and thinking in very long timelines and understanding how the world works.

[Seth Matlins]

Right, okay. So for those who were not in the room before we started rolling camera. What we were talking about, Tomas and I was the difference between privately held in particular, excuse me, privately held, family owned companies that they plan for generations and publicly held companies that are, because of the pressures of the capital markets, planning for the quarter.

[Tomas Puig]

Let's think about two of the best in the world, right? Hermes, because we're in camp, right? I'm like, I'm walking by Hermes. Lvmh. Monstrously thoughtful about the brand and how they handle it and what things, what will this be like in 10 years? Am I a arbiter of taste? Right? The monetization of taste and being the leader. It's not just about that. It's about understanding cycles where things move, how you move entire things. And so, you know, when we talk about products that are inherently commoditized, right? And by commodities, I mean from the, not from like this product is no different than anybody else. I mean by like the perception of it's good enough economically, like gasoline, commoditized product, choosing between BP and Shell, right? Having a laptop bag. A laptop bag is a laptop bag. They're only usually in my opinion. When I was doing my economics research, I kind of came up with a theory that was like, look, only three things can separate a commoditized product. Brand, service or price. I guarantee you brand is cheaper than doing service every time, right? So if you're a Coca Cola and you sell a carbonated, you know, sweetened beverage as a category, right? They're kind of like, there's a lot of similarities between things. All the margin, all the profit comes from brand. And so there are people who do do this, right? And who can be very, very thoughtful. But the way that I've always found when I look at a CEO and go, those are your three options, which we do like, they go, all right, that makes a bit more sense, right? And so I think we've done a disservice to ourselves as marketers where we don't. We built very little theory since the four Ps. Yeah, right. People don't think about this. They don't actually think about why do we do this? Why? What is the physics of our universe, okay? And all our material is dated from the 60s and 70s.

[Seth Matlins]

Mostly what I find interesting about that is it makes me think of John Steele's 1974 paper sorry, it wasn't John Steele spacing his name. I'll add it to the notes when I get it. Right. The JWT planning guide.

[Tomas Puig]

Right.

[Seth Matlins]

And it's as relevant today, within a few degrees as it was then because what they're. What he was talking about was human behavior and how to plan for that. And that's relatively, if not almost completely unchanged. At least the dynamics of it.

[Tomas Puig]

Oh, I would disagree.

[Seth Matlins]

Go ahead.

[Tomas Puig]

Like, like think about two side marketplaces. Two side marketplaces roughly existed before but we couldn't do the transactions fast enough to really build them at scale. So think about like all the ad supported tooling of say a. Any of the delivery apps or any even Uber who's here. Right. They have an ad system. Walmart has an ad system. Everybody's actually everybody doing that system. Yeah, but are you saying that really human behavior didn't change like that?

[Seth Matlins]

I'm missing the link between human behavior and business.

[Tomas Puig]

So systems, when we talk about human behavior. I have a 7 year old, my 7 year old walks up to TVs and starts to swipe them. Is that different in human behavior?

[Seth Matlins]

Maybe behavior, the things that drive human decisions is really what I'm talking about. You're right about behavior. Yeah. Behavior adapts as, as the world changes. Yes. But the things that drive purchase behavior from humans are relatively unchanged. And, and you're.

[Tomas Puig]

But you gotta be specific about the language. Right. You're.

[Seth Matlins]

It's a, It's a fair, It's a very fair.

[Tomas Puig]

I agree with you, by the way. Yeah. Now we're, now we're aligned. Yeah.

[Seth Matlins]

And you know I talk about this all the time. Which is synonyms are one of the things that kill marketers. Which is. I say behavior by the way you're pushes. Right. Like it was a lazy choice of words. But we, I had the same laziness here.

[Tomas Puig]

We're having a great discussion.

[Seth Matlins]

No, no, I'm fairly lazy. But yeah, synonyms kill us because I say. I say creativity and mean X and you hear me say creativity and interpret Y which again is the subjectivity that surrounds humanity and you know, us individually and collectively. But let's talk about brand for a second because I think you and I are completely aligned.

[Tomas Puig]

Oh yeah.

[Seth Matlins]

Always on the power of brand. And it has historically been to the commentary you were just making hard to measure the actual value of Sam. You know, brand doesn't have a place on the P L typically.

[Tomas Puig]

Oh man. I was talking about the Fortune 500 CFO.

[Seth Matlins]

We like to say Forbes 540. Kidding. For kidding.

[Tomas Puig]

No, this game. See, we get it again. Yeah, Definition, coco. Let's say top 500 global 2000. I was talking with an actual CFO from that and I brought this up being like, I had a proposal for how you'd actually. A theoretical proposal for how you'd measure brand as an equity. Right. And he looks me dead in the eye and goes, I've always had it as a write off. I never actually considered it had value. And that's dead serious.

[Seth Matlins]

That is the fucking problem.

[Tomas Puig]

What the fuck did you say to that? Right? You're just like, really?

[Seth Matlins]

I mean, going back to my note about, you know, how they deny their own lived experience. You know, he wouldn't drive. I'm assuming it was a male cfo, but I think you indicated it doesn't matter. They wouldn't drive the same car if it had a different lower priced mark on it.

[Tomas Puig]

But you have to understand where I want to do instead of rage against them, I want to understand why they say that, yeah, that's.

[Seth Matlins]

Can't solve it.

[Tomas Puig]

So what? Because every CFO I've met that I have personally worked with has a deep seated belief that like in their world, a lack of certainty is fraud. That is how it works for them. If you give an inauthentic metric, if you give something that you cannot sit there and be as true, you are committing fraud. And so you walk into their office with those things and naturally they're training who they are. Is when somebody. Do you ever have like a used car salesman or somebody try to really work the numbers on you and you're like, you feel it in your bones. They're trained to that times 10,000.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

And so when you walk in and you pitch it like that, you use vanity metrics, they go, I've seen CFOs be like, you came into my office lying.

[Seth Matlins]

It's such an interesting and important choice of words. Back to the importance of words because their context is.

[Tomas Puig]

But we're marketers, we're supposed to understand the people we talk to. Why do we not do that with CFOs?

[Seth Matlins]

Well, that's its. That's that comes up over and over again. And what on this show and in my conversations.

[Tomas Puig]

So what do you think the value brand is if you had to build an equation, put a dollar on it.

[Seth Matlins]

Oh, please don't ask me to build an equation around anything. I haven't. No, that's.

[Tomas Puig]

Give me a simile.

[Seth Matlins]

Well, I'll give you an adjective which is extraordinary. I think, I mean, goes back to what you said, you know, the CEO has three choices. I don't think there's anything more important. Look, important than brand. Right. It is the great differentiator. Decommoditizer. Driver of performance.

[Tomas Puig]

Decommodization. Walking into a CFO's office and saying the words brand. Decommoditize the product and protects gross margin.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes.

[Tomas Puig]

That is a function.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes. Yes. I couldn't agree more. Again, seemed to be in violent disagreement. Except.

[Tomas Puig]

No, violent agreement, my friend.

[Seth Matlins]

Violent agreement. Except for that one place where we disagreed. But there's been a word implicit in a bunch of what we've been talking about that I want to make explicit, which is emotion. You know, because we are emotional beings who typically, if not almost always make emotional decisions subconsciously and then rationalize them.

[Tomas Puig]

Right.

[Seth Matlins]

When we buy that Tiffany blue box that you referred to, it's because of our emotions.

[Tomas Puig]

Hermes orange.

[Seth Matlins]

The Hermes orange or a toothpaste. There's typically an emotional connection when we buy the lowest price good. It's not because it's the lowest price good. It's because it makes us feel thrifty, like we save money. Money is emotional itself. Very emotional.

[Tomas Puig]

Of course. So, number one reason for divorce, as.

[Seth Matlins]

I recall from personal experience.

[Tomas Puig]

No, no, in general, this is like a fact, right?

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Like that clearly means it matters to people. Yeah.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes, it matters to people. Putting aside that it's very hard to stay married for a long time from personal experience. But I digress. Have you figured out. Are you in the process of figuring out how to measure and attribute to slash for emotion?

[Tomas Puig]

The answer, I would say is no one can perfectly attribute emotion. But I do know how to actually value a brand.

[Seth Matlins]

Gone.

[Tomas Puig]

And so this is a proposal that. You know, it's funny. I was having a long conversation with brilliant partners at E and Y. Was E and Y do, right. Finance auditing is their core key.

[Seth Matlins]

Why?

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah, they do a bunch of stuff. Right. And so. And the reason I was talking to all the CFOs is I was attempting to be like, can I build an equation to talk about this that can separate out into language they understand, not emotional language. Right. Because again, emotional language to that group is never going to work. Right. Can I separate that out? And so here was kind of my puzzle. You brought up toothpaste. I remember. So I did a two year stint in Bollywood at one point of random things in my life. And I remember I flew to India and ended up there and I forgot my toothpaste and I don't read any Hindi. So I go into the store to try to find one. And there's only one logo I recognize. What toothpaste did I buy the logo you recognized. So my entire premise is brand is a function of the cost of cash.

[Seth Matlins]

Now explain that for. Well, for me.

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah. So it's friction reduction.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes, yes. I love that.

[Tomas Puig]

So what brand is it is the greatest friction reducer on the face of the earth. How you do this monetarily is actually really interesting. We've been, we have a whole instrumentation behind this. But the way you would think about it is this is. You would say, okay, say I have a 12 month sales cycle, B2B company. Right. Suddenly, because my brand is so good, you know, you get your own adage like nobody gets fired for buying IBM.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

Remember that thing?

[Seth Matlins]

I reference that 1974 A.D. all the time. First of all, it's one of my favorite pieces of work. But it's one of my favorite pieces of work for exactly what we're talking about. Because it spoke to the emotion of being afraid to make a decision. And while that was measured probably at the time in millions, tens of millions, and not billions of dollars. Whether it's billions of dollars or your deodorant, you're afraid of failure.

[Tomas Puig]

And that failure has a cost in time and also cost in capital. So suddenly, because of that, your sales cycle goes from 12 months to six months. Right.

[Seth Matlins]

Wait, I'm sorry, I missed.

[Tomas Puig]

So we have a 12 month sales.

[Seth Matlins]

Oh, the friction reduce.

[Tomas Puig]

Right, right, right. Suddenly you do that ad, you bank it, you get your own adage. Right. Everybody's stuck with it. And now your sales cycle is six months.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

The value of brand is the time it takes to run the entire business between the time it would have been 6 months and 12 months. Really interesting that friction has a cost. Yeah, a really, really expensive cost.

[Seth Matlins]

And the absence of friction has a value.

[Tomas Puig]

And, and the absence of friction is value. So you can actually put a real number on it. And this is one of the things where we're actually like, I'm like, could we build this into an actual true metric? And that's what we've been discussing. But Most of the CFOs I've talked to have been like, that is an equation to him. When you tell it to a cfo, they're like, that is a thing that I can look at is a system that works across multiple stuff. Now I've added one more thing to this. It's a function of friction and volume. In my opinion as well, I add the volume component after we did some research because it can not only reduce friction, but it can also increase volumes.

[Seth Matlins]

And you're talking about sales volume. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Or any type of volumes of things. Right. Volumes of actions. You might not have sales you might do be doing like you might be a streaming service doing tunein. Right. How do I get views? Right, right, right.

[Seth Matlins]

I think it just is a bit of a digression. But do you think in the context of a streamer, tunein is kind of the sale? Do you think that's a fair note?

[Tomas Puig]

We've been blessed enough to work with a few of the streamers now. Actually, no, this I can. This I can talk about because we just did the panel yesterday. Sorry, I usually have to be very tight lipped about these things. I have to do generals. So. No, we did a panel yesterday with.

[Seth Matlins]

For our listeners who are going to come into this at some other point. We're recording in Cannes at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. And the panel Tomas is referring to happened here the other day.

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah. And it was Rito Farrow, the president of advertising for Disney, and Gulen, the global CMO of Mars.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Who I've been blessed to work with both. They're brilliant. And so when I was, you know, when we were originally, very, very first started even discussing things, I got to hear a lot of things from Disney about like how streaming works and we have other streaming customers as well. There's a few things to note and I'll just throw some things out there as metrics that people might think about. It's not just viewers being the thing, it's also what show, what thing causes somebody to sign up for a service. That compelling moment. What's the first thing they watch? The first time we really saw this was like Game of Thrones. Remember, Everybody's like, all right, fine, I have to buy HBO now. Right? Yeah.

[Seth Matlins]

It was House of Cards on Netflix.

[Tomas Puig]

House of Cards was originally not on Netflix. And then, you know, for me, it was Paw Patrol on Paramount plus with a seven year old, there was no avoiding Paw Patrol. There was not chase in my life. There was sadness. But like you have those compelling moments that by itself, if you just talk about tuning, you can have really high volumes of stuff that people find. But it might not be the initiating event.

[Seth Matlins]

Will you define compelling moments and initiating event.

[Tomas Puig]

Compelling moments are so again, what I'm going to try to do is just like I talked about brand is I want to put this in a concept that if you set it to a CFO or cmo, which is Our audience here, they're going to understand it. Cfo. Yeah. Cmo, CEO. All right, so the way you think about is there's some great neuro research done a while back and what said is, you know, when I need coffee in the morning, getting myself to the awake state is actually kind of hard sometimes as.

[Seth Matlins]

As I am finding today in particular.

[Tomas Puig]

Right. Especially after, you know, it is. Can.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

So what ends up happening is it actually takes more energy to change state than it does to actually sustain that state.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Right, yeah. What is a compelling moment? A compelling moment is something with enough energy that it can change the state.

[Seth Matlins]

I fucking love that.

[Tomas Puig]

Right. That means it takes more energy. You can't just do like a standard blah thing. Right. You actually have to rise above it. Right.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

But that to achieve a state change, to materially move a business, you have to have a compelling moment with enough energy to change the state of that business. And there's equations around this that you can do. This is a lot of what we do is we're an applied science company. Right. Like I build these equations, I give them to CMOs. CMOs can now suddenly communicate with their exec office.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah. Which to me, by the way, is. Is less about applied science than contextualizing. And you come to that contextualization through an applied science lens. But what's also interesting, I mean, I really love what you said. I hope my notes reflect it, which.

[Tomas Puig]

You know, you need to do that study.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, I'd love to see it.

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah.

[Seth Matlins]

I won't understand it, but I'd love to see.

[Tomas Puig]

No, you're authority to chatgpt and have it tell you.

[Seth Matlins]

Okay, there. Yeah, I can do that. Enough energy that it can change the state. Which is as true for, you know, at the global. Which is at the global enterprise level, company transformations fail so often. Right. They work. You know, they spend however much time and however much money putting in place the transformation plan and then there isn't enough energy to make the transformation plan a transformation reality.

[Tomas Puig]

But for a cfo, they're going to be like, what's the minimum amount I could do this with? That's how a CFO should think. Right?

[Seth Matlins]

Right. Yes.

[Tomas Puig]

But what marketers aren't saying is, by the way, the minimum amount is there has to be enough energy to change state.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Not just to sustain the same.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

So what marketers do is they pitch to a cfo, CFO goes, you only need enough money to hold that new state. But there's actually way more investment done on the Front side to change to that state and we don't to the delta. Yeah, it's our own fault.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Right.

[Seth Matlins]

Really interesting.

[Tomas Puig]

And so like, this is where I, like I said about the theory of marketing and everything, like we need to have these discussions.

[Seth Matlins]

So one of the old school theories of marketing was based on the funnel and the funnel was linear. And it went from.

[Tomas Puig]

Worst thing that ever happened in marketing was.

[Seth Matlins]

I'm curious as to why you think that, but give me a second just to get there, which is, you know, the, the old school model was a linear reality awareness, trial awareness, familiarity, consideration, trial purchase, repeat purchase. Perhaps today there is no such thing as any. Nothing is linear. The customer journey. And I'll let you in just a sec, explain why you don't like that phrase. But the journey from awareness or unawareness. Is unawareness a word not being aware.

[Tomas Puig]

To becoming a cause about you? Where it's like, you know, if you can be overwhelmed and you could be underwhelmed, can you be just whelmed? Yeah, I think you can. In Europe. Wait, we're in Europe.

[Seth Matlins]

I'm verywhelmed. Looks like, you know, tangled iPad, the old ipod, headphone, wires. How do you. How does one. How does a CMO within that tangled mess where you don't know if that initiating event comes from what or where. In a world where we see there are so many inputs to our decisions. How. How do you figure out the attribution model? And actually you mentioned Gulen and school and Benji, who's the CMO at Mars, who said something just yesterday on your panel. She said, when you can find attribution to any investment, there's really no barrier to making investments, which I just loved. How do you find attribution to any investment given that tangled wire, Those tangled wires.

[Tomas Puig]

You know, the original inspiration for our company came from two places. The first was one of the people that convinced me to start, which was a company called Renaissance Technologies, which is out in New York. They were the first high frequency trading firm ever. Like, hey, could I look at the weather in Paris and guess the stock price in New York type stuff. The second was a lot of the mathematics that came around during COVID I.

[Seth Matlins]

Mean, I don't even understand that equation. I mean, it's just such brilliance, like would never.

[Tomas Puig]

I mean, that guy, the guy who founded Renaissance Technology is considered one of the greatest mathematicians to have ever lived. He's very quiet. He said something that actually just because the audience for the show will talk about where he's like, look, we have Things called edges. So when you're dealing with what's called a graph, like a social graph, right? Think, like, I'm connected to my friends. The connection between two points is called an edge. But this guy said, all edges have a capacity of which you cannot exceed. So what he's talking about with this is like, if you find something in the market and it's like your secret, if you get good enough at it, someone will be able to track it, everybody will jump in, and your advantage for that edge in the market will disappear. Right. So all edges have capacity. Marketing is the same way. One of the old adages I used to always tell my staff is, you know, the more mature the channel, the less likely you are to have cheap wins. Yeah, Right. So, like, as that capacity fills. So when we kind of talked through this, the math from COVID was I woke up one morning, I was like, you remember contact tracing?

[Seth Matlins]

Yep.

[Tomas Puig]

I was like, what is the difference between a contact trace and a marketing touch mathematically?

[Seth Matlins]

Oh, interesting.

[Tomas Puig]

Nothing.

[Seth Matlins]

So for everybody, literally the inspiration.

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah, that was literally. It was like a shower thought, right? And there was a lot of incredible mathematics being done at the time where they were literally using supercomputers. They'd taken over, like, some of the nuclear computers and stuff to actually model this stuff. And I'm like, so if nuclear weather, disease, drug discovery, if everybody else can do this, why when we spend a trillion dollars a year on brand marketing in the world, do we all use math from the 1970s, right? Now, at the time, I remember this call with my board, and we were trying to even get compute to test this, and we couldn't. And Nvidia and Jensen, the team over there, have been very good to us over the years. And I remember calling. They were. One of our first customers, actually, was Nvidia. And we called them up and we're like, hey, I want to try this crazy thing, but I can't get computing power. Like, we run one of the couple hundred fastest supercomputers on the planet to do this, okay. And like, not like, like one giant machine, Right. We keep it in north northern Virginia, where the three letter agencies are. Right? It's ours. You have to understand a marketing company calling up board and be like, you know what? I would like to buy a supercomputer, please. Real credit to Justin Wexler and Katzenberg that they did not throw me out of the room at that point. And so I'm like, ah, yes, I would like a supercomputer. And I'm going to Pivot the entire company to do causal mathematics that are based off of biotechnology. And they're like what?

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

And to their credit, after enough explaining to do it, we went with it. And we knew. And by the way we would. Jensen's kind of like a weird. I don't talk to him now. But we're patron saint for our company. He saved our company's life like twice. And so one of them was gain us this compute because you just couldn't get it right. So what happens when you bring that methodology? That's this is the stuff actually we did with gun. What happens when you bring that methodology, that level of intelligence? You bring it down to marketing. Well, one, we can do things we've never done ever before. Two, when you can do things, what? Oh, so remember how I mentioned that use case where we're like $100 million over seven year for sports? We can find out the value down to the dollar in what time frame, how much revenue? Yeah, over any time frame. As long as the data stream has current data.

[Seth Matlins]

Okay, so, so let's use that as an example. Like break that down. How can you find down to the dollar the value of a seven year sponsorship in any time frame? Like what are you actually considering?

[Tomas Puig]

Well, let's do a simple one because we did, we spoke at the GTC conference which is in videos giant developer conference, the highly technical one. And I did a panel with Alicia Tillman who's one of my favorite Samo from Delta. Yeah. And she was SAP before that and came from private equity background. And so they were doing the Olympics. And there's a couple problems with the Olympics. One is how many times have you been in your career and somebody's looking be like ah, we don't have enough historical data to know that or predict that. It's like one of the most common things any executive years. So the Olympics are a really expensive event that's held every two years for a couple weeks. So if you have daily data, that means you have 14 time steps. That's it. So how do you actually know across those. Right. Whether it did anything at all? Now normally you'd be waiting for a big mmm study. Right. Or something else later. What we do is we take in every single data source that can, we can possibly get our hands on billions and billions of rows of time series. We once brought in 100 billion transactions in two days. You know what I mean? Once we bring that stuff in, we can then see what actually changes. Now one of the problems that we had that we had to solve that was almost impossible, is that you have two major problems. That why marketing has never been able to do this before. Problem number one, how do you compare apples and oranges? What I mean by that is like, say, take a Nielsen rating. Nielsen rating is a survey, right. Of the population. How is it that the same as a person pressing a button on a mobile app? How is that the same as somebody walking a store? Different mediums, different modalities. How do you normalize that? The second thing is the lack of history. How do you actually decide what actually changes? So we had to build.

[Seth Matlins]

How do you decide what actually changes? Or how do you decide? How do you determine what caused the change?

[Tomas Puig]

Yeah, both. Right. How do you even detect it? Because there's not enough historical data. Now you can decide.

[Seth Matlins]

Right.

[Tomas Puig]

So to do this, we actually had to build what's called a spiking neural network. And it's a digital twin of the human brain, and it's Gen 3 Neural Network. You know, transformers are much earlier than that. Two are not.

[Seth Matlins]

So you've created a digital twin of the human brain.

[Tomas Puig]

Yep.

[Seth Matlins]

Okay.

[Tomas Puig]

In an AI, and what humans can do is we can pattern match from the moment we're born. You don't have to teach us. So we actually can look at the shape of data, how it reacts. That lets us do the short time history. The other thing is spiking neural networks encode everything into neuron spikes. So, like our brain, I touch this table, I look at you, they're both coming into the same system as, you know, neurons spiking throughout other systems. So it changes it in.

[Seth Matlins]

I sense. I sense yours spike higher than mine. But.

[Tomas Puig]

But the. The way that you can kind of think about this is that lets us normalize the data and also detect short time periods. But we had to literally build things that had only been done in the most advanced AI labs to be able to accomplish this.

[Seth Matlins]

Okay, let's keep talking about Delta and the Olympics.

[Tomas Puig]

Now we can detect it.

[Seth Matlins]

Well, let me try and find out the question, which is you bring in a bazillion data points, you have 14 timestamps. How the hell do you figure out that their partnership.

[Tomas Puig]

When we have many years of data that we can pull in, and what we do is we can mine for chain reactions. So the way that this works is it's. We actually. It's like an ekg, it's actually drug discovery. So you know how they talk about we can do automated drug discovery. Now what you do is you might have, like, carbon, carbon, sodium, nitrogen, Has a likely treatment effect on a disease.

[Seth Matlins]

I did not know that.

[Tomas Puig]

But okay, but it's like, think about like it's. You model it, you go, hey, this has a good chance. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we're like well tv, right? Plus podcasts with that Google Ad equals sale.

[Seth Matlins]

Right?

[Tomas Puig]

So chain reaction is.

[Seth Matlins]

So you're measuring the chain reaction and. Or the individual elements contribution to same. Back to your notion of energy.

[Tomas Puig]

Both. So first we look at things like energy, signal processing, everything that lets us link things together. This is linked to this. The carbon is linked to the sodium. Right. The second thing that we do is we then mine all the chain reactions that exist, all the levers and chain reactions that exist in the business. The thing is people don't even know. Now we do this with all anonymous aggregate data. No pii, no cookies, everything. But this is the same as talking about we have a whole bunch of anonymous people in a medical study in Covid. Right. This math is fairly well known. And so what happens then when we do that is if I see this chain reaction occurs every time. Suddenly a whole bunch of brand new chain reactions that have never existed occur. What are the things that changed in the system? The only thing that massively changed in the system at that time was the Olympics. Now the most fascinating thing about this study actually was they're running a ton of 32nd and 62nd etc spots. Right. Large volume. The thing that actually had the highest ROI was when they did that NBC gave Delta the medal ceremony. You ever watch, did you watch the Olympics at all in the U.S. i did not. So if you did, you would see like every medal ceremony was the Delta metal presentation, you're saying. Yeah, well it turns out when you have a really emotional moment with gold medal with the Eiffel Tower in the background, you sell a lot of tickets to Paris.

[Seth Matlins]

That was the most measuring for emotion.

[Tomas Puig]

But the. But you can actually measure it. We're like, we see that new chain reaction based off that motion moment. The most profitable thing was actually the in program. Now it was obviously supported by the spots and everything else. They wouldn't even have gotten that if they hadn't ordered enough spots. But that's the type of fascinating things you can look at.

[Seth Matlins]

So I want to invert the question a little bit because in the Delta example, what we've been measuring is the return on dollars already spent. What about from a predictive and forecast perspective? How can. Which is one of the greatest problems any marketer has because they're trying to figure out where to spend the next dollar for maximum return. How has technology advanced, in particular yours, I suspect, to provide me greater line of sight and confidence, if not certainty, that the next dollar will yield a greater return than it might otherwise have.

[Tomas Puig]

You know, it's interesting when we talk about there's a. One of the hardest things for marketer is oftentimes they confuse measurement with intelligence.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes.

[Tomas Puig]

And so when we talk about how we look at that, the way. The way we tackle it is a little bit different. So we model the whole universe of marketing, right? We see everything, a little chain reaction, all that. So say we know the last 180 days, then what we do is we simulate if that universe was still in motion for the next set of days. And then what we do is we go in and this is. I kid you not, it's the hardest thing to describe sometimes because it's literally, you know, remember the. The Marvel movies with, like, Thanos and Dr. Strange and everything and, you know. Yeah. Know, Dr. Strange goes, Ah, I looked at a million universes and this is the only one in which we won. Right. We literally permutate the universe artificially. Literally, the past. We change the past in every single way we can think of, and then we project out what will happen in the future.

[Seth Matlins]

Okay, let's spend a second on that, because that's fascinating. So make it tactical. You change the past.

[Tomas Puig]

So if you had done more of this, less of this, all these things, right? Change what you actually did, artificially change all that data across billions of little permutations, and then we find the best possible universe for you.

[Seth Matlins]

Is there a moment where I remember I was with a client years and years ago who said to me, brilliant marketer, one of the world's largest, most revered brands. He said, we know that every time we run television ads, this is 20 years ago, we're going to see an increase in sales. And so I said to him, so why don't you run more television ads? And he kind of looked at me like, don't ask me that question. Is there a. I didn't understand it. If, like, every time you spend a dollar, you're going to get a dollar and ten back, why not spend more dollars? Is there a point at which the investment ceases to be, well, creative?

[Tomas Puig]

But remember a good investment. Yeah, but remember what Gulen said, right? That you would. People will find money. The problem is, is that again, remember how we talked about margin and unit price and everything else? Marketers are coming in being like, I have a correlation that when I run tv, everything but Then the CFO looks and goes, well, how do you know it was marketing, not the market?

[Seth Matlins]

Yes. Do you actually know you're measuring for incrementality? No.

[Tomas Puig]

I mean, that's not even incrementality. Like incrementality is still correlative. Right.

[Seth Matlins]

But isn't. Isn't marketing in the market versus marketing equation? You just put out the incremental.

[Tomas Puig]

Little more complex than that. Right? Because what you're doing is you're doing single. A lot of incremental stuff is based off a type of math called linear regression, right? Where you're just projecting out that cannot see individual events and the time between those events mathematically. So what we do is we look at individual events. It's a lot different than standardized incrementality. It's neuroscience, basically. Now, incrementality is a wonderful way of measuring. Right. It's probably the better one out of the ones we currently have available to most standard kits, like standard toolkits. But the way you would think about this is here is remember those edges? I said they all have capacity.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

You want to invest up to capacity. When you go past capacity, you lower it back down. Right. The problem is marketers can't prove that capacity. But let's take tariffs. Sales are down. Is it marketing's fault or is it the tariff? What's counterfactual?

[Seth Matlins]

Well, probably could be both. But I take your point.

[Tomas Puig]

But that's why. So why you can't get money is because you have to be able to prove that was marketing. But us saying we don't know, Right?

[Seth Matlins]

Like your QSR example, if you say.

[Tomas Puig]

We don't know we want to do this anyway. You're like, you want to hold up $50 million on the PNL line off a guess.

[Seth Matlins]

Mm.

[Tomas Puig]

Who's going to do that?

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah, like, I spent some time with the folks from McKinsey who just put out their CEO CMO survey. And if I remember the second year of it, remember there was a data point that said 80% of CMOs and CEOs agree that marketing is underfunded. There was another data point that said 20% of CEOs don't understand what their marketing organization does to drive growth. And what I asked them was, I was like, can you take a look at the data and see if the 20% who don't understand what the fuck marketing does have been removed? And the 80% of CEOs who think marketing is underfunded are therefore the 80% who do understand what marketing does and therefore they Understand, at least believe in, at least implicitly, that marketing is a driver of sustainable, profitable growth. Because if it's underfunded, it goes back to the premise of the show, which is you're just punching growth in the face.

[Tomas Puig]

Have you ever bought a house?

[Seth Matlins]

I have. I'm selling two right now, if you'd like to buy.

[Tomas Puig]

No, I like my little broken down check in sf. But the. When you're buying a house, Right. There's all these requirements that you can't violate. Yep. And if there's even one little deviation, you have to write an entire story about all the things and that's like $500,000, $1.5 million purchase when you're asking for 50 to $100 million of the PNL or more. Yeah, right. Some of our marketers have $1.6 billion budgets. Wasn't that, that, wasn't that the contract assigned to Pulisis for Mars?

[Seth Matlins]

I don't know.

[Tomas Puig]

Just awarded. Right. 1.6 billion. When you're assigning that much cash, you don't get to guess.

[Seth Matlins]

No.

[Tomas Puig]

And so that whole conversation, the whole.

[Seth Matlins]

System has been in fact built on that guess historically. Right.

[Tomas Puig]

And this is where I say the theory. This is our own fault.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes, I agree. Well, I think. Doesn't technology make available? I mean, could, could we have done this 10 years ago?

[Tomas Puig]

No. Absolutely.

[Seth Matlins]

There we go. So, you know, we work with the tools we have, but we could communicate better. Of that there is no doubt. No doubt what? So all I say it all the time, which is, you know, you got to manage, by the way, set and manage expectations.

[Tomas Puig]

The entire purpose of my company is to turn marketers into storytellers again. That is the only mandate.

[Seth Matlins]

Amen.

[Tomas Puig]

Every single thing I built is built off of that.

[Seth Matlins]

It's the first rule of comedy. Know your audience. But also the first rule of marketing.

[Tomas Puig]

But also I sat in the chair, Right?

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

That's all I ever wanted. I don't. The funny thing is I don't. I'm good at it, but I don't like, love doing math. I love solving problems.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

And I actually got out of mathematics and went into music because to me they were very similar.

[Seth Matlins]

Yes.

[Tomas Puig]

Right. Because I didn't love doing math all the time. For me, I'm so passionate about the problem that I will sit down and code GPU kernels and stay up till 3 in the morning, deal with, you know, open source libraries. Right.

[Seth Matlins]

Well, I'm going to say that's something I've never done and likely never will, but I want?

[Tomas Puig]

I wouldn't recommend it.

[Seth Matlins]

We've got five minutes, and I want to ask you a series of questions that we try and weave into every episode.

[Tomas Puig]

Let go.

[Seth Matlins]

They're like, fill in the blank. Super fast. Marketing is.

[Tomas Puig]

Marketing is growth.

[Seth Matlins]

A brand is story. Sources of strategic advantage are intelligence. The hardest part of being a CMO.

[Tomas Puig]

Is everybody thinks they're a marketer.

[Seth Matlins]

Preach. The hardest part of being a CEO is external expectations. By the way, you're doing a great job with the quick answers. The biggest tensions between a CMO and their C suite colleagues are using vanity.

[Tomas Puig]

Metrics instead of reality.

[Seth Matlins]

Last one. Brands and businesses grow when through invention. Tomas Puig, CEO and founder of Alembic. Thank you so much for being with us. I found this absolutely fascinating.

[Tomas Puig]

I love this conversation. Anytime.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah. Well, thank you. And to our listeners. Thanks.

[Tomas Puig]

We have drinks next time.

[Seth Matlins]

Yeah.

[Tomas Puig]

Okay. I mean, I feel like I was not. I could have done so over for this conversation.

[Seth Matlins]

To our listeners, thanks again for tuning into Forbes, the CEO's Guide to Marketing. I am Seth Matlins. If you like the show, smash the subscribe button. By the way, I say this at the end of every show. I want you to know I'm paying homage to my kids who used to say that about their Instagram accounts when they were too young to have Instagram accounts.

[Tomas Puig]

So.

[Seth Matlins]

Hi, guys. Smash that subscribe button. Give it. Give it a rating. And if you. You can leave a review because that's how others will find it. If you found it useful, maybe they will be too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you next time.