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The Marketing Architects
Debunking "Attention" with Marc Guldimann
00:34:35
Elderly intoxicated people pay 33% more attention to ads than sober viewers but remember half as much. That's just one reason why optimizing solely for attention can backfire spectacularly. This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Marc...
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- [00:00]
Mark Guldeman
The market is totally irrational. There are lots of valuable placements that are underpriced. But I do think there's a lot of opportunity in CTV and on the web and in all mediums to use attention data to more efficiently buy attentive reach.
- [00:17]
Wayne O. Jasper
Marketing Architects hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Wayne O. Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects and I'm joined by my co hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines. Hi guys. And we're joined by a special guest, Mark Guldeman. Mark is the co founder and CEO of Adelaide, a company redefining how we measure media quality through attention metrics. Adelaide's proprietary metric AU is the first omnichannel media quality score, proven to predict business outcomes, helping brands understand not just if their ads were seen, but if they truly captured attention. Before founding Adelaide, Mark launched and led Parsec Media, the world's first cost per second platform for mobile advertising, which was later acquired by Cargo. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon with a background in social decision sciences, Mark has spent his career at the intersection of technology, data and human behavior, challenging the industry to move beyond exposure based metrics towards more meaningful measures of effectiveness. So Mark, thank you for joining the pod.
- [01:23]
Mark Guldeman
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [01:25]
Angela Voss
This is going to be super fun. But before we get into all this smart marketing talk, do I have this right? Because I feel like I would have had a lot of fun hanging out with you in college because you were for pure sport hacking wireless networks, is that correct? And that you ultimately then developed the world's first wireless virus filter. Is it, Is this, Are all these rumors true?
- [01:51]
Mark Guldeman
Deep in my old bio, I worked at a company in high school called pinx, which was public access Unix. It was like the well of the east coast. And so I got really interested in like computer networks and stuff. And this was in the early 90s. And so when I was looking at schools to go to Carnegie Mellon had the biggest wireless network at that time. So I ended up going there and messing around with their wireless network. My first job out of school was a sales engineer for a wireless security company that's basically running VPNs because WEP was so insecure. And so I would go around hacking WI FI networks to prove that they needed to use our product. And then there was, I think it was probably 2002 and there was a virus called Welchi and Nachi, I think this is a long time ago and I'm really digging around in the roots of my brain here. But there was, it was Welch and Naci and we were able to figure out based on like the header of a TCP IP packet if a computer was infected and then put that computer in a separate vlan it was a virus that would infect other computers over the network. And so as kids were going back to school and I think we did this with a UC school with a big campus, as kids were coming back to school, they were really worried that these laptops were going to infect all of the other laptops on the network. And so yeah, that's the, that's that story. We built a wireless virus filter using our technology.
- [03:21]
Angela Voss
There's a lot of great reasons to choose Carnegie Mellon for your post secondary education, but you're probably the only person I've ever heard say I chose them because they have a good wireless network. They have the largest wireless network. That's quite bright and right.
- [03:35]
Mark Guldeman
I wasn't a decision scientist at that point. It was only after, after I went to CNU that I became a better at making decisions and I got that was a good basis in that one.
- [03:45]
Angela Voss
Awesome.
- [03:45]
Mark Guldeman
Well, welcome.
- [03:46]
Angela Voss
You are among nerds. So we're excited to have you.
- [03:48]
Mark Guldeman
Great. I feel at home.
- [03:50]
Wayne O. Jasper
Well, we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. And I'll kick us off as I always do with some research. I chose an article today from our guest and it's titled Byron Sharp is Right. Chasing Fleeting attention is a Waste of Money. In this article, Mark responds to a growing debate sparked by Professor Sharp's comments at the Mi3 LinkedIn B2B next summit. Sharpe said that paying more for more than fleeting attention is a waste of money. And Mark agrees that buying more attention for its own sake is wasteful, but argues that's not what attention metrics are for. He says attention should be treated as an input to gauge media quality and price fairly, not as the end goal. Optimizing to attention seconds can lead to sensational creative and over target familiar audiences without improving outcomes. And that is just a tiny preview of what we're going to cover today when it comes to attention. But Mark, thanks again for joining us. To go back in time a little bit, you've had a really entrepreneurial journey. Clearly I missed that intro. Could you share like the common thread that's connected your different ventures and what led you to eventually focus on attention.
- [04:52]
Mark Guldeman
I've always been sort of interested in measurement, even before I knew it was called measurement. Like I was the kid who like counted the steps on the way to school every morning to try to find a more efficient path to school. And I, I got into advertising after studying decision sciences, which is basically like a, an undergrad MBA with a little bit of economics, and got into advertising and I was like, oh wow, there is really bad measurement here and people don't really understand the underlying asset that's being created. And the companies that I've been working on for the past 18 years or so have always been around trying to figure out better metrics for advertising or better ways of understanding data. So yeah, I think advertising, a lot of the weird things that we do in this industry and a lot of the perverted incentives that people face can be traced back to bad measurement or a lack of shared understanding of quality.
- [05:47]
Wayne O. Jasper
So going back to that article that we opened with, Byron Sharp likes to comment a lot on attention metrics. I know that you're familiar with that, but in your rebuttal in this article you said that there's a lot that he gets right about the critique. So what does he get right about attention? Like what are the main challenges of a brand investing in attention metrics?
- [06:07]
Mark Guldeman
So first of all, we named the company Adelaide after where Byron Sharp is from. So after where Ehrenberg Bass is based and we read how brands grow and we were like very inspired by his approach to advertising. When he started talking about attention it was a kick in the teeth. He was like, oh, all this attention stuff, you don't want more attention, you don't want more attention. And the reality is like we 100% agree with him. I think he was speaking very broadly. There wasn't a lot of nuance in what he was saying. There was some specificity around like you don't want more attention. But the amount of people that sent that article to me and like with a laughing emoji like haha, the guy who you named your company after is talking trash about your. The whole category you're trying to create was pretty funny. So to his specific point, we have been in the attention space, me and my co founders for about a decade and our first business was selling media on a cost per second that it worked really well and it was a very, it was a pretty lucrative business. We were charging about a penny per second. We were generating about three and a half seconds of attention per impression and it was these big full screen mobile ad Formats. And so we were using moat data to count how long the ad was on screen. So three and a half seconds, a penny per second. It was a $35 CPM. So really good business. And the crazy thing is, even with that high of a cpm, we were delivering more efficient incremental outcomes than the competition than an ad network that, you know, an advertiser might be deciding between parsec and some other ad network. And they were. When they were looking at the cost of incrementality, we were more efficient, we looked really expensive. And the viewability rates weren't that great though. So the, like the old metrics of cost and viewability that people were holding us accountable to, we didn't look that great. So that was the first challenge. The second challenge was I got a little greedy and I went to the engineers. I'm like, we do three and a half seconds, let's do four seconds, let's do four and a half seconds. This is like straight to the bottom line profit. If we can go past 3 1/2 seconds and like a group of really strong crack engineers, they did it. The numbers start going up. We draw in four seconds. Four and a quarter, four and a half. And along the way we started making some really weird creative decisions. Like we were choosing creative that was like more whiz bang and like more like interesting and less heavily branded. Because there is essentially like this tension between how much attention people are going to pay to something and how heavily branded it is. There was a campaign for a company that was launching a hummus and that we made two ads and one of them said this brand now makes hummus. And the other ad was a spinning hummus container. The spinning hummus container captured a lot more attention but did a lot less work in terms of recall than the one that said this brand now makes hummus. So that's like a very specific example of you don't want the most attentive creative. And you can take that all the way down to like, if you think about what the most attentive creative is, it would probably puppies and kittens or naked people. Neither of which actually Carl's Jr. Ran an ad campaign with like very scantily clad people eating hamburgers and they had to cancel it because it didn't work. So you don't want the creative that captures the most attention. I think there's some common sense that people can use, like when they're designing creative and that they can stay away from just this like full throated optimization towards the Most attention. But that's not the same as you find with audiences, because a lot of times with audiences like you just find programmatic tools will just optimize towards the audience that's generating the best result. And if that result is attention, you're going to be optimizing to old drunk people, because old drunk people pay more attention to things than everybody else. In fact, it takes people 33% longer to read things when they're intoxicated and they remember half as much as sober people. And there's a bunch of other likes.
- [10:07]
Wayne O. Jasper
I knew Rob was gonna love that fact.
- [10:09]
Angela Voss
I mean, that's just outstanding. Wow.
- [10:12]
Mark Guldeman
But if you let the algorithm go and you're like, just get me the most attentive audience, you'll skew. And we found that. We found this out by buying the Nielsen DHAR data. And then a lot of our delivery was skewing later. It was skewing towards older men later in the day, hypothetically, were slightly intoxicated, having a few cocktails at night. There's some less comedic things that happen as well, because people who are aware of brands will actually pay more attention to an ad from a brand than someone who's not aware of it. And that's the exact opposite audience that you want to reach. People who've been over frequencied will actually pay more attention than people have been under frequency. The net is. Byron is 100% right. You do not want to optimize towards the maximum amount of attention you run. This is something called Goodhart's Law, right? It's a leading indicator. But when you start optimizing to it, things start to go really weird. The example I always give to people that have run sales organizations is imagine you find that the number one and two salespeople in your organization are sending the most emails. And you said, oh great, that's a great leading indicator. Now the new KPI for the whole sales team is who can send the most emails. You know what would happen immediately, right? The people who care the least about their leads would just hammer their leads with as many emails as possible. The quality of the emails would go down. And all of a sudden the number of emails sent would no longer be a leading indicator of performance. So that's Funk Goodheart's law. And I think the same thing happens with attention. Attention is fundamentally necessary for advertising to work. But if you optimize impression towards the amount of attention, you create all of these unintended consequences. So it's our view that you shouldn't measure a media campaign based on the duration of attention. But media's responsibility is to create an opportunity that creative capitalizes on and holds your attention and ideally changes the way that you think or behave. So if you want to judge the quality of an opportunity, use probability. So that's the basis of our score, which is like the probability of attention by any person to any creative in a placement.
- [12:15]
Wayne O. Jasper
So you've done a really nice job of pointing out where you and Byron Sharp agree. And it actually seems like you agree a lot more than you disagree. He's not the only one who's challenged attention. When we were talking before this interview, you pointed me to an Ad Age article that has some critiques over attention. They have this study, they said attention doesn't move brand or sales outcomes. So we talked about what people are getting right when they debate attention. What are people getting wrong in your view in this current debate?
- [12:42]
Mark Guldeman
So that article was by Jack Neff and it talked about one of our competitors products that was being used by an RMN. Now RMNs have a lot of incentive to not really pay too close of attention to media quality because audiences are small. Like the audiences that they're selling against are smaller. So they want to make sure they spend through the entire budget. So they have a sort of built in proclivity to steer away from media quality. I think you have to sort of take their opinion with a little bit of a grain of salt. The other problem is that it was an attention product from a legacy verification company. These legacy verification companies have an innovator's dilemma. They've been telling the market for 20 years that like viewability is all you need to understand. Oh, and also brand safety, like because it's a good idea to advertise on recipes instead of news, which everybody knows is not true. So they've been out there like with a narrative, which is much more of a narrative than it's actually evidence based. And so when they went to make an attention metric, they just sort of bundled up a bunch of their viewability stuff. They didn't, they haven't done a lot of the model training that we have and it didn't work. We win the vast majority of head to head competitions we have because of the way that we've constructed our metric. And I do think that at this point it's been so consistently proven that sort of fourth generation attention metrics like ours are predictive of outcomes and they do work way better than viewability. That the biggest risk to the widespread adoption of attention metrics is bad attention metrics because an advertiser will use them and they'll use like one of the verification companies attention metrics or they'll use like a third generation, like a duration based attention metric that's trying to count the number of seconds and they'll get bad results and they'll say, I've done that learning, I can check off the attention metric test and I'm going to move on to the next thing. I'm going to do an AI test or something. And that is by far the biggest challenge that we have to overcome now is oh, like there's different kinds of attention metrics. You should try it this way. Try doing a programmatic optimization instead of just a retrospective or try these different approaches. There's a lot of people who have taken a shortcut to create an attention metric or I will say I won't tell a lot of people. I'll say that a lot of the legacy verification vendors have taken a little bit of a shortcut to release an attention metric.
- [15:12]
Wayne O. Jasper
So then what kind of attention metrics or what way of utilizing attention metrics is valuable for brands in your opinion?
- [15:20]
Mark Guldeman
And this is take this with a grain of salt because I've got a bag to sell and I of course think our approach is the best and I think our metric is the best. I think that attention should be distilled down into. Are we talking about creative? We've talked if you don't want the most attentive creative. Are you talking about audience? I don't want the most attentive audience. You can use attention to like sequence ads to audiences in interesting ways or to maybe pick up if they're already aware, if they're, you know, been over frequencied. So you don't really want the most attentive creative, you don't want the most attentive audience, but you do really want the most attentive media. So you want to break it out and to be about media. Now if we're just address in media, we don't need to measure impressions, we can rate placements since media ostensibly comes all out of impressions originate from a placement. So if we can use attention metrics to rate the quality of placements, we can fundamentally change the way that a lot of people think about media Buying. Advertising is only one of three industries in the world where people will spend $10 million and say, oh, I wonder what I got. Let me look at the measurements. The other two industries are gambling and venture capital. Every other industry in the world trades on Like a clear quality and quantity and then a negotiated price. And so I think that if we start to think about using attention metrics to rate the quality of placements, we can move the industry from post campaign measurement and oh, I wonder what I got to here is a clear, concrete understanding of what we're about to trade. You can use attention metrics to do this by assigning a score to every placement, that is the probability of attention on any impression that comes out of that placement. And you can also start to think about how that placement does in terms of driving outcomes. Because advertising isn't about creating attention, it's about moving the needle for businesses. Right? It's about actually getting more sales, more awareness. Is I moving that business forward? And at Adelaide, our approach is very similar to a bank that's trying to come up with a new credit rating for a group of people. And I'll walk you through very quickly what a bank might do. The first thing a bank would do is they would go and work with researchers who would tell them what are the characteristics of people that make them more or less likely to pay back debt. Then like what school they went to, what kind of car they drive, what their income is. Then they would go gather all that data about the audience. They would build a model that would create a score for the individuals in the audience and then they would train that algorithm using historical debt repayment data. So we take the same approach at Adelaide. The first thing we do is we work with eye tracking companies. We're probably one of the most prolific licensors of eye tracking data in the world. And that eye tracking data tells us what are the characteristics of placements that make that placement more or less likely to capture attention in a specific channel. For example, on the web, it's coverage, clutter, position, duration, page velocity, audibility, and about a hundred other metrics we use now in podcasting, it's like, is it host read or is it stitched? What's the genre? What's the player? How deep into the podcast is this ad actually playing? Like, how dense is the pod? What is it like a Howard Stern type thing where there's 30 minutes of ads? I don't know, I guess I'm dating myself with, with that one. But like used to drive to school and he would hit, like if you hit a Howard Stern ad break, it would be like the entire drive. Or is it like a one minute long break? That's the first step we try to figure out what are the characteristics of ads that are more or less likely to capture attention. Then we go gather that data about every placement in the channel, and then we build a model. The model's not trained yet, but it's still able to generate a score for every placement. Then we go get historical outcome data from impressions that are associated with those placements, and we use that to do very simple reinforcement training. And so what we're left with is a metric that is based in attention data and rigorous research, but is coming out of a model that's been trained to predict outcomes. We like to think of ourselves as like a credit rating agency for media quality.
- [19:28]
Rob DeMars
Okay, so I want to drill into that a little bit, Mark. We have a lot of debates, conversations, both good and some not so good, related to media quality, sometimes related to television. That's the space we play in, right? Both CTV and linear. And I think this might be. I was thinking about what you were saying earlier. This might be unique to television just due to the variance in cost. One commercial break, or not even the break, one commercial spot in a pod versus the next can be wildly different in terms of what that agency or that brand negotiated for it. So when we think about media quality, obviously we're after an audience. That audience is vast in terms of their viewing behaviors. If you think about how you watch television, how I watch television, I was watching NFL football yesterday, which was probably the most expensive way to get in front of my eyeballs. But I watch a lot of other television, too. And so we take that audience first mindset because cost is such a big lever in terms of performance for our brands. So I'm curious, you gave a little bit of backstory there in terms of how you got to that and how you think about it. Point blank, how do you define media.
- [20:38]
Mark Guldeman
Quality At Adelaide, we think about media quality as the probability of attention and the probability of an outcome. You raise a bunch of very good points. And I think that historically, big tentpole events have been more expensive because of the attentiveness of the content, but also the deduplicated reach that you're able to get through them 100%. Yeah, I agree with that. That sort of wanes with programmatic and the ability to do addressable audiences. On ctv, what we find is that the market is totally irrational. There are lots of valuable placements that are underpriced that people hopefully can use our data to go out and identify and buy more of, and then over time, the market will start to correct. But I do think there's a lot of opportunity in CTV and on the web and in all mediums to use attention data to more efficiently by reach, by attentive reach. I don't know if you saw our partnership with Nielsen that we announced, but now Nielsen has our data inside of Nielsen 1 so that they can look at the concept of attentive reach instead of just treating all units of reach as the same.
- [21:45]
Rob DeMars
Love that. I think just bringing new perspectives. We're in such a unique time, I feel like where you've got marketers that are still buying based on TRPs, GRPs, impressions, age old ways of buying, and then you've got marketers that are people purely buying based on performance. And it's like this, the in between of what, what ultimately drives effectiveness. That's what we're talking about here every single week. So just you and your company providing that data set to help brands think more holistically about it. Love that. Want to shift gears a little bit? You've said that agencies shouldn't have to disclose their margins or their business models, which is a hot take in this industry. How do you reconcile that view with today's demand for transparency?
- [22:30]
Mark Guldeman
So I think that in a lot of ways the fixation on transparency in advertising is just the wrong kind of transparency. There should be transparency of quality and not transparency of margins. Transparent margins is closer to Marxism than capitalism. It's just like Marxism with a little bit of money, right? Maybe that's becoming more popular in the US in certain cities. So to answer your question, a lot of people like every five years brands figure out that there's kickbacks and they hire a forensic auditing company and they come in and they look at, they look at everything and they're like, yeah, there's kickbacks. And the brands say, wow, we just gotta switch agencies. They don't change the fundamental economic relationship between the brand and the agency, which is cost plus or fte. Now it is a felony if you work for the US government to sign a cost plus contract because the knock on incentives are so well understood right out of the gate. It creates the principal agent problem and then it inevitably leads to price inflation in order to support kickbacks and declining quality. However, cost plus is like a natural human reaction if you don't understand the quality of the thing you're buying. Inevitably people will default to this doctrine of fairness of oh, you should get 5 to 10 to 20% of margin on what you're acquiring from me. You know, if you went to the gas station tomorrow and the gas station attendant says, sorry, we have no more gallons or octane, all we have are buckets of gas. You would start to behave exactly like an advertiser. You'd say, well, how much did you pay? I'll pay you 10% more than you paid for that bucket of gas. And then you'd wire up your car with an attribution system to try to figure out what did that bucket of gas do towards your business outcome of transportation. You would just, you'd trap the spark plugs, the tire pressure, how heavy your passenger was, were your windows up, were your windows down? All of these various factors. We do the same thing in advertising, except we just wholesale invade the privacy of 400 million people because we don't have gallons and octane. So, so this sort of the behavior of advertisers and the idea that they trade on cost plus can be traced back to a lack of shared understanding of quality. And we hear pretty consistently when people work with us that they become less fixated on transparent costs and less fixated on attribution when they understand the quality of the media they're buying. I think that agencies should trade non disclosed media. Like I don't think that. And I, and maybe this is something we can unpack on this podcast. Like, I don't think that agencies should be selling outcomes or platforms should be selling outcomes. Agencies maybe, because they're a little bit closer to where the rubber meets the road for a brand. But if you are a brand and you're buying outcomes from a platform, that platform is going to get better at producing outcomes than you do. And they're going to take all of your data and then they will 100% sell those outcomes to the highest bidder, which chances are it's your competitor, right? They're going to sell you the worst version of the outcome. They're going to get better at finding those outcomes than the marketer. And that's the core purpose of being a marketer, is to turn resources into demand for the product. So I think it is a, it's a fundamental mistake to trade on a business outcome. But if we're in a media marketplace, we should be trading on the quality of the asset, right? We should be trading on the quality of media and the media agency. And I think maybe the name agency is wrong and maybe it should be the media broker or the media supplier should be held accountable to the quality and the quantity of media, not the outcomes that it provides because there's so much more stuff that happens between the ad exposure and the sale actually happening.
- [26:27]
Rob DeMars
100 yeah, I agree with you. I feel like we're in a time where maybe it's due to AI. There's a lot of things going on from a tech and data perspective, but the questions being asked more and more. But appreciate that perspective from you.
- [26:40]
Angela Voss
And speaking of just perspectives, I think this is the first time we've ever talked about Marxism on this podcast, so I'm loving these spicy takes. What's your spiciest take? You've already been peppering us with questions. Quite a few good ones. But we love a good contrarian perspective. Throw us your biggest one.
- [26:59]
Mark Guldeman
I think that the agency business model is the spiciest one, especially when I started talking about Marxism, which I think can turn people off from my opinions. Yeah, I think it's literally like all of the weird stuff we do in this industry can be traced back to the fact that we're ostensibly in a lemon market for media and all of the behavior is really predictable. If you study lemon markets and you study adverse selection and the principal agent problem, like the way that, that agencies behave and the way that ad tech companies behave is very predictable. That was it. I sort of.
- [27:33]
Angela Voss
That's a good one.
- [27:34]
Wayne O. Jasper
I don't know if I've ever seen someone say that publicly, you know, so. Love that we could broadcast that. Oh, no, no, it's great. It's great. Well, Mark, you made me think of a few more questions. I hope that's okay. I was curious with all like the data Adelaide has now, have you found any trends or like patterns in most attentive media kind of quality by channel? Like, are there any channels that consistently seem to like, do well in your rankings or how does that work?
- [28:02]
Mark Guldeman
Yes, I, I think I need to be careful because we do need to be independent as Adelaide, we need the market to trust us as an independent auditor of quality. But at the same time I think we're allowed to have taste and I think that a lot of what goes into our rating, I think as I've been learning more and more about credit ratings agencies, because I think that's literally like what we're starting to become. I've been surprised by the amount of taste and sort of manual input and of opinions that actually go into these ratings. Fitch and Standard and Poor's and Moody's, they're all, they all get together, they get all the data they can about out a debt issuer or any instrument issuer and then they try to come up with a rating for that. So I think that we should be allowed to have some taste and we should be allowed to have an opinion. We've done a lot of work with YouTube to help YouTube understand the quality of media placements within YouTube and then also help compare apples to apples with the rest of media. YouTube, podcasts and pockets of premium CTV are the best bargains in media today. Low quality CTV is probably one of the biggest rip offs. A lot of like these new age CTV outcome platforms have just figured out how to game attribution, which I guess maybe there's. I have a hot take that I forgot to share earlier which is this thing I call the law of outcomes or the rule of outcomes, which is any platform who gets to be large enough will figure out that it's easier to predict outcomes than it is to create them. And so what you'll find is that platform figures out when you're about to buy something and then serves you an ad which has no impact, but then it's able to take credit for it. So I think that there is a lot of like low quality media that has a lot of scale and a lot of data behind it and those platforms are really just able to predict when you're about to do something. If you go on your phone to Rimowa 8 Sleep and Blue Nile, three big brands and then put your phone down and then open up a large social platform who will not be named because we need to be independent. You'll notice all ads from all of their competitors. And so what they're doing is they're just basically saying you're very qualified in market for this thing. And we're going to start to try to figure out how we can drop as many cookies or as many attribution signals as possible. So I think to answer, there's a very long way to answer your question. We do a lot of podcast advertising because podcasts are a great way to reach a very well defined audience and get a lot of their attention. I am trying to make an AI ad with our new mascot, the Quality Koala to run on YouTube because you know, I think that, I think YouTube is an amazing bargain in terms of reaching audiences with high attention placements.
- [30:53]
Wayne O. Jasper
No, that's super helpful. Thank you and love that you created a mascot too. Sounds super cute.
- [30:59]
Mark Guldeman
He's from Australia. The Quality Koala couldn't be better.
- [31:01]
Wayne O. Jasper
I love it. Okay, let's wrap up with something kind of fun. If your attention were money, what would you say you're overspending on? And Mark, why don't you get us started?
- [31:11]
Mark Guldeman
I wish that I was more cerebral, but it's doom scrolling. I mean it's like I Open up Twitter or X or whatever we call it. And it's getting too much of my attention when I should be reading a book. So I am 100% wasting my money and my attention on the feed based apps.
- [31:31]
Rob DeMars
There's lots of people doing that.
- [31:33]
Angela Voss
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [31:35]
Mark Guldeman
Just that next little dopamine hit, right? You want that next little.
- [31:39]
Angela Voss
Oh, yeah, for sure. They've got us wired in, plugged in like the Matrix. All those eyeballs are somehow like juicing alien technology somewhere else.
- [31:48]
Mark Guldeman
Right.
- [31:49]
Angela Voss
It's just. It's being siphoned from us. That's the Matrix, Alina.
- [31:53]
Wayne O. Jasper
So I haven't seen it, so sorry.
- [31:55]
Angela Voss
All right, so you should. I'm gonna have to go with a recent obsession and I go in and out of reality tv and then when I go in, I'm like, God, I just, I can't stop. And right now, for some reason, I'm hooked on the Voice. I can't stop watching. It starts off with the auditions and then the battles and you got Snoop Dogg on it this season who's just, you know, couldn't be more fun to watch. So I'm just in afterwards. I'm like, that was absolutely empty calories. Like I got nothing from it. But I'm still watching.
- [32:28]
Rob DeMars
I went the non content route. So something getting attention from me is college planning for my oldest. You'd say, well, that's a great use of attention. That feels like quality media, so to speak. But I'm doing college planning for a child that makes decisions based on emotion, how it feels when she gets on campus. And yet I still have spreadsheets built because I'm a type a freak characterizing every little piece of every college. So I should probably back off.
- [33:00]
Wayne O. Jasper
There is something to that feeling you get when you go on campus.
- [33:03]
Rob DeMars
That definitely a lot.
- [33:04]
Mark Guldeman
No, that.
- [33:04]
Rob DeMars
That's a column. But she makes the whole decision based on that. It's one of the attributes. I agree. Right.
- [33:14]
Wayne O. Jasper
Well, mine's similar to Rob. It's like reality tv and there's way too many shows right now. But Rob, mine is Dancing with the Stars. I never watched it. Yeah. Now I got pulled in and now I'm really into it.
- [33:26]
Angela Voss
I've gotten in and out of that one too. So it's. That's the one thing about reality TV shows is you get so into them, but they are easy to like get.
- [33:33]
Mark Guldeman
Off of them too.
- [33:34]
Wayne O. Jasper
I like to think I'm learning. I'm learning a new respect for dancing for sure. By watching.
- [33:38]
Angela Voss
Yes, that's true.
- [33:40]
Wayne O. Jasper
Great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people follow you and learn more about you and what you're doing at Adelaide?
- [33:46]
Mark Guldeman
So our website is adelaidemetrics.com or my LinkedIn. My Twitter is Goldie G U L D I. But I don't really tweet or post that much. But yeah, on LinkedIn. I think it's Gouldy or adelaidemetrics.com for the company.
- [34:01]
Wayne O. Jasper
Nice. It's a nice short handle.
- [34:02]
Mark Guldeman
That's great. I'm pretty old. I mean, been around for a while.
- [34:07]
Wayne O. Jasper
Yeah, that's impressive. Okay, great. Thanks so much for joining us today.
- [34:11]
Mark Guldeman
Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.
- [34:12]
Rob DeMars
Great to have you.
- [34:13]
Angela Voss
Thanks so much.
- [34:15]
Wayne O. Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing Marketing Architects.