← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
What Marketers Get Wrong About Measurement with James Connelly, CEO of Charlie Oscar | Ep. 401
00:44:02
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- [00:01]
A
Today's episode is brought to you by Customer IO. You have customer data, but turning it into personalized marketing at scale, that's the hard part. Customer IO connects the dots. Feed it your data. Start sending messages that actually feel personal. Learn more@customer IO TMM. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for Unfilter through conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. I am here with James Conley, the CEO of of Charlie Oscar. I will give James the floor to basically tell us he is a cool history through marketing. So I want you to dive into that and then we'll go into the topic of the day. So let's get into it.
- [01:12]
B
Sounds good. Yeah. Lovely to meet you, Daniel. Thanks for having me on. So my love affair with digital marketing started when I was 21 and I worked in a very small agency in London, and we had a. We had a group of clients that at the time were mobile content clients. So the people that are listening to this, if you remember the days of ringtones and crazy frog, that's where my career started, because they were my customers. And this was like 0809. And if you're a technology history buff, you'll also know that was the year the iPhone came out. And so I could quite quickly see this new technology of the iPhone killing the mobile content industry, because you were about to get every single piece of content at your fingertips for free. And so why would you pay for a ringtone or a screensaver? And, you know, I thought, I need to be in this. I need to be in this business. And so I started my first agency called Fetch, and it was a mobile agency. It was one of the first to exist. And we were going to figure out how to do mobile advertising ahead of anybody else. And the first year was, yeah, was an interesting experience because we actually had a lot of brands that wanted us to come and talk to them and tell them, like, right, I'm thinking about buying an iPhone myself. My kids are getting an iPhone. Should we be advertising this platform? And so we had lots of these great conversations, but the reality was people weren't actually changing the way that they market themselves. And the learning was like, trends happen fast and marketers move quite slowly. There's a subset of marketers that move really fast, and we had to figure out who they were and in that case it was apps, app based companies because they were startups, they were going really quickly and so we really focused on the app ecosystem and. Right, okay, so once you've got an app, how do you find your next 100,000 customers? And so we got really good at that and figured out the app stores, how to market, how to get good quality customers and that, that was how we found like our, our niche. And so we went on and we, we launched in San Francisco and actually we took the business around the world and worked with a lot of the world's biggest digital economy businesses or app businesses from Apple, Uber, Expedia Group, supercell, all the big, all the big app companies. And then I eventually sold that business to Dentsu, which is one of the larger holding companies and I left a few years ago and now building Charlie Oscar, which, which I can come on to. But we're solving a slightly different problem.
- [03:42]
A
You can go into, we'll, as we talk about it, we can go into it. But I think the thing you're solving with the, the iPhone, I think we're in the next phase of marketers moving fast with AI and then there's the people who are going to move slow. So I think we're in that new, the next big trend right now, which is crazy to see that, that happens 10 plus years ago. And now we're in a new trend where people are figuring out should I be marketing on these LLMs, what is that going to look like? Or should I just keep my playbook the way it is and forget about that? Because that's not a revenue driver right now. So it's an interesting fork. We are in the road again.
- [04:28]
B
It is. And the reality is timing is everything. Right. So if we launched our first business fetch two years earlier or two years later, it may not have been as successful as it was because ultimately we were solving problem for a really fast growing market at exactly the right time. So if you apply that to what's going on now with AI, like most people think about timing as you don't want to miss the boat and you don't want to be too late because you're going to be disrupted and left behind. But you can definitely be too early. And there's so many cases where businesses have been for the last three years building AI companies and a new model from one of the large AI companies has completely killed, wiped out thousands of businesses. From a marketer's perspective, what you cannot ignore is user behavior and user behavior is growing really, really quickly. In search trends on LLMs, but it's largely incremental and so it's still like in the opportunity space. What I mean by incremental is that people aren't searching less on traditional formats like Google yet, but they are searching a lot on LLMs. And so I think for most businesses, if you're not already thinking about an AEO or a geo, which I don't think the industry has decided what to call optimization for LLMs, but if you're not looking at that already, then I would definitely be experimenting with that. At the very least I want to
- [05:53]
A
go into something that the industry has been trained on a lot of time that clicks equal customers. I know you talk about this, but when you audit a brand's marketing today, what are the first two to three signals that tell you their measurement is completely broken?
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B
You know what, we can actually tell if their measurement is broken without auditing any of the data. We can just look at the media mix because if you're, if, if you're, if the media plan looks very similar to what you know a media plan would look like two, three years ago and you're spending a lot on the, the dominant search platforms on brand terms and not doing anything in more mid enough funnel, then I can immediately tell you've got a measurement problem because your, your, your advertising reporting is telling you that bottom of the funnel is driving all of your success. And we know that that's not right. Ultimately once we do we've got a tool called Compass which is largely using mmm but it's like different measurement solutions triangulating to understand like where's the incremental opportunity in a marketing mix, not just a media mix. And if a lot of your advertising is pointed towards demand capture bottom of the funnel, then either the measurement's broken or you need to start thinking about moving more of your investment into mid enough funnel channels to create more interest in your brand, in your product, in your service or whatever it might be you might be selling. And that could be non media channels, it could be creative marketing, it could be a new platforms like TikTok Commerce or whatever it might be, but it could be a brand going onto tv.
- [07:34]
A
Yeah, I think a lot of marketers keep Google branded search and Google because I've seen this, because I used to run marketing ops and I used to say to people, hey, branded search means something's coming from somewhere else. Someone found the brand somewhere in the funnel. It wasn't from just they randomly heard our name but I think it's just When I see the argument of trying to make that argument back in the day, this like five, six years ago, the argument back was that I could start getting more, it's easy to prove so I can get more budget and I could just say that I, I need more budget for Google because look, it's working. But when you go to these other traditional channel, not traditional but like newer channels, tv, they're getting easier to prove now. But back then it was really hard to say that okay, TV is the only cause unless you do like a geo test or something like that to prove it out. And most companies didn't want to do that. So what do you suggest for people to do a test to just say okay we or rethink how they are their media mix so they're not so heavily on a search platform like Google who's taking all their money and not really incrementally helping them grow.
- [08:54]
B
Yeah, the first thing I would say is by the way, Google is still a phenomenal advertising channel but the way that you use it and the network they have is probably underutilized. In the example that you're giving me. Right. I would say like the challenge you just described there Daniel, is where business and marketing, and when I say business, it could be the CEO or the CFO and marketing are not aligned on what success looks like. And five years ago it was really difficult to prove to your board like exactly how effective your marketing spend was other than what the click based tracking was telling you. So you're exactly right. Well I can actually see in the Google Dashboard or the meta dashboard or whatever it might be that this has driven this number of customers. But most sophisticated marketers would have at least had a sense or a feeling that that wasn't quite the full picture. And I think that's the feedback we get from people over the last few years. Like yeah, it says this but is that really happening? And now we have the sophistication of tools like our Compass or there's loads of other ways of doing it, but using modeling and predictions to figure out what is cause and correlation of marketing and business outcome. And then once you've got a hypothesis you can then run a, you can run a test to validate that it could be geo holdouts or you know, there's a number of different ways that you could run tests to validate the data. But ultimately all of this is about, we spend a lot of time with CFOs and getting boards to align behind one source of truth. And it's like helping the business understand, okay, so what's been showing up as positive for the last 10 years in our marketing mix, we're going to start changing the weight because we've now linked marketing input to, let's call it sales. That's most customers care about sales and we can see that we need to start moving money over here and this is what we're going to look out for. Here are the KPIs. We're going to keep an arm. We give brands something called fields F I O D S. These are forward indicators of demand. Because when you start changing your marketing mix, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to actually prove it. Right? It might take two, three months to say, right, here we go, this, we did a holdout test or whatever it might be and here's the results. This verifies what the MMM is telling us. But we can actually start to look at certain signals ahead of that, which we call field. So it could be that, you know, then maybe your brand search will show a level of intent. So we can say, okay, right, so we've been doing some more mid and upper funnel activity, let's say working with creators, for example, and we can see that there's been more searches for the brand. And so we, even though it's not sales yet, we can start to see a correlation between the new activity and some sort of demand for our brand. And so usually we will give marketers like three or four things to watch out for before you actually expect to see sales. And you can validate the test.
- [11:57]
A
Going in a little deeper into that, what are some of those leading indicators you said? One is like maybe tick up in branded search for your brand. What are some leading indicators that marketers could look at today if they're starting to experiment on channels away from the giants that most companies are advertising on.
- [12:21]
B
So the way we would think about that is like you've got third party data points and you've got first party data points. So the third party data point would be something like Google Trends and having a look at the demand increases there over time. But then the first party would be looking at your own media. So it could be your website or your app, it could be your social channels. Like what change are you seeing from potential customers interacting with your brand? Is your, is your sessions increasing to your website? Is your follow account growing? Is your, are you having more app downloads for example? Like what we want to see some intent from potential customers even though they might not purchase straight away. And so it really does depend on the business. But we. They're the type of things that you can capture in real time. You know what's going on and you can correlate it to marketing activity.
- [13:19]
A
And what are some. I know you said, okay, you go into this business and you, you're trying to basically talk to these CFOs to make a, a change of like what we're trying to do. What are some, like, what are some structural changes you would make in let's say you were running a marketing department or going in to fix a marketing department right now. What are some structural change that you make to make sure that they are capturing demand but also like doing you say creating, creating demand. Is it. Do you think it's misaligned incentives? Do you think it is attribution problems? Do you think it's like Rory Sutherland says all the time that I mean it's like going on Google is basically like you're like IBM, right? You're making a choice that everybody's making. So it's hard to get fired from like say I would have put money at Google versus I would have put money in CTV and it. And it flops. So what are some structural changes you would make in a, in an org?
- [14:21]
B
It's a really good question and it really does depend on the size of Org. I'll work backwards like that Roy Sutherland comment. You don't get fired for Google advertising. Google the IBM anecdote. At the end of the day, businesses either have a growth problem or not. And if you've got a customer growth problem, then you need to look at the marketing strategy. And spending lots of money with Google might not be as safe as people think as an acceptable answer. We see this a lot with private equity owned businesses because they look at marketing in a very data science way, which is ironically how we look at the measurement side of things. And ultimately, if increase in spend in marketing is going up, but we're not hitting growth targets, then there's a fundamental issue with the mix. But in terms of thinking about an orchestra, I don't know if this will answer your question directly around measurement and incrementality, but a successful marketing organization today probably gets three things right. They do have the data flow in the business so that they're continuously learning on and getting signals on what's working and what's not. And that could be incrementality. I mean hopefully it should be. You should be using some sort of tools and solutions around incrementality. But it also needs to be things like feedback loops from paid Media to the creative teams and, you know, social signals from potential customers. Like if a business isn't leaning into leveraging data and it's readily available to decision makers in the business, which by the way, we still see as a huge gap for a lot of marketing, then you know, that that would really need to change. I think the second is it's the creative media debate. I've got a. I'm working on a theory that nearly all marketing problems are actually creative problems. And for too long you could do reasonably good marketing without being brilliant at creative. That's changing. And so having an organization that respects, understands content and creativity and elevating that across marketing is something I'd really embed in a marketing team. And I think it's impossible. To grow a successful marketing organization if people aren't inherently social. Understanding exactly how social works and how fast trends are moving and having native people in the business that live and breathe the platforms that their customers are spending time on, I think is crucial. I said I'd say three things, but there's a fourth and the fourth one is AI. And this is I think, probably arguably the most interesting one. But I don't know why I thought of Burger King. I have no idea. But if Burger King implement AI into their marketing this year or not, it's not going to have a huge difference on how many burgers they sell this year. But the speed in which this technology is changing, changing and how marketers can implement it is like faster than I've ever seen before. And so I wouldn't need a team full of AI experts in a marketing organization. But I would really want some curious people. Like curiosity as a culture within a marketing org is going to be very, very important if it isn't already because change is going to be faster than anyone's ever seen before.
- [18:03]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think what you're saying too is fundamentally what a lot of marketing teams get wrong is you need to start with some sort of hypothesis of what you're trying to solve and then without bias, you do that test and then come up with an answer. And you need curious people to come up with a hypothesis that are, that are good. And then you need someone this data analysis to show if you're correct or not and then use data to, to instill more curiosity, look at those trends, analyze those trends and say more curiosity to build. And I think it's this like loop of creative people helping with the hypothesis, coming up with new things and then testing with data people validating. And this is a cycle where if you don't have both, you're just using data all around in a circle which data only could tell you things that you've done before. I can tell you like net new things usually. So I like the way you think you have like hypothesis with these creatives because I do believe too that creative is the new targeting. I think we people have mastered targeting five, ten years ago now. Creative is the new targeting. So if you're not good at creative, you're not good at now targeting. In this day and age you're sitting on a gold mine of customer data and it's doing nothing for you. That's not a data problem, that's a tools problem. Customer IO connects your data to every channel you ready use sms, email, push in app, then it uses AI to build workflows that used to take weeks. Weeks. Every message feels like it's written for that customer, not blasted at them. 8,000 plus brands already made the switch. Learn more at customer IO. TMM
- [20:04]
B
yeah, well that's because there's no other way of targeting anymore because if you're advertising with the core platforms then really you're only leverage creative. And that's why we're seeing this like huge, like the huge, huge increase in demand for creative at scale. Like we're talking about actual creative assets now rather than creative thinking. But the algorithms like Andromeda in, in meta and basically from app loving through to TikTok and Meta, everyone's got their own version of AI algorithm that basically demands thousands of ad creatives and will place the ad, they'll place the ad creative in front of the right person at the right time and really the way of winning an auction these days is by as you rightly say, it's like you just need velocity at scale of creative. So that is really, really pushing brands to have variation and they just can't keep up. I do think that will. My guess is this is a really good thing for the industry but just quite difficult at the moment because everyone's thinking about scale rather than quality. And I think, I think the market will evolve and I think what we're going to see is the, the rewards at the moment are to the early mover who's throwing all of the creative at the wall and seeing what's sticking and then iterating. But the reward soon will go to the brands that are able to make the best creative. And what is the best creative? Well it's different, it's unique and it's thumb stopping and it and it actually brands customers engage with it and feel good about it. And so I think we're going to go from a quantity to a quality shift over the next. I couldn't tell you how long but nonetheless you're absolutely right. You can only optimize your way so far. At the end of the day you need creative thinking and it's not, I always say creative thinking is not reserved for the creative team. So in a creative team one of the things you need is that next big idea that's going to make someone laugh, cry or stop scrolling. But I want to see creativity from other parts of the business because trying to do something in a different way could even be the way that you approach a data challenge. Like if you could try and do it differently to get a better result, that for me is also being creative.
- [22:17]
A
I agree. I mean I used to be a marketing ops and I thought that was a creative role because you're trying to manipulate systems to be more efficient to try get a better result, to move faster, to save time and some of the more interesting solutions that the software that you were presented with couldn't do and you had to do a workaround around that software. So I, I, I, I'm 100% on that side. I wanted to ask you when you thinking about like media mix, how much should should brands reserve for investing in that like creative arm to test on these platforms? Because I think a lot of people just say I want to put all this budget, I'm going to spend a very small amount on creative and I'm going to maybe do creative slop here and there. I'm going to put, and I'm just going to put a bunch of money on these platforms. What do you think you should reserve for building out a creative to market on these platforms?
- [23:15]
B
There's a pragmatic answer and then there's one that's a little bit more out there. Should we say the out there answer is I would completely start again and think about budgeting from a creative media point. Like if you were doing a zero budget starting now, building up, I wouldn't think about how much of my media spend should I spend on, on creative I was, I would think about building a creative content engine right through creators, UGC ambassadors, celebrities, branded content, found a content, whatever it might be, I'd be growing organic channels and I'd think about paid media as the amplification to that content strategy. That's like the, and, and what that percentage split lands on I don't know. But I bet you it's closer to 50, 50 than it is in the current model where people build a media plan. They go right, what creative do we put in the media plan? And usually you probably spent like 80 on the media and 20 on the creative and that's max. Like we see brands that are spending 90 on media, 90 on working media. But the shortcut answer to your question is like every brand, the life cycle of their business, whether they're challenger, market leader, you know, small, independent, huge congratulations. The numbers different but I would say I had to pick a number for all. Like if you're not spending 30% of your overall marketing budget on creative then and that could include influencer marketing, whatever it be, then I think you're probably underweight.
- [24:38]
A
I think it's, it's, it's funny because I think we, we as marketers have been trained to not think of that as a like a network, our channel to invest in. We've been thinking of like influences of these one off buys. We think of influencers as just paid posts. We don't think of the. Obviously the people who get it aren't thinking that way. But I'm saying I just think that sometimes just because Meta and Google are easy to allocate money to, I think we automatically think that that's where we should go where it is a little bit. There are platforms that are helping allocate budget better for creators but it's harder to allocate budget like you are on a Facebook or Instagram or. So I think we have a mindset problem a lot especially in B2B when it comes to investing in the network of these are media entities that have trust with an audience that you're investing in versus these are one off buyers billboards that I'm, I'm buying. I think it's a mindset shift.
- [25:49]
B
Yeah, you're, you are spot on. And it's not, it's not actually just from the marketing teams, it's sometimes from the, you know, the CEO and the leadership team. Because I'll tell you this, last year I was in a meeting with one of our customers and you know they probably spend $100 million a year on marketing and it was at a time of year where they really needed to push, they needed a push, it was seasonality wise, they needed a push and they were spending far too much with some of the big dominant digital platforms. I won't name names. And we could show that actually they were really underweight in areas like influence marketing. And we were like guys, now's the time to really start to shift because you, you may want to spend more money here, but it's just not going to, it'd be better just not to spend it because the incrementality is showing. There's diminishing return curves in all media and they were at the limit. Right. As in they spend any more money, they're just not going to get anything back. But the CEO's answer was yeah, but I can, it's easy to spend, I can spend more money with Google tomorrow and I'll get more something. And that's the problem. Like it's so easy to spend more money with the digital platforms. And not everyone's understand, not everyone has the same level of understanding of it's not this unlimited road of high quality customers that are going to mention your brand. So there's an educational piece and that's why I go back to the point I made earlier. Like internally you need to make sure in an organization that the cfo, the CEO and the marketing team are all aligned around what success looks like and what the right KPIs. We actually go in and do training on measurement mmn to boards and to internal teams and that's where we've seen the best success. They go okay, we get it. This is the, this is the bridge. This is what we're working towards. And it's that, it's that understanding.
- [27:49]
A
Yeah. That I think the whole problem obviously is a lot of people just don't know how to execute good measurement and they, they, they, they opt in for whatever the platforms tell them as measurement or last click attribution. They don't think about incrementality, they don't think about different media mix modeling. All these models are like you said are, are compasses. They're, they're, they directionally trying to tell you none of them are going to give you a straight answer but they an idea of where to invest. But if you only pick one thing like last click, you're losing on half your marketing. But I also wanted to go back to one thing. I know you've mentioned this a bunch on this podcast but of like the creator spend and investing in creators. What could you just because I think there's a misunderstanding what that actually means. So what does, what does it look like spending on creators for an elevating that content.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a really good question. You're right, there is a misunderstanding but. And people are using different terminology. You've got. Some people talk about influences, some people talk about Creators, ambassadors, celebrities. The way that we look at it is when you work with a person of influence or a person that's creating content online, right? They may have a thousand followers, they may have 10 million followers, right? But they're creating content online and people are engaging with it. So we call them creators. And broadly speaking, you can use creators in two different ways, one as distribution. So they can create some sort of content endorsing your business and their audience is going to see it and that's going to have some value if it's, if it's the right match, right? But increasingly the most interesting way to use creators or influencers is actually just for the content. And so the biggest shift in the industry, the biggest growth in influencer marketing is coming from some people like to call them like nano influencers, micro influencers, bloggers, or even like just, even just like UGC content, which is people with no audience at all, but they can, they've got a phone and they can create ads. And that part of the industry is growing really, really quickly. For what we discussed before, number one, paid media is still the biggest line item on most marketing organizations, certainly in consumer marketing, on most marketing organizations plan. And the way to get the most out of paid media right now is content at scale. And the cheapest and most efficient way of getting content at scale is outsourcing it to an army of creators around the world. And so creative marketing as a content engine is incredibly powerful. But naturally you want to work with smaller creators because you're not interested, interested in their followers, you're interested in their ability to create content. And then you'll take that content and you might repurpose it and use it in a paid advert. You might do what's called whitelisting or meta, might call it partnership ads, where you collaborate with them and advertise under their account. But that is the biggest driver in creative marketing. But on the distribution side, you've then got, and that's usually reserved for slightly larger creators and influencers where ultimately you want their audience. Now the holy grail is to have both, where you've got a creator strategy that has like we talk about there being a pyramid of, pyramid of creators. So like you've got the Kendall Jenner at the top, like the big celebrity ambassador. And at the bottom you've got people with 500 followers making UGC content. And like you really want that entire pyramid working for you where it's driving organic reach. So reaching their audience without having to pay any advertising, but giving you volume of different creative that you can use in your paid media.
- [31:57]
A
I like the way you framed the Nano creators as not only it's not a distribution engine, it's a content creation engine. Because I also think even if you're not using them as a distribution engine, they do inherently know how to talk to those audience because they grew some sort of following with that audience and they're an audience that you want to, you want to market to so they understand that market and you want to market to that audience. And most market, most marketing teams, unless you're marketing and marketers don't have the best deep understanding of that audience that they're marketing to because they haven't one lived the life of that audience, they haven't been a day in the life of that audience. They're not doing that job. So the best way to do it is get people who are doing that to talk about that and put that as your content. So I like the way that you framed that. I think that's super important to help scale your paid advertising as well.
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B
Yeah. And as look, it's multifaceted but that is the, that's what's going to have the biggest impact on any marketers plan if they're inherently spending on paid media.
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A
What is one thing mindset that you would try change in the current marketing landscape of the problems you see what is like a mindset you would change for marketers.
- [33:25]
B
Two things that swing to mind. One is I think you need to get really good as a marketer at distinguishing between the noise and the signal because there's a lot of, there's a lot of change but there's also a lot of bullshit in marketing and I don't know about you, but like, you know, I might be scrolling in my own time trying to think about something completely different to work and I might be on Instagram and I am getting hounded with ads from all sorts of different marketing companies or marketing professionals promising me that the world is about to end and everything's going to change and they've got the perfect solution. And so the noise to signal ratio is not great in marketing at the moment. I'm seeing so many adverts and people talking about things that would actually just breach the meta T's and C's. So you know, there's a lot of crap. So I think I would encourage marketing teams to be forward thinking, think about where you need support and if communication like people get in touch with you, you read something, whatever, like if it falls in the noise category, just ignore it for now. On the flip side, and this is a bit of a contradiction, and I said this earlier, but like, there's noise for a reason, there's a lot of change. And if there isn't curiosity in a marketing department about what's coming next and like a personal interest in figuring some stuff out, then I think that's a challenge. So in one respect, I would encourage everyone to be curious. But on the other side, don't go down the rabbit hole.
- [35:13]
A
Yeah, I think it goes into the point you're making also with paid advertising too, I think you need to have some people on your team that have a pulse on the trends and the relevancy of what's happening in today's market. Or one with your customer and two, also with the market marketing, like, have a pulse of where user behavior is headed to have a pulse on what is culturally happening to different generations. If you don't have that on your marketing team, it's hard to make that pivot. You, you as a user know, like I as a user know as a millennial that I've shifted 70% of my behavior that used to be go to Google towards Chad bots. Like, I know that as a marketer. So if I know that that's happening, there's probably a lot of people that are doing the same exact thing. So how do I solve that as a marketer and figuring out that that pointer.
- [36:25]
B
You have to be careful because you're right, Danny. Like if also if you, if you assume that the population acts like you do, then you'd be wrong because they don't.
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A
Exactly.
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B
This is the crazy thing, right? And look, we are inherently as marketers probably a bit more forward thinking than I guess, the general population. But like, that's a really good example. I'm using Claude and all these different LLMs and ChatGPT and whatever else. But the reality is Google search traffic is going up. It's going up. So as a marketer, you have to look at your own trends and then the trends of your customers and then what the data is showing you and then sort of triangulate between the three.
- [37:10]
A
I think you make a good point there too. I think you're right. I think the end, the end person that you should give a real damn about is the person who you're trying to sell your product to and your behaviors. I, as a lot of marketing companies and SaaS companies are way ahead of the curve. Like those people you were trying to market to when you first started your first business Fetch, you were Trying to those people who really forward thinking of I'm going to build apps, I'm going to. These apps are going to be used by a lot of people. These apps are I'm going to. And those people I'm going to market to, those are the forward thinking and a lot of the marketers are, especially on LinkedIn are those forward thinking people who are scaring you. But there are so many, just like the computer, just like iPhone. There's so many people who are not, have not crossed the chasm at all. And we can't forget that a lot of people are marketing to plumbers or electricians or restaurant owners or that aren't they care about making good food. They don't care about trying to figure out how to do a new workflow and claw today.
- [38:33]
B
Yeah, exactly. It all comes back to that timing horizon. It is impossible to time things perfectly. You just don't want to be too early or too late. There's a bit in the middle where you're a bit early, bang on time or a little bit late. That's all fine. So when you look at ChatGPT or like LLMs versus search like and you're targeting plumbers, your target, your ICP is plumbers, right? Right now if you shifted a lot of marketing efforts into LLMs, you would be in that too early category. But at some point that will be the right thing to do. So you have to have a view and that's making a bet on the future, which you need a little gamble there.
- [39:20]
A
I also think you always got to have that curious testing mindset, curious mind experimental mindset. You just keep putting a small amount of testing, working capital to see if there's an uptick and not blow your budget on it, but have working capital doing that. Lastly, I want to ask you what is a marketing kill would die on
- [39:47]
B
the marketing hill that I would die on? I don't, I don't want to repeat myself, but just there's this, there's billions and billions of dollars of advertising being wasted every year and it's because people are using last click measurement. And so we've spoken a bit about this, but if you really think about it, last click basically says user clicks on this advert sale happens. So because they clicked on the advert, the sale happened. It's a bit like being a Brit, I'm a soccer fan. And so if you think about soccer, you've got 11 players and the striker tends to score the goals. But that doesn't mean that all the goals happen because the striker put it in the net, right? You still need the wingers, you need the defenders, you need, you work as a unit and then the ball gets crossed in and the striker scores the goal. If we took last click measurement and applied it to football, you would get, you'd have 11 strikers on the pitch. It'd be a disaster. So yeah, I'm down a hill for moving away from last click as your single source of truth for measurement.
- [41:01]
A
I think that was one of the best analogies I've, I've heard for people who understand football or soccer as you call it in the US But I think it's super true. You don't base your, your game plan off of the one, this one score. And I think you have to play offense in marketing, but you need some defense, you need some take, you need defense in marketing. And defense is usually in marketing that long term brand building, moat building. Because the best defense usually wins in the long, the long term of like they may not win the first one or two games, but usually the best people who are stopping the goals to coming the goals are, are usually the team that ends up winning in the long run, maybe not the short run, but in the long run. So I really like that analogy.
- [42:03]
B
Oh, good stuff. I'm driving my team up the wall with all my sports analogies. I don't know where they're coming from, but it's just that's how I like to see things.
- [42:11]
A
No, I do too. I usually, I've given like the football analogies a lot because I played American football. So I've given those analogies a lot when it comes to like marketing ops and stuff like that. So I totally get it. Lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing?
- [42:30]
B
Pretty active on LinkedIn. So search for me, James Connolly, and I'm sure you'll find me. And yeah, that's probably the place.
- [42:42]
A
Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it.
- [42:44]
B
Thank you for having me on, Daniel. That was really interesting and you're building an awesome community. Congratulations.
- [42:51]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great, great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.