Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They're missing everything, they're missing every opportunity.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: AI is only useful where there's a tool and a need that combine.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: People have shown intent and then you can follow that intent and actually influence the decisions. You build trust for that company over time.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: But the thing is that AI and our system knew how to find that person at that moment when they were most available to act. And it knew that they would be kind of considering these purchases at that moment.
[00:00:24] Speaker C: Welcome to The Entrepreneur's Logbook Podcast. I'm your host Zach Be Nerd. You can find me on Social at its Zack B. In each episode I I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extreme business growth. Today we're joined by Rick Brown and Carol Lawson, co founders of Marketstorm, an AI driven advertising and demand strategy company that helps brand reach and influence buyers before they even start actively searching. Rick and Carol built Marketstorm from the ground up, years before AI was mainstream, where everyone is using it nowadays and have grown it into a nationwide operation without ever taking a single dollar. That's an investment which not a lot of companies are able to do. And before co founding the company, Rick on his side Spent about 15 years building brand partnerships in sports and entertainment for organization like the Oakland Raiders and Citibank. And today he also lectures at Harvard Extension School on entrepreneurial leadership. Carol on the other hand brings a kind of interesting background as well in data science and behavioral research background to the table. Having previously led a major statewide digital transformation effort taking California from basically the bottom of the national ranking to winning Best of the Web from the center of digital government. And she's also become a sought after voice on how AI and shifting consumer behavior are reshipping the way people are making decisions. She's a two time keynote speaker at Oracle Open World and was even invited by the United nations to speak at the world Tourism organization. Rick, Carol, nice to have you guys aboard. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Thanks Zach.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Good to see you.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: I always like to have these like duo type like appearances because I feel like I'm able to get two perspectives into one and then you guys both have a different like background which always makes the conversation fairly interesting. But one of the first thing I was like to ask anyone that comes on the show as it is a business, it is an entrepreneurship podcast and you guys have been around the block to put it fairly simply. I, I'd love to hear from you guys if is there like one thing that you feel if you had to restart from scratch your Entire company knowing everything that you know today that maybe you would do differently, that a lot of people get, like, totally wrong.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'll speak to that. So in business, you make a lot of mistakes, right? I think for us, I would say on our end, our. I think. And I don't know if Carol agrees with this, I think I would have just chosen to do everything faster.
I would have. You know, we worked together. We've been doing this for about nine years.
We have had explosive growth. We, you know, had exponential growth just about every single year. We've never had a down year, which is wild, I think, in any business.
And like you said, we never took a dollar of any investment. We've had countless offers from large and small entities trying to buy us, saying that they're going to take us to another level.
And at the end of the day, we know we can build it ourselves. And I think if I could go back and start over, you know, we didn't actually get our own office place together for probably three years because we were really building. We had other companies at the time, and we were not together every day.
And I think if I was founding my company or this company or if I was talking to other founders, I would say a critical ingredient is be in the room together, physically in the room together, as early and as often as you can.
And the other thing I would say is don't lie to yourself.
The biggest thing that people do in business is they assume every revenue is going to come in. They assume no problems are going to come in. And those are all just foolish assumptions.
Every problem is going to come up, and every revenue you counted on will probably not happen.
So the faster we could have gotten the room together and spent every day just thinking through things, being that yin and yang of this company, we would have been so much better suited. And I think we would have had, you know, we probably could have 10x in year two rather than, you know, 3 or 4x. And then that. That could have just sort of accumulated over the years. That would be kind of my. My. My recommendation myself, nine years ago.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: That's interesting.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: I totally agree with that. Because the thing that's really built this company is the dynamic between the two of us. We do different things. We have different perspectives. Linking those perspectives together is where the power comes from. And we didn't realize that until we actually sat in the room together. We knew that we had the different perspectives. We knew that we had the different gifts that we could bring together. We knew we worked together really well, but there was something about being in the office together every day and working through and building, and that was even before we started having employees.
So way before that, just being able to engage together and form this together and learn each other and how each other thinks and learn those handoffs was pretty important.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I found that really interesting. And the reason I'm saying that is a lot of people. I mean, a lot of marketing agencies, I feel like there's a lot of agencies that have come up during the time, like, Covid. Like, a lot of them just, like, come up out of nowhere. And big thing that's similar with people that have launched during COVID is it has all been, like, remote and everything like that. And a lot of people have just, like, kept some of this culture, like, remote, where people are just like, oh, just working from home. You know, like, we're saving an office cost and everything like that. But from your perspective, like, the sooner that you were be able to be together, there was more of, like, this, like, synergy or, like, energy where you're able to just build, put your head down and build. And I feel like a lot of people have not even had the chance to experience that in some capacity.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned Covid, because we launched in 2018, around the time we were. We were literally about to sign a lease on our first office in March of 2020.
And for whatever reason, the landlord, at the end of the day, we were three months into negotiations about the sign. He doubled the cost, and we said, interesting. And I had been reading about this crazy virus coming out of. Out of Asia, and I was like, you know, I'm gonna just say no on principle, and I'm gonna kind of wait. I want to see what happens here. And then, sure enough, we were all, you know, locked up for a year and a half. It's crazy.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Yeah. I think everything happens for a reason. That's. That's my big belief on that here. One of the things I'd love to, like, understand, because a lot of people, when they're thinking about AI, they're like, what does that even mean? Like, there's so many different things around, like, AI right now. It's like, oh, should we be implementing AI and everything like that? But with you guys, I mean, you guys use AI, use marketing data. Like, you have a very specific approach towards, like, the work they do, which is obviously why you've been able to grow so quickly. But one of the things I'd love to understand is when, like, a company just comes to you or maybe like a brand or something like that. Like, how do you guys actually figure out where a customer is in their decision making process? And like, how do you even show up for them at the right moment? Because I feel it can be hard to know like how to target someone. Like for example, at our company we do like a lot of outbound, do a lot of volume to negate the luck factor of appearing at the right time. But you guys have a more strategic approach to being able to do that.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: So I had coffee with a friend of mine the other day and we're friends outside of work stuff. And he runs a company where he does flight schools and private flights and private jet stuff.
And he was lamenting to me the other day, he's like, I'm spending all this money on Google, I'm spending all this money on social media and I'm trying to get my brand out there.
And he said, it was so funny, Zach. He goes, I just wish there was a way to find the people that were thinking, I want to do private jets, I want to learn how to fly a plane, I want to get involved in this private aviation stuff. But they're not ready to buy yet. They just are starting to think about it. I would love to have my brand in front of them. And I just, there's no way to do that.
And I started laughing. This literally happened a week ago. And I started laughing. He goes, why are you laughing? And I said, dude, do you know what I do? And he goes, no, I don't know what you do at all. And I was like, what you just described is exactly what I do. We find the exact people that need your service, that don't really know what it looks like, what it's going to cost them, how they're going to do it. They're starting to think about that problem in their life or that idea in their life.
I would like to move to Florida and get a house on the beach. I don't know what that means for taxes. I don't know what it's going to cost me. Are there different fees for having a beach lifestyle? Like, I don't know what that looks like. And they start to think about that. And what we do is we capture them in that first moment. We go, here's a person that would be a good fit for our client in that market that needs this kind of home or this kind of service. Or maybe it's like a condo group that wants to sell high end condos to retirees. Whatever they're beginning to think about, we capture them in that first moment and then we put that brand in front of them everywhere they go. So where that brand is now the only brand of choice for that consumer. And I just started laughing because I go, what you're describing is what we do. It's kind of the magic and marketing that almost nobody in the world has, right? Maybe American Express has it, maybe Nike has it, or Lululemon, but the, you know, company that does $40 million in roofing or med spas or, you know, maybe a, you know, a small bank that wants to expand on their home loan process and get more home. Home owners through them. They don't know how to do this. They're just doing blanket marketing. We literally cut all that out and we go, forget the noise. Let's get the exact person that needs you in your market, target them and make them buy from you. And he was like, I cannot believe you do that. I didn't even think that existed.
How do we start? You know, so that, that was kind of funny because that's, that's, that's the difference. Almost all marketing is capturing a market area, a type of demographic, an avatar, if you will. And that's all good, but that's like great guesswork. And what we do is science. We hit the person that needs it, we drive them through. We make you the brand that they choose.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: It's really all about the behavior. So we write the algorithms to track the behaviors generally across the web, but we can do it in real life as well. And when people start showing the behaviors that they want the thing that you have, or we can capture that into the algorithm and start serving the ads. It's very different than what most programmatic does. We serve programmatically, but it's very different than what most programmatic does, which is here's an audience of people 24, 73 hours old, 78 hours old, whatever it is that has shown some kind of broad interest, that broad interest may or may not help you. That just tiny focused interest is what helps you. And that's what we can do with our algorithms.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: It's like the V2 of programmatic, essentially, like finding that little tiny spot in like the broad segment that's actually looking for it in like a way, like nurturing them and getting ahead of that curve. Essentially.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: I think of it as like heat seeking missile versus shotgun, right? You shoot a shotgun in the air, you might get something we're talking about. You have a guy that's thinking about your product that doesn't know you exist and doesn't know your brand, and you want them to know who you are and that you offer what he needs.
Our ads find that person when they're available to pay attention. The AI is learning that person directly, that exact guy, that exact girl, and knowing when they're available, it hits them with the ad that speaks to their need. It shows them the type of ad that they would most likely respond to, and it drives them into that moment where they start to consider that brand as the opportunity for them.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I. I find that very interesting because I would. I'm. I mean, I'm not exactly like your friend, but your friend has like, that reaction was like, that exists like that. That's something. And I feel like I've asked that question myself before. It's like, wouldn't it be fun that, like, that one person that's looking for our services, Like, I could just be like, oh, like, you're looking for this? Like, I can help you with that, like, automatically. And I feel that not a lot of people understand that it is starting to be out there with AI having the good data, the algorithm being built to be able to find those segments, analyze behaviors, get in front of them. You can get those people. And I feel that's going to be a pretty interesting next couple of years. I mean, I know you guys have been doing this since, like, 2018. My numbers are correct, something like that. So you guys have probably been collecting a good amount of data, if I'm not totally wrong.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's not just data, but it's also refining IP so people can come into the marketplace and say they're going to do the same thing that we do right now. Good luck with that.
It's going to take you a few years to catch up. And while you're trying to catch up with where we are now, we're still moving forward.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Yeah. And you're going to improve.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: And we meet with marketing agents all the time and they go, I can't believe you guys do this. And we go, what do you mean? They go, nobody does this. We can't do this. How can you write an algorithm for every client, for every market?
And we say, well, that's what we do. That's who we are. That's our secret sauce. And so even when people try to compete with us and they do some kind of programmatic thing and they have the right audiences in their mind or whatever, even the best in the world, the very best in the world, are doing this. We beat them 4 to 1 in results every time, like 4 to 1.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: It's even to the point where a major DSP that we work with has come to us and said, so can you write audience or create audiences for our clients? And we're like,
[00:14:00] Speaker B: no, thank you.
Yeah. And we're talking about publicly traded companies going, hey, Rick and Carol, we want you guys to do all of our audiences. We want that power for our system. And we go, no, that's market storm. We'll do that.
You keep in your lane.
[00:14:16] Speaker C: We'll keep in our lane, our secret sauce. You know, we're gonna keep that under the wraps. Fair enough.
So one of the things I love to, like, switch gears a little bit too, is when one of your business owners, CFO founders, or anything like that, like, I find that a lot of those individuals, what they obsess over is like, that. That final click before, like, a sales happens. And I'd love to understand from, like, your perspective and what you've seen in the market, what would you say they're actually missing when they only pay attention to that last touch point, as opposed to, like, the entire, like, buying journey, client journey, or anything like that?
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, they're missing everything. They're missing everything. They're missing every opportunity. Because if you look at Google's research, it. Google will tell you that 70% of the time, if you get to someone before they make that final decision, you can change their mind. So if you're only looking at the last click, you're literally conceding traffic. You're literally conceding dollars in revenue to your customers, competitors. Your competitors are following them around. Your competitors are getting in front of them at those right times. And if you're not, you're waving the white flag.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, it's crazy too, Zach, is everyone talks about last click attribution and. And the reality is for marketing agencies that do Google, LSA or pay per click or SEO, they. It's the easiest thing to sell. If you go to that, that, that, that client and you go, hey, these are the people that clicked on our ad and they bought from you. That's great. We're not growing very much. Yeah, but we got all these people to buy from you. They. They know intrinsically that they're not doing the whole job. They're doing half the job. Google says in their research. Think with Google, most marketers, almost all marketers, are missing most of their return on investment because they're only focused on the last click. And they say, really, what the Google Research sort of shows what we're seeing and discovering as we get deeper in discussions with some of those folks is if you look at marketing today, it should be Google and Marketstorm, roughly 50, 50. Your SEO, your LSA, your pay per clicks. Really important. It's not. You can't discard it because we have AI with marketstorm. But you cannot get this audience without marketstorm. So you need us to filter that in and bring that traffic in and then have them do that final click with Google. And what's so funny is people are still focused on the last click attribution.
Yes. The year that Google said last click attribution was dead. Zach, just give me an idea what year you think that was.
[00:16:42] Speaker C: 21. Complete guess.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: 2021. Pretty good guess, right? 2015.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: Oh, wow.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: 11 years ago, Google said last click attribution is debt. And yet 99% of the agencies in America and marketers in America are only focused on that. And so they miss so much of the market, which is why our clients grow so much while the other people are proving their, their metrics through Google Analytics. But they don't have the fuller market. They're missing that opportunity.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: Yeah. So there's like a complete different set of like the puzzle that a lot of people are just like completely forgetting about, or they're just ignoring it, to put it very simply.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Yep. Well. And again, it's easier. It's easier for them, I think it's
[00:17:23] Speaker A: easy to measure what's easy instead. And it's hard to measure what matters.
So if you're trying to sell your services, you're going to measure what's easy. You're going to show how great you are. You're not going to dig into. This is really hard work.
We're going to show you everything that matters, even if the things that matter don't show us very well.
[00:17:41] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like showing what makes you look good and then like the rest of the pictures, like, oh, it's not really priority. You know, we're still getting you results in a way, so.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: Interesting. We talked about AI and I mean, I know you guys use it quite a lot within your company. I mean, I would see that being like one of your moat in a way. But also you have like the data, your algorithm that you've been able to build over the years, but there's just so many people throwing like the word AI like, around constantly in marketing right now. Like, I'm sure you guys are probably seeing that quite a lot. Oh, yeah. What I'd Love to hear from like the both of you, seeing that you guys have been using AI for a little bit a while compared to like a lot of other people. Is interview in your view, like what's kind of the difference between the business already using it, like well, versus the ones that are just like slapping the label on what they're already doing, if that makes sense.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Well, we definitely experienced that. So for probably the first three or four years that we did business, people didn't really understand what we were doing. It wasn't until the emergence of ChatGPT that people started going, oh, AI is real. We got to take this into consideration. So we'd be meeting with a client and they'd have their Google agency on the call with us and they basically would take all the credit because in Google Analytics it would show the last click attribution was coming from them and they'd say, oh, AI is a future. We know that that's the, you know, this is cute. Market storm's a cute idea, but we really know Google is really your only pathway for, for customer success. And we go, okay, but we drove 90% of the traffic into that portal and now we're. When we came on board your Google Analytics, your all your stuff jumped through the roof because you have this sort of power engine through our intelligence and our AI building this. So then when they started seeing that, then all of a sudden they were all AI companies. So suddenly all these people that were Google companies were AI experts. And that's just, you know, not too shocking. But the other thing I would say about that is that AI is a, a larger concept where there's all sorts of use cases and all sorts of tools, but people are buying into the concept on hype rather than understanding. And it kind of reminds me of like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago when everyone's cousin was selling every business in the world on, they needed to have their own app.
So a real estate agent needed to have their own app. A plumbing company needed to have their own Apple. They don't, no, no one needs a real estate, you know, agents app on their phone. We don't need that. And so everyone is spending all this money because apps are the future. But that usage is not there. That need is not there. AI is only useful where there's a tool and a need that combine. And so it's great that people use Copilot or Claude or Chat GPT to, you know, maybe freshen up their emails and all that stuff, no problem.
But adding Claude to your Tech stack at your, you know, whatever. Your credit union does not suddenly make you an AI using company that knows what they're doing. And so it's really critical to understand what the tools are that you're implementing, why they actually have a need and what they will actually execute for you. And that's where we do a lot of education on sort of what we do with AI. And then what AI is sort of not as useful for?
[00:21:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, he says like every single day, like, people are like, oh, we need to be using AI. We need to be getting ahead of the curve. I mean, I had this one client that they do, like, marketing for, like Fortune 500 companies. And he was telling me, like, yeah, Zach, like, I cannot tell you how many people I get on the call and they have like, their, like their CFO is like, oh, like we need to be getting on AI. And then I speak to them like, what are you actually going to use it for? And it's like, I don't know. I mean, everyone is using it like we should be using it. But the end, the question they should be asking themselves in the end is by applying this, will this improve the business, make us better, more efficient, faster, anything like that, and obviously outweigh the cost. And maybe you're going to be spending on tokens, for example, because a lot of people like, oh, we have all these things built, we have replacement people, we're more efficient. It's like, okay, but you're spending way more on tokens now versus just having someone to do the job. So I always find that to be interesting in a way there.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Well, and really I find the best approach is to approach it like any other technology implementation.
So what outcomes are you going for? What resources do you have to start with? What kind of timeline do you have?
How are you going to judge whether or not you actually hit the outcomes that you said you wanted in the first place? You can't just run and grab a bunch of technology pieces and plug them in and hope it works. You really have to start with what are we trying to accomplish here? And then did we accomplish it at the end of the project?
[00:22:26] Speaker C: It's like reverse engineering, like, where do we want to go? And like break the puzzle pieces.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: It'd be like buying a power tool for your boat that is useful for working on car motors. It's great. You have this power tool. What is it doing? Is it actually what you needed? Like, probably not, but you have this power tool. So that's so great. And then you can tell Your board, I have a power tool. It needs to be effectively used to actually be worth the investment.
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Yeah. So we talked about like business owners, but I mean, I know you guys work with a lot of like, different, like industries, verticals. But one thing I'd love to touch on is when you're thinking about a business that has a, like a longer sales cycle, so someone selling something people don't decide on like overnight, because that's the case for a lot of things.
I kind of love Johnny Sen. From your perspective, what kind of shifts when it comes to earning that trust versus just like chasing the traffic, if that makes sense.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: You want to speak to that, Carol?
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So that's why when we talk about our work, we talk about working in the intent and influence layer.
So you can influence decisions, People have shown intent, and then you can follow that intent and actually influence the decisions. You build trust for that company over time. You build trust by showing up at the right place at the right time, even when it's someplace that as a marketer you would not have necessarily chosen. Like if we. That I don't know that I want them in that publication. And that's, you know, that's probably not our audience or our audience doesn't read mom blogs or you might be surprised. People are everywhere.
But really, if you focus on managing that intent and driving that intent and building that influence for your client, that's the outcome that you want to see. It's not just getting a bunch of ads in front of people. It's not frequency. It's really developing intent.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Love that.
Rick, anything you would add to that?
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say sort of speaking to that. We had a client a few years back that sold very high end, upscale wines. Right. And so they were based out of New York and we were working with them in their agency and they had a lot of questions for us. We do a lot of reporting and walk them through customer journeys. You know, we got this person from, you know, first seeing an ad on, you know, January 1st, and they bought a bottle of wine on, you know, April 2nd. Right. Okay. So it's a long sales cycle, but this person bought a $20,000 bottle of wine. Oh, interesting. That's a, that's an expensive bottle of wine. Right. That's a nice, a nice conversion.
Who was the person? Well, let's look at it. This was a person that saw an ad playing a game on their phone. They were playing the solitaire game on an app.
It was at 4 in the morning and it was in Oklahoma On a Tuesday.
Now, if we went to that agency and said, hey, we're going to be targeting, you know, wealthy people in Oklahoma on the Solitaire app at 4 in the morning, they would like, get the heck out of here. Like, we don't, like, I don't know what you guys are doing, but this is garbage.
But the thing is that AI and our system knew how to find that person at that moment when they were most available to act. And it knew that they would be kind of considering these purchases at that moment. It targeted them there in that place that they kind of had their downtime and that's where they acted and clicked through and bought that bottle of wine. If we go through sort of the traditional mechanisms, if you think about Moneyball, that, that movie from years ago, looking at the traditional metrics are good, not great. They're okay. They're not really exact. What we're doing is exact, is finding the exact person, is building that rapport with the exact person for that brand and then driving them, that single person through that funnel their way in their timeline and then helping them act towards that, that, that final conversion point that we want.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I'm learning a lot just with this quick conversation that we're having so far. But it's, it's like you can do that. It's like, it's kind of scared for like the, the next couple like years and everything like that. But it's interesting because you mentioned like 4am because like my first, I was like, oh, it's probably a business owner, an entrepreneur, someone that has like a high net worth. You know, they've been working for a while and then it's like four in the morning, maybe they're traveling or something like that. This, they decide on their downtime, as you said, to just go on their phone. But it's like a traditional agency. Yeah, they're probably not going to be targeting mobile app ads on Salteri at four in the morning.
Because when you just, when you just have those variables, like, okay, where is that interest? Like where's that avatar? Like, there's nothing that kind of makes sense there. But when you have dig a little bit deeper and you have an algorithm behind that than those, when to target those people, it's like, you know, that kind of makes sense. Like I can see why I was targeted that way. And I'm assuming this is probably something that you guys see a lot when you have, you work with maybe agencies or you work with companies and they bring on their agencies and Absolutely. You probably have to educate them a little bit because they probably come in confused. That's probably what I'm assuming here.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: So all the time people are asking us where did you serve the ads? Give me a list. And then they want to get picky and they want to say well you know, I don't, you know, I wouldn't have served it on that site. Okay, you got a click through and you got a conversion. So we're good, we're good, it's fine. So the key is we're following the behaviors and where the people go. We're not choosing where we're going to serve the ads. So we're not saying we are choosing no dark web. I mean it's all brand safe and all that. But we're not specifically saying we have this list of publishers or we have this grouping that we're going to serve to. We can reach about 90% of the available web across any connected device or platform.
People go where they're going to go.
Think about how you use the web. I mean you're not limited to a couple of things. You probably use it very differently than somebody else. But if you're the prime target for us, we're going to follow you where you go. And that somebody else, if they're a prime target, we're going to follow them where they go.
It's not really about deciding ahead of time where somebody should be. If you decide where they should be, you're going to miss them altogether.
Chances are they're not going to be there.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Well, and also we know the stats are there. Most ad budgets have 96% waste.
So if I'm talking to a marketing agency and they're spending a hundred thousand dollars a month for some brand, I can tell them outright $96,000 are being lit on fire to non targets.
That's not how I like to spend my money and I don't like to spend my clients money that way. And so what we do is we cut all that waste out and we only go after the 5% or so of people that are actually in the market for that kind of purchase and then just become so much more effective because the targeted people are actually engaging with.
And then there's also going back to the AI question. There's the sort of byproduct that if people are interacting with our ads for three weeks, four weeks, a month, two months, the, the systems like Google's, Gemini and ChatGPT and others might see all those interactions with those ads and then when they go to search for that type of service, they go, well, who's the brand that they know that well, they see this ad through marketstorm all the time. We're going to choose this brand because we want the click through. And so when Google goes to give that answer on Gemini, they're going to choose a brand that we've been putting in of that consumer for six weeks as opposed to just whoever's on the top of the SEO list. And so now you have the byproduct that's not even really something we sell per se, but with a byproduct that the agentic stuff, the, the AI answer stuff is most likely going to choose our, our partner in that market for that service. Meaning that you're going to win not just the Google race, but you might win the Gemini race, you might win the chat GPT race, et cetera.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Yeah. Like not intentionally. You end up amplifying other efforts and things that are happening in terms of marketing. Absolutely. Interesting. I love that. I've learned quite a lot in this conversation, but one of the things I was like to ask is like parting thoughts is is there maybe like a couple recommendations, insights that you have for people that are like, hey, we're trying to market more effectively, what's kind of maybe the 1, 2, 3 things that people should be looking at, doing, should be considering, researching or anything like that that maybe comes to mind there?
[00:30:42] Speaker A: I'd say the number one thing is stop looking at that last click, stop treating that like that's your gold, because it's not. It's kind of fool's gold in a lot of ways. The second thing I would do is I would look at that messy middle area that Google talks about. How are you approaching that? How are you working with that? What is the balance of your budget?
And as you're changing your budget between platforms, you're going to see Google get more effective, meaning cost less, and you're going to see the price go up. That's how you manage that balance, is watch what you're paying and make sure that you have enough pressure in that messy middle, that upper area, that decision area, what we call the intent layer, before you get down to the demand layer.
[00:31:27] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: I would also add, ask a lot of questions. So what I find is so many brands go to these agencies and they think that the agency knows all the answers and what they really see on the other side of that zoom or the other side of that table is typically someone who just graduated at, you know, you know, Clemson or Utah State or something.
And they're, you know, three years into their career and they're regurgitating information from their boss that their boss got at a conference from three years prior that was really three years old data. And so they're, for example, the last click thing. You never hear an agency talk about last click being dead. Never comes up. Right. It's 11 years old. It's been dead for 11 years according to Google. But. And they never talk about the messy middle. So they're missing so much of what's actually going to make them a dominant player in their market. They're missing the chance to make more money or earn more revenue or get a better trusted audience that would actually engage with them. They miss all that because they're really listening to outdated models, outdated ideas, or they're, they go from that where they just miss all the kind of the updates or they go and just go, well, we know that we've missing updates, so we just got cloud for everybody. Claude's going to solve our problems. And then cloud is just a good tool for reshaping things or doing research. It doesn't actually change your marketing efforts. It doesn't actually make you more effective in that market. So when, when marketing agencies or marketing directors or owners of, of of companies are sitting with their marketing people, it's kind of like when, when you go to ChatGPT or, or these other formats, you want to ask questions, but they're going to tell you kind of what you want to hear. So then you want the data behind it, so you've got to ask for those sources. How do you know that that's what works? How do. Show me the examples that that's actually what works across the board. Because most likely they're talking about something that's 7, 8, 10, 11 years old and that's the source of truth, because that's what all the experts talk about. And that expertise is generally wrong or outdated.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like when you ask, are you sure? Like, are you sure about that Answer. Sorry about that. You're right.
Not the right data. Like, you always need to ask questions, do your due diligence, do your research to obviously educate yourself on what's working, what's not working, to put it very simply at the end of the day, I love that. Well, Carol, Rick, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to jump on the podcast and for anyone that wants to get in touch with you, see what you guys are doing, because you guys are obviously doing some pretty cool stuff here. What's kind of the best way to get you in touch with the both of you or just the company as a whole?
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say go to marketstorm AI, that's our website. If you want to learn more about this, you know, we don't hold, you know, we don't have 100 reps calling you every day trying to get a hold of you. If you want to learn more about this, just click on a thing, find a demo, time. Our team will walk you through what we do. If it's a good fit, great. If it's not a good fit, no problem.
And by the way, we'll tell you if it's not a good fit. If there's something that we go, this is not going to work for us, it's not going to work for you. We don't want to do it. We don't want to have bad engagement. So if you want to learn about us, go to our website, sign up for a demo, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to see a lot and then you'll be able to make a better decision.
[00:34:33] Speaker C: No doubt. So we're going to put all those links in the other show notes, of course, and I'll put both of your LinkedIn. I know, Carol, you also have a substack newsletter that you're writing as well, so we can make sure to put that on there if anyone wants to check that out. And yeah, to anyone listening to your listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, like, comment, review, all that fun stuff. Make sure to reach out to Kil and Rick here and then, yeah, until then, keep pushing and we'll see you in the next one.
