10 - Dave Roth - Confessions of Digital Marketing Missteps

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
You bad decision makers out there. It's Jim Banks here. We've managed to get to episode number ten, and my guest today is Dave Roth. Dave has been a friend of mine for an awful long time. I guess probably 20 odd years. I've got a bit of a confession, actually. When I first met you, Dave, the jury was out because you were very corporate. And I was like, not really sure, but we've become very good friends since then.

Jim Banks [00:00:23]:
So much so that he. He let me sleep in his yurt. Anyone that's watched the Tim Ash episode or listened to the Tim Ashe episode, you'll hear me talk about a dinner I had with Tim and Dave. And it just seemed only fitting to have Dave on as well as having Tim, I think, in episode six. So, Dave, welcome to today's episode. Welcome to the show.

Dave Roth [00:00:41]:
Thanks a lot. So happy to be here. I know this has been sort of a long time coming, so I'm happy to be episode ten. That's quite an honor.

Jim Banks [00:00:49]:
Yeah. And it's funny, I was going through my instagram yesterday, and I was having a look, and one of the posts that I've got on instagram, I've posted a picture of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas next to the Paris hotel with the Bellagio fountain. And I put hash, Bdwjb coming soon. And that was in January of 2015. So that was nine years ago that the hashtag existed. And, yeah, I mean, I'm obviously delighted to get to episode ten. I've actually heard that most people that set up a podcast bailout after three or four episodes. So it's testimony to the quality of the guests that I've been able to have on so far.

Jim Banks [00:01:25]:
And I'm delighted to have you as a guest on today. So today, Dave, tell us a little bit about your career in the industry to date.

Dave Roth [00:01:33]:
Sure. Yeah. So I was thinking, as you said, that, Jim, that nine years, I can't even imagine how many bad decisions we've collectively all made in the past nine years. I would take a number of episodes just to get to that.

Jim Banks [00:01:47]:
Absolutely.

Dave Roth [00:01:49]:
Yeah. So I've been doing this a long time, just like you. And when we got into it, but it was. We didn't know what to call it. It wasn't called digital marketing. It was like that search engine thing that we were doing. It got into it like most of us did, almost accidentally, like, happen to be doing something with an Internet startup in, like, 2000. And it had to do with search engine indexing of valuable content.

Dave Roth [00:02:14]:
And I think the seminal moment was like in 2004, which is now almost exactly 20 years ago when the Google Adwords auction marketplace launched. And that was really the moment I think for a lot of us because that's when the industry took off and that's where instead of us going to look for jobs, the jobs started to come look for us. And so that was a great run. I worked in the agency business first in San Francisco and in Denver, and then I spent about a decade in Silicon Valley working in house at some big brands, namely like Yahoo and realtor.com. And when I got to Yahoo in 2006, I think it was the third biggest website on the Internet behind MSN and AOL. And we were serving up I think 3 billion page views a day on Yahoo. Worldwide. So it was a big deal.

Dave Roth [00:03:14]:
And I was running all of our outbound search engine marketing on behalf of the Yahoo properties. And so there was some, there was a lot of bad decisions there. I had six or seven years at Yahoo navigating corporate waters and that's about the time that we probably met because back in those days I would wear a suit to the conferences when I presented like a proper, like a property.

Jim Banks [00:03:37]:
I remember that, remember we used to go and we would both be speaking at Pubcon and I remember always seeing you in the speaker's room wanting to come and talk to you. But one, I was like always wearing a shirt and tie. I'm not really sure about that. So that was the first kind of like red flag to me. And secondly, you always on conference calls. It just seemed like every single time I looked at you, you were deep in the weeds on a conference call of some description, right? You had your headphones on and you were just like really deep in the weeds with, with a conversation. Yeah. And for me, like I said, it took probably a little while after that for us to really sort of get into our stride and become good friends.

Jim Banks [00:04:13]:
So how did you find working in a fairly fledgling industry for probably as you say, one of the maybe second or third biggest companies in the industry at that particular point in time? How was it for you at that point?

Dave Roth [00:04:25]:
Yeah, it was really, it was wonderful and it was strange, it was really difficult and it was really interesting, like all of those things at once. I got there and the people in the central marketing team after I'd been there for a couple of weeks asked for kind of a rundown on all the business units and what they needed and I basically showed them like what all the Yahoo properties were doing as far as their own search marketing, how none of them were really united or unified in any way. And I pointed to a particular group of properties that had really, really big search programs, like 35, $40 million a year that they were spending on search. And I highlighted those areas as this is where our risk is because there's a ton of money going through these channels and there's not really any infrastructure to speak of. There's like a developer, and he's got a machine and he's pushing bid updates to Google and without any QA or anything like that. And they said, great, so that is going to be your responsibility now. And so they gave me that to manage in a matrix organization where I had no authority really to speak of other than the backing of my management. Right.

Dave Roth [00:05:39]:
So that was really, really challenging. And as somebody who was new to corporate environments, even in tech, it was, there was a lot to learn. There were a lot of bad decisions made, there were a lot of mistakes. But in the course of it, I learned how to be really good digital marketer and how to navigate corporate landscape, which is its own set of issues. Right?

Jim Banks [00:06:00]:
So obviously you spent some time at Yahoo and realtor, and then obviously you progressed and moved and eventually sort of set up your own shop now, which is emergent digital. And when did you actually start emergent digital?

Dave Roth [00:06:15]:
I broke free from Silicon Valley about ten years ago. So it was about 2014, roughly. And the, the reason that I had decided to do it was because the, I was@realtor.com. Had a great team, had teams of people doing SEO and analytics and mobile and search and everything that we could get our hands on. And we were driving all these leads to realtors across the country. And we were doing a really good job. I think thousands of leads a week, a month just kind of, that's how realtor.com made a lot of their money, was by selling leads to agents. And long story short, I woke up one day and I realized that I really didn't care if we send another lead to another real estate agent over again.

Dave Roth [00:07:01]:
It just wasn't, it didn't have any personal meaning to me. And so that's when I decided to go out on my own and try to do work that I wanted to do with clients that I wanted to work with. And so that was sort of the, that was the impetus behind the creation of emergent digital.

Jim Banks [00:07:19]:
So tell me a little bit more about emergent digital, because again, I think unlike a lot of agencies, you do multifaceted campaign management, both on the organic and pay side of things, but you focus on specific types of business, types of things.

Dave Roth [00:07:34]:
So in terms of the types of media that we focus on, what we call like the bread and butter channels that have always. It's the reason I stuck with digital marketing and search marketing in particular, is because you're very close to the revenue dollar, right? So high RoI, optimizable, accountable types of media like search and social media, paid and organic, so things that you can readily draw aligned to the revenue that they're producing. And so I set out to leverage those channels and to serve industries that I had a kind of a more personal interest in. So started working for nonprofits, healthcare, education, shared economy, green energy. Areas like that were, they were our primary focus, going out and started with consulting gigs and then ended up getting more kind of media management projects from clients. And then that kind of evolved into a point where I could start hiring people and building teams. And then honestly, we broadened our scope beyond just that sort of core set of industries as one does to grow a business. But that's sort of where the ethos of what we're doing, we're trying to do good work for good companies and in organizations that have what I would call an ulterior motive, that is that they're, they're on, they exist for some purpose other than just making money.

Dave Roth [00:09:01]:
And not that there's anything wrong with making money, but I found that that was one of the things that was missing for me personally, was that some tangible outcome of the marketing efforts being satisfying in some way. So that was really kind of what we set out to do and what we've done.

Jim Banks [00:09:19]:
It's funny, like you mentioned at the beginning of the types of companies you work with startups, and for me, I always remember one of the very bad decisions I made was working with some startups. And I soon got to the point where I'm like, I don't want to work with startups. I think one of the challenges I had, or one of the many challenges I had working with startups is I tend to find that they felt themselves very entitled and really they were no way near that position to be able to do that. So they put you under a lot of pressure because obviously they raise money, they then have to spend the money, they have to hit a certain number in order to get the next branch of money. So you were constantly under pressure to deliver probably above the capabilities of the business to be able to sustain it, right? So were doing lead generational. I mean, I worked with a startup that was doing sort of meal delivery service, and it got to the point where we generated significantly greater numbers. I mean, I think we took their paid media spend from 25 grand a month to 300 grand a month, but their fees went up proportionately because obviously the fees were tied to the spend. So it got to the point where the clients were unhappy with the fee attached to the spend, delighted with the results, but unhappy with the fee, and they expected us to reduce the fee.

Jim Banks [00:10:37]:
And we're like, well, that was all very transparent at the very beginning. So in the end we ended up losing the account, not because we did a bad job of delivering good results. It was just because they had an expectation that they were going to be able to get ten x the number of leads or sales without necessarily having an increase in the cost of the solution for us to actually provide the service. And I was just curious what your thoughts were with working with startups now versus when you first started.

Dave Roth [00:11:07]:
Yeah, definitely. In spite of the fact that you told them it was going to happen. Yeah, yeah. Well, start. We could do a whole show on survey servicing startups. We have worked for a lot of startups and it's really, it's very risky. They, they don't all make it. And sometimes even if they do make it, they change course and leave you behind.

Dave Roth [00:11:30]:
So there's a lot of risk that. The good thing about startups for us is it's really easy to plug into a startup because they have a marketing department that looks like a piece of swiss cheese, it's got so many holes in it.

Jim Banks [00:11:42]:
And they've assuming that they even have a marketing department.

Dave Roth [00:11:44]:
Yeah, sometimes it's just like one person in a budget and they all have very aggressive growth targets. So it's easy enough to say, like, hey, why don't, you know, hey, client prospect, why don't you tell me a few things that you would like to be doing, but you either don't have the time, resources or expertise, and then they name a few things and you say, okay, well, how so?

Jim Banks [00:12:05]:
They always compare themselves to the big unicorn that may exist in the same vertical that they happen to be in and expect themselves to be able to be like that, like right out the gates. And again, just in realistic terms, just never happens.

Dave Roth [00:12:17]:
Yeah. So the, so they're, they're relatively easy to sign in that regard because you can just say, well, how about if we started doing those things for you tomorrow that you don't have time for them to do? And we're very nimble, so it's easy enough to say and do that. And so getting startups to sign on hasn't been the hard part. Keeping them is usually the hard part for a number of reasons. And as you point out, it's very often the case that those reasons are external to your control. So you have to know, working with startups, that you're going to lose some of them. We lost one in one day. We got fired on our first day with a startup.

Dave Roth [00:12:58]:
One time that was something else. We signed up and we said, okay, we're ready to get going. Okay, great, get started. And then they wanted to know what we were going to do on the first day. And so I said, well, we're going to look at a lot of things on the first day. We're not going to like, produce anything. We're just going to start auditing your accounts. But then they wanted, they wanted production on day one, so they wanted like an ad copy overhaul.

Dave Roth [00:13:27]:
Okay. So we started working on some ad copy, and then by the end of the day, the client said, okay, we're moving in a different direction. We're not going to work with you guys.

Jim Banks [00:13:37]:
At least it was a day and you.

Dave Roth [00:13:39]:
Exactly. I felt lucky that it was one day. If it had been a month of that and then they'd fired us, it would have been much worse. I mean, that's the other thing as an agency, you have to be really conscious of is that you're, we're upside down for the first few months. It takes an incredible amount of work to, to launch with a client in an intelligent, strategic kind of way. It takes a ton, a ton of work. And so it's not until probably month four that you can really expect to return a profit on a client at all.

Jim Banks [00:14:14]:
And really, I mean, risky, right? Yeah. And I've always said I'm more than happy to be a performance based digital marketing agency and back myself to get good results and throw an element of my compensation with the client to the results that we were able to achieve. But at the same time, I expect there to be a period of grace, if you like, at the beginning. Usually I call it the Goldilocks period, 90 days to begin with, where I'll actually say we're going to work on a fixed fee initially while we work out what some of these key metrics for your specific business are in terms of. They may say, well, I want to get leads at $50 and realistically they should be getting leads at $80. And there's no point in trying to set up campaigns to deliver results at 50 if 80 is the kind of more realistic number and it's only with putting rubber on the road that you're able to see whether that is actually the case or not. And then from there, you can then benchmark and understand to what extent the deliverable is achievable. And then once you set that number at the end of the 90 day period, it's something that everyone will feel more committed to because it's based on real data rather than just supposition.

Jim Banks [00:15:28]:
And I was wondering if you did something similar to emergent to that effect or not.

Dave Roth [00:15:33]:
Well, often we'll put in just a three month minimum to start. Right. That's the easy thing to do. Performance based deals can be really tricky because, like with any negotiation, if you do a good job, everyone's unhappy with the results. So. So I think what you risk with a performance based deal is either you or the client at some point saying, this is not a good deal for me, but then you can always renegotiate it. Like, I mean, we're a big proponent of, like, let's price it in a way that makes sense for the client, right. If, if they want to know what their exposure is month to month, we can do a retainer.

Dave Roth [00:16:12]:
If they want us to be incented to scale, we can do a percentage. Or, like, you're talking about where you actually have, like, essentially you're selling the leads to the client, right. If you do like a cap CPA kind of a deal.

Jim Banks [00:16:30]:
So those can, obviously running an agency, and obviously running an agency, you have overheads. I mean, obviously you've got your people, right? But more often than not, you've also got the tools of the trade that you may pay for to run your business. And those are things that you're going to be paying for regardless of whether they spend a dime or a ton of money. Right.

Dave Roth [00:16:49]:
And we pay for a number of tools. We pay probably a relatively large amount of money to get all of our reporting data straight and to be able to push it out to our clients. That's expensive to do in terms of time and money. So there's a lot of overhead, and then there's a lot of, and then there's a lot of services that just get poured in. But at the inception of an engagement, there's one.

Jim Banks [00:17:15]:
And I think obviously, your experience in corporate makes you think differently. Again, I came from an insurance background. I was really well trained as a sort of insurance professional, as a sales manager. So I have a very good understanding of how businesses should be run, knew my way around the balance sheet and everything else. And I think one of the challenges that you see now, I mean, again, there are so many agencies coming in, brand spanking new, just starting up, flashy website, nice domain name, and they've got no real world business experience to be able to go out and talk to clients in a more sort of realistic way about what some of the challenges and pitfalls may well be. Right. And again, they don't factor in things like the cost of the tools and everything else. They'll just spend time.

Jim Banks [00:18:04]:
They'll produce really poor, poor reporting. They'll probably use Google sheets. There's anything wrong with Google sheets, but it's like, it's not cost effective and not good use of time to actually do the reporting in that way. And I think a lot of people have. Again, the clients are disappointed with the results because the results are not presented to them in a way that's easy to understand.

Dave Roth [00:18:26]:
I definitely think that my time in house has served me well to go out into the agency world, because. Cause now we're working with customers who used to be us. Right. So I used to be that. I used to be the guy who hired the agency. So when I'm on the other side of the table, it's really easy for me to relate to the person on the other side of the relationship. It's real easy for me to say, oh, I get your. I understand your planning cycles.

Dave Roth [00:18:53]:
I understand why you don't have a budget for this year, and it's already January 21. Right. It's easy for me to understand why it's hard for you to put that tracking pixel on the website. These are things that I've lived through and the frustrations that I've had as an in house resource. And so I found it's really helpful for me to just relate my understanding of that to clients. It puts them at ease, helps them know that we understand their problems.

Jim Banks [00:19:22]:
I remember when I worked in house with cheap flights for a few years. They worked on a. It always seemed like a bit of an oxymoron to me. They worked on a sprint cycle, and the sprints typically took six weeks to three months. That's not a sprint, exactly. And it was always one of those things that I think, before I'd even taken my jacket off the first day, I managed to save them about $150,000 a year on a bid management tool that they were paying for. That really was ineffective. And I basically said to them, look, why don't you let me run my strategy through one of the accounts we had? I think at the time, six accounts.

Jim Banks [00:19:58]:
And we ended up with 13 accounts in terms of 13 different territories. I said, let me try or prove my strategy works on one of these accounts. And obviously if it doesn't, we'll just plug the bid management tool back in. They called it the life support machine. We'll plug the life support machine back in. And literally we went from -15% roas on a daily basis to plus 15% roas instantaneously just by adopting this alternative strategy. Right? So, and that was like, literally that was before I'd even taken my jacket off, right? I'd made that decision, right. One of the first things I did was I went into every account, they had something like one and a half million keywords in every single account.

Jim Banks [00:20:36]:
And to download the account every morning into Google Ads editor used to take about an hour and 20 minutes, right? And I said, look, why don't we just do this? Why don't we look at every keyword in the last 90 days that's never had a click, never had impression, and we'll delete them. So I think I did it with one account. We went from one and a half million keywords down to about, I think it was like 85,000 keywords that we were left with. And everyone was freaking out saying, we can't do that. All these keywords are really important. I'm like, well, if they were really important, they would have had clicks and impressions. They haven't had any. Which tells me that Google is basically saying, I found another way to serve up that search result.

Jim Banks [00:21:16]:
It might be a different keyword, different match type, whatever it might be. And again, if you look at it now, I mean, I look into some of the accounts that when we do an audit, they have, again, hundreds of thousands of keywords. And in today's day and age, with broad match terms, I mean, they shouldn't, shouldn't be that many keywords, right? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Dave Roth [00:21:36]:
Yeah, there's a lot of, when you go in with, and we've frankly, we've gotten a lot of business that way too. Like it's, it's not that hard to go into an existing account and find problems with it, right? So the converse is funny, right? We've also lost clients that way too.

Jim Banks [00:21:53]:
Yeah. And it's funny, like, I always remember when I was working with a friend of mine who ran an agency and he had like a chief revenue officer. So this guy was responsible for bringing in the money, right, which was great. And he had a couple of salespeople. I remember him talking to me one day and he said, jim, we've just landed. We got a $10,000 audit for this new account that we're going to work with. And I need you to do a sort of PPC audit for their account. And I'm like, okay, well, I need the login.

Jim Banks [00:22:22]:
We need. Went through the process of saying, well, this is what we need to do to get access to their account, blah, blah, blah. And he said to me, oh, they don't have an account. I'm like, well, how can I do an audit on something that doesn't exist? So, again, chief revenue officer goes, you'll figure something out.

Dave Roth [00:22:43]:
I mean, his job is to get the $10,000, and your job is to figure out what to do for it. Right?

Jim Banks [00:22:50]:
Yeah. Again, I mean, I think I ended up. I think I did sort of two or three days of, like, intensive, workshop based stuff of training, working with their team. So as we were building out the new campaigns and ads and everything else, I was, like, doing an over the shoulder, like, showing them how it worked. Because, again, I think it's quite good and useful if you work collaboratively with your clients to actually show them just how difficult some of this stuff is. But also think explaining the kind of process of how you arrive at the decision, why certain things should be in the kind of the ad copy and landing pages, what they should have on them, and all those sorts of things. Because, again, I think so many people just think, oh, it's. Buying keywords is really easy.

Jim Banks [00:23:37]:
I mean, I can get a credit card out. I used to say, before she passed away, I could give my mom a credit card and she could set up a Google Ads account in about ten minutes. Right. Doesn't necessarily mean that she'd be any good at it, but she could definitely set up an account in five minutes, ten minutes, and she could probably start spending money in that time as well. So will it be any good? Probably not. Will they get some conversions? Possibly. Right. But I think the reality of it is that, as you know yourself from doing this for a long time, there is.

Jim Banks [00:24:03]:
There is, like, a lot of science to what goes on. Right. It's not as simple as it may as it may appear. At the kind of first instance, I.

Dave Roth [00:24:12]:
Was spending some time with a friend of mine, and we had worked together at a little search shop sort of in the beginning of things, and he went on to do other completely different work. And. And I was at his house and I said, you want to see something why don't you come look at what a Google Ads account looks like now? And he looked at it and he honestly, he didn't even know what he was looking at. Like, it's so much different and it's gotten so much more complicated, like orders of magnitude more complex than it was. It used to be just, you know, you get some keywords, you buy them, you make some money, you go home and it's, it's anything. It couldn't be further from the truth now, right? I mean, yeah, how much?

Jim Banks [00:24:53]:
I think, and I think one of the things that scares me the most, doing what I do. I mean, I run an agency, I work with clients, I get paid by clients. So I'm going to be selfish and say, well, yeah, all clients should work with, if they have the budget, they should work with agencies because agencies will put far more money on the table than they'll ever take off it. A good agency will always do that. But what I'm seeing now is that because of the onset of AI and the way the algorithms are changing, the doors are like shutting down. I think, again, I think when you think of things like driverless cars, if I sat in a car and there was nobody in the driver's seat and it was just steering, that would freak me out immensely. I'd be wanting to go and grab the wheel and turn it and everything else, but I think sometimes you just have to trust that the machine is kind of like going to do a good job. Right? I'm not convinced that the AI that meta and Google and Microsoft is using is delivering absolutely the best results, but it's getting there.

Jim Banks [00:25:58]:
And I think for me the challenge is that again, like Google Meta, Microsoft will all say you don't need to work with an agency because this just kind of like runs itself. And as you pointed out there, it just doesn't, it's not that way. And I'm just concerned that more and more clients are going to take their PPC and their paid social in house because they think they'll be saving money and they'll get great results and it's going to be carnage. What are your thoughts on that, Dave?

Dave Roth [00:26:27]:
Well, yeah, I do think that there has been a more general trend towards moving things in house, particularly with bigger clients, with bigger brands. But for us, obviously, us being an agency, we're always looking for things we can do to add value. So to us, our job has just changed. For the last few years, we've had in our pitch deck like, hey, we leverage machine learning and AI we use machines to do what machines are good at, and we use people to do what people are good at. And up until now, that's worked. Okay. I do think that there is a tendency now for, for brands to think like, oh, yeah, we can just do it ourselves. So if you think about that piece of it.

Dave Roth [00:27:19]:
So what we like to hand let the machines do is optimize.

Jim Banks [00:27:24]:
Right?

Dave Roth [00:27:24]:
Like, we like to let the machines look at all the data and try to figure out what is the best way to get another sale. Right. Based on everything that we've set up. So our attention has shifted to the setup and the architecture, setting up testing frameworks that will help you understand, like, what's working and what's not working, so you can do more of what is and feed the machines that way. It's also expanded a lot vertically. So we spent a lot more time looking at landing pages and conversion rate optimization, as well as looking at what we call downfunnel optimization. So, like, in the lead gen space, that would be like offline conversions and things like that. So we've really had to, as a result of exactly what you're talking about, we've had to expand both horizontally and vertically in terms of what we deliver to clients so that we can continue to deliver value.

Dave Roth [00:28:18]:
So I think, number one, you're absolutely right, and number two, it means that agencies have to reinvent themselves to some degree. But in this industry, all of us who do this are people who reinvent from time to time.

Jim Banks [00:28:33]:
Right?

Dave Roth [00:28:34]:
Like to become a podcaster or whatever it is. So it's, it's. It's complicated. It's getting. It's challenging. It's getting more challenging. Those trends will not stop. This business gets harder every year.

Dave Roth [00:28:48]:
There are very low barriers to entry. And there's not like, the other thing that I notice that you see is that there's not one way to do anything that we do, right? So everyone's got their own flavor, their own recipe, their own secret sauce, or maybe not so secret sauce, but it means that you have to find a way to differentiate, and not everybody's going to implement it the same way in order to find success.

Jim Banks [00:29:15]:
Yeah, because again, I think you see people saying, oh, the best way to set up a master ads account is to have two campaigns and this number of ad sets and blah, blah, blah. Like, everyone's going to be different. Yeah, right. Everyone's going to. They're all selling different things. They're selling them at different price points. Right? They've got different websites as you say, I mean, if their website's horribly slow and janky and doesn't look very good and everything else, they're going to have to try so much harder to get their ads to convert, right? Because the experience from the click through to the landing page is going to be a poor one, right? So instead of it converting it, say, 5%, it might only convert at 1%, in which case you've got to be five times as good on your ads, right, to get the same amount of money at the end of the day. And I think, again, I think so many people think that because everything's gone down this AI route, all of a sudden it's like magic wands being waved all over the place, and all of a sudden it's angel dust sprinkled everywhere and everything's fantastic.

Jim Banks [00:30:07]:
And the reality of it is that's not the case, right? And again, I think sometimes I spend a lot of time talking to clients, and we're not talking necessarily about the performance of ads and everything else. It's like it'll be a sort of change or a pivot in terms of, you know, landing page design, mobile first, all that type of stuff. Again, the types of ads that you may have, again, meta will be pushing very heavily. Things like reels and stuff like that. And again, if you haven't got a good strategy for it, I think, again, it frustrates me a little bit, because if you go on to Instagram and places like that, you'll see everyone's talking about, you got to get your message across, the hook's got to be in the first two to two to 5 seconds, blah blah blah. And I get that. But sometimes, depending on what type of product you're selling, it's not this fast paced. Stack them high, sell them cheap product you're selling, if you know, the storytelling needs to be more complex, right? That doesn't lend itself to that two to five second, kind of fast paced, jump cut type ad copy, right? It tends to be much more, especially.

Dave Roth [00:31:10]:
As you get into like b two b engagements too. Your sales cycle could be months or years. So I did a presentation at the last conference that we were, and it had a lot to do with b two b lead gen and how to find success for companies that are selling software or SaaS products or things like that. And the first three to five slides I have are all about content strategy, nothing at all to do with ads whatsoever. So it's now a much broader project, because if you don't have good content, your ad campaigns aren't going to work on LinkedIn or anywhere else. It's just, there's so many foundational things that need to be in place for the media to work properly, and there's so much less margin for error in the media markets now. The auctions are so impacted that you really have to have everything lined up correctly to make any money doing this. Right.

Dave Roth [00:32:05]:
It's absolutely required. So when you get somebody out there, like, who says, oh, let's throw some ads out there and let's sell some products, it doesn't work like that. Right.

Jim Banks [00:32:17]:
Yeah. And I get horribly frustrated when I see people are doing it because they're trying to, again, they're trying to hook people into their content, but they're, they keep talking about hacks and tricks, and it's like, there are no hacks. There are no, if you have to trick people into doing something, then in my view, you fail. I mean, there's, there really are no hacks. There's no tricks. There's just, there's a, there's a logical way to arrive at what the strategy should be to deliver the results that you want and, and not again, there's nothing that is being done now by any advertiser on any platform that is a kind of a hack that is a backdoor into some other piece of the algorithm.

Dave Roth [00:32:58]:
Yeah, there's no, yeah, there's no, yeah, there's no reverse engineering the algorithm. Like, that's a waste of time. I mean, you, you'd much rather focus on, like, how do I increase my conversion rate? Like. Or how do I increase my engagement rate with my ads? I got a great one, though. And these are the things you can pick up, like in b, two b gift cards. Apparently, gift cards work really well. We found this out with one of our clients almost by mistake. Hey, if you want to get somebody to download a piece of content or show up to a webinar or otherwise engage with your brand, throw a $50 gift card.

Dave Roth [00:33:34]:
And if your cost per lead target is $300, well, now it's 250 plus your $50 gift card. Right? And if, and if it nets out to an all in lower cost per acquisition, that's, that's like what tips and tricks are these days. It's not, it's not tricking the algorithm. It's not like, to your point, there's, there's not really any shortcuts. It's just being smart marketers, being good marketers. We always talk about unfair value exchange, the notion that whether you're in b two b or b, two, c. That you always have to be delivering more value to your client or prospect than they're giving you. You have to maintain that not only during the sales cycle, but also throughout your entire tenure that they're your client.

Dave Roth [00:34:23]:
You always have to be giving them more. The more unfair that exchange is, the better for marketers. So the more you can just over deliver with value relative to what you're asking for, the better off you're going to be. And a lot of people just lose sight of that. They're like, well, why aren't people signing up? Why aren't people converting? It's like, well, why should they? Why have we spelled it out to them that they're going to get more in value than they're going to give to us? Right. So there's really basic principles at play here on a very, very complex landscape.

Jim Banks [00:35:01]:
And it's interesting. I mean, I, I've been working with, with Microsoft advertising for a long, long time, right? From probably long before they changed their name to Bing or whatever. Like, again, I don't even know what MSN advertising now, remember? Whatever. Yeah.

Dave Roth [00:35:15]:
Able to buy like, keywords on MSNBC.

Jim Banks [00:35:19]:
Yeah. And again, it was great. But so, so for me, it was always one of the things, like, I always remember the rep from Microsoft would ask for a testimonial and we got great results on Microsoft because everyone was like, poo pooing Microsoft. Oh, it's crap. It's, there's no traffic, there's no volume, blah, blah, blah. Right. And the reality of it was, is that it actually performed incredibly well. Right.

Jim Banks [00:35:41]:
I don't think it's necessarily as good as it is as it used to be. I think because they're trying to be more like Google. Right. And again, I think that's probably the biggest mistake they made. Right. They tried to be more like Google rather than more Microsoft, that they, that would have been probably a better play. But they're always saying to me, can you give us a testimonial? And I'm like, no. And they would say, well, don't you think the service is great and the results are good? I'm like, yeah, the service is great.

Jim Banks [00:36:04]:
The results are fantastic. But if I tell people about that in a testimonial, all of a sudden they'll have far more competition. I don't want to tell people about it. And that's always one of the challenges when you do good work for people is, yes, you want them to tell other people about it, but at the same time, they don't want to do that because it then means that potentially they could have ten more competitors because nine other companies that work in the same vertical that they work in say, well, they've done that great work for that company. I'm in the same vertical, I'm going to hire that agency. And it's always, again, it's a bit of a double edged sword, the kind of the whole referral recommendation kind of model.

Dave Roth [00:36:42]:
Yeah. And we came up through this auction, marketplace for ads and it's a brand new concept. Right. Ads had never been purchased that way before. And so a lot of people don't really understand even what that means. I still find that we really have to sit clients down and talk to them about like here's what's happening to your search impression share and here our competitors that are coming in. And heres why your results need to be better. Because we need to be more aggressive in the auction and Amazon is pushing us out or whoever.

Jim Banks [00:37:14]:
So Dave, in the next three to five years, what are you concerned about and what opportunities you see ahead?

Dave Roth [00:37:22]:
David yeah, well, so as far as concerns go, I think youve alluded to some of them where theres a lot of consolidation in the industry. There's a lot of people who are going in house. And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity to reach out, like we've always done, like more towards the cutting edge. And so I think that more so than ever before, you have to have a point of view on Genai and how we use it. So we have to spend time like really thinking about that, ironing out our process. Like, okay, for us as an agency, Genai is about efficiency and it's about ideation and iteration. And so it allows us to be more creative and more efficient and make your client your, make your dollars go further. We're doing more than our competition is.

Dave Roth [00:38:13]:
We've been doing it longer. So there's a lot of just refining the process and the message and the product too. Like coming out of Pubcon last couple of weeks, I've seen some demos from some of the folks that we both know. Really amazing stuff, like really, really great workflow, automation tools, leveraging AI. I think that's where a ton of the opportunity is. And it's like we've talked about in our industry, low barrier to entry. So I don't have to outrun the lion, I just have to outrun you. That's what the agency game is a lot about.

Dave Roth [00:38:50]:
It's just about like being faster and smarter than our competition. And so that doesn't change, but what makes you smarter and faster is definitely changing. So that's both where the challenge and the opportunity lie, I think.

Jim Banks [00:39:06]:
I don't know. I don't think I coined the phrase, but I've adopted the phrase as being part of the business. But really, I mean, I think we're moving into more of being a consulgency. Yeah, right. Because again, I think if people want to take things in house for whatever reason, I mean, again, there are some benefits of taking things in house, and I think there's some things that will be detrimental. And for me, I think that a lot of the detrimental pieces, that they're missing out on the cutting edge kind of stuff. And again, practitioners like you and I that are living and breathing every day, we'll understand things at a far more granular level than people that work in house. For one company, they work in their island.

Dave Roth [00:39:43]:
As a business, we're exposed to a lot more data. So if our client is interested in advertising on TikTok, which is brand new, we've got ten clients on TikTok. We can bring a lot more data to the party than our clients can, even if they think they know TikTok advertising, like, we're doing a lot more of it than they are. So that's always going to be a good reason to go with an agency, is when you're thinking about, like, how do I handle this new thing? Like, agencies are good with that because they see a lot of the new thing, because everyone wants the new thing. So I believe there's always reasons to use an agency. But to your point, now, it's not just for blocking and tackling, it's for higher thinking, it's for. It's for better workflow, it's for better efficiency, more creativity. These are reasons that you want to work with an agency.

Dave Roth [00:40:32]:
It's not because you just need somebody to work the Google Ads machine, right. A lot of that stuff, if you set it up. So we do a lot more work in architect, like search architecture gets a lot more attention than execution. The execution is now being handled more by machines. So strategy, set up everything you do above that in the funnel and below that, that's where we can add value and that's where we do.

Jim Banks [00:40:56]:
And you make it look simple, but it's really not simple. I think that's the challenge sometimes. Could people go, they may be concerned about, how can you justify what you're charging for what you're delivering? Because they might think, well, you haven't done any changes. Like, well, they didn't need to make any changes. And again, it's that whole thing of knowing when to do things and when not to do things.

Dave Roth [00:41:16]:
Sometimes not doing something is the best decision. Right. You can get into this, into this place where you're making changes every couple of days and it's a spiral. Right? Like, you don't want to do that. You want to, you want to make some changes and then observe what happens and then make some more changes. And that's, that's how the business works. It's not, there's no one recipe either. Especially all these campaigns are changing so rapidly.

Dave Roth [00:41:42]:
Like, if you think about, like, even Google performance max campaigns, there isn't a single playbook for performance max across clients or even within the same vertical, there's no playbook because the campaigns themselves are changing so rapidly. So whatever you were doing that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow and vice versa. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of horsepower, a lot of resourcing that goes into, like, how do we set up seven different performance max configurations so that we can figure out which one works for this specific client? And that's complicated stuff. And it's not to your point, it's behind the scenes. Nobody sees it. But when you can get the new campaign types to work, that's how you earn your money.

Jim Banks [00:42:25]:
Yeah. And I think when you look at the origins of PMax, it used to be people would do standard shopping. Some people would do Google display network campaigns, some would try YouTube, and quite often people would try them, fail miserably and just stop doing them. Right. And that obviously hurts Google's bottom line. Right. So they almost, like they've forced people into this corner of saying, you're going to do pMax, you're going to get all this stuff, you need to upload videos, you need to do display campaigns, blah, blah, blah. Right.

Jim Banks [00:42:53]:
Because. Because ultimately they want to have people not opting out of anything. Right. They don't want to kind of like give you the option of saying, well, you know what, instead of advertising all 25,000 of my products, I'm only going to advertise ten of them because they're the ones that give me the most money. Right. That gives them the least money, gives me the most money. That's not good for Google because, you know, ultimately they, they want you to make profit, but not so much profit that it's bad for them. So.

Jim Banks [00:43:20]:
And again, I think, I think sometimes that that's the, the, again, trying to understand the adoption of something new. When it comes out, it'll come with some limitations, things that work. Maybe before that, you. You don't have access to now. We've always looked back and gone, oh, I wish I could do this. Wish you could do this. You can't. Got to move on.

Jim Banks [00:43:37]:
It's not there anymore. You've got to just keep looking forward, not looking backwards. Dave, I'm going to. I'm going to wrap things up. It's been fantastic to have you on as a guest. I'd love to have you on again because we didn't really get into too many of the decisions.

Dave Roth [00:43:51]:
There's some really bad decisions that we haven't talked about yet. So hopefully we get to do this again sometimes.

Jim Banks [00:43:59]:
Absolutely. And, yeah, I mean, again, I've loved having you on the show. Obviously, all of Dave's information, contact details will be in the show notes and they'll be on the page on the website that will be uploaded when this episode goes live. It only remains me to say thanks a lot for being on the show. Thanks for being a friend, and we'll talk to you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.

Dave Roth [00:44:21]:
Awesome. Thanks, Jim. It's been a real pleasure.