Look, we've all heard that maxim that I know that half of my ads are working, I just don't know which half. So you have to consider half of your ad spend is wasted. But what if you could finally know which half? Well, in today's episode, we're uncovering how AI-powered attribution is transforming marketing in a privacy-first world. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Stagel. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Today I'm joined by Jeff Greenfield. He's the founder and CEO of Provolytics. After decades in marketing analytics, Jeff is leading the charge on solving one of advertising's oldest problems, proving which half of your ad spend is working. And now, with AI and privacy first data, he's showing brands how to finally close that attribution gap. Listen in today and you'll discover why clicks don't tell the whole story and the overlooked metric that matters most. You'll also learn how Provolytics uses AI to reallocate wasted ad spend into measurable growth and the surprising trends in non-click channels that will shape your next marketing strategy. So if you're tired of guessing what works in your marketing budget, this episode will change the way you think about attribution forever. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, ChiefAIOfficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit ChiefaiOfficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi everybody, this is Chris Daigle. I'm the host of Using AI at Work, and today our guest is Jeff Greenfield, the CEO of Provolytics. They're basically delivering AI-driven attribution and planning, uh, leveraging AI with a real focus on this privacy-first environment that a lot of marketers find themselves uh trying to cope with these days in outreach to prospects and clients. So uh before we get started, Jeff, if you don't mind, maybe just share a little bit about your journey and what got you here to today to be on an AI podcast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, thanks, Chris. I'm excited uh to be here today. You know, I I think you know that what got me the most excited is I was a marketer for many years. I used to buy media for companies, and there's this kind of old problem that's been around for years, and it's this old adage that's attributed to a famous, famous marketer in the Midwest by the name of John Wanamaker. And and and that saying goes like, half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don't know which half. So that problem has has kind of you know been a mystery for most marketers for many, many years. And I I faced it, faced it myself. In fact, that's kind of what brought me along, you know, towards where we're at right now. Back in the around 2007, I was buying media for one of the um publicly traded weight loss companies. And we ran into this problem. We were buying a lot of digital advertising and we were buying it on a CPA basis, meaning we didn't have to pay for the ads. We only had to pay when they brought us a new customer. And that determination that there was a new customer was all based upon these digital pixels. And so what would happen is that we would get a new customer, you know, when you go and you order something and you put in your credit card, you hit submit, and a thank you page comes up, and then that would fire a pixel and they would say, Hey, I got you that customer. But but here was the issue is that, and this this happened before I got there. This is the issue I I discovered is that we were running six different partners on a on a cost per sale basis, meaning six six companies were running tons of media uh out of their own pocket to generate sales for us. And the issue that we had is that um they were they were kind of spraying and praying, is what it's called in the world. And so what that meant is that for every new customer we had, all six of them would claim that's my sale. And so at the end of every day, we would end up paying out six times more commissions than we should have. And so we looked around for a solution. The only solution was to put all of them inside of one of these uh what was called double click, which eventually became Google, but was DoubleClick's ad server. And at the volume they were running, that was going to cost the company about $85,000 a month. And the CEO told me, no, we needed to come up with something different. So I was uh I had a kind of a technology side hustle, if you will, back then and was building out a bunch of things. So I had a team already working on stuff. So I pulled off a couple of people and started building out kind of this rudimentary system that would allow us to determine who actually got the credit for this sale. But also, since weight loss back then was something that people like, you know, they didn't just buy it immediately. They had to think about it. There was research, it was a lot of competition. I was also interested in who like built the awareness, who started them on their journey, and then who kind of helped them along in the middle. So I ended up building out uh what became one of the first multi-touch attribution companies, which was called C3 Metrics. And I built that company up uh up to about uh 55 employees. So I left buying media and went over to the measurement side. Although measurement to me did not seem very sexy, it seemed more exciting to be the person, you know, moving the dials and buying the ads and creative and all that. Measurement actually became very sexy because you're in the middle of a lot of stuff that's going on. You get to see what's happening across a multitude of clients, and it's it's fascinating. I exited that company in 2019, um, thinking after 12 years that was enough. And then COVID came. And with COVID came about all of these privacy changes. And what I mean by that is it was in a big, you know, everyone remembers the update on Apple on your iOS where you click, and Facebook and all these apps would say, Do you want to allow this app to track you? And everyone's like, No. But what people didn't realize is that it was tracking us before. And so that was the first thing that happened. And then the other thing that occurred is that a lot of sites kind of put up walls, if you will. Facebook stopped allowing to have outside vendors look in on their stuff. And and also, so so those were kind of the big shifts, and now there's all these privacy regulations. And what I saw was that there was gonna be this kind of monumental shift where measurement was going to have to be done completely differently. And then the biggest, the biggest kind of uh ringing bell for me was that Google Analytics said, hey, we're gonna update to a new version, which they were doing on a regular basis. But they said, because of privacy, everyone has to update the code. And Google Analytics is used across every company in the world because it's free. Yeah. And but what that meant is that for a period of time, this concept of measurement and analytics was going to be at the forefront of every company in the world. And it seemed like a great opportunity to jump back in and do it again. So but this time I decided that instead of having to collect all of this data, that we could leverage this new world of AI and these super fast computers. So I started building this out in 2022, did some beta tests with clients in 2023, and then we started commercializing it in 2024. Uh, so that's kind of been my journey. And again, the goal here is to be able to find that missing half, find that half that's wasted, and then tell marketers where it is better spent in order to improve. So imagine being able to get more sales than you normally have ever gotten with the same amount of money. That's that's essentially what the goal is, and that's what the platform does.
SPEAKER_00For the listeners, if you're not a sophisticated marketer, you're probably operating on that wanna maker model. I 50% of it's working, I just don't know which half, right? So uh this is very important if if you are in the marketing profession or if you're just a uh, you know, you're operating a company. If your marketing team isn't paying a lot of attention to what uh Jeff was just discussing, you are not in an optimized ad spend environment. So this is very important stuff. So what you mentioned, Jeff, and you kind of pass through it, but I think it's very important. If you've got multiple uh ad partners out there, somebody may have gotten my initial interest, but somebody else's link may have been who I bought through. And you guys are able to track that attribution from initial interest to oh, they clicked on follow-up from advertiser two, uh, and then they ended up buying from advertiser three. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01That's right. But let me let me kind of paint the picture. Yeah, let me give an example. Let's say that you've got a company and you've created this phenomenal hose, a hose that doesn't leak. And so you advertise and it has a cool name, and you advertise on Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, and you've got videos of the thing. And then you're also advertising on Google so that when people type in the name of the hose, that they'll be able to find the page and click on it and purchase. So someone comes along, they're scrolling through their Facebook feed, and they see this cool video and they hover over it for a second, but they don't watch it. They don't click on it, they don't do anything, but it they recognize it it's a new hose. Okay, great. And and that's it. And then let's say the next day they're on Instagram and all of a sudden they see it again, and now they watch it. They watch like the 30-second video, but they're not ready to buy. You've now built the awareness and they say to themselves, okay, when my hose starts to leak, I'm gonna get one of these cool hoses. Yeah. Okay. Then they go out this weekend and decide to garden, turn on the hose, and there's a leak in it, and they're like, I should have gotten that hose. What is the name of that? They pull their phone out, they type it into Google, and they click on the link and they buy. Okay. That's a typical scenario. So for most marketers, when they go into their Google Analytics and they look at that sale, what they're going to see is they're going to see that Google brought them that sale. And so now multiply that a thousand times over a thousand sales over the month. And a marketer who's smart, who's following the numbers and the data, which they all should, would then say, Google's working great. Facebook, Instagram is not working. So they would cut their spend on Facebook and Instagram and try to spend more on Google. And the strangest thing is that since there's that delay of like a couple of days to maybe a week and a half, they're not going to notice anything right away. But within a month, they're going to notice that their sales start to decline. And that's because Google Analytics is based upon the click. And the click is not what advertising is buying. The click is the impact from the advertising buy. And marketers know that you want to be, you want to find out what is driving that awareness. You want to build awareness. That's the job of advertising is to get people's attention, not get clicks. But unfortunately, digital marketing has made it so easy and so simple for marketers to focus on the click. And we now have an entire generation of marketers that have moved money down to the bottom of this, you could call it your sales funnel. Sure. And they're all down there and they're all bidding against each other, which is why for most marketers that are listening, they're probably saying, Hey, I'm getting fewer clicks this year than I did last year, and I'm spending the same amount of money. And that's because there's competition and Google has to make more money.
SPEAKER_00That's just the way it is. So this is fascinating because I've been in marketing and know the importance of attribution and tracking and all that kind of stuff. But I was focused on the click. So with provalytics, you're saying that you guys are able to inform me as somebody who's making marketing decisions, not just where the sale came from, but where the initial interest was, you know, sparked, where maybe a deeper review or some research by the client occurred or the prospect occurred, so that I'm not doing exactly what you said, which is just, oh, all the sales are coming from Google and cutting off the part that really made it, made the click in Google possible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And we even go a step further. We actually calculate for you an accurate cost per sale or return on ad spend. And then we even go one step further than that, and then we tell you how in the next month or the next 60 days, how you could better redistribute your money so that you can get more sales. And it all comes down to the fact that most marketers today believe that you invest dollars to buy clicks, clicks lead to leads or sales. Whereas how marketing actually functions is that you invest dollars to get attention. And that attention leads to awareness. And when awareness is built up to a certain enough level, people will walk into your store. If your store happens to be online, that will translate into clicks and then that will lead to sales. But the key is that clicks are so far down at the bottom of that funnel. Yeah. And the secret here is that for most marketers that are listening, they probably have, like I'm sure you do, Chris, on your on your computer there, you probably have a Google Sheet that has every dollar you've spent over the last year or two by day, and it's got your cost per click, your cost per sale, and all that stuff. And what's crazy is that when you downloaded these reports, just like everyone else, there's actually a column that most marketers don't put in their Google Sheet that actually represents awareness or attention. Yeah. And that column is impressions. Because actually, what you're buying are ad impressions, which is, and you could look at it as like you're you're trying to generate an impression or a picture of your ad or your product or service inside of someone's mind. And so before there was digital, this is the craziest thing, is that before there was digital marketing, everything was impression-based because there were no clicks. So this is what's this is what is kind of the the craziness for marketers today is that everyone is focused on the click and they look back to how things were, like in, you know, in in 1990. Like, how is it that BMW actually knew that their ads were working? How is it that that Coca-Cola knew that their ads were working? Well, they used statistics and math, but it was all based upon ad impressions. How many impressions were in market? They weren't interested in individual users. And what happened with digital is we learned that that we could hyper-target, we could actually target people that were in. If I'm selling cigars, I can find people that that love cigars and spend over $1,000 a month on cigars. I can hyper-target them. But the issue with that is that when you hyper-target, you have the cost to deliver your ad, which is always the same. But every time you add in a layer of targeting, it exponentially increases the cost of your ad. So you may get customers, but at the end of the day, you actually may be losing money on those customers depending on your product or service. And so sometimes it's best to kind of pan the camera back and, you know, spread your advertising out, make it broader so you're actually reaching more people. That was the secret that big brands did before digital marketing came around. And it worked great.
SPEAKER_00You know, so everybody, we'll get into the AI part of this conversation in a minute. But what Jeff is sharing here, like again, I've got uh 20 years in marketing and and I'm having some aha moments here. So Jeff, I want to kind of dive into that a little bit. Sure. As somebody who spent a lot of money on paid advertising, I didn't pay much attention to impressions. Big mistake. Right. I'm I'm realizing now that I wasn't thinking about it the way that you just described, that one channel may have provided the awareness or attention, another channel would have built the interest before they did click on the Facebook ad or the Google link or the affiliate link or whatever it was. So for anybody who's not a marketing pro, doesn't have a degree in marketing, that's a very critical distinction that you need to make sure that your team is thinking that way, that they're understanding exactly what Jeff has just explained, that the click certainly matters, that's where the sale comes from. But there's upstream activities that occurred for this, and that unless they've got, I don't know, the right tools or the right mindset, they're probably just glossing over that and going, oh, that didn't work. A bunch of impressions, but no purchases from Meta. The link came from a Google search. So um wow.
SPEAKER_01You're right on there, Chris. And I'll give you like, you know, when you think about that Google Sheet, the one with the clicks, the way most people optimize, meaning the way that most people make a decision, okay, now it's the new month. What am I going to do this month? Is they'll take their clicks and they'll look at them. Maybe they'll they'll graph them over the last month and they'll look at the days where the clicks were the highest. They'll look at the days when the leads or the sales were the highest, and then they'll dig into their platforms for those particular days and see what campaigns ran. And they'll they'll do more of that. You know, real simple. Hey, whatever generated the most clicks, I'll do more of that. Yeah. And what we're saying is take that same Google Sheet, and this is kind of the DIY method, if you will, for marketers. Take your Google Sheet and regenerate it all uh for at least a year, but add in impressions. So now you've got date, you've got impressions, and impressions should come before clicks, you know, psychologically as well, on your Google Sheet. Then for the last year, I would just take, and you know, you can just grab the column of date and impressions and create a graph. And you're gonna graph it and you'll see that every day is never the same, it's always different. And you want to total it up. So if you had ads running on Facebook, you want to add all those impressions up. And if you, and people will say, well, Google search, that's click based. It's like, it is, but there's also impressions that are there because people see the ad, may not click on it. And they may not click on your ad. They may click on someone else's ad. But you want to add all those impressions together. And then what you want to look at now, you want to take that graph that you already had of your clicks, and you want to look at how those impressions impact the clicks. And there's going to be a delay. And what I mean is you may have a lot of impressions one day, and your clicks may be relatively low, and they may not go up for a couple of days. Sometimes it could be two weeks, depending on every channel, marketing channel, and every product or service has what we call a time to conversion. I'll give you an example. Automobiles in the US, yeah, people are in market nine months before they purchase because most a lot of people in the US have leases and you usually get a letter from your lease company saying offering you a pull-ahead lease. And so, meaning come back to the same dealership, we'll give you a good deal and save you money. So if you're a smart automobile marketer, you know that you want to get that person's awareness before they get that letter. So you kind of have to go 10 months out. So, so it all depends on that time frame that you're you're thinking about. But what you'll start to notice is if when you see those impressions go up and you see that downstream impact, instead of going in and looking at the campaigns that were generating the clicks, look at the campaigns that were generating those impressions. And that's essentially that's the secret at that we do at Provalytics is that we look at those patterns, but we look at them on a much, much larger scale and use machine learning and AI in order to do it. It's a lot of very sophisticated math that a single person with a spreadsheet could never do, ever. Um but you could do it yourself if you're a smaller marketer and you've got you've got a handle on what it is you're spending, spending on.
SPEAKER_00So, Jeff, as I mentioned before we started recording, you know, we tend to focus on generative AI, but I see Here, what's what's happening is you guys have custom algos and that sort of thing in a machine learning environment. This is very sophisticated application of AI. It's not ChatGPT generate something for me.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all. In fact, we we've just started thinking about utilizing a large language model, which is what ChatGPT is, to train them on the data sets that we output on behalf of our clients. No, this is this is something this is definitely custom built completely. That's just a lot of very high-level math. But it's interesting because we're borrowing from the past. We kind of went back to the future to see how did marketers do it before there was digital. And then we created the platform such that whenever new types of campaigns or platforms come out, all we need to be able to get are those impression numbers, which you can always get. An impression number is like how many views did a video have, essentially.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I wouldn't even know the questions to ask to really dig in on the machine learning side, but I'm fascinated by what you guys are doing. Because again, I've had some aha's already, and I realize um we have been, you know, I once had a mentor, he said there's nothing that brute force and sheer ignorance can't solve. He's joking, of course. But I it sounds like without this type of sophisticated analysis of your paid advertising, that a lot of us are operating on brute force and sheer ignorance, and that's the spend more on clicks, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, you're you're a thousand percent right on. In fact, I would even update that wanna maker statement because most of our clients, when they come to us, uh 80 to 90 percent of what they're spending on is completely wasted. Uh, it's it's actually losing them money. The numbers are astounding, and it's not because the folks that are running things are ignorant or stupid, they're actually following the script that was outlined uh for them by these publicly traded platforms, especially Google, and they're they're following the numbers. And the reason they end up speaking to us is because they see that their competitors are are constantly on connected television or they're running out of home. And when they first see it, they're like, Oh, that's never going to work for them because we tried it and it didn't work and we stopped it. And then after six months of seeing their competitor on TV, they're like, Well, they're not dummies. You know, why are they doing this? There must be, I must be missing something here. And that's and then the other big issue for a lot of marketers is that as a marketer, the one thing you want is you want you want more money so you can test out and try things. And for a lot of folks in corporate America, they have to go to the finance team, to the chief financial officer to get budget. And what ends up happening is that they bring in their spreadsheets and their numbers never add up, they never match what the CFO had, and they get laughed out of the office. And finance has this opinion that marketers can't do math. And it's not that they can't do math, it's just that you know, their hands are tied because they're trying to string together data from seven or eight different platforms, and they're all taking credit for everything. And so the numbers never work. So we come in and become this kind of single source of truth, if you will, that enables them to be able to have conversations with finance, and then the numbers work, which is pretty cool.
SPEAKER_00So, who are your like company size? And is there any pattern to the industry that tends to be uh clients of Provolytics?
SPEAKER_01Folks that are it's it's typically larger advertisers, those that are spending uh, you know, upwards of 10 or 20 million dollars or more per year. It tends to be obviously e-commerce has gone through a major shift in the last uh couple of years. It used to be, you know, if you had a product, you would have it on your website. And if it took off, that was the greatest thing in the world for you. You have a hot hit. It's awesome. And that was that had difficulty because as you started advertising, you ran into the same problem I talked about before, the the deduplication and stuff. But you're you're spending a lot of money, but all the orders are coming in on your website. Then one day you get a call and you find out that someone is now selling a knockoff of your product on Amazon. So you're like, okay, well, now I have to be on Amazon. So you set up an Amazon store, and now you're spending all these dollars to tell people about your product. But in America, when people hear about a product, the first place they go to search now is Amazon. And so very quickly, what ends up happening is a lot of your sales now start to come over to Amazon, but now you're also advertising on Amazon. So now being able to tie all that together is nearly impossible because there's no Google Analytics for Amazon. And then Walmart says, hey, we'd love to have your product too. So now you're selling it online at Walmart, you're now in the store, you're in Target, you're in CVS. And now it's nearly impossible to figure it all out. So for those types of folks, we're a perfect solution for them as the different places where people buy, because you can convince people to say, hey, try our product. You cannot convince them where to purchase it from. They're going to purchase it where they want to purchase it from. So e-commerce is great. Uh, insurance, finance, uh, healthcare, folks that tend to always be spending and have to deal with the ups and downs of the economy. They're perfect customers for our solution.
SPEAKER_00So, the what what would be the impact that you see clients typically getting going from we're focusing on, and I'm sure with this level of spend, they've got a little more sophistication at this than I do. But I would imagine that are you doing a lot of re-education of the marketing teams when they connect with you?
SPEAKER_01It's a lot of re-education of the marketing teams, number one. I would also say that you would expect, and and and most people would expect that these large companies, they've got the best of the best marketers and the best of the best tools. The reality is something different. The reality is that even though they're smart enough to know that Google Analytics is wrong, that it's not the best direction. In corporate America and in large companies, consistency is more important than being right. And it's consistently wrong. That's one thing. It it it's it's always there. You can count on it, even though you know it doesn't give a complete picture. So sometimes some of the largest advertisers in the world are operating on the least sophisticated system because it's always been there. And it's in and what I say is our solution's not right, because there's nothing right, because nothing can get inside of a human being's mind to figure out what made them purchase. Uh, but I guarantee them that our system is less wrong than what they're currently doing. And and that's really the key is as a marketer, you you know, everyone thinks I want to go from zero to a thousand right away. And the larger companies, when you do that, you break everything. So you can't do that. That's why startups have an advantage. But what you want to do is you want to incrementally get a little bit better, or like I say, be less wrong every month and kind of move forward for there. So the the impact to these teams is significant in terms of the return on investment. It's it's it's a huge amount in terms of cutting down their cost per sale or cost per action or significant increases in the return on ad spend. More important than that, though, is the education, not only with the internal marketing team, but across all of the different agencies that are involved. So this is another issue. The larger the company, the more cooks there are in the kitchen. Yeah. And every cook has their own perspective, which makes it even more difficult for the head of marketing to have a conversation with finance. Um, so it makes things even more difficult. So that that's kind of the the larger scale impact is what the single source does for everyone.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's interesting. Our our chief AI officer, the way he puts that, he says, I don't want to be right, I want to be correct. And it seems like that's exactly the the paradigm that you guys are taking them into is is being able to correctly map the sale to the attention, interest, decision, and action. So as far as like being we're talking data here, being data driven, what type of impact do you see clients have when they go from the way that they've been doing it to the the introduction of this more correct uh mapping of sale attribution? Like numerically, what what do you typically see?
SPEAKER_01Oh, we we see about a 25 to 50 percent increase in the metrics across the board. Uh the ROI is is is staggering. And it it significantly decreases their stress level as well, because now they have a tool that they know is going to be able to capture that kind of branding upper funnel activity. And so for them as a marketer, you know, what you want to do is you want to try new stuff. You know, the only way you win in this game is to test. You have to test new creative, new messaging, and then new places to advertise. And you get kind of a defeated feeling when you're in the last click world because nothing seems to work except for Google. And so this allows you to start testing things and actually seeing the impact and understanding how long it's taking for these things to have an impact.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Um, interesting question. Now let's put the spotlight on provolytics without giving away your secret sauce. How are you guys advertising?
SPEAKER_01Oh, so that that's a that's a great question. It really is. You know, I've been in this space since 2008. So, you know, I've built up quite a network of folks and individuals uh that I've known throughout the years. For me, one of the most exciting things is when you go back and you look up, you know, who's the chief marketing officer of a company. And you're like, in fact, I was just having this conversation earlier today, and I was saying to someone on my team, oh wow, we've been I've been connected with her since 2012. Uh, she was an analyst at a company now. Oh my God. That's so to me, that's pretty exciting to see people kind of grow up and move up in this industry. And so primarily it's been leveraging relationships that I've had from a marketing perspective. This is, you know, this is enterprise grade software. It's a very long sales cycle, incredibly long. This is not a decision that someone says, in fact, I've had folks that have said, oh my God, after one phone call, let's do it, send me a contract. Those never work out because they're not thinking ahead to all the ramifications. This this impacts, you know, across different aspects of the business. And you need to get buy-in from all of them in order for to have a successful outcome. So it's it's a combination of leveraging those relationships to having introductions, uh, and then working through the sales cycle. Obviously, we're doing things like behavioral retargeting and some upper funnel advertising, primarily on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is primarily our main point because all of our prospects, 100%, all are on LinkedIn. They're all active on LinkedIn. Uh, and then LinkedIn kind of becomes that gateway. The nice thing is that with LinkedIn now you can actually do connected television using your LinkedIn contacts. So you can prospect on LinkedIn, build up a prospect list, and then buy CTV advertising based upon those profiles. It's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_00I had no idea. We should probably start.
SPEAKER_01You know, LinkedIn, if you remember, got acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft really wasn't that big in the ads business, but LinkedIn has grown substantially. And we're now starting to understand that the value, it used to be before privacy, it used to be the value was these these companies that had built up all of these unique IDs based upon cookies. Meaning, I've put you into a persona list without your permission. You don't even know you're here, but it's based upon your behavioral activity online. And now we've moved to a world where privacy is paramount. And the only way that people are building up lists is if I have an app or a community like a Facebook or like a LinkedIn. Because in order to join LinkedIn, you have to give your express permission, you have to authenticate with an email. They're now making people authenticate with like a driver's license and everything. And so now the value of LinkedIn has gone up substantially for Microsoft because of all of these privacy changes uh that have occurred in the advertising ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting. We spend a lot of our time, we we certainly provide content. That's primarily our our outreach. We we used to do a lot of paid ads because we were more targeting B2C, which makes a lot of sense, uh, but also makes sense on B2B. Um but we're kind of like you where we've got the relationships that have kind of uh I guess launched the B2B effort. What are maybe some of the trends that you're noticing? Because obviously with the amount of spend that your clients are doing over the size of your client catalog, your book of business, you guys have a lot of intelligence on what like where things are headed, right?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00What are some of the trends uh that you're seeing now based on that insight you're getting from all the optics you've got on across the spectrum?
SPEAKER_01Well, what we're seeing is this emergence uh in media plans of what I'm calling non-click digital channels. And these would be things like connected television, which is essentially, you know, TV ads that are through purchased through digital means and that are hyper-targeted. And I would also include with that streaming. So, you know, essentially if you turn on Amazon Prime and you see an ad, that's a connected television ad. They're targeted. They they know who you are, type of thing. I would also add to that podcasting and then also influencers as well. So there's huge, huge uh impact from influencers, which I would say is like the modern day equivalents of product placement and products in film and television. Uh, and then also out-of-home billboards are massive, have always worked. Really? Uh oh, yeah. Billboards are are huge, especially in certain geos. But now uh a lot of the billboards, a significant number, have been digitized. We call it now digital out-of-home. And what that means is that it used to be to do an out-of-home ad, you had to pay for the advertising, but then you had to have the ad itself made that took weeks or months, and then it had to be pasted or painted up there. Now there's platforms you can log into and you can light up your digital out-of-home ad across the US in minutes because these ads rotate. So it's not a static billboard, they rotate. So it's pretty powerful. So smart.
SPEAKER_00So kind of a uh maybe a little tangent a little bit, but one of the things that you hear a lot, you guys, and the reason I'm asking you in particular is because you have a strong technical understanding, you've got a deep marketing background. I hear this a lot. I mentioned something, you know, I've got my phone here and I mention, oh, we want to go to Cancun. And then all of a sudden I start seeing the Cancun ads in my LinkedIn feed or my maybe not LinkedIn, but like my Facebook feed or my Instagram or whatever. Any opinion on whether or not they're listening to us?
SPEAKER_01Well, what I can tell you is that if there were ads like that that were out there, they would obviously be for sale. And I haven't seen them for sale because those would come at a premium. Yep. Uh, and and I have not seen them. Now, it used to be there were apps on your phone that were always on and always listening unless you got rid of the app. And they would listen for certain words. And in fact, there were apps on your phones that would actually, and and what they were trained on is they were trained on certain TV ads so that they could validate that TV ads were actually running. So when you start to think about how vast the local, you know, there's thousands upon thousands of local TV stations that run TV ads all throughout the day and night. And to validate from an advertiser's perspective that they're actually running is nearly impossible. So they would use audio sometimes for that. But when you actually dig in and you find out, you know, you know, that you're thinking of Cancun and you mention it, it turns out that there was probably something else that kind of led you down that path or kind of influence you to get there to the first place. Like maybe you were viewing some travel stuff. And then it turns out because of your location and the time of year, there's a lot of people from your location who go to Cantoon this time of year, and it just happened to come up. And then human beings, we tend to think in linear fashion. We go from A to B. And magic, I used to be a magician years ago. The way magic tends to work is that we take advantage of that. We don't have to go A to B or you know to get to C. I can just go direct to C and not tell you what I did. And that's so it, but humans, we have to connect the dots. And so sometimes the way we connect the dots is is we we're missing something. And we're and the truth is, you know, everyone has their own unique perspective of the world. You know, I always use the example of, you know, the car accident at, you know, there's four corners there. The cops talk to someone, ask them what they saw, they cross the street, and the person says something completely and utterly different. Yeah. Uh, and it's their job to take those four opinions and build out a kind of a broader perspective on what actually occurred. But what I can say about those audio ads is that if they were available, they would definitely be for sale. They would be a major premium, and I would have seen them, definitely.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well, that's very comforting. So it's probably more of just like a reticular activating system thing. I've been thinking about it, and all of a sudden I assume that they were listening because even though the ads were running in the background before I was looking for Cancus. Right.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I heard a marketer years ago from BMW who said that when their ads, so this was probably 35, 40 years ago, that their ads were not designed for the consumer today. He said that he was designing ads for 16-year-old boys so that when they grew up, they would aspire to drive a BMW. Now, that that was a great time in marketing that you could plan that far ahead. Today's world, you have to live on a quarter-by-quarter basis. But good marketing is there's this emotional, unconscious aspect to storytelling that most marketers today forget. When you think about most of the ads you see, they're all based on some sort of special offer or benefits. They're all every ad is in sales mode. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Yeah. Versus, hey, let me let me try to get a personal connection with you. I want you to feel something for my brand. When you do that and you invest in those really upper funnel branding, you really can do an amazing job of imprinting your brand and making people feel good of it about it. A great example of this uh that we can see during COVID is that when COVID came, a lot of brands said, well, people aren't gonna be shopping for this now. And so what they did is that they pulled their advertising because all their ads were benefits and and and sales and things like that. And the larger brands had been through this before. Because anytime there is some sort of disruption or war, the brands that pull back lose market share and they never gain it back. The brands that shift their advertising from instead of selling benefits and instead of trying to imprint you, that they say, we're here with you, we back you, and they spend their dollars to back whatever it is that, hey, we've got this America, that type of thing. Those brands grab that additional market share because they are uh they're hitting the feelings that their consumers are feeling. And they're saying, we're aligned with you. And that's the advantage of being at that kind of upper funnel branding stage. To be able to do that is that's that's really the game changer for a lot of brands.
SPEAKER_00So, Jeff, now now we'll finally jump into the generative AI side of things. So we we've got uh listeners they're B to C, they might be employees of companies with their B to B maybe marketing. For those who aren't spending ten to twenty million dollars per year and they still want the benefit of what perhaps a large language model can do in extracting this type of intelligence, maybe not to the depth that you guys can with your custom stuff. Um what would be some advice for them on how how how would you go about it if it was like starting tomorrow, you know, your neighbor says, Hey, I I could use some help. I sell hoses and we sell, you know, a few hundred a month. How would you recommend that they because it's obvious like you've spent 30 years thinking about this stuff or whatever, right? How would you tell them to approach this if the only tool they had was maybe chat GPT?
SPEAKER_01So what I would do is is that I would take that same spreadsheet that I talked about, date, impression, clicks, sales, and I would take that spreadsheet, I would upload it to ChatGPT, and then I would take this podcast and I would download the transcript. Boom. Yep. And I would upload it to ChatGPT and I would write a note that I listened to this podcast and it talked about how impressions, impact, clicks, and can you look at my impressions and the patterns there and let me know what days I should examine? Uh, because it's telling me that there's some campaigns that are there. That that's what I would do is that instead of me, the human, look at the graph, yeah, I would give it to ChatGPT and I would use the transcript because if you haven't done that with a transcript from a podcast or anything, it's great. Because Chat GPT, you can just, you know, it wherever this is at, grab the trans transcript, put it in a text file, upload it, ask ChatGPT to summarize it. But in this case, you want to use the intelligence that we've talked about to instruct Chat GPT on how to analyze those impressions, clicks, and sales. That's that's what I would do.
SPEAKER_00So easy. So easy. Totally easy. Yeah. So for anybody listening, I think we'll have the trans full transcript in the show notes for sure. Um, Jeff, do you do you teach this at all? Do you advise? Do you write books? Do you put out content?
SPEAKER_01Well, I put out a lot of content. Going back to the question about from a you know a marketing standpoint of view, I I typically will add like a new video to LinkedIn. Again, that's our our place of choice. Yeah. Three times a week, Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Uh, we put together a course on marketing and marketing attribution that's available on our website at no cost. And folks, they have to take a quiz. If they pass it, they get a certificate for LinkedIn. And then I do a lot of podcasts because the conversations I have are great. They make me think more about our business. And also it exposes to me other sectors that you know I'm not currently thinking about. And I start to think about okay, what what are some solutions for those areas where there's a need at? Uh, and for us, like we built this platform primarily for brands. And this is a great example. And I was on a on a podcast talking to someone about agencies because an ad agency sometimes they they may only be buying the television for a brand. And even though the brand has their own way of measuring, uh, the agency needs to be able to prove what they're doing is working.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I started thinking about it. And then I looked at some of our clients' data and I took one of them and I removed everything except for the television and and ran the data through our platform to see like, is it taking all of the credit? And it didn't. That it took a little bit more than it should have, but directionally, it was giving the same directional advice. And I realized that our platform's smart enough to know that there's probably other stuff going on that it's not aware of. And it's not going to take, it's, it's not gonna, it's, it's not gonna get over credit something too much. And so just because of a podcast, I was able to then realize that we could start talking to agencies that are sitting in the scenario where I need a tool to be able to prove, you know, we sell upper funnel stuff and it doesn't show up in GA4. How do I, how do I prove to our customers it's actually working?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's brilliant stuff, man. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I I have a obviously a career based on marketing, it was a part of it, but not exclusively as a marketer. But I've learned a lot. And for those of you listening, like this is principally this is stuff that your marketing team should be thinking about for sure. So, Jeff, we're gonna include the links to your to your LinkedIn profile and that sort of thing. But um, if people do want to maybe even engage provolytics or find out more about the way that you guys approach marketing, um, what would be some of the resources that you would recommend that they do to find out more about you?
SPEAKER_01Well, obviously go to the website, it's provolytics.com. You can also go to get prova, that's g-e-t-p-o-v-a.com. Prova actually means proof in Italian. So it means get proof because that's that's the problem that folks have. And then uh on the website, there's uh you can download our playbook that kind of talks through, you know, what probolytics does, the solutions it solves for, and gives a couple of case studies. But then we've got all sorts of other materials. If if there's even a demo on there, you can sign up for and watch the demo. And and then there's tons more resources if you're interested. We can send out a list of the types of reports that we make available. And there's uh even a new report that we just put out. We're just finishing it off right now on connected television and how that's kind of changed things as well, too, from a measurement perspective.
SPEAKER_00And I guess final question: you you've mentioned television a lot. I've been a digital marketer, and I guess television at this point is becoming digital, like you said, with the out-of-house with the billboards and things like that. You're bullish on that channel in particular? Of course.
SPEAKER_01I mean, the greatest thing about TV is that unlike digital, with people scrolling along and and seeing tons of ads at once, you've got the whole screen. And there's still something about when someone sees an ad on TV and you're in between Coca-Cola and Walmart, you actually get the you're elevated in the consumer's mind that wow, you're as big as Walmart. It's that implied kind of endorsement, if you will, of the other ads that are running at that same time. So TV works, it it's always worked and it will continue to work.
SPEAKER_00I'll tell you, I I'm going to be paying a lot more attention to your perspective on marketing because again, I've learned a lot in this. I didn't know it was going to go in this direction as far as uh marketing strategy and tactics, but I'm hearing things from you that and I know a lot of very talented marketers, but I'm hearing things from you that I don't hear from them, and um I'm interested. So um everybody, everything that that Jeff has mentioned is gonna be in the show notes of this episode. And it maybe you're not the marketer, but everybody has marketers on their team or their company or an agency or whatever. I would get this type of information, this episode, uh, the links that we're gonna be sharing in front of them, just to make sure that they are they're thinking the same way that we've uh heard Jeff describe today. So um, Jeff, any any closing remarks before we wrap up the episode?
SPEAKER_01No, but thank you so much. It's been uh it's it's been a great pleasure and an awesome conversation as well, definitely.
SPEAKER_00All right. And so everybody that was listening, thank you so much for joining us for yet another episode of Using AI at Work. Um, you know where to find us. Uh new episodes come out every Monday. So we'll be looking forward to uh having you join us on the next one. Jeff, thank you so much again for your time. And uh everybody, go use AI. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. So thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.