Prophecies and Pleas of an Advertising Man, with Myles Younger
Release Date: 02/21/2024
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 233 In the 2009 movie “Up” there’s a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel. We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let’s be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it’s having an impact. How do we break this habit? This month’s book says it’s by creating a...
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Episode 232 There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It’s not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take: Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is...
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It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks. When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don’t have to raise N...
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Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales. This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way. A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would...
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Episode 229 We need to talk about what’s been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta’s ad platforms. A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we’ll take it from here." Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They’ve turned "manual control" into a...
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How do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional justifications like “because we’ll make a profit out of this”? In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or...
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Episode 226 Positioning is an element that’s so foundational to Marketing, it’s taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price. But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail? Take...
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Episode 225 At the time I’m recording this it’s a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they’re going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you’re working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let’s dive right in. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry. In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult. Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight...
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The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I’m talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing. Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The...
info_outlineYou could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with:
The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.
CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite’s questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.
There’s the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won’t need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who’ve poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.
Because our field doesn't have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn’t uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How’s that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.
My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he’s been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy MightyHive which became Media.Monks.
He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company's educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets
To me, he’s something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.
I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.
Timestamp/Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:03:25 Welcome Myles
0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy
0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future
0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can
0:24:53 Tech debt we've brought on ourselves
0:31:50 PSA
0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies
0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al
0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings
0:52:32 Best reaction is educating ourselves
1:00:00 How to reach out to Myles
Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show appear within the Funnel Reboot site on Ep 184's shownotes page.