Running CTV & OOH Video Ads, with Aaron Foley
Funnel Reboot podcast
Up to the end of the twentieth century, the only ads that appeared on a screen were the ones arranged by a handful of TV networks. They were the only ones who could sell commercials, and only the biggest companies could afford what they charged for 30 seconds of airtime. Then, about 25 years ago, some digital marketing innovations started to make a new ad model possible. In 2000, Google launched a self-serve ad platform, and it was later joined by display ad exchanges like Right Media and DoubleClick. For a while, they displayed image ads, but faster broadband internet eventually meant they...
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Rebranding Done Right, with Travis Gobeil
Funnel Reboot podcast
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What Analysts wish marketers knew, with Marc-Andre Seguin
Funnel Reboot podcast
Some of us are lucky enough to work in a place with analysts who can help us make sense of our data. But there are added challenges in making this collaboration work. Analysts may struggle with the questions marketers ask, finding them too vague for analyzing. Marketers may get data back that they find irrrelevant; they may assume the analyst misunderstood their request. I’ll grant that we can speak the same language, but that isn’t enough. An Analyst cannot look at all the data, they cannot do analysis that will answer all your questions. The outcome you get will match...
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The Personal Branding Book, with Daria Dmitrieva
Funnel Reboot podcast
When I ask how someone forms their perception of a brand, what comes to mind? It might be they hear about it by word of mouth, or on an email thread or private message. In a nutshell, what’s said about our company when we’re not in the room, when we’re not in control of the message. Now try the same experiment with our personal brand. Is our immediate thought how to look as good as possible? Is it how to curate the results that pop up when they search our name? Truth is, our personal brand has already been formed, we just weren’t in on those conversations. Being active on...
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Balancing Data in B2B Partnerships, with Brendan Ziolo
Funnel Reboot podcast
“Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says “understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit" He might have been referring to B2B marketing. Think of it. Internal teams have internal data that give insight into customer accounts and lifetime value. Their agencies are close to different data: media auction signals, campaign trends. But both of them are data-poor, disadvantaged by limited access to each others’ systems. As long as we tolerate the status quo, both sides will keep making false...
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Content, Simplified with Lee Densmer
Funnel Reboot podcast
Talk of Content marketing started appearing online around 2007. One of the few people who started talking about it was former Funnel Reboot guest Joe Pulizzi. It wasn’t until 2014 I became aware of marketers who were staking their career on the profession of creating content. I found the idea of giving-away-expertise a bit unsettling. Maybe it was because for a dozen years prior to that, I’d mainly communicated with audiences through paid ads. Gradually, Content marketing won out - we simply expect content on social media brings marketing results. Only one problem, our...
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Why you want AI to be a more Skilled Marketer than you, with Chris Dore
Funnel Reboot podcast
Small businesses run on lean marketing teams and tight budgets, but don't count them out. They're the overwhelming majority of businesses on earth. Small companies have one function that's poised to figure out AI through experimentation, analysis and strategic changes in direction. It's marketing, and it may very well determine the winner of the AI race. After graduating from Laurentian University, our guest worked in corporate and consulting positions across Canada and even in Korea. He then founded a business which he grew to a successful exit, which led to mentoring students at Algonquin...
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Earn It! with Steve Pratt
Funnel Reboot podcast
Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn’t automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands’ programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What’s different between content that’s adored and content that dies in obscurity? The brands that win make content that audiences don’t see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they...
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From Adversaries to Advocates: How to win friends (and budgets) with data
Funnel Reboot podcast
I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership. I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts. Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts. I was recently given the chance by a local association - the OPMMA - to give a talk and I picked this problem. I hope as you listen to how I think it's solved and the three moments where this...
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Using CRM for Total Recall, with Brandon Drake
Funnel Reboot podcast
We humans like conversations that keep moving forward. Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it. If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn’t interest us. This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that's...
info_outlineIn 1985, Robert Fulgham published a book that has gone on to sell 7 million copies. That puts it in league with nonfiction books like the biographies of Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela & the Diary of Anne Frank. In "All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten," Fulgham lays out a handful of rules we all internalized on our way to adulthood. They include…
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
You’ve probably noticed the problem with Fulgham’s syrupy homespun advice. It’s not the world we live in. kindergarten class bear no resemblance to Capitalism— which is more like what you see in recess on the playground. From a marketing perspective, there are critical qualifiers we must add to Fulgham’s rules to make the applicable to the Big bad world out there:
Share everything? Sharing sounds noble… but capitalism says if you come up with an idea and patent it, those whom it’s shared with have to pay you for its use. Sharing doesn’t automatically mean you lose your competitive edge
Play Fair? Sure, play by the rules. But know that the biggest rewards go to whoever understands the rules best. If your competitors are using a playbook, you should change how the game’s played, and beat everyone else in the process.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours? You shouldn’t steal, of course… but marketing is literally the legal appropriation of someone else’s audience. History’s full of greenfields where pioneering R&D created a category…only to see it harvested by a fast moving disrupter.
To sum up, being a producer in this system is trying to outdo your fellow producers to win a consumers’s business, you should use every exploit capitalism allows to win.
Our guest has been in and worked with many startups, showing them how to bend the rules in their favour. He has run conferences that have brought thousands of companies together to share these unfair advantages. He’s also co-authored a book showing how to identify growth hacks using analytics. And in 2025 he and his co-author released the book “Just Evil Enough”
Let’s go to Montreal to talk with Alistair Croll.
For full notes on concepts mentioned, go to the Funnel Reboot site and check episode 218.