Funnel Reboot podcast
This podcast aims to solve common problems that operations-minded marketers have with their marketing performance.
info_outline
The Classical Marketing book, with Anthony "Tas" Tasgal
12/20/2025
The Classical Marketing book, with Anthony "Tas" Tasgal
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 concepts they gave linguistic expression to are stitched into everything that comes out of our mouths. You’ll hear a passionate discussion today by two guys who both did an undergrad in classics. But you won’t need to know anything about this to get great marketing lessons from today’s talk. Believe it or not, the ancients can teach us a fair bit about marketing! Our guest’s undergraduate courses taken at the University of Oxford in Classical Greek Language and Literature inspired him to write the book we’re discussing today. He is a trainer, author, strategist, and lecturer who applies Storytelling, Behavioural Economics, and insight-driven thinking to brands and communications. Serving as a Course Director for several professional institutes, he also delivers TEDx talks and has spoken on stages around the world. His clients span organizations such as the BBC, Panasonic, Nokia, The Royal Albert Hall, and the UK National Health Service. An accomplished writer, he has published several award-winning books, including The Storytelling Book, which has sold 40,000 copies. His seventh book, The Classical Marketing Book, is being released in North America at the start of 2026. Let’s go to the UK to speak with Anthony ‘Tas’ Tasgal. Chapters Timestamps 0:00:00 Introducing Tas Tasgal 0:02:48 How Ancient Cultures Inform Modern Marketing Today 0:06:29 Uncovering Marketing Power in Word Origins 0:10:26 Using Ancient Myths for Market Segmentation 0:13:33 Connecting Behavioral Economics with Storytelling Power 0:17:21 Strategies to Avoid Marketing's 'Junk Folder' 0:21:52 Crafting Persuasive Frames with Historical Stories 0:26:43 The Power and Peril of Condensed Language 0:30:53 Mastering Persuasion with Ethos, Logos, and Pathos 0:34:48 Satire and Timeless Human Patterns in Marketing 0:37:57 Tapping into Ancient Wisdom for Modern Marketing Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/39446815
info_outline
Keeping the Revenue Engine Running, with Karl Ortmanns
12/12/2025
Keeping the Revenue Engine Running, with Karl Ortmanns
We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don’t hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That’s especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It’s a live feedback loop marketers can’t get anywhere else. Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other’s meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly. Our guest today understands that better than most. He’s a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He’s known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach’s tone to get them back on track. And he doesn’t restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let’s go talk with Karl Ortmanns. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/39322470
info_outline
Brandjitsu, with Michael Dargie
12/01/2025
Brandjitsu, with Michael Dargie
Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable. You don’t have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we’re going to hear a process that’s been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. . Listen in as we delve into the book’s process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we’ve got to Embrace. We’ll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand by thinking of it as an Iceberg. Lastly, we’ll drill into a brand’s DNA to find out how we can spread its unique outlook. Our guest was tired of working with brands that felt like they were screaming into the void, so he designed a process that let customers feel, remember, and advocate for a brand. He honed his methodology as a creative director, and founded the brand agency called Make More Creative to help brands that had this problem solve it outright. He is also Host of TheRebelRebelPodcast and Speaker and mentor for the Canadian Trade Accelerator Program. Let’s go to Calgary Alberta to speak with Michael Dargie. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/39227465
info_outline
Human Centered Marketing, with Ashley Faus
11/17/2025
Human Centered Marketing, with Ashley Faus
Here’s a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities When it’s so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them. A new book came out in 2025, called Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Even though Gen AI that’s all around looks set to marginalize content marketing, this book predicts that AI’s knock-on effects will bring old retro practices back into vogue. If Wired Magazine were to meme it using their Wired/Tired/Expired phrasing, it might say that Humans Interacting with no machines = Expired Machines Monopolizing Interactions = Tired Human-Human interaction via Machine = Wired The book also argues that marketing & communications folks have to make different types of content for segments of the buyer journey, all held to different goals and different time horizons. Don’t dump random content on social channels. Like instruments in a score, your pieces need to work together—not add noise. It also said being Human-Centered extends to where and how we use our messages. Our leaders have to go to trade shows, make podcasts, meet people, and have real conversations. Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard. The author of the book is by day, a speaker and is currently Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva. By night, she’s a Singer, actor, and fitness fiend. Let’s go to Northern California to talk with Ashley Faus. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/39059000
info_outline
Analytics that's Metrics Centred, with Allan Wille
10/30/2025
Analytics that's Metrics Centred, with Allan Wille
Up to the 18th century, making and trading things was harder than it needed to be. You had to deal with a bewildering patchwork of local constants and norms. It was actually the French Revolution & administrators who came out of it that started to codify how we measure things. The standards they adopted were ultimately formalized in 1875 at a Convention whose name you may recognize, the Metre - or should I say Meter - Convention. The Standard set at the convention spread beyond France to most of Europe, removing friction in commerce and everyday life. Engineers could spec parts to the same tolerances; pharmacists could dose reliably across borders; food producers could print consistent nutritional labels; shipbuilders and container makers could agree on common dimensions; and architects and builders could order materials that matched on site. Over decades that shared language of measurement turned local guesswork into dependable infrastructure for industry, science and trade. Today, About 95% of the world’s population lives in countries that have officially adopted the metric system. “Metric” in that sense solved disagreement about how much — it replaced local guesswork with a shared language of measurement so engineers, traders and regulators could trust one another. Businesses face the same problem today — only the units have changed. Instead of metres and kilograms, modern organizations trade in clicks, sessions, impressions, cost, conversions and revenue. These are the metrics that power decisions, budgets and boardroom arguments. If one team’s “conversion” counts form submissions, another’s counts purchase intents, and a third’s counts paid signups, you get the same mess Europe lived with before standardization: wasted effort, mistrust, and bad decisions. That’s why the digital-era equivalent of adopting the metric system matters: a single, governed vocabulary of business metrics (clear definitions, lineage, owners and calculational rules). Give everyone the same definition of “revenue,” “LTV,” or “ROAS” — and the same ability to trace where those numbers came from — and you turn noisy arguments into aligned action. In short: standardize the units, restore trust in the numbers, and your dashboards start to behave like the modern factories that metrication once enabled for Europe. Turn to how many marketing teams are now constrained by the disparate marketing measures we have - it’s the choke-point preventing us from sharing dashboards between groups, asking bigger questions, and getting full bang for money spent on our analytics infrastructures. If we’re going to keep our sanity, we must get on with Metricizing our metrics. Going down a path where business metrics are treated as standardized units opens up possibilities as big as the Metric System opened up for our global economy. Our guest is a Proud Swiss-Canadian, technologist and entrepreneur. In 2001 he co-founded analytics software company Klipfolio, one of whose products aims to address metric management. Note that I’m having him on today to give his personal perspective - there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. When he’s not working in or talking about analytics, you’ll find him cycling in the city we both call home. Let’s go talk to Allan Wille. For links to people, products or concepts mentioned, visit the Funnel Reboot site’s page for show #219.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/38854330
info_outline
Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll
10/14/2025
Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll
In 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.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/38572785
info_outline
Scar Tissue, with Danny Covey
09/29/2025
Scar Tissue, with Danny Covey
For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we’ll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey, For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey’s, surgery isn’t an if, it’s not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations. But throughout all that, he’s displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, "Scar Tissue." And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you’ll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings. Let’s get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/38389405
info_outline
Website Wealth, with Philippa Gamse
09/15/2025
Website Wealth, with Philippa Gamse
One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of. That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career. Back in high school he’d struggled to master all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short. But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar - it’s playing a trick on physics. Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn’t until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA. The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury’s new backflip maneuver - the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance - he didn’t miss a jump right up to the metal round. I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to 2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury’s style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don’t even question it. Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It’s a phenomena today’s guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: “The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that's the point!” Our guest has spent 25 years teaching digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of “42 Rules for a Website That Wins” and came out in 2025 with “Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics”. Let’s go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 216.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/38218900
info_outline
The Path to AGI with John Thompson
08/29/2025
The Path to AGI with John Thompson
Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.” What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence. This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI. Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows. Today’s guest graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group. He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/38014865
info_outline
Books for the Summer Break
08/18/2025
Books for the Summer Break
Hey, Glenn here. It’s the middle of summer when I’m recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I’m going to share some reads that go a little farther afield. Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction. Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:01:44 The Discoverers 00:12:43 Blindsight 00:19:05 How Big Things Get Done 00:24:12 Private Truths, Public Lies 00:27:41 Seveneves 00:30:01 Other SF recommendations 00:31:00 Earth Abides 00:34:57 conclusion Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode, #214.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/37865365
info_outline
Optimizing Marketing with Statistics, with Ateeq Ahmad
07/28/2025
Optimizing Marketing with Statistics, with Ateeq Ahmad
Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths. In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane’s entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they’d taken enemy fire and either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel. Wald’s team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed. Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren’t examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn’t make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn’t sample could have been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they’d been lucky! the returning planes weren’t the rule, they were the exception. Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that’s not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution. This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today’s episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we’ll get a bit more comfortable using them. Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he’s learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs. Let’s now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad. Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/37579360
info_outline
Unorthodoxy, with Gil Gildner
07/09/2025
Unorthodoxy, with Gil Gildner
We as consumers do a lot of things just because the people around us are doing them. For proof, look no further than some historical examples—from the 17th-century tulip bulb craze in Holland to doomsday cults and prepper movements in the lead-up to Y2K. Buying fads such as pet rocks, fidget spinners, Beanie Babies, and NFTs all show how easily prevailing thoughts influence individual behavior. The science behind this is well understood. The evolutionary drive to fit in with our peers is very strong. When a group of people’s purchases are plotted as a histogram, we always see the majority of them clumped near the centre - we see it so often we came up with a term for it - the Bell curve. So even when people think they are expressing themselves, showing individuality by their brand choices, they are only veering slightly away from the norm. Hey, Glenn here—welcome to Funnel Reboot. Our guest today—who I really do think has positively impacted marketers’ careers—argues that marketers are just as susceptible to conformity as consumers are. We get caught up in prevailing marketing practices when doing our job, while ignoring better marketing options. That’s a recipe for mediocre results. Our guest is the author of three marketing books and the co-founder of an eight year old digital agency that has attracted clients whose annual spend ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. What does he credit for this marketing success? The time he’s spent on the edges of the Bell curve - doing things that most of us view as too far outside of our comfort zone. And he says to be a better marketer, you too should reject the orthodoxy of conventional marketing. Unorthodox is the name of his latest book, and I’m glad to welcome back for a second time, Gil Gildner. All people, products and concepts mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot site's shownotes page.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/37353050
info_outline
Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales
07/01/2025
Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales
Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives. In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.” Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change” This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that? Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks? I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes. The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress. I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends. And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/37241570
info_outline
From Armageddon to GA4 Alignment, with Neil Shapiro
06/18/2025
From Armageddon to GA4 Alignment, with Neil Shapiro
Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you're still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you're not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the 'Armageddon' of digital measurement. You'll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature. Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn't know we needed. Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love - he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data. Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro. See Shownotes page for all people and products mentioned in the episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/37051380
info_outline
Deeper Clarity - Better Results, with Nilufer Erdebil
11/04/2024
Deeper Clarity - Better Results, with Nilufer Erdebil
Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example: The iconic came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973. Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider . A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B. A last example: In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe. These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?” I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions. When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited. Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest. At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t. All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van, carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset. Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher. My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success. She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil. Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer 00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects 00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs 00:25:07 PSA 00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating 00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows 00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers as a foreign language? 00:43:12 AI's potential role 00:47:55 About Nilufer, book Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/33785612
info_outline
The Data Storyteller's Handbook, with Kat Greenbrook
10/20/2024
The Data Storyteller's Handbook, with Kat Greenbrook
Episode 208 People resist change. They only stop resisting when they’re convinced the change is needed. They’re only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth. The best way to present them the truth is with data. You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable glory. Nope. Those avoiding change give themselves offramps by arguing about your data. History shows that to persuade people to take an action, it takes taking them through data in a way that grabs them emotionally. Some examples include: Florence Nightingale, 1854 Al Gore, 2006 Princess Diana, 1997 Numbers prove, but a story compels. This has so much to do with marketing. Here’s why. To do what we do, our bosses / clients must be convinced in how our work is yielding results. That is the core of every story that a marketing presentation tells. Our guest is a Data Storyteller. After graduating from Massey University in 2002, she moved into data analytics. She earned a digital design degree in 2015, combining her design and analytics skills, which led her to specialize in data storytelling. In 2016, she founded Rogue Penguin, a company focused on bridging analytics and business operations. She now leads workshops for professionals in data science, marketing, and design. And she’s the author of “the data storytelling handbook” Let’s go to New Zealand to speak with Kat Greenbrook Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:05:48 Welcome Kat 00:07:45 when data storytelling is needed 00:09:00 two ways of communicating data 00:13:55 Data stories improve communication between groups 00:26:38 PSA 00:27:18 Canvas for making time stories 00:30:05 making visuals relevant to the business 00:33:19 How to present when you only have part of story 00:39:06 Conserving data-ink 00:43:00 More you show - the less you contrast 00:48:20 Getting the book or contacting Kat Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/33535717
info_outline
The Smart Advertising Book, with Dan White
10/04/2024
The Smart Advertising Book, with Dan White
Episode 207 Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I’m doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true. I’ve picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions. However, it's hard to pass these insights along to others. They're often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire. Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book. As I leaf through its pages, I’m delighted to see many concepts I’ve known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form. Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. He’s one of the nicest authors I’ve had on, and he’s back on this show for a third time. Let’s go to England to speak with Dan White. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 00:02:27 Welcome Dan 00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement 00:09:18 Uber's clever transit ad 00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads 00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset 00:23:49 PSA 00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story 00:33:19 How brain perceives messages 00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor 00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan For links to the people, products or concepts mentioned in the show, head to episode 207’s shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot website.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/33324752
info_outline
Causal Artificial Intelligence, with John Thompson
09/16/2024
Causal Artificial Intelligence, with John Thompson
Episode 206 There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do amazing things. Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do. But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen. The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked. The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences. The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying: “During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.” All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something, and they would have chained this together with reasoning by others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work. This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen by building a model of something in the real world. That distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI. My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA. He has written five books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson. Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:04:36 Welcome John 00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI 00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for 00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal 00:26:50 PSA 00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling 00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery 00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/33056367
info_outline
Marketing more efficiently with AI, with Rich Brooks
09/02/2024
Marketing more efficiently with AI, with Rich Brooks
Episode 205 Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine. Timestamps/Chapters 0:00:00 Intro 00:02:49 welcome Rich 00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly 00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content 00:22:47 expanding to image & video 00:27:11 PSA 00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI 00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT 00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/32853912
info_outline
Present Beyond Measure, with Lea Pica
08/25/2024
Present Beyond Measure, with Lea Pica
Episode 204 Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation. But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication. That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.” Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode. Chapter Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica 00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to 00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message 00:32:14 PSA 00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas 00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides 00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs 01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/32630877
info_outline
Greenlighting your marketing strategy with a winning deck, with Shea Cole
08/18/2024
Greenlighting your marketing strategy with a winning deck, with Shea Cole
Episode 203: How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.” Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode”. JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Hilary Clinton 2008 when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes. Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable. Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves. Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty. Timestamps/Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole 00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision 00:18:04 Slide 1 00:29:20 PSA 00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6 00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars 00:46:06 Contacting Shea Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/32629072
info_outline
Prompt Engineering, with Mike Taylor
08/11/2024
Prompt Engineering, with Mike Taylor
Episode 202 One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.” Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel - I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying. Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT - when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity. If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them - and this has given rise to a whole field - prompt engineering. Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models - the brains behind Generative AI. In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor. Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:28 Welcome Mike 00:11:27 Expressing all that's needed for a GPT to produce good response 00:20:24 Using AI context window 00:34:48 PSA 00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data 00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT 00:47:52 Training GPT for writing For links to all people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 202’s shownotes page.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30601718
info_outline
The Content Entrepreneur, with Joe Pulizzi
08/05/2024
The Content Entrepreneur, with Joe Pulizzi
Episode 201: While our guest wasn't the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience. These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He's showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He's urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur. This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they've acquired and The next criteria - content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time - be it in increments of hours or years. Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content. This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new. So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea 00:11:21 Content mktg's more than a wrapper 00:20:27 Audience vs community 00:23:11 PSA 00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience 00:31:13 Having media calendars 00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3 00:45:34 About CEX & Joe's book For links to all things mentioned, go to the show 201's shownotes page at the funnelreboot.com website.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/32438052
info_outline
Guest Insights
07/04/2024
Guest Insights
Episode 200 Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating. Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn't know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom. Links to all episodes that featured the people mentioned are in the Show Notes.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/32018142
info_outline
The AI Playbook, with Eric Siegel
06/07/2024
The AI Playbook, with Eric Siegel
Episode 199 Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things. Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job. He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook” Let’s talk to Eric Siegel. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel 00:01:56 Barrier we face isn't technical know-how 00:06:05 Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread 00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML 00:27:41 building a custom algorithm 00:29:45 PSA 00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover 00:54:03 Contacting Eric Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30601818
info_outline
Ecosystem-Led Growth, with Robert Moore
05/30/2024
Ecosystem-Led Growth, with Robert Moore
Episode 198 A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark. But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition? We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling. Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a team that has performed over 100 shows together. This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore. Timestamps / Chapters 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken 00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope 00:26:13 PSA 00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices 00:31:38 Pooling together data 00:55:06 Contacting Bob Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30601808
info_outline
Partnering on Customer Acquisition, with John Wright
05/23/2024
Partnering on Customer Acquisition, with John Wright
Episode 197 Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us. Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing. Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites. As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them. There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone. Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges. Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright. Chapter Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:35 Welcome John Wright 00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking 00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods 00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables 00:23:14 PSA 00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars 00:42:13 Contacting John For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/31104638
info_outline
Mastering Video Ads on Social, with Nikki Lindgren
05/15/2024
Mastering Video Ads on Social, with Nikki Lindgren
Episode 196 There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that video must be part of the mix. There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help. Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from. Let’s go to Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren. Chapter Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:12 - Welcome Nikki 00:09:05 - Video on platforms like TikTok 00:23:37 - PSA 00:24:26 - Reporting to stakeholders 00:29:59 - Ad campaign optimization 00:35:05 - Contacting Nikki Links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned in show is available on the Funnel Reboot site’s show page.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30601708
info_outline
Analytics - in-house or outsource? with Luke Komiskey
05/08/2024
Analytics - in-house or outsource? with Luke Komiskey
Episode 195 We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best. But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this. But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven. We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest. Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire. In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts. Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey. Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:14 - Welcome Luke 00:17:38 - PSA 00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data 00:49:29 - The MSP model 00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30441388
info_outline
Building insights with Adobe Analytics, featuring Jenn Kunz
05/01/2024
Building insights with Adobe Analytics, featuring Jenn Kunz
Episode 194 There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different. - Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar - Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC - Programming can be done in various languages - Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool, Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it. She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use. Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she. As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR. She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that. Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn 00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs 00:20:55 - PSA 00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface 00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
/episode/index/show/funnelreboot/id/30349908