Why the performance marketing era is over

Speaker A: View through completion rates for on the wall TV are well above 90%.

Speaker B: If you haven't thought like a D2C or a direct response marketer, doing this on B2B is much harder.

Speaker A: There is simply is no way to build a national brand at scale with only digital media where the data tells a story that's gotta be told. It's the art and the science. Get the numbers right.

Speaker B: Brandformance. Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of brandformance. Today we are speaking to Peter Sengenberger. He is a stalwart of the industry. He spent more than 25 years in D2C, infomercials, consumer, and most recently also B2B where he led demand gen brand and social at Bamboohr and they ran their first national TV campaign there. So very excited to chat with him about the intersection of both babies, B2C and B2B. And let's dive straight in. Okay, Peter, I am super excited about this one. We got to know each other through LinkedIn DMs what, about a year ago, I think. And yep, um, we probably followed each other's content and liked what we were each saying. So I'm excited to make this into, you know, from a LinkedIn DM to an actual sort of podcast conversation. So thanks for joining me.

Speaker A: Great, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation as well.

Speaker B: All right. Okay. I'm going to start with something I noticed in your background. I was a customer of P90X. I don't know if I bought CDs or what it was, but like 20 to early 2010s I wanted to get back into shape. I bought the whole kit. I got like those bands, the whole thing. And my wife's like, what are you doing? I was like, P90X. And I noticed you were working on P90X. Is that right? Is that where you started? Tell me all about it.

Speaker A: Well, no, it's not quite where I started. I actually, I started off in the infomercial world, um, back in the very late 90s right after I graduated college. And I was actually working, um, in Japan for a company that imported American infomercial products and then acted as the reseller there. So they would take American infomercials, dub them, localize them, put localized phone numbers on them, offer the price in yen, and then they had their own call center and they would, they would take the calls and fulfill the orders and everything. And that was just one of the most fun things ever to get in at the ground level.

Speaker B: Did you speak Japanese. Like how did you do this?

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I studied it. I grew up in Portland, Oregon and um, I went to college in San Diego and I studied, I studied um, Japanese for most of my life and not very good at it, to be honest. I hit a ceiling when I was over there. I was in Japan for about three years and cumulatively I, I studied abroad there too and Love Japan, love the culture, love the people, love the food. But I just was, I was, I just wanted to keep moving on. So I, um, I ended up going to the UK after that and did the same thing and, and started, uh, worked in a startup there in the same capacity where I was running the media for placement for all of these infomercial products. And it was a blast, absolute blast. Really, really fun to be in the lab, you know, where you get instant results. And that's what hooked me so quickly with direct response, is that whatever tests you did, whatever logic you had, you're going to get a black and white answer really fast. Uh, we're talking, this is in, in Japan and even in the UK back then back in, you know, the early knots, not much transactional Internet, not a whole lot of Amazon either. So the signal ratio was really high. People would just call you up, um, directly from. So you get a one to one attribution because they call a unique phone number and it comes to you. So you know. Exactly.

Speaker B: It was almost easier back then. Right. Like this is very similar to. I, um, I'm a big fan of this book, Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. And he used to do this in the 1920s and 30s where he would take a very specific idea and launch it in one retail store and see if he can, you know, drive more foot traffic and then he would replicate it elsewhere. It was very sort of straightforward to get that response. So what were the channels, what were the tactics, the distribution mechanism for these infomercials for you?

Speaker A: So really the distribution mechanism was underpriced television airtime. So we would find the whole strategy back in the day. And this is before I started working with P90X from Bodi, who's just legendary. I worked with them for about a decade as their agent in the UK and in Europe. But, um, yeah, you're looking for enterprise airtime. You're buying blocks of airtime. Usually you go to a company and you're like, look, we buy on the channel just next to yours and we pay, you know, say a thousand dollars for this, this half hour of airtime. At 8 o' clock in the morning, we Think because you're a bigger name and because, you know, whatever, we could offer you probably 1500, and then you can have a real substantive conversation and really get into, well, what if we did 9 o'? Clock? It's dead. Well, then that might be worth even more money to you. And this is a recurring, very predictable revenue source for the channels. And that's one thing that's really unique, and one thing I really appreciate so much about offline media is that the media airtime is perishable because it's linear. It's going to expire. And what keeps these outlets up at night, anybody selling linear TV or audio or, um, any such media, even out of home, is it's perishable. It's going to go away unless it's sold. So you need to sell as much as you can for as much as you can per unit it. So those are the currencies we had. It was relationships, a lot of conversations, there was no transactions, a few little tiny auctions and other ways to transact. But basically it's a, uh, pen and a phone.

Speaker B: Do you think there's. Is there still a place for infomercials today? And if it is, what does that look like? Or do you think that's done, that's gone, and you have to adapt to what's happening now?

Speaker A: Well, the market has diminished. There is still a space for it because TV is just still so big. And CTV also too, is, you know, it's surpassing now what linear TVs overall, you know, market size is in terms of advertising spend. But there are so many places, especially in the US to get products now, that the immediacy and the urgency and the uniqueness of anything you're going to put in front of a customer on TV just isn't really there anymore when you've got Amazon carrying billions of SKUs and you've got, you know, Temu, and you've got instant access and so many different ways to get what you want and even maybe have it delivered today, that the infomercials intrinsically are less. Less.

Speaker B: Um, okay, I'm going to give you an example. So, uh, on my Instagram feed, I see this. I think it's a. It's an influencer, micro influencer who's selling T shirts. And I see the T shirts. I like the T shirts. And then he says, oh, hey, like, they're going to go out of stock, so you better buy now. And I'm like, is. Does that work?

Speaker A: Oh, yes.

Speaker B: Yeah, it really does, actually.

Speaker A: And this, this is a good segue. My work at Beachbody they had in place. They were the management there. Carl Daikler and John Congdon were real dyed uh, in the wool direct response guys. And they had serialized a formula for a value build in their call to action. And I got to sit alongside and learn from the masters about how to build these call to actions. First of all, your product has to have wide appeal. It has to be. It's not a niche product. It's, it's got wide appeal like lose weight or clean your drywall look good.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And then um, it's got to be easy to understand. It's got to have a significant margin, usually at least 5x um, you know, COGS versus uh, retail price. And then it's got to have an ability to have upsells bolted onto it. It's got to have, it's got to be an entry point to a larger ecosystem. And so what you trying to do in an infomercial is build up the value as much as possible. And urgency is one of them. Call in the next 15 minutes and we'll add this or we'll take a payment off or we're running out of stock. We don't know when we're going to get back in. That's a common thing. You see that in live shopping a lot. I've done a lot of work on QVCs around the world and they're and live shopping environments and that's. It's scarcity is a thing showing the number tick down gets people to convert. Because you're thinking about it when you're watching something on television. It's not appointment viewing. You didn't schedule to come in and watch this program. It just caught you. Something about it caught you the promise or maybe just the fun of it because sometimes they are just really fun to watch because they're just creative and uh, and they're always a little bit tilted towards over the top. You know Billy May's like shouting and you know um, yell and sell is, is um, kind of a thing.

Speaker B: But what's interesting about this is Peter, uh, like live shopping has become a phenomenon in East Asia and I think it's, it's like maybe do making. Making an entry into the US not as much. Um, I think there's a platform called whatnot. Is that kind of like live shopping? Are you following them?

Speaker A: No, I'm not actually. Live shopping in the US has been contested for a long time. I think it's consolidated quite a bit. It's very Female. And it's a very. It's 80% the same folks buying the same stuff all the time. Um, in the live shopping environment, I think TikTok Shop has really taken off here and in the US but it's sort of category specific. I think TikTok Shop is great for apparel and for cosmetics, a few other things. But, um, for a lot of standard products, it's just not the right format. But yeah, live shopping will always be a thing, I think.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so you've got this direct response route and pretty global. You got to learn a lot about just like how to get people to buy. Right. Lots of influence and buyer psychology. And then now you're doing B2B. Was there something that translated pretty well from, from the, the D2C and you know, direct response world to B2B or did you have to like relearn everything and kind of reinvent how to do this, um, on the B2B side?

Speaker A: Yeah. It's been a fascinating journey going into B2B. It's just been that everything I've done, every industry I've tried, whether it's direct response or E commerce, consulting, brand advertising, it's all just gotten to be more important, more interesting and more fulfilling to kind of see how it works. B2B was a bigger learning curve than I expected because the customer is different, the buying cycle is different. It's not personal selling so much as it is appealing to logic and reason. And uh, and the stakes are a lot higher and a lot different than they are for say, a personal purchase. But yeah, B2B. Yeah. Some of the things that translated over and I think some of the reasons why they liked me as, um, as a candidate was that a lot of B2B guys have an inferiority complex with the quality of their advertising messages, which is a really healthy attitude to have, by the way. Way. Because, look, this is the most humbling kind of. When you're doing demand generation of any kind, it's the most humbling type of advertising there is because you get told you get their scorecard every day. But they think that the direct consumer guys have got a leg up, that they're closer to the customer, they're faster with their techniques, they've got a wider arsenal of tools to try and use. And I think they're right. To be honest. I think that there's a lot of stale thinking in B2B, especially on the creative side. And also too, one thing that I've learned from D2C and all my colleagues and everybody who Knows me is watching. This is going to be. Is going to groan when I say this is. You got to solve what's in it for me. You've got to paint that, like, on your computer monitor and say, what's in it for me? And you've got to keep asking yourself that all the time. When you're looking at a creative, when you're looking at a value proposition, when you're looking at a. And even a, uh, funnel design, what's in it for me has to be answered because the customer is not going to give you their time and attention and trust unless they know what the heck's in it for them. And if there's an upside, and when you watch infomercials, you'll see they just pile on the what's in it for you over and over and over again. Don't tell me about how great you are. Don't tell me about what a cool company you are or what awards you've won. How can I make you look thinner? Or how can I make you prepare better meals or whatever, or look better in B2B?

Speaker B: How do I get you promoted? How do I get you that next raise? How do I get you to, you know, get your, your next awesome job? Whatever. Whatever floats your boat, right? Or how do I give you, like, five hours back every day so you can go and chill and not have to work nine, nine, six.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. So claims. Those are claims. You need to make these claims, these assertions of do this. And you get that from me. This is missing in a lot of B2B. They're maybe getting a little too logical. But quantifiable claims. This is something we did at Bamboo is we started doing superiority claims. And these are just quantifiable claims that, um, are designed for a C Suite audience. So the CFO sees it instantly. It's talking about money savings, or the head of HR is looking at time saved or more efficient processes. And, yeah, you tailor your message accordingly. But claims are a big one. You need to have quantifiable claims that you can back up, by the way, you can't make them up. People tried that. A lot of tiers, uh, have come after that. You've got to have quantifiable claims that you can back up. And then number two, you've got to have some kind of offer. There has to be an offer, a value proposition. What are you going to get from clicking on this ad or watching this video? What's in it for you? And you got to spell it out very Plainly, there's no, no ambiguity. It is so easy to confuse customers. Most, so many marketers confuse customers relentlessly and wonder why they never get the performance. You gotta be very clear upfront.

Speaker B: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, this is, uh, you know, I agree with your overall take that if you haven't thought like a D2C or a direct response marketer, doing this on B2B is much harder because like the stakes being higher and it's not as direct response, it's not as impulse. And so you actually have to work really hard on figuring out those, those claims, back them up and then create that, that compelling offer. Okay, let's talk about. You know, you kind of helped the Bamboo team expand their horizons a little bit. Right. So when you entered the scene, it was mostly bottom of funnel, am I right? And tell me about like the journey that you went on with Bamboo.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it was absolutely fascinating. I mean Bamboo's, um, really, um, successful company. Very, very well run. Um, amazing operators there. They had been doing brand advertising and marketing, but m. Most of their investment was bought on a funnel and they knew that they needed to kind of evolve past that and have a more full funnel approach and be talking to more people more frequently. I was brought in to help with some brand advertising. I had a really interesting role there. Brand advertising for awareness, which meant huge reach in new mediums like TV and audio and sports sponsorships. And then also I was running paid social demand generation where you're really, uh, looking for an immediate roi, trying to convert customers in a relatively short amount of time. And so the tools they were using were all digital, a hundred percent digital. Digital is great because it's accountable. But like I said that, you know, the, the, the offline markets are enormous and some tools are better at reaching an impact than others. Not all impressions are created. And I think that tv having a visual component to it, a laid back, consuming component, when you're, you know, you're, you're watching it, you're not scrolling. You might have the remote in your hand, you probably do. But, um, view through completion rates for on the wall TV are well above 90%. Whether it's 95 or 98 doesn't matter. The consumption rates are enormous. I wrote a substack recently about what that looks like in terms of how much attention you're, you're getting, how much time you're getting in front of a customer versus say a YouTube campaign or a Facebook or meta or uh, whatever campaign that actually has digital in it and what your view through rates are really, like, you'd be lucky to get in the teens for view through rate for a lot of digital products. So tv, you know, wide and out there also, too, tv, um, confers legitimacy that a lot of mediums don't. Nobody believes what they see online. It's only going one direction, right? I mean, now we've got all these, uh, all these deep fakes that can be done, and AI is almost incomparable. It's just almost impossible, uh, to figure out what's real and what's not.

Speaker B: Uh, there's this media buyer I follow, David, uh, Herman. He's on the E comm side, and he said something like yesterday that he's just so depressed looking at what's happening with online advertising. And this guy has spent, like, tens of billions of marketing dollars over the last 15 years with working with some of the largest brands. And he's just, like, he's just personally disappointed looking at the state of just ship more, ship fast. And, you know, that's. Yeah, the pendulum's gonna swing back, but I agree with you. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. 100. So TD is rarefied air also, too, the cohort that you're advertising into, like, uh, we'd buy Monday Night Football. Okay. You are right behind the new Ford F150AD and right before the preview for the Odyssey. That's good. That's Rarefied Air. That's a nice place to be. And you're. You're in front of the fans of these teams who have an affinity to them. And thus, when they see you, a little bit of that affinity, um, brushes off. And so you do that enough times at enough scale, targeting the right customers, they see you. Not enough, they become used to you, and then they become a much softer sell because they already know who you are. And so that was really. That was really a big job that I had to accomplish, uh, at Bamboo. And they gave me the leash to be able to go out and get creative about how to acquire that media footprint and how to get enough heat out there in the marketplace, enough share of voice to make a difference.

Speaker B: So let's talk about that. Right? So there's linear. There's ctv. Did you do both? Did you start with one? What was your thought process on the media buying itself?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. Well, I did both. And also in the audio world, too. We also did both. You can do a lot of targeted audio with pixeled, and it's super accountable. And then you can also buy terrestriality as well. They both have their pluses and minuses. Linear TV is where uh, I put the majority of the budget. Linear TV is more, is less expensive index pretty high or higher for our ICP in many regards. TV audiences are a little bit older, a little bit more senior, a little bit more affluent actually. And uh, they've got the money and they've got um, they've got, and M. They're giving their attention to you on the screen. CTV is great too, but CTV significantly more expensive on a CPM basis. Uh, there's many ways to get ctv, many ways to source it. It's a landmine ridden environment of quality and of a uh, lot of.

Speaker B: I'll give you a fun story on this one. So we have a customer who's uh, who's doing some CTV and they got the report hour by hour and 90% of the spend is from like 12 midnight to 6am M and we're all going like huh, huh, what's going on here? I mean kudos for the platform to expose that. Right. And share the analytics. But like that's the landmine with some of these CTV sort of type of things that you do.

Speaker A: Yes, there is a lot of fraud out there too. Um, there's been some really in depth studies done in the last couple of years that suggest that up to 20% of ads are being served of TVs that are off.

Speaker B: Oh my God.

Speaker A: And that's just the scratch of the surface. And you're right, you know where you show up and win matters. Uh, a lot. Yeah. And so a lot of the promises about CTV are. It's been over promised. And the pricing too used to be really, really premium. We're talking $35 CPMs kind of thing. Um, I don't know anybody pays that now. It's dropped now down into the teens really. And, but also too, what's really interesting to me about CTV though is the targeting capability. We had some very, very strong uh, targeting pools that we could do lookalike audiences on taken from digital platforms like LinkedIn and flex those onto CTV which was great and very happy to do that. You know these are our highest indexing customers possible. They already know about us. Now let's get in front of them in their living rooms. That's a really cool thing. You know you do you use, did

Speaker B: you use LinkedIn's CTV platform or did you use a different platform for that?

Speaker A: We did some with. Yeah, we were um, Strong advocates of LinkedIn CTV platform explicitly because of the targeting. Its reporting wasn't nearly as good as other CTV that we bought. But yeah, we were always very diligent on CTV and on and on Linear to make sure that we're showing up in the right places and not just getting cheap, uh, exposure. You really do want to be in premium placements.

Speaker B: Hey folks, thanks for listening to this podcast today. If you're enjoying the show and if you're getting value out of it, we'd really appreciate if you drop us a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app. You did this as a geotest, right? You didn't go national right off the bat at Bamboo or uh, tell me about sort of how did you, you know, kind of do the measurement? Because that's where lots of brands get, get hung up. How did you do the measurement? How did you sort of make the case internally?

Speaker A: Well, I established early on at Bamboo that we had an awareness problem. Just, just a general awareness problem. That was a very unpopular opinion to have there. Um, a lot of Bamboo is very proud of, of, of its, of its market penetration and its, its, its legacy being in the around for nearly 20 high NPS score, but did a lot of research with agencies that were pitching us as well as just some independent research, um, and some of our own lip studies. Uh, and it just was not the case that we were that well known. We're just not that well known. And when you take a look at the wider media environment and on an impression basis, on a TRP basis, I know I won't get too technical, but on how much you're showing up in the share of voice in your industry, uh, Bamboo wasn't ranking as high as it, um, as we believed it should have.

Speaker B: So how did you, how did you do that research? Like what was your methodology to, to do that research?

Speaker A: The backbone of it was really Nielsen. Nielsen is still the gold standard. So much money is transacted off Nielsen and has been for so very long that it's, it still is the North Star. So we took some in depth look at uh, what's going on and this is really what's great about that I like so much about the offline world is that because it's been transacted for so long, I mean TVs been being bought now for gosh, 80 years, 100 years almost that all this infrastructure has come up to support it, uh, things like Nielsen. So there's a wealth of data. We really do know where people are watching and who's watching and how long they're watching. And also we know what your competitors are, where they're placing their ads and what they're paying for them, what creative they're running, et cetera. It's an open book. You uh, just need to know how to, how to navigate your way through it. And so we saw some of our competitors were majorly outspending us and also on an impression basis, on a share of voice basis, we're way ahead of us. So we needed to level up. So I didn't incrementally start while just putting a foot in actually just dedicated resources budget wise and a strategy for maximum reach, reach, reach early on and just turned on this, this attention engine. It's, it's like a warm heater in a room and you just tap on and let it, let it run, let it, let it take its time and you, in order to you know, measure that impact, you're going to get the empirical numbers back on how much you showed up relative to your competitors and you know, hopefully you know, you, you bid right and you are showing up at their level or a little bit higher. And then you launch quarterly very well constructed studies on brand lift and you start to see like patterns emerge and the signals are very clear. Also we did some geo, we did a little bit of Geo2 with CTV. We targeted a couple of regions with CTV and had holdouts in other ones to see if the message was getting through and indeed, indeed. Yeah, that was, it was, it was

Speaker B: unequivocally approved the quarterly reads that you did. This is particularly hard in B2B. Right? Like there are many good solutions on these uh, lift studies for consumer companies. And I think what happens in B2B is like the sample sizes are smaller, it's harder to kind of build the panels. They get very expensive. I'm curious like what was your methodology? Did you run this yourself? Did you have a third party? Like I'm always curious to see how you know, B2B firms are doing this.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's mostly internal. We did engage externally with some vendors to do it for us but it was mostly done internally and it was done chiefly by. We had a data science, data scientist in sitting in the seat for all things measurement about us in the competitive landscape which was great. It was just such an amazing resource. Her name's Ashley and she's based uh, in Texas and was just such a talented creator of just the right types of really meaningful surveys that would give us all the insights that we needed and get, and get sharp answers out of it.

Speaker B: So you would sort of reach out to your database and through other mechanisms to get that survey out, do the measurement pre and post your sort of TV buys. Makes sense.

Speaker A: And then compare over time and, you know, you're looking really for, uh, aided and unaided awareness as well as a sentiment. Interesting thing too about brand advertising is the more they see you, usually the, the higher affinity you gain with the customer. So even if they're not interested in you, like I'm not interested in Geico Insurance, but I've got positive feeling about them because I like the lizard and I see him everywhere. I mean, it's a little pedantic, but it is true. There's a lot of, there's a lot of very fascinating literature written about brand advertising and how it works and how it, how it builds mental equity in people's minds over time, thus far to measure. But there's been a lot of very, very strong academic research done on it, a lot of great books written about it.

Speaker B: What's your favorite? What's, what's. What are some of the, the books that, uh. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but like, what are the one or two books that come up in your mind when you, when you think about brand advertising?

Speaker A: Absolutely two. I've got two favorites and they deal with, and they're both relatively recent. One is this gentleman named Les Bennett and Peter Fields. They were associated with the IAP in the uk, which is a advertising body over there that kind of helps promote a healthy advertising environment. They wrote the long and the short of it, which you can find as a PDF out there for free. It's dense, it's going to take a little while to get through. I highly, highly encourage people to get through it. They're basic. They basically prove without a question of a doubt that brand advertising's benefits are way bigger and take way longer to occur than anything in the performance realm. But they're tangible and they're real and they're quantifiable. Another one, similar research, which is probably the seminal book to read, is How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. Absolutely essential. And it covers the same material, a little bit different, but same conclusions.

Speaker B: Fascinating. Those are also two of the books that I sort of recommend and read all the time. So we're cut from the same cloth. All right, so let's talk about. I think you have this notion that the performance era is gone. And I've heard about this, uh, from other sort of CMOs and marketing leaders. And there was a time in the 2010s, maybe where meta, Google, you could just show up and just make money and that's like, done. Why do you think that that is the case? What's your sort of formulation of that assertion? And what should brands do now if Meta and Google are kind of done and saturated and like, what's the modern sort of way to think about this?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I bought my first Facebook ad in 2008, um, and it didn't go well. But yeah, I've just, I've had a very long vantage point here. Okay. I've been buying, I've been in the performance media world since 98, so like before the Internet was even transactional. So I think about two years after Amazon started. So I've been able to see kind of the evolution of all these mediums, all these technologies, all these techniques, all these audience pools and all these great things. And what I'm finding over and over again, either through consulting or just from what I'm hearing in the marketplace, is that the digital, digital algorithmic buying is, is pretty saturated. Um, and the margins on that business continue to expand. And it's an oligopoly as well. There's only a handful of great digital outlets. I mean, you know, you've got to have your meta, your LinkedIn and your Google and your TikToks. But then, you know, there's a lot of nice to have other networks, like there's DSPs and there's all kinds of ways to buy media. But a lot of the hacks have been starched out of the market and have been for a decade at this point. You're in an environment now where everybody is. Most any marketer under 40 has quite good in digital, has a lot of experience and just lets her rip and they, they go with what they know. And so they're getting very crowded algorithmic buying, um, environments that are just pushing CPMs up and getting more restrictive. So, yeah, the glory days are over. And you know, we're seeing products like Performance Max come out and Andromeda, um, at Meta, and they're just getting more and more black box and more and more tilted towards the advertiser. Because in algorithmic buying, they built the algorithm, not you. So you're playing against the house.

Speaker B: You're playing against the house. I like that framing a lot. And the house always wins. We know that too. Uh, that's the whole point. Yes, that's the whole point. Okay, so you, you know, have also said that brands that survive will be the ones that built measurement independence before the math stopped working. What, what does that mean to you? And how do you, like, if it's a, you know, let's talk about another like B2B or a B2C brand that's doing, I don't know, 20, 30 million in, in media. What should that look like from your perspective?

Speaker A: I mean, measurement is different for all companies because what they're selling is different. All their, all the dynamics that go into why they're doing what they're doing and what their expected result is, is totally be different. So measurement has to be super, super adaptive, has to be customizable. Measurement's not something you can really buy off the shelf. I mean, with some beat like D2C companies. Yeah, maybe Google 4 is, is, you know, is might be as far as you need to go until you hit $15 million, I don't know. But you've got to have a lot of nuance in the way you look at your models. You've got to be disciplined in one regard and stick to a solid methodology and be consistent about it. However, you've got to look over the, you've got to check those assumptions and look over the fence a lot and have a flexible brain where you could be like, we're going this direction, but I'm just going to make sure and do anything you can to.

Speaker B: I love that framing, I really love that framing because I think a lot of marketers think that you will buy some solution or your data science team will build some solution and it's going to solve all your problems. And it's like, I wish that were true, but that is just not the reality.

Speaker A: I mean, I've seen some very miraculous turnarounds when new systems are implemented. Whether there was an inferior one in place before or none before that's happened. That's a real thing. It doesn't happen every day. And yeah, silver bullets are rare. And I mean, boy, I've been promised a lot of silver bullets and they don't all come up heads, I'll tell you. But yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker B: What's your take on using things like first touch, last touch, multi touch. Right. I'm sure. And you've seen a lot in your 25 plus years of media buying and then things like, mmm. Things like incrementality. And obviously I have a biased opinion given what we do, but I'm curious how you think about it, uh, about sort of all of those systems and tools and what's your take on. Should you use all of them? Should you use one of them? Where do you start?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm a check all the about box kind of guy on this. You don't have to trust them all the same. And you can explicitly use some for different things. Right. But they each have something to tell you and something to contribute. Mmm was a real game changer for me, um, professionally. I just started using them in the last year and a half and. Super eye opener, Real eye opener. Deep, deep insights that would not be found. But for the. Mmm. Things. Some things you just can't, you can't see unless you're dealing with big data at scale and with some really, really smart logic in it. But yeah, the more, the more ways you look at it, the better. But you do have to, like I said, you do have to maintain a discipline and kind of choose one as your North Star. But also, you know, trust but verify.

Speaker B: Makes sense. All right, what did I not cover that you're thinking about these days? Like what, what's the, what is the stuff that you're pushing the boundaries on or, or things that you're exploring in your substack? Like, let's talk about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I'm, um, I've got a few lines there in the, in the substack that I, I really enjoy talking about the industry. I just, I've just got so many touch points and I've just got so many opinions and I need to say them because, I mean, I need a venue to, to vent. But one thing for me too is the digital shakeout, um, and how a lot of companies and you know, I worked at a, at an, at a, at an aggregator for a while that, where I controlled 13 different direct to consumer brands. Each had its own Shopify store, its own Amazon business, its own retail business, its own ad accounts. Those just died on the vine. And a lot of that D2C pop that we saw after the pandemic or during the pandemic has really gone away and rates have continued to go up and customers are continuing to get less interested. I think D2C is still probably relatively healthy, but it's in a structural contraction kind of phase where what I'm really interested in is seeing companies who are evolving their media maturity to look outside of just digital. Like I said, Most marketers under 40 have never bought anything that's not digital and they don't think there is anything to buy that's digital or they don't think anything's coming after digital. But really what I'm seeing over and over again is you're seeing a lot of firms, no matter what industry, are expanding their wings and actually going back to some of the old school media, going back to Sports sponsorships, going back to TV and radio and spending significant sums there. Because there is simply is no way to build a national brand at scale with only digital media. Can't do it. I'm sorry. You can get a roundtable of people around that I don't think you're going to find that is a difficult um, or uh, non widely held view. So I think seeing companies come back and layer in more types of media, maybe a little out of home, test it, see how it goes, see what you're hearing on the phones, kind of understand in a really mature way what kind of message people are seeing and how you're appearing in the marketplace and being really humble about it. But I see digital's diminishing returns. I see the trackability as being m. Somewhat diminished and not can't believe everything you see in your dashboards. And I see the lower CPMs on offline media and the abundance of scale you can get as being big game changers for a lot of marketers.

Speaker B: Fantastic. This was a great episode. Peter, I know we mentioned your substack. What is your substack? Where do people find you?

Speaker A: Yeah, Grow with Peter. Um, at Substack and um, yeah, I'm accumulating a whole bunch of thoughts there about advertising and media in general. Some industry specific stuff. I've started to look more at the I Gaming industry, um, and mobile entertainment. Mobile. Mobile gaming is, is. Is really kind of interesting to me. So. Yeah. And then of course there's my LinkedIn. Just Peter Sangenberger and it's all right. It's all ease.

Speaker B: All ease. Peter Sangenberger and growwithpeter.substack.com Peter, this was a fantastic conversation. I enjoyed it. Learned a bunch of. So thank you for joining me.

Speaker A: Thanks Pranav. I've had a great time too. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: All right folks, that was Peter Sengenberger. Go check out growwithpeter.substack. com. He has some really interesting thoughts. And tune in again next week for another great episode of brandformance. See you then.