AI & Marketing in 2026 with Neil Patel ($100m agency owner)

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Tom, founder of Demand Genius and host of Demand Geniuses. This show is all about equipping B2B marketers with everything they need to convert demand to revenue. So please hit the follow button. It makes me really happy. And then enjoy the show. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm going to get straight into it today and I'm very, very excited to introduce our, uh, guests who you might have heard. Neil. Hello. Welcome.

Speaker B: Ah, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Good to have you here. I have a load of questions that I'm pretty excited to get into with you. I guess before we do that, and rather than me butcher the, the introduction of you and your background, do you want to maybe just give folks a little quick overview of, of who you are? Um, and m, what's kind of brought you up to this point?

Speaker B: Sure. So my name is Neil Patel. I'm the co founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency. I think we're in 28 or so countries. Uh, I've been doing marketing for 24 years now. About to hit 25 within the next, next, uh, month actually. Um, yeah, just love growing traffic, generating leads, sales online. For me, it's addiction.

Speaker A: Sounds good. Um, and how did you fall into. So I guess maybe I know you a little bit more as being very, very prominent voice within the SEO industry. It sounds like there's certainly a lot more kind of breadth that you've had. Like, how did you fall into being the SEO guy? Or is that something that you would, um, characterize yourself as? Or is that just my perception that I've built up from my own little echo chamber?

Speaker B: That's not your perception. That's probably the majority of people's perceptions. It is my background. If I actually have to say what I spend my time on today, by no means do I think I'm the best SEO person out there. By no means do I think I'm the best marketer or anything like that. I spend majority of my time on, um, entrepreneurship and doing deals more than anything else, just being very transparent. I still know marketing extremely well compared to most people. I do get my hands dirty when it comes to marketing, whether it's SEO or running paid ads or creating the actual campaigns, or optimizing for conversions or modifying flows or, you know, I was talking with my team yesterday. We collect leads through a few funnels on our website and I tore apart the funnels and I put in a Word document of every single change I want line by line. What APIs I want called what Text. I want the text change for the lead form so I still get my hands really dirty. I just tend to spend most my time. If I look on a weekly basis, I just pinpoint problems within the organization and I'll just start solving them one by one. And that's how I run my life.

Speaker A: Nice. I think with the rate of change lately, I think it's something that I always worry about with people who are maybe at a higher level but don't get their hands dirty anymore because it's so easy to get disconnected from what life is actually like executing things. I think that's a frustration that a lot of people more junior in organizations feel is the people that are in charge of them just don't, don't get it anymore. So I think that's good.

Speaker B: I agree with that. But I'm the opposite. If you ask me to manage employees and run a big organization, I will fail miserably. Like I will be one of the first people to fail. I'm terrible as a manager. I'm much better as an executor and a strategist and a deal maker. So I focus on what I'm good at and I don't spend any time managing because I just suck at it.

Speaker A: Well, that sounds like an entrepreneur to me. So it sounds like you've made the right choices then to end up where you are. Uh, one thing I'm always interested in and I always like to ask you, you're quite a unique case actually. I was looking on LinkedIn for the prep before the call and you have one role that you've ever done. I presume there's been various different steps along that 25 year career in marketing. Um, and I'm always curious like, is there a step in that time for you that stands out as being like particularly formative? Like, is there one that you could pinpoint where? That's really where stuff started to click and you started to feel your confidence grow.

Speaker B: So I'm actually looking at my LinkedIn because I have no idea what's on my LinkedIn.

Speaker A: It says Neil Patel Digital. It's cool.

Speaker B: All it says. I think you're right. Experience, Neil Patel Digital. That's it. Education. Yeah. It doesn't have anything else. I didn't know that by the way. Um, yeah, I've done quite a few software companies. My background's actually in SaaS and I spent my time being a marketer for my own SaaS companies. I spent more time of my time in my career doing that than Anything else? Now when you look at uh, my LinkedIn, NP Digital is the last, call it eight years. But I've been doing this stuff for 24 years so it's roughly a third of my uh, time. And there hasn't been any one role that's been transformational. To be honest. There hasn't been one aha, uh, moment or like I did something and it changed my career. It's just been my journey has been messing up a lot and learning from my mess ups and eventually I avoid messing up on the same thing over and over again. And I say eventually because early in my career I didn't learn from my mistakes soon enough. So if I was doing a marketing mistake or a business mistake, I probably would make it two, three more times and then eventually I would learn from it. Uh, but now I'm pretty good at learning from the first time.

Speaker A: Is there something that you've done that's enabled that shift? Like are you more intentional in how you evaluate mistakes that you've made or just experience?

Speaker B: No, you just kind of figure out where you suck and um, patterns and where you kind of keep screwing up and you're like, okay, I should probably stop doing this or else this is not going to work out.

Speaker A: Well, I think that's the thing for me is realizing there's certain things that I should just be nowhere near and kind of starting to accept that rather than think that you can do everything cool. And then uh, uh, obviously at some point, I mean you've now got something like 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. So at some point all of that started to work building up a personal brand. Yeah, you've kind of answered my question because it was going to be like to what extent was that deliberate and something that you decided to do? But I think we've kind of just answered that with a question.

Speaker B: Yeah, I didn't even know I had 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn right now because when you said NP Digital is my only work experience, I had to look it up. But you're right, it says 8001000 followers. Being very transparent. I assume they only had like 2,300,000 followers. I assumed actually closer to 300,000 or somewhere in the 300,000 range. Never knew I had 800,000 followers. But I don't look at following and clout that the same way most people look at following in clout. And it wasn't deliberate. Like I just got back from Las Vegas on a family vacation. My wife had a dinner with A friend. And my wife is amazing. She never really leaves me alone with the kids. Not because she doesn't trust me, but more so because, you know, she doesn't want to give me the burden of, uh, having to deal with everything. And she knows I don't have as much patience as she does and stuff like that. And she's much better at raising kids than I am by far. And her job is much harder than mine because raising kids is not easy, and we do have wonderful kids. So she's just like, hey, what do you want to do Monday night? And, um, this is just a few days ago, right? Because it's Wednesday right now. And I was like, it would be great. I want to do something just with the kids. She's like, you know, it'd be really cool. She's like, you should get a limo and put the kids in a limo, because they've never been to a limo. And then go to the Rainforest Cafe, which is like, a cafe with all, like, these animals, and they do, like, this lightning and thunder show. And I was like, okay. So then, as we're eating at this Rainforest Cafe in Las Vegas, kids, of course, want dessert. Mommy's not there. They know they can get their way with me way more than they can with my wife. They'll try stuff with me that they would never dare to try with her. Because keep in mind, I travel probably more than half the year, so I'm gone quite a bit of the year. So they want to go somewhere else. We went to this linq promenade in Las Vegas on the strip, and we couldn't go to too many places because I don't want to take my kids where they're smoking. So it was an outdoor place, and, uh, we went to Ghirardelli's ice cream shop, and someone comes up to me like, hey, are you Neil Patel? I've been following your stuff for a long time, and I get that quite often, no matter where I'm going, not every single day, but often enough where I'm used to. And people always come to me and be like, did you do all this marketing and personal brands so you can get well known? Um, being quite frank, I appreciate people coming up to me. I feel honored and privileged. Never did any of that for any of that, or I never tried to build a personal brand for recognition. I tried building a personal brand because when I started off, I didn't have the money to spend on ads. So I naturally started speaking at conferences and blogging when blogging wasn't popular. Uh, hopefully it would help generate business. The intention was never to build a personal brand. The personal brand happened on accident. And if I die tomorrow, I hope I live much longer than that. Um, my goal was never for people to recognize me or what will people think about me when I pass away I really live for? What will my kids think of me as a father and my wife think of me as a husband? And if they feel that I've done a good job and I tried my best to provide for them and be there for them, to me, that's a win. It's not how many social followers I have. Look, I have an Instagram account, LinkedIn account. Do you want to guess how many times I log into Instagram and TikTok on a weekly basis?

Speaker A: I'm, um, going to hope for your sake less than I do. It's something I'm trying to cut down on now.

Speaker B: But if you had to take a guess, how often do you think I log into TikTok on a weekly basis?

Speaker A: I say once or twice.

Speaker B: I don't even know when the last time I logged in. So probably close to zero. Okay, Instagram, we get leads through there. I should probably check if we get leads through TikTok, but we get leads through Instagram. So I log in probably two to three times a week. I just go to the inbox and I just send the leads to my sales team and I don't do anything else with Instagram, I'm not scrolling, checking people's content or any of that. Right? Like, I'm pretty unplugged from what I would say most marketers are spending their time on. Because here's what I've learned when it comes to growing a business, a lot of this stuff does not impact your revenue. And so many people are being like, Neil, you got to check out this stuff with AI. It's so cool. Why aren't you using Open Claw for this and that and so forth? We got like a thousand plus people, right? My team definitely should be using it, and they do use it whenever it's safe and secure. And we won't have safety issues or privacy issues because there's security issues with some of these AI tools. And I'm a big advocate for AI. But when I go to most corporations, okay, and I ask them, because I speak all around the world, how many of you guys use AI? Everyone raises their hand. I could be in Brazil, I can be in Colombia, I can be in Hong Kong, us, uk, it doesn't matter. You know, I travel literally non stop. Everyone use it. You want to guess how many marketers see an uh, increase in revenue from AI when I ask them that question. Take a guess. Percentage of the room on average.

Speaker A: I say that would be quite low, but I think you'd have some that would, would claim to, I'm going to

Speaker B: say 25, usually 2, 3% max. That's it. Now most don't even see cost efficiencies, right? Because in theory you should be able to save more money with AI. And it doesn't mean AI is bad. People actually use it in many of the wrong ways. I look at it as people aren't spending their time and energy on stuff that drives a roi. And I think that's the biggest problem with marketing. They spend their time on everything that's cool and sex. And I'll give a great example of this. One of my dear friends who I do a podcast with talks to me about how he's using OpenClaw and is creating tons of content for him and look at all these views he's getting on X, uh, from his articles. And I'm like, good for you. Him and I probably will have a disagreement with this. And I'm not saying he's right or wrong because I don't have his data, but if I had to bet a million dollars, I bet you it drove very little revenue, right? So I spend my marketing efforts and my time in business on the stuff that produces a tangible roi. And I think that's the problem with marketing that we face in today's world. People want to do all this stuff that feeds their ego and get some likes or looks cool versus the stuff that just produces them revenue.

Speaker A: I think there's a, there's a challenge here. So because what I, uh, completely agree with you and I think what you're, what you're describing is that for you the vanity metrics followed the organic growth, right? So you were looking for organic revenue growth and you were trying to be smarter than other people and that's what led you down the route of posting and blogging and things like that because it was a more cost effective way to reach people. And the following grew from that and it spiraled like a flywheel. I think now what folks do is they view the reach as a route to the growth. So they're trying to go at it from the other direction.

Speaker B: But it's not. It's not. And I'm going to take you back to when I was blogging. Everyone thought I was blogging to just get tons of visitors. We did that approach. I ranked on Google for things like Instagram followers, and I was at the top. And it drove little to actually didn't even drive little. It drove no revenue. It would just create a ton of calls. I think we're getting 600,000 visitors a month. No joke. 600,000 visitors a month for things related to Instagram followers, how to get more Instagram followers, how to be popular on Instagram. Right. And variations of drove no revenue. All it did was call people and be like, hey, my daughter wants to be Instagram famous. Can you help her? Right? Which was a waste of time. Now, on the flip side, there was a point in time where we ranked number one on Google for digital marketing. You would say, as an agency, that's a prime keyword, drove little to no revenue. Okay. And those terms were really terrible. On the flip side, we started creating blog content around specific edge cases that we knew large enterprise businesses would face, like massive publicly traded companies like Adobe and Cisco and Microsoft, et cetera. And we'd have blog articles on things like how to structure your blog when you have multiple products and multiple languages that you're targeting. Okay. So when you think about something like that, that's not really a problem that most people would have. It's not something that you're gonna get really any traffic for. But the people who read that are be like, oh yeah, we're in a hundred and something countries and we have all these languages that we're targeting because some countries, you know, target the same languages. And we have 32 products and we're competing internally. How should we structure it all so it works out the best and each division in each language isn't hurting the other. And clients like that will pay us seven figures a year. Drives very little traffic. So we switched our approach from me creating content on social media. Like, what did I learn from flying first class for a whole year? Which would get tons of views to content. Like the example I gave you on like dealing with a multilingual, multi product domain and how to structure your content or your blog or URLs. So that way it works and it doesn't hurt you. Like, that kind of content drives revenue. The other stuff doesn't really drive revenue. And this is the problem with marketing. Everyone focuses on reach and it feeds their ego and they think reach is gonna drive revenue. And I'm telling you, I've already done this. I've already tried it. Uh, I know so many other businesses that have. When I look at NP Digital, my ad agency, the first year in business, I think we did around 5 or 6 million in revenue. Almost all of it was driven from my personal brand. I think the second year was somewhere around 18 million in revenue. 10 million was my personal brand. The rest came from word of mouth, good employees, you know, awards. Although actually back then we didn't have really awards, but more so good employees, track record, client referrals. The third year, I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it was in the 30 range. It was more than 30 million, it was less than 40 million. Okay, I'm going to pick a random number, let's call it 36. Because I think we're doubling roughly at that point every year. And it was still 10 million that came from my personal brand. And as we kept doubling and growing, only 10 million was coming from my personal brand. And we started getting accounts and customers from referrals and word of mouth and awards and stuff that was very specific and targeted for ideal customers. Like me going to event and talking about how to do marketing for a multi location franchise. Right. When I say multi location, technically all franchises usually have multi locations unless they're getting started and they're just trying to create a franchise. But I would talk about how to do it in not just multiple locations, but multiple locations throughout the world. So you're dealing with different cultures, different languages and you have to adapt things like the menu and how you do the marketing. Because what works in America does not work in Brazil. Right? There's a lot of nuances. You can use a lot of the same strategies, but you got to adapt and stuff like that does not get tons of views, does not get tons of likes, but it drives revenue way more than someone walking down the street be like, hey dude, what's up? I see you all the time. Great content. That kind of stuff does not drive the revenue people think.

Speaker A: Do you see? Because I think what you're describing here though I completely agree with. And so we operate mostly in the B2B world and I think in B2B people do talk a lot about these kind of marketing fundamentals, which is what you're talking about really, which is understand who you'll get to know them as well as possible. And then actually there's a lot more value often in finding the obscure problem that they're trying to solve than just marketing to them at a very kind of in a very broad sense. And that's, I think what you're describing by find specific things that you can help them do and that will get low reach. But it will have a high impact, which I completely buy into. Do you find there's a lot of difference in the extent to which that mindset is adopted between consumer and B2B? Because I think most folks in B2B tend to think they do that well.

Speaker B: It's very similar. So we have customers that run super bowl commercials. We have a lot of customers that run super bowl commercials. When I go and look at the numbers, and I'm not going to go pinpoint a specific customer because, you know, I don't want to share anyone's data and get in trouble. You want to take a guess how many of them see a, uh, increase in revenue from a Super bowl commercial or a World cup commercial or Olympic commercials? You want to take a guess?

Speaker A: I'm hating these guessing games because I never know the answer, but I'm going to go low this time and say virtually none.

Speaker B: You got it right.

Speaker A: There we go.

Speaker B: I like the guessing games because eventually people get where I'm going with this. But, like, they're spending arm and leg. You buy super bowl and then you buy Super Bowl. They expect you to buy Olympic ads at the same time. So you're spending way more, and then you're paying all this money for commercials and production. So you're spending well over $20 million because you gotta buy more ads than just a Super bowl, typically. And then you gotta actually produce the commercials, which adds up. So, like, let's say if you spend 6 million on a Super bowl ad or 7 million, they usually want you to buy 6, 7 million dollars of other ad spots. So non Super Bowl. So now you're talking about you just spent 12 to 14 million dollars plus you're spending money on the production of the commercials and then other promotional events on it and YouTube and all this stuff. So you're usually spending 20 plus money. Very few companies see growth from it. It's like the money's in the boring and, uh, boring and ugly in marketing. It's not in the sexy. That, yes, every once in a while you'll see companies do really well from the bull commercials like the Godaddies of the world, which it really helped put them on the map. But that's, you know, a needle in a haystack.

Speaker A: It's a statement that you're making, right, that that is a, uh, that is by definition, kind of a vanity project. It's difficult because I kind of want to. Want to play devil's advocate of it, but I completely agree with everything you're saying, I guess. Do you Buy into the idea. What some people might say is it's not that they don't have that impact, it's that you don't see it. So actually what you might see is a bit of an uplift across every metrics. It's like, um, there's an added or, uh, kind of little line that someone told me a few months ago actually, which is basically all that matters in marketing is word of mouth. Word of mouth is good. Everything works. If it's not, everything doesn't work. And I think what you could argue is that something like a Super bowl ad is a way of turbocharging the word of mouth and the hype that just lifts everything up. Have you ever seen that in the data?

Speaker B: No, we have not seen in the data. What we've seen help create the word of mouth mouth is grassroots. I want to international. No, let's not use word grassroots. It's very targeted marketing to our ideal customers, uh, to get them to see it and they spread it to more ideal customers for both B2B and B2C. So that's number one. Number two, you need a good product or service. If you have a crap product or service, the word amount doesn't work out no matter what you do on the marketing. But if you have a great product or service, but you have a terrible marketing, it doesn't work out either. And what we found is the super bowl or Olympic style ad appeals to too many people or goes to, uh, you reach everyone. The majority of those people are not your ideal customers. It doesn't matter if you're B2C or B2B. It's very rare that someone's selling something that's applicable to everyone unless you're selling toilet paper. But at that point, you don't really have to make a pitch for toilet papers. More so you go to the store. Whatever's reasonably priced is what people buy. Soft and reasonably priced. Right. A Super bowl commercial is not going to help too much. What we find in most cases, focusing your marketing on your ideal customer helps really spread your word of mouth to more ideal customers.

Speaker A: So because again, I completely agree and I don't think, I think if I popped you in the room, um, of a hundred marketers and we did a poll then of how many people agree with that and don't agree with that, I suspect the vast majority would put their hands up and say yes, 100%. Yet loads of people do super bowl ads. Why?

Speaker B: Yes, it's because they can afford to end its branding.

Speaker A: Okay, it's just budget to burn.

Speaker B: Yes. So. But there's nothing that we can end up. It's just like a lot of the companies, not all, but a lot of the companies. It's like when your company is producing like 2, 3, 4, $5 billion a year in profit, you don't really care. It's just something you're doing, getting it out there. It's like the same thing. Why do people sponsor Formula One? We have a lot of clients who sponsor Formula One. There's no direct roi. They just do it for branding and they don't care. And they think it's fun and they take some of their top customers or whatnot. It's like some of these companies are just so large they don't know what to do with their money. We work with one company, they don't do 10 figures a year in profit, they do 11 figures a year. Right. So double digit billions in profit. They have jets in their own company for their executives. And we were talking to them, uh, I was talking to one of the executives about their jets and their airfare and they were talking about maintenance and like, yeah, we don't really have maintenance on a plane. Like, what do you mean? Like we just buy new planes every few years so we don't have to deal with the maintenance. And they're like, yeah, it's too much of a headache. Downtime. We're optimizing for speed and efficiencies, not even fuel savings. We tell them to fly as fast as possible and don't do what's most economical. But you have to keep in mind you're making double digit billions a year, which means ten plus. If you're making ten plus billion a year in profit, not revenue, your viewpoint on money is very different. Including things like a Super bowl ad. You're talking about these jets that they buy when they have multiples are like $75 million a pop. So when you're buying a handful of them, and typically they're not buying them themselves, they're going through a company like a NetJets or whoever and they're just paying them so they can get them to the planes and it's just dedicated or some other third party because they don't want to maintain them. It's just like you look at money in a very different way, including things like super bowl ads or sponsorships. Sometimes they just do stuff to test it out and they just want to try different things because they don't know what else to do with their. As ridiculous as that sounds, it's funny

Speaker A: that plain analogy, because I think we've all. We've seen that trend happen in society in general. Right. The bar of what is such a commodity that we don't bother fixing it has gone up and up and up. Right. It used to be clothes that you would stitch together and fix. And then we slowly realized, actually, I can just buy new clothes. But now we have reached the point where some people in society treat planes like that, which is mental.

Speaker B: Yes. So check this out. If you bought a $75 million plane and you do 10 billion in profit, uh, okay, it is 0.75% of your profit for the year. Now here's the kicker. When someone buys a plane for $75 million, it's not like they lost $75 million. One, there's payments plans, two, there's tax deductions. Right. A lot of corporations can save. There's bonus depreciation. So depending on company's tax rates, if it's a C Corp or s Corp or LLC, it can be upwards, you know, 37% on the bottom end call. I think 21% is what, C Corp's tax deduction. And then you also have to remember when they sell it, a few years later, they probably got back 60 million, 65 million. Right. Because they're just rotating through it. So you're talking about over a few year period, maybe they lost $10 million. And when you put it for a perspective of $10 million, it's such a small number. It's. It's like a fraction of a fraction of a percent where it just doesn't even matter.

Speaker A: Yeah, I get it. So, okay, let's say that I'm the vast majority of marketers that doesn't operate in these organizations. And so we're saying, okay, that's what we're competing with is that level of frivolousness or that that level of freedom in terms of how we market. And so we have to be a lot smarter. I guess a few questions come to mind then. Do you think that AI will be an equalizer in that? Do you think it will help people be scrappy and smart to compete without the resources? You think it will make the market less pay to play or do you think it will exaggerate that issue very broad?

Speaker B: I think AI levels up the smaller businesses and gives them a better chance to compete. For now, I do believe in a few years the big organizations will eventually adapt and it won't help them as much because AI creates efficiencies. Okay. And allows you to Move faster. Imagine you're a big company. The big company has a uh, bigger savings because they have so much expenditure right from AI and efficiencies. They can move faster and it allows them to have even more money to spend on marketing and advertising. What people forget is it's not, in my opinion, it's not technology, uh, that causes small startups to overgrow and outtake, uh, the bigger companies because the big corporations have access to the same technology and everything else that the small companies do. The real reason that small startups can be big corporations a certain portion of the time is actually due to bureaucracy. The startups can just move because there's no bureaucracy. The large corporations have bureaucracy. So I'll give you an example of this. I was talking with my CEO, we're talking about releasing an offering for our customers where we help set up AI agents in their workforce and we help them out and we help modernize their marketing stack and we do it customized. A startup would just go and just do this, okay. At our organization size we're not the biggest company in the world but in the US I think we're classified as a medium sized company, right? Or some may classify us as a large company. We had to look at things like legalities, privacy, data ones. If there's a data breach, what is this going to do? We're big enough, we're getting sued and going to zero has a really big negative impact. More than not adapting because if we don't adapt, I can still sell the business and I would never in theory have to work again. Right. From a lifestyle perspective. Now it doesn't mean we're not going to adapt because I'm a crazy entrepreneur and I love doing new things and I don't care about bureaucracy. And as a founder or co founder I can do whatever I want, but I still have to deal with internal politics. Well, on the flip side, a uh, startup does it so they can run and move way faster because they don't have to deal with bull crap bureaucracy that large organizations have. Startup never thinks, oh man, if I implement open claw in an organization I'm going to get sued because there could be this breach. Big companies think about that. Startups were more like, I'll deal with it as it comes.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, and that was my first thought. When you, with what you said about how many people get a revenue impact out of AI, I was like, I'd be interested to know the composition of that room because we're a fairly small startup and I feel it's Got a massive impact. Our ability to compete with much larger organizations and to do a like, if we just take content as an example to produce a quality of content that we could not have dreamt that before with consistency is amazing. The research that we've used AI to help us do and things like that, but we, we have zero bureaucracy. There's only a few of us and I can think of an idea and I can do it.

Speaker B: Well you, you make a good point. Uh, and I have two points on this. So majority of the events that I go to are all enterprise like just massive corporations like hey, we're Pfizer. Hey, how does, when anyone asks ChatGPT medical advice, how does Pfizer come up? Like that is the majority of the events that I'm talking to and I'm Talking to the CMOs in different countries for these organizations because keep in mind they have multiple CMOs. It's not like Pfizer will have one CMO. You'll have a CMO for every damn drug in every country. And the list goes on and on. Right. So majority are large corporations. But even the last time I was at HubSpot's inbound conference and I would, would you agree that HubSpot has a lot more medium and smaller sized businesses than let's say the Pfizers of the world? Right, Because I would say the average HubSpot paying customer and I should know this is somewhere around 11, 12 or $13,000 a year. So much smaller organizations than you know, the Fortune, uh, or global, you know, 1,000 that we tend to try to pitch for ad agency. And when I ask that, uh, same question, how much of you guys are getting more of a roi? Almost no one raised their hand. And I think there was maybe like four or five or six thousand people in the audience when I was speaking. Less than 1% was raising their hand. No joke. I was trying to find the hands and I asked other questions to see if people just don't want to raise their hand. And people were raising their hands for other stuff. So. But I'm with you. I do think there is a ah, ROI in AI. We've seen it firsthand but I think it's the ROI is more created from cost efficiencies than actually revenue growth in which you can just do more with less people. So you're really saving on the labor end versus you're seeing your revenue grow faster. That's typically from what we see from the data for both SMBs and large enterprises. Others could disagree with me on that statement. And we also don't believe there's a big ROI from things like content creation. So. And uh, I'm going to use that one because you mentioned content. You know, there's markers where AI knows that AI created the content. Invisible markers. Um, there's a lot of posts online about this. People should check them out. AI doesn't want to continually train and rank their own stuff. You want to guess why? What happens if AI creates tons of articles for people and then trains off of their own content? What do you think happens?

Speaker A: It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You're kind of compounding hallucinations.

Speaker B: Yes. So they of course are engineers, they're really smart. Of course they're creating systems to make sure they avoid training off of their own stuff. And what we found is a lot of the human created stuff in marketing does better. Now on the flip side, there is amazing use cases for AI like transcription and language adjustments when you're translating from English to Portuguese or whatever it may be. Also for ad creative, we actually see the best use of AI in marketing. It, uh, may not be the best, but I would say at least top three is data and analytics, which no one really wants to talk about because when you think about data, it's like a puzzle, puzzle piece, a thousand puzzle piece. And what you find in most marketing organizations is there's a thousand pieces, but the thousand pieces are in different boxes when they should be in one and these boxes are in different routes. So to really get a good grasp of your data, you need to bring all the pieces together and put them on one table. So that way you can get a clear view and AI can really help you with that. Uh, so you can have better understanding of what's actually working and what's not.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that's what we've found with content. Like to give you some context and give you an example of one thing that we did with it that I was really proud of and give folks who are listening as well. Um, we did a big benchmark report. Right. So relatively small startup. We ran hundreds, thousands of prompts across loads of different categories in every stage, the buyer journey. We want to understand how AI responses vary at each stage. So that was a huge amount of data collection that we relied on AI to do because we were trying to think what that we couldn't do before. Can we use AI to kind of turbocharge? We then had to analyze all of that data and we created a custom GPT that allowed me to extract all of the storylines, all of the interesting stories from the data. And then I wrote it. So the content that goes out is still high quality, but the quality of that content is ten times better than we would have ever been able to produce before without AI. And I think that's where people have gone wrong with it a little bit, is they've seen this shiny thing and they've thought, cool, we can chuck way more volume out there, rather than think, what were the limiting factors on me doing better and how can AI help me overcome that? And I know something is something we've got flagged in our research for this as well a little bit was that. That's something you've been talking a bit about how, like, there's a moat to be built there. Complexity is a moat. I'd be interested to hear you talk about that a little bit because I think it kind of reflects what I was just saying.

Speaker B: Yeah, nice spot on. What we found with AI, we get the most efficiencies in product and engineering than any other division that we've seen in our organization. And also support those divisions, see the most impact from AI directly. For example, we get tons of support tickets and emails. AI parses it and just goes and fixes it, does agent, does a qa, and then a human just verifies and then releases it. Like, stuff like that has changed our product, our development and technology on our end. But. But in business, the problem that we end up finding, at least in marketing, specifically with AI, is if everyone's using the same technology to create content and marketing campaigns and leverage the same. You have AI create the strategy. What we find is you end up creating two things, everyone starts doing similar things. And the second thing is what we found is AI doesn't optimize and give you exceptionally amazing results. What we found it does is it scrapes the Internet. The, uh, Internet has tons of mediocre, average content. Yes, there's some exceptional stuff. There's a ton of crap, but on average, it's just mediocre and, you know, average. And what we found is it trains off of that. So the outputs that it ends up giving you is average. If you do average marketing and everyone else's average marketing, it doesn't work. You gotta be exceptional. And that's what makes marketing tough. See, writing. So I'm black and white versus marketing.

Speaker A: I think one of the challenges that a lot of marketers that I speak to feel in this area is that actually the impetus or the pressure to adopt AI aggressively and use it to churn out volume doesn't come from them, it comes from above them, I think is one of the issues in this space is basically marketing is talking, Talking to investors, talking to CEOs, and that's coming down the chain in terms of the expectations. Like, if you were to put yourselves in the shoes of that VP of marketing who knows everything that you just said to be true, but they're trying to balance that with the pressure that they're seeing for efficiency, how would you approach that if you were them?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we get this a lot. I was in the UK recently. When I say recently, I think it was last week. I was in the uk, in Paris then. Uh, yeah, it was actually last week. So I was in the UK last week, and I was in London, and I was in a room and someone asked me, my CFO is putting pressure for us to cut a lot of our headcount and be way more efficient and do more in marketing and use AI. And I said, cool. And then I said, well, one, you gotta explain to them on how it produces a lot of mediocre work so you're not gonna get results. But I'm like, two, you should go back to your CFO and say, hey, now, because of, uh, AI, why do you need all these bookkeepers and accountants and finance people in your departments? Can you just use AI to automate most of it and get rid of most of your headcount? And they laughed and they're like, no, our accounting team's actually grown. And I'm like, exactly. We've seen AI create the opposite problem. There's more channels now. People are doing things faster. We're not seeing people reduce headcount. We're seeing people trying to get more done with the same amount of people they have to compete. And we see that as the new norm because of monopolistic laws in, I would particularly say, the EU and the US because, remember, acquisitions don't happen in most cases from these big organizations. If it's not approved by the US regulatory community and the eu, those are, I would say, the two big ones. Asia is a lot easier from what I've seen in the past. And I'm not a lawyer or anything like that. I don't know the laws. But just from what I've read and kept up to date with, um, so Anthropic couldn't get acquired earlier on by Google. You know, ChatGPT couldn't get acquired earlier on by Microsoft. There's too many regulatory rules. So now you have Perpexity, you have Claude, you have openclaw and the list goes on and on and on. So what do marketers have to do? Well, people use Instagram. Oh, TikTok didn't replace Instagram. So we have to market on TikTok as well. And Facebook is still around. It's not actually dead. It generates a lot of revenue from ads. We got to still leverage Facebook and we need to do YouTube because people love it for a long form. And LinkedIn and then Google. Oh, there's still some volume on Bing. Not as much, but we got to be on Bing. Oh, Reddit. A lot of platforms use Reddit data like these alums. So we got to be on there. Oh, we also have to optimize for ChatGPT and AI visibility on perplexity and Claw and, and oh, we got to do email, SMS and push notifications. Applovin their stock. It's booming. What is this company? Oh, they actually have inventory. We gotta actually start advertising there. Uh, you can't get the volume, but it's very profitable and we should scale up that as well. And as you can see, I'm continually throwing in more and more channels. And that's the new reality of marketing. It's getting more messy. The funnel isn't straight and linear, it's more messy. People are scattered around everywhere like a spaghetti dish where pasta is all intertwined. And there's just more work for marketers and people expect better marketing, better quality of stuff that they're consuming before they decide to purchase with the company. And then you have other stuff like, oh, now we got to optimize for reviews because everyone's looking for reviews whether you're B2B or B2C. We don't know if they're going to pull from Trustpilot or Capterra or GT or whatever new source or Better Business Bureau. So we got to look at all these sources because one is pulled from, you know, one LLM Performance prefers this source, the other LLM M prefers this other source. Like it's just become more of a headache.

Speaker A: So again, VP of Marketing, Series B company. We have resources, but we don't have unlimited resources. Would your advice be. Look, that is just the reality. You have to spread yourself across all of these. Or would you say no? Be smart, pick the right ones, do them well, branch out over time as you can or somewhere in between.

Speaker B: You have no choice to be on all of them, but you should start off picking the main channels you know your ideal customers are on. Get them going, scale them out once they're not on Autopilot, but close enough to autopilot where you're just on maintenance mode, start adding in more channels and you would keep doing that with those new channels, scale them up and then once you get them where they're pretty efficient, then you add in more and then eventually you'll be on the majority. You may not be on all of them, but that's the methodical approach to eventually get on all the main ones that you need to be on on.

Speaker A: I think that's a great place to transition um, into a couple of quick fires. Neil. So I think we did give you some of these in advance, but we have a few that we'd like to just do at the end. So the first one I'm m going to give you is um, an AI use case that you absolutely love. Something that kind of what, what has most blown your mind over the last three years?

Speaker B: Yeah, the AI use case that has blown my mind. And my engineers ended up showing me this. And this was earlier on with Claude code was we see all the inquiries in our marketing tools like ubersuggest you or uh, support inquiries. We then end up having Claude fix those issues, then we end up testing them, qaing them, another agent's qaing them and then a human just approves it and then it gets rolled out and then the bugs get fixed all much faster. And someone may not look at that as marketing, but if you're delighting your customers faster, the word of mouth marketing kicks in and you grow much faster. And we've seen it have a direct impact on revenue.

Speaker A: Nice, I like that. And then this is always a bit of a fun one. If I were to give you like, or one of your clients were to give you carte blanche to do any marketing campaign that you wanted, budget is no question, what would you do? I guess it's like what is the wackiest, weirdest marketing idea that you couldn't justify but kind of feel like you'd love to do?

Speaker B: I don't have a customer who'll let me do this, but I've always dreamed about this. This is going to sound a little silly. I would love to do a marketing campaign where I'm blitzing Super bowl, any current major events, all the television channels globally, soccer stadiums, NBA arenas, you know, sponsoring journeys, jerseys, and doing it all within like a 30 day period and see what happens to a brand if everyone continually sees it. Um, and I think it would just make the business just blow up in a really massive way, in a mainstream way. I'm not saying in a revenue perspective. And I know we talked about super bowl having crappy roi, but I've never seen anyone, I've actually only seen one company get close to it. Uh, but very few people have the budgets to be like, let's go burn a billion dollars this month on Google Ads, Facebook ads, television, and just buy of a bunch, everything that we can buy and just see what happens in 30 days. If we just do that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's like if we compress our annual budget into a month, can we actually, can. Can we make an outsized impact on the kind of cultural zeitgeist? And then the question would be, does it actually make up have a return

Speaker B: so, so, so not compact it in a month because typically from all the results we've seen, when you stretch it out, you actually get a better ROI than when you compact it it, but it's more so for a month. I just want to blitz the whole world and I just want to see what happens.

Speaker A: I can see why no one's let you do that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. And then what, um, is there like a skill or trait and this is for you, for you personally in your career that you would say has really moved the needle for you?

Speaker B: I'm pretty good at making deals. And I don't know how to describe that other than persuasion.

Speaker A: I say, okay, well when you say making deals in most people's world, are we talking kind of at a sales level? We're talking buying, setting businesses. And um, when did you.

Speaker B: How did you like me convincing someone to give us like a $10 million okay.

Speaker A: And that's something. Yeah, that's. Would you say that was an innate skill or is that something that you honed?

Speaker B: I'm naturally decent at making deals, always have been. I hope people can learn it. But, but I've always just been decent at making deals.

Speaker A: And then what was the biggest screw up in your career? Is there a moment that stands out

Speaker B: as like man, I f. Yeah, uh, we had a company called kissmetrics. We were in talks to sell to Meta and Microsoft back in the day. We got a class action lawsuit over data privacy. They were saying like if you're one company, we would sell the data to your competitor. We didn't. And what I learned in the US is it's actually cheaper to settle even if you don't, than it is to fight because the legal fees are so high. Our system's quite a bit different than Europe and we had FTC investigation and no publicly traded company wants to buy these Kind of organizations that are dealing with these issues. The, um, FTC investigation passed with flying colors. They looked at code and all this stuff and they're like, oh, you guys aren't sharing data. The Wired magazine article was inaccurate. I'm like, yes, it was. No one also sees a retraction, by the way. But the big mess up on that. We didn't adapt to mobile fast enough and we were too focused on the lawsuit instead of adapting our product from desktop to mobile because everyone was trying to get smart devices and the web was moving into, hey, we're all going to start moving mobile phones. We saw that trend, but we didn't adapt our product to mobile devices early enough. And it was a data and analytics company and we should have. If we did, you know, it would have been a multi billion dollar company.

Speaker A: Painful one. Cool. Um, and then before I let you go, very last.

Speaker B: And we lost acquisition because of the lawsuit, so that sucked too.

Speaker A: Okay, so that's a double pain here.

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think we would have sold for hundreds of millions, but let's call like 60, 70 million when you only raise like 4 million bucks and you still own the majority of your company. Between me and my co founder, like, that would have been a great exit for us and it was much earlier in our careers.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we'll call that the highest stakes, um, screw up that we've had yet on the pod. So. Nice. And then last one before I let you go is just, um, for everyone listening at home, a book recommendation, podcast, thought leader, anything that you find really, really valuable that people should check out.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so. So one of my favorite books is Principles by Ray Dalio. I know it's a little bit old, but I recommend everyone check it out and read it.

Speaker A: Cool. I've not read that, so that will be my weekend now. Um, look, Neil, I'm conscious we're at time, so, um, um, I'll let you go, but thank you very much. It's been lovely to chat to you. Um, is there anything that you're doing that you'd like to just promote quickly before we let you go?

Speaker B: Check us out at NP Digital if you ever want marketing help.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you very much for joining us. And if you're still listening at home, then, um, thank you for listening.

Speaker B: Um,