#45 How to Get Found in AI Search: GEO, Visibility & ChatGPT with Thomas Peham, co-founder of Otterly AI

Luke Szkudlarek: M Coming up in today's episode, ranking well on Google used to mean something. These days it's only half of the story.

Thomas Peham: Our impression share might still be high on the Google search results page, but we're getting less and less organic clicks, direct clicks these days from Google. That's big pain point where I feel the pain might be even bigger than ChatGPT. But we as marketers are trying to understand what's going on with those changes and trying to react and build up on some adjusted playbooks.

Luke Szkudlarek: That's Thomas Peham, former VP of marketing at StoryBlock, now uh, co founder of Outerly AI and one of the leading voices in generative engine optimization. Today we get into why everything you thought you knew about measuring search is changing and what to do about it. Thomas also points out the hidden impact of AI search that's not visible in your Qlik data.

Thomas Peham: About 1% of their web conversions came from ChatGPT. But when they asked ah, all of their net new leads in the form where did you Hear about us? 10% of all net new leads mentioned ChatGPT as a source. Right. So you can see a significant difference here, um, on what sticks top of mind amongst our users.

Luke Szkudlarek: That's all ahead on Fixing the Game podcast. Join me on a mission to unveil strategies and hacks that turn the tables on the tech giants. They created the rules, ensuring only they can win. It's time to fix the rigged system, listen, learn, transform your mindset and conquer the digital game. Your winning journey starts now. Welcome to Fixing the Game. Today I'm joined by Thomas Peham, um, CEO and co founder of Otterly AI and former VP of marketing at StoryBlock. Thomas is pioneering how brands track and improve visibility across generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI overviews, perplexity and the new discipline, generative engine optimization. Thomas, welcome to the show.

Thomas Peham: Thank you, Luke. Hello. Super happy to be here today.

Luke Szkudlarek: Well done on the journey with Atherli AI. I think you guys are one of the leading providers in this space and it's really cool to see that.

Thomas Peham: Thank you, Luke. Yeah, it's an exciting time, isn't it? With just the recent changes in the Google ecosystem and how ChatGPT is pushing forward. So, uh, yeah, super happy to dive deeper today into the whole space and I think as maybe also for setting the stage as my background is really in marketing. I've been super excited about SEO 15, 16 years ago and still today. Right. It's a changing space and that sometimes keeps me up at night, but also Excites me day in and day out.

Luke Szkudlarek: One of the things that I want to start with is you have lots of experience working with clients. Of course the growth rates are huge. But. But how do you see the scene developing and why is this so important

Thomas Peham: to look at why we started with, oddly in the first place kind of goes back to my last role where I led a marketing team of 30 people at StoryBlock as VP marketing. And StoryBlock is a tech B2B SaaS company. And we've always been super big on Google, right? Super big in terms of Google being our number one inbound acquisition channel for us as a software business. And I kind of realized a year and a half ago that I, as a marketing leader and we as a brand had no idea what's going on on those new, what I would describe AI search channels, right? Such as ChatGPT and others. And to be honest, it kind of gradually made me more and more nervous to not know what's going on those new AI search platforms. Because to your point, I truly believe that our consumers are already there, right? Yes, for sure. ChatGPT also today, it doesn't have the same market share as Google, for sure. But I kind of realized there's a change going on on the consumer side, both in B2B as well as in B2C. And it made me as a marketer, really nervous to not know and be not in control of those new search channels. And at the end of the day, why I cared back then, meaning a year and a half ago, a lot about solving this problem for me as a marketer, because I felt that, yes, it's an opportunity, it's a new opportunity for us as a marketing team, as a brand, to show up more than our competition. And at the same time, we can also look at the Google ecosystem and how the Google ecosystem is not getting easier for us as marketers. Right? So we can look at Google AI reviews, which were rolled out in May 2024 in the US and then gradually in more and more countries in Europe. We've been a bit more lucky because they only just recently started rolling out the Iowa views, and in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other markets in the eu. But I'm mentioning Google because that rollout of aiwof use has created some pains for us as marketers, right? Because suddenly we are realizing that organic traffic is declining. It's getting really hard these days to grow organic traffic. And sure, it's not a new thing per se, right? Because several clicks have been on the rise even before AI were views, but they're uh, now even rising faster. Right. So yes, our impression share might still be high on the Google search results page, but we're getting less and less organic clicks, direct clicks these days from Google. That's a big pain point where I feel the pain might be even bigger than ChatGPT. But we as marketers are trying to understand what's going on with those changes and trying to react and build up on some adjusted playbooks.

Luke Szkudlarek: You're of course preaching to the converted because if you know the premise of this show is also to give uh, businesses alternative strategies so that they can actually do uh, their work. Because when I go back 20 years or 15 years, Google is actually very helpful tool for business and it still is in many ways, but it has this part of it driven by the importance of the share price or something like this. They need to roll out things that are not really in favor of small businesses, for example, or medium sized businesses. And AI overview, it's one of those examples. And then of course a huge push towards paid Media where with ChatGPT and other Gentrif AI engines, it's still like a really open space how it will develop. But I'm curious to know from you, how do you measure volumes or do you observe any statistics? Because of course it's easy. With Google you have for example search console, you have Google Ads so you can see, okay, this is the number of impressions, this is number of clicks. You also have Google Analytics so you know how much traffic you're getting with geo or visibility. On ChatGPT, it's much more difficult. Right, because this data is just not available. How do you go about measuring it?

Thomas Peham: Yeah, I would mention two things. One is from a ChatGPT, if we stick with the ChatGPT example, right. I think what many marketing teams are observing and measuring is for sure referral traffic. Right. So how much referral traffic do we get from ChatGPT directly as a referral source? That's on the web analytics side. Right. In some occasions this might be 1%, it might be 2%, it might be lower or a bit more of our total traffic. So not a big share. Uh, it's only a super small fraction of what's really going on on ChatGPT. Because the reality is click, uh, rates on ChatGPT are completely different than they are in Google. We don't go to ChatGPT to click on blue links. Right. As we do in the Google search. We go there to inform ourselves, educate and so on and so forth. So the Reason why we actually built Otterly in the first place is because we wanted to uncover this user journey and give marketing teams a couple of more insights and data points on what's going on on ChatGPT. I'm a big believer because of also certain limitations, we need to be more focused towards certain brand metrics. We can measure how often our brand shows up on ChatGPT for certain search queries. Right. We can measure what we call grant mentions. Right. How often is my particular company, my particular brand mentioned for my relevant set of topics and queries. Right. We should also measure not only how often and where we are mentioned, but also, uh, where are we mentioned on the AI output. Right. Because I truly believe if we look at the interface of ChatGPT, that it does matter to our consumers if we're the first brand that gets referenced and mentioned, or are we the 15th brand? It will do something different to our consumers. In addition to that, to Your point, yes, OpenAI is currently not disclosing any search volume data or whatnot. Right. Similar as we all used to have from Google. But there is, let's say, clickstream data available, certain data available, where we can estimate it. Right. And where we can build some models around which intent is already happening. On, um, ChatGPT, we have such a metric in our product. I know other products are working on that as well. Right. Right now it's more of a secondary metric because ultimately right now I think everybody's thinking about are we showing up, where are we showing up, how often are we showing up as a brand? And I think we're now, uh, moving into this direction where we also, as a SEO team, as a marketing team, we need to take those brand metrics more seriously and we also need to optimize for them. At the end of the day, I

Luke Szkudlarek: think it's very good because it's actually just more social monitoring. Right. And I think it's misleading to try to compare it to the search volumes. For me, the eye opener was really when we started getting first leads from, um, ChatGPT, when a year ago we did some experiments and some clients called us and they asked them where you found us and said recommended you. Of course, there's no click, there's no referral from ChatGPT to the website. They just looked it up and found the company and then maybe went to the website separately. But it's real, right? And it has nothing to do with old style metrics.

Thomas Peham: Love it. Luke, that's a really great call out and I would like to add one statistic that I recently heard from a B2B client of ours who told me, and I've seen similar accounts as well that from a pure web referral traffic, right. It is no longer the main metric. They were showing me about 1% of their web conversions came from ChatGPT. But when they asked all of their net new leads in the form where did you Hear about us? 10% of all net new leads mentioned ChatGPT as a source. Right. So you can see a significant difference here on what sticks top of mind amongst our users. And I do recommend everybody to be it on the enterprise go to market side, make it obligatory to ask where your prospects hurt you, where they came from. And on the same side you mentioned the brand listening. Yeah, absolutely. Also on the brand monitoring side, understand what's going on on those channels. Where do you show up or do you not show up? Where does your competition show up?

Luke Szkudlarek: Yeah, because I believe this is probably one of the main challenges for the scene like this kind of geo movement because it would be great for your product if people actually rethought how they measure success on Google. Right. Because I think it would really boost their awareness and importance. Because right now I still have a feeling that this is a uh, quite a niche scene. I mean of course you're growing, we're in a bubble. I also super excited about that you are working on a product but I think it's to raise awareness of it. I think we need to really rethink how we judge success of campaigns. Let's move on to another topic and I would love to hear more about how you actually do it. I mean first there's the monitoring part that you mentioned. And when I was researching this I learned that it's actually the tools that are needed for geo are completely different to the tools that were needed for SEO. The concept is maybe the same, but actually how it works is very different. So can you talk more about your experience with building the product and how you go about monitoring and measuring the rankings so that it fits the purpose and there's also what are the similarities where you see with SEO?

Thomas Peham: Yeah, I would start with one thing, right? The baseline is always monitoring, right. Understanding what's going on. And when I say monitoring and analytics on AI search, I refer to both the brand side that we mentioned earlier, understanding how often your brand shows up for particular topics, how often it shows up on particular queries. Right. We at Odderly, for example, have a very prompt based approach where we help you define the relevant queries that you as A brand want to track in the first place. Right. So that's really step number one, um, on the brand side, brand mentions, brand position tracking, those are the key KPIs, I believe. And obviously you can compare yourself with your competition on how you compare there. But then we for example, also track citations because yes, ChatGPT has by now web search capabilities. Other AI search engines have as well. Right. So decide our content. Decide content and then provide those citations back as links, but also, uh, provide that content back. So uh, while I'm a big advocate of us moving into this brand focus, we also track website citations. And I think when it comes to the optimization piece that you now mentioned, I'd like to quote one study that we did where we analyzed about 100,000 websites and how those a hundred thousand websites show up on ChatGPT, for example, we also analyze Diwal, Fuse and Perplexity. But generally speaking, I keep mentioning that, uh, study because it clearly shows that there are three, let's call it pillars in the optimization strategy that any brand can basically do. So it starts with one on page, 36% of all websites that are cited on ChatGPT are actually corporate websites. All, uh, brand websites. This is us, right? So what we've been doing traditionally from an SEO perspective, that baseline is still valid, I keep seeing, right? Yes, there are some, let's say, basics where for example, a chatgpt crawler cannot crawl dynamic content. And you might want to look into that in a bit more detail because in a way the crawler is a bit more stupid than the Google crawlers today. This might change, Right? Another thing what we've been observing is that ChatGPT, for example, tends to highlight lots of long form content that sits on also our corporate websites tends to prioritize content freshness. Right. So also that's an important factor for ChatGPT. So those are basically some variations of on page optimization, SEO optimization that anyone can do with our own websites, right. In order to also show up on ChatGPT. Another basic thing that I forgot to mention. Right? I mean also make sure that ChatGPT crawlers can even access and crawl your site. Right. So double check your robots txt file on that as well. But those are the on page optimizations, why I believe they're still valid because 36% of those websites that we analyzed were corporate websites showing up with those kind of mechanics and tactics. Then big part, 29% of all websites being cited on ChatGPT are uh, news and media sites. Right. From the big players. Sure. Chatgpt has special deals, licensing deals with those big publishers, but also local media, great media. So the media in your industry, the media in your region, in your city still gets cited big times. 29% of all of those citations come from those sites. We also saw, because we are monitoring ChatGPT basically since mid last year, 2024 to today, we saw that ChatGPT is also going into a more and more localized direction. Right. A year ago if I would add a German search query it, I might get a mix of German and English citation results. These days it's more and more localized. That's why we also tend to see more and more smaller medias and publishers there as well.

Luke Szkudlarek: Just one remark I think just for understanding, for everybody else who is listening when you refer to citations, it's basically from the way I understand it, it's a similar concept like links in SEO essentially. Right. Because what I noticed with one of the examples that I worked on is actually we had, there was a new industry that we entered and there were only a couple uh, pieces of content produced about this. One was published on our website and one was published on a third party media site that actually got us enough like kudos to be mentioned in ChatGPT. So the citation from this media, uh, website is essentially what you would normally do with your typical link building strategy in SEO. Right. Do you see similarities there or how do uh, you look at it?

Thomas Peham: I look at it differently because the UI is different. Right. The citations are important because most often that content is being quoted and cited. So which brand gets mentioned on ChatGPT is influenced by those citations? Right. That's a uh, fundamental UI difference than the Google search and results pages. Right. And the other thing is. Yes. I think the effort you mentioned is still super relevant. I'm not a link building expert and I don't want to comment if link building is more or less relevant on ChatGPT. I think what's more relevant from a media perspective on ChatGPT than on Google is being mentioned in those trusted sites on those trusted media outlets as well. Right. So getting your citations and mentions through the media outlets. Right. And I think there's lots of conversations on the Internet that these days about authority, Right. Building authority through digital pr, uh, earned uh, media efforts. Because of that, I think I see that as a really good opportunity for brands to get affiliated and associated with the right topics. On ChatGPT, I was mentioning, big citations come from media. Right. 29% of all of those sites are media citations. One comment I wanted to add There is. We will also see small blocks showing up there. Right, so smaller blogs, influencer type content shows up also to a higher degree I believe on ChatGPT than compared to Google. Right, so that's one comment I wanted to make. The last thing I wanted to say is with 19% of all websites rotations we see lots of user generated content these days on ChatGPT. And yes there is a big buzz about Reddit and Reddit being big on um, Google. I uh, would put the argument out, it's even bigger on the iSearch, it's even bigger on ChatGPT. But we shouldn't forget other local communities. Right. Communities we might even own, we might even build up. There might be trade communities, regional communities and we see all of them also being cited and referenced on ChatGPT. Sure. ChatGPT was also trained partially, their LLMs were partially trained on Reddit data. So that's one reason. But the other reason is yeah, a lot of that user generated content is really being used in general to train back AI engines. At the end of the day I think community marketing is something I do recommend many marketing teams to look at depending on the industry, depending on the mechanic, uh B2B versus B2C it might work differently but it's a thing that also helps you get position on ChatGPT.

Luke Szkudlarek: Actually this is good news to a lot of businesses who are operating in local communities and also local business communities, networking communities where they have access or by their physical presence, access to places where it's very difficult to access. I'm sure you're in Austria, you know Switzerland has this, there are like these local groups where you can only infiltrate these groups when you are actually based there. And I think if you get the uh, position there, I think that's more value and more trust. So that's really good news.

Thomas Peham: Yeah, absolutely. And also like user reviews, the trust radius, those type of sites, G2 in the B2B space. Right. Lots of those sites get mentioned and um, get a good share of visibility on ChatGPT.

Luke Szkudlarek: So you mentioned content on the page. So this is kind of bread and butter SEO, making sure it's indexed. This is crawling the website again, fundamental stuff in SEO and then the citations so being mentioned on other websites, the brand where it's talked about, forums and I don't think there's a good equivalent of Reddit in Europe. Do you see any in your results for the European clients trends?

Thomas Peham: I wouldn't generalize in terms of Reddit. There might be Reddit showing up for Our European examples as well. There might be some local Swiss forum community showing up that nobody ever heard of who's not working in this specific industry. Sometimes we even see communities from brands showing up. Right. And that now gets picked up as well. So I think the opportunity to your point is to own your community, to build up your own community in your own space. And it doesn't need to be on Reddit. Maybe Reddit helps if it shows, uh, up for your queries, but it doesn't need to be there.

Luke Szkudlarek: And can you share maybe some success stories from clients that you worked with, how you start the process? If I understood you, you start with defining the prompts that, that will be monitored and that are important to the business and, and then you identify how they are positioned today. Then they learn what citations, what's driving the results in their space, and then they implement. So can you share some success stories from clients who went through the process by the book and saw great results?

Thomas Peham: Yeah, absolutely. And to be very clear, we are, I would say, just the software platform that powers that. Right. The success most often depends on the implementation strategies, the playbooks that our clients, our marketing teams go through. I can mention one client by name that sits also as a case study on our website, which is Videoloft. VideoLoft is a B2B tech company operating out of the UK, but it's really a global international business. And they came to us with the challenge that it's getting harder, as we spoke earlier these days, and to compete in the Google ecosystem. And they wanted to understand the baseline on how they show up on ChatGPT. So what they did is, yes, they set up the key queries, the key topics they wanted to crack. They understood and realized that on ChatGPT they were missing out where some bigger competitors with more budget, better brand visibility were basically mentioned, but their brand was not mentioned. And what they then did is basically what I mentioned earlier. They basically streamlined their playbook into three areas. One was content on page, right? They didn't have a lot of relevant content. I would say on Page there was lots of content outdated. And they would realize that by analyzing the Link citations on ChatGPT to see what gets picked up by ChatGPT, which of their competitor sites were referenced. They would basically analyze super deeply their competitor content and would make better content. I would classify it. And by doing that on Page, I was really surprised, to be honest, Luke, because I usually keep telling my clients, you have to give it some time, right? Give it three weeks, give it four weeks, five weeks, Maybe even longer until you hopefully see some results. As mentioned before, right, they were not showing up as a brand. Their links, their website was not being cited and after three weeks they would realize, ah, also thanks to Otterly, obviously on the monitoring side, after three weeks their web content got cited and after a couple of weeks more, their brand was mentioned on ChatGPT. And this was really the main, first technique they did because they basically realized that, uh, there's lots of content needs, content gaps to be filled on page. We have other clients. One of the biggest fintech companies that's also a publicly traded company came to us, did the same thing on the monitoring side. But then they started basically by breaking down the silo between SEO and their PR team because they realized the importance of earned media, right? And how they need to build up credibility on the earned, uh, media side. So it was kind of an interesting thing for us to see and observe because it was really the first time for them when the SEO team would start properly engaging with the PR teams and they made this basic collaborative effort to build up their credibility. Their mentions on the media outlets they would see being siled on ChatGPT. Different approach, right? Not on page first, but earned media first because that was the starting point for them. And while they are already a very big brand, they were able to grow even the number of brand mentions and their brand positions on ChatGPT. So it kind of shows that I think the playbook is around those three areas that we mentioned earlier. But it also depends a bit on each individual setup and the priorities each marketing team defines there.

Luke Szkudlarek: And how do you see the importance of content quality? Because of course the intuitive and easy fix would be to use also ChatGPT or another LLM to create the content to appear. But of course this is very spammy and potentially not very valuable piece of work. So have you seen any trends or patterns in terms of how content quality can impact this visibility?

Thomas Peham: My personal opinion is we as marketers, we as SEO experts have been talking for a long time about the EID principles on Google, right? But we've been too lazy to implement them. We haven't done that properly. And I think the businesses who have really focused on authoritative, expert content do succeed Also, well on ChatGPT because it's an important thing, right? I'm not a big fan of using AI generated content. I don't have any statistics that I can recall personally. But my personal opinion is that content should be unique, should be expert, content should be authoritative, and that content sits within our product experts that sits within our business and the marketing goal is to uncover that. And, and I've been big in content marketing for a long time and I keep saying that the best success I've seen in terms of content is when great copywriting meets on a particular industry. Matter expert, basically. And when either two people meet up or one person has both skills, you're going to succeed on the content side.

Luke Szkudlarek: I totally agree. And for those who don't know, the EAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Right. So this is the Google, um, recommendation, best practice for creating great content. I've experienced that myself. If you just have a copywriter, they will try to research, they will use Wikipedia, they will use GPTs and their own research to create something. But it's missing this edge. Right. But as soon as you add somebody who actually works in the industry and actually has firsthand experience, that's when the useful things is being written and something that actually is helpful for the user, not just the summary. Because ChatGPT is very good at summarizing existing information. So you're not really adding any value.

Thomas Peham: Exactly.

Luke Szkudlarek: Yeah. Cool. And I would love to hear your thoughts also on what's your outlook for this industry. What do you see as the main milestones in the next two years, three years?

Thomas Peham: Google just announced the I Malk. Right. So everybody's now trying to wrap their heads around what Google is doing. Because right now we have basically three ways where we can interact with Google. We have a Google search engine running on google.com, powered by AI Worldviews and AILove views are being still rolled out in Europe, for example. Right. So, uh, we will still see a trend where our organic traffic potentially will decline on the traditional Google search thanks to AI overviews in the US Based on our data, one third of all Google search queries trigger any alpha view right now. And we saw a growing number there month by month in the last six months. So it will be interesting on how Google keeps scrolling out AI volumes, while at the same time it will introduce AI mode as a new tab, as a new search experience. And in addition to that, we shouldn't forget gemini.google.com this is another existing search experience. So at the end of the day, I think if this AI mode rollout goes well for Google, that's probably becoming pretty soon the default search experience for all of us, with soon probably in the next year or two. And if we look at that AI mode user interface as it is right now, it's basically a combination of a very Conversational Interface Similar to ChatGPT, similar to Gemini in combination with certain elements from the AI overviews. Right. The different links, citations that have a similar look and feel. So I think the future in terms of the next one or two years will be defined by how Google will make that switch to this more conversational AI powered search engine. In addition to that we can expect performance ads, Google Ads being rolled out on AI mode. On AI with use. I would assume that ChatGPT follows soon with some advertisement options as well. I mean it was already rumored for a while that ChatGPT is rolling that out as well. So we're definitely going to see I think first some wild west on the ad side of things and then um, yeah, some big opportunities for us on the Google Ads performance marketing side of things as well on those search engines. We're going to keep iterating and learning what can be done on the organic side of things in order to make sure we get mentioned as brands on those systems and platforms. How do you see that, Luke?

Luke Szkudlarek: What I'm interested in is the um, advertising opportunities with ChatGPT. I hope that it's not going to ruin the user experience because I think that has been a um, big part of Google's kind of development and I think that's why probably a lot of people are moving away from Google because the effectiveness of advertising and how it's changed. So I don't think it's healthy. I hope that's not going to be the same case for ChatGPT and others. Also with Google I think the number of products it's also very difficult to change user behavior. So if users are used to just searching and getting the list of links and clicking and now turning it into a conversation, it will be not an easy transition because of course if you are logging into ChatGPT, that's kind of what you're expecting from the start. And with Google it would be interesting to see how the AI mode and other products like how they're adapted. But I agree with you and I think this is what is interesting is the definitely less focus on the website traffic and that is a big disruption in how people build their data tracking. And a lot of companies invested a lot of money to build the perfect system to track every click on their website and I think that will become irrelevant what you guys are doing. I think it's really spot on because it's a uh, monitoring of other tools and a lot of action will happen on other tools. Brand monitoring is not a new concept. Right. It's been around for also like 20 years and I think now it's actually a revival of this brand monitoring tools because they need to adapt. And I think you have an advantage when you're building something new because I know some of the old brand monitoring tools there are now also adding AI functions. But it's a really interesting challenge because you have to know SEO, you need to know pr. You also need to know analytics and there's not many people getting it right. I just don't believe for example, that Ahrefs or Semrush will come up with like a killer tool to solve it. So that's why I think marketeers probably need to work with some new software or new approaches, uh, at least in the short term for a year or two to understand it. But I think it is moving away from the website, I think is the biggest disruption that people will be converting somewhere else or at least building an opinion somewhere else on where they should buy stuff from.

Thomas Peham: Consumers are formulating their opinions somewhere else and they will shop somewhere else as well. Right. If we think about the shopping experience coming to ChatGPT and those platforms as well. And it's an opportunity, right? It's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity for us. And, and I think the exciting thing for me as a marketer is I love that it's also kind of a breakdown of those marketing silos that we're now dealing with. The breakdown in silos between SEO, pr, community marketing. So at the end of the day, I truly believe that from a mindset perspective, the marketing teams who will succeed the most are those who are able to break down the silos and be able to collaborate across SEO, PR and community marketing the best. It's going to be also an interesting play out from a platform perspective. I wanted to only comment on that real quick because I personally think Google is doing the right thing right now. They are following that chatgpt like experience and I think they still have the opportunity to capture that share as well. Right. And keep users happy on their side as well. But yeah, who was able to predict ChatGPT two years ago? So, uh, let's see what's to come in two years on the platform side.

Luke Szkudlarek: And I think one final question for you is about skills because I think this also requires a different skill set. Right. I mean you talked about the breaking down silos and I totally agree and it's great. I also think the way we build content and create content and approach creativity because it's now easier to also do this Type of research and create stuff. The different skill set is needed because actually it's really challenging, mentally even challenging to think about all these different things. Whereas before you could just, okay, I have a keyword, I write about this keyword and then I find other places where they can link to it. And I think if you're optimizing for this brand presence and you have to take into account also brand guidelines, tone of voice, right? How you're positioned, where are you positioned? Reputation, it's actually a lot more complicated. So how do you see the skill set of a marketeer developing in the future?

Thomas Peham: It's a great question and I think since there's so much conversation about how is AI taking over marketing, right, as a job function? There are two basically directions a uh, marketer can go these days. One is on the creativity brand side, right? Being really the best in class, on top for sure, Being great at using AI tools to help you with that. But being great at the creative side of things, right? Being great at the brand side, at the design side. I think that's what we will always need, right? We need creative marketers who are able to build new stories for us as companies and businesses, stories that resonate with our audience, where we always have a very custom obsessed view, where we know the customer, where we know the pain points and then be able to tell those creative stories. So uh, if I would start a fresh career in marketing right now, I would lean into that potentially, right? Becoming the best at storytelling, at brand building potentially for a particular industry and for a particular area I enjoy working in, right? Because to the point earlier, subject matter expertise piece, I think that's required on the storytelling piece as well. And then the other option is we need technical marketers, we need data driven developers who build and do cool stuff on the maltech side of things. Because I think the tech side is not going away, the upside is not going away per se. Yes, things can be automated, but I've seen great marketers who didn't start their career in marketing but who started a career on the development side, full stack, front end, back end, dev side, who started their career in other more technical areas and turned then marketer because again they would either come with the uh, subject matter expertise and they were able to orchestrate the marketing engine, let's say the marketing ops engine. And yeah, I would personally really enjoy both extremes in one way. And uh, I think those are skills that every marketing team will need in the future as well. For sure. Lots of stuff can be automated. The whole project management side of things. The whole editing, those type of roles, yeah, might be less relevant, but I think the way to stand out as a marketer these days is by leaning into one of those two directions.

Luke Szkudlarek: Finally, to wrap up, can you maybe share what's coming up for Otterly AI, what you guys are working on and what are the new releases bringing?

Thomas Peham: Our goal is to provide marketing and end to end view both on the monitoring as well as optimization side. So everything we do basically is doubling down on the monitoring analytics side, but also on the optimization piece, providing marketers some good inspiration on, um, what to optimize for and how to prioritize those optimizations.

Luke Szkudlarek: Thank you Thomas so much for your insights. That was super fascinating. I love the subject and I think I'll be also observing what you guys are doing in the future. So thank you so much for this conversation.

Thomas Peham: Yeah, anytime. It was really great chatting, Luke. Thanks for having me.

Luke Szkudlarek: That brings us to the end of today's show. My thanks to Thomas Foreign. To find out more about what and what we do, go to our website what Digital and if the topics resonate with you, download my book of Hacks which contains ready made recipes for growth that I've collected in my own client work at WHAT and picked up from conversations with my guests on this podcast. You can find it on what.com digital remember to subscribe and to look out for the next episode. You will find it wherever you get your podcast. That's all for now. Goodbye.