Pushing back on AI campaigns with humans in the loop, with Lyndsey Maddox

Can we talk about what's been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta's ad platforms? Short while ago, those of us who use those platforms could be surgical, we could use a scalpel. We knew exact keywords, bid modifiers, placements, exact heading and descriptions. But now Google and Meta are basically telling us, Hey, just give us your credit card, some images, some text.

We'll take it from there. Things like Advantage Plus and P Max, they're the ultimate, trust me bro, of the marketing world. They want us to believe that their algorithm knows the customer better than we do. So the platforms are morphing out of being just tools to, at their extreme being backseat drivers of our marketing's vehicles.

They aren't optimizing for our ROI necessarily. They're being pushy and optimizing for their inventory, and in cases it feels like we're losing control over our own accounts, or in the case of agencies, control over our client's accounts. Hey Glenn here. Welcome to Funnel Reboot the show for data-based marketers.

My guest today is the with the Media Agency Digital Third Coast, and she's gonna tell us how she deals with this. After getting her BA from Butler and working in B2B, she had her first brush with digital channels like SEO and paid search, and she saw how they could drive business better than old traditional methods, and that came as a very pleasant surprise given how in her sales role. She was expected to do cold calling. Now bringing that sales focus, grit to Digital third Coast, honing her expertise over the last 14 years.

She's now its CEO, and when she's not inside the agency managing client accounts, she's likely to be with her husband and kids often at Wrigley Field, catching a ball game. Let's go now to Chicago to speak with Lindsay Maddox. Glenn: Lindsay Madox, welcome to Funnel Reboot. Lyndsey: Thank you so much.

I'm thrilled to be here. Glenn: I'm really glad to have you. So I wanted to talk to you because we are. Talking.

I talk with a number of people who are in the agency world and I also talk with in-house marketers, and it doesn't matter which side I talk to, there's a concern, and it normally comes down to dollars as well, when someone is trying to figure out what marketing services they wanna buy and they're trying to figure out how to justify the value of paying for someone's expertise. And I think Lee, since the advent of chat, GBT and a few other tools, there's been an erosion or a, a shaking of the foundation on whether or not expertise is something that should be paid for as it has been in the past.

Are you seeing this too, and if so what do you say should be done about it? Lyndsey: Yes, absolutely. I think we are seeing very polarized views of cha GBT. You are either using it and therefore destroying the environment, ruining human interactions and disgusting capitalist.

Or you're not using it and you're behind and you're gonna lose your job and your family and your house and your car and everything that feels like you get one or the other. Some of those viewpoints I think are motivated by financial factors of the person talking. Glenn: Yeah. Lyndsey: Some of it's motivated by fears.

There's the world in between those two. Views that get the most play on LinkedIn. That's probably the reality, right? Yeah.

If as a human being, your job is to push a series of buttons, I would be feeling fearful about what Yes, your career will be over the next few years. Because pushing buttons is something that. The robots can do. But if your job requires critical thinking, which I would argue is paramount and marketing expertise, I don't think you need to be concerned at all.

In fact, I think you can use these to expedite the stuff you don't wanna do, give you some more research and background and information and tools that you're. Disposal from which to make a more educated decision based on your expertise and experience now? Yeah, let's own it. I run a digital marketing agency.

I definitely think you should be paying for expertise. It's a bias I cannot remove. But especially when we look at something like a Google Ads campaign. I think that we have seen what automation can do in an account over the last couple years with things like P max where you suddenly get lots and lots of form fills from bucks, right?

Yeah. And spa like, and if your measurement, if what you tell the robot is get my form filled out, it will get your form filled out. But if you say to the machine, I want you to get me qualified leads for these opportunities, those levels of nuance are not currently processed in a way that's really meaningful. Glenn: Yeah.

So I'm gonna pull on a few strings there. The point about the machine, and let's say a. Person who is in-house says, alright, I ought to be able to, I can see that it is mostly automated. I can just take that over.

There's no need to pay another expert. What I'm hearing you say is there's two things they're missing. The first thing they're missing is, number one, a agency or an outside marketing consultant. They will.

Be able to explain what is happening and they ought to be able to anticipate what inputs that machine has to do to give you, like you said, that better outcome, like real people filling in forms, Versus. I set it up and I've got junk forms, but it did hit the number I gave it. And then the second thing is, so the, if you leave the agency out of it or you buy the line that it's only you and the platform you are taking onus on what that platform is going to do for you, and are you ready to demonstrate to your seniority that you've got, a really good view on how the money's being spent?

Lyndsey: I think that is very fair, right? Can you validate and justify the decisions that you're making? And I wholly believe. That you can do marketing in-house with a marketing team full of specialists who collaborate.

I think it's a fairly expensive proposition. But, I think that when we look at some of the automations and the tools that are being released, and I don't mean to sound like such a cynic. But they tend to favor the platform above all others. So P max benefited Google more than it benefited anybody else?

Glenn: Yep. Lyndsey: Meta rolling out, some more AI around who you target, how you target, what creative you serve them. Benefits meta a lot. Glenn: Yep.

Lyndsey: My director of paid media, Nathan would say. You never ask your barber if you need a haircut. Glenn: That's a presumptive Yes. It always will be.

Lyndsey: It right every time. Glenn: On that note about it, having the tool has so much of the information we are not saying. That the agency is all knowing either, and there's a fine line to walk here. Would you agree that what the agency is trying to do is say we can do some experimentation on this platform?

But, no tricks of our sleeve. We don't know truly either how it's going to work in your particular instance. Lyndsey: Absolutely. Glenn: But we're willing to do that with you.

And we're also able to treat it like it's our money, right? Yeah. That, that's certainly different than somebody in-house just going willy-nilly and saying let's try to experiment here. But how do you deal with, in the past, expertise was always that person could go and tell you something that would be very hard to get from.

I'm thinking of a tax lawyer, right? I'm not gonna go into the tax library and spend a day reading all that information. Lyndsey: Oh yeah. Glenn: The tax lawyer will say it's in or it's out.

In the case of this though, when the marketer is admitting that they don't know what it's going to do, How do they do that? And I'm, I want you to share with other agency folks what you think is the right thing to do so that they can preserve that thin veil of expertise, but deliver it in an, I don't know, message. Lyndsey: And a really nice, analogy because my husband is a tax lawyer, so I don't think you do that, but that worked out really well. Yes.

And by the way, I wouldn't even pretend to do my taxes because, they're too complicated and I don't want to, so you Glenn: married him from Lyndsey: perspective, that's part of the messaging as well, right? I had a new client kick off this morning. They have never run Google ads before. It is brand new.

He said, do you think what this spends? I can get 10 leads a month? I said, I don't know. Here's what I know.

Here's what we can look at. Here's the things. I don't think it's an unreasonable target based on their industry, their competition, estimated click costs, which like major result because of who that's coming from. And average conversion rates.

But it's all make believe numbers right now. Yeah. And I am very direct about that. Yeah.

If I could predict what Google Ads was going to do for any business, my background would be the ocean, not the records. Yeah. Be sitting on a beach doing that, I know that it's not outrageous, right? He didn't say a hundred.

If he'd said, could I get a hundred leads? I would've been like, uhoh, no. That feels Glenn: That's outside the bounds. Yeah.

Lyndsey: Wacky, but 10 feels potentially achievable. And when we launch, we're gonna collect data really quickly and we'll be able to say, this is trending towards that, or it's not. We're high or low. And adjust expectations as we go once we have real data to work with.

That's the line of conversation. Because to go into it and be like, yeah, we'll get you 10. No problem. Meanwhile, I have another, business that I talked to.

I told them the same thing and we are gonna lose the deal because another agency gave them charts and numbers with what they can expect. And I, it's all make believe to be and I don't, Glenn: yeah, Lyndsey: I never wanna put something on paper and say, this is how it's gonna work. When I couldn't possibly know that, let alone guarantee it. We might lose that opportunity as a result.

And I'm okay with that. Because in my 14 years what happens a lot of times is they call me in six months. Glenn: Yeah. Oh, I love that second story and, yeah, it's a sober moment for the marketing services person, but you've got to we're all in that boat.

Philosophers call it, there's determinism and there's, probabilities. We live in a probability world, not a deterministic world. You're right. You can't say what it will be.

But here's a weird situation I've seen I would like to know if you've seen it, is when people are walking around in their heads with that determinism, like they can. They know there's a black box here, but they feel like the challenge is to understand, I put this into the box and I should be able to say what comes out. got a company with an ad campaign and we were expecting, I. Let's say a result of five leads and it comes back and it gives 25 leads.

Now you would expect that everything else being the same, that the client's delighted with that. In this case, the client said, I'm not happy, and when asked why, they said it's because I can't determine how what we did made that come out. Lyndsey: Oh, so then it's totally unable to be replicated. Glenn: Maybe they were going with that or maybe all that they, were fighting was the fact that it broke how they thought it should work.

And they're comparing it to a toaster or a. A starter engine on a car. Yes. I turn the key.

I hear the, Lyndsey: oh yeah. Glenn: I think a really good marketing provider has to coach them through that moment to say, yeah, in the past that might have been what you listened for that, but. Lyndsey: I think that's fair. And I think this is where the value of marketing expertise really comes in.

And the human element is machines can predict based on previous data. So it can say, I put a thousand dollars in, I got 10 leads out. I'm gonna put $2,000 in, it's gonna gimme 20 leads out. But that never actually happens that way.

Or very rarely. We have a client I love who launched, some e-commerce campaigns. They performed very well. Okay.

It was a test that succeeded and their board said, let's 10 exit. Put in 10 times the spend. Now you would think it's a for-profit digital marketing agency. I would love to hear that.

But I was like, we can't 10 exit. There's not base for that. And there's no way that, to use the thousand equals 10. That 10,000 equals a hundred.

Glenn: No, Lyndsey: you got point of diminishing return. There's a limit of volume. There's only so many buyers, right? Glenn: Beyond the, conceivable inventory of every advertiser on that platform.

Lyndsey: I would really love to 10 exit. I just don't think that's a great idea. And you have to say that, right? I don't want your money.

That's not what I mean. I just don't want your money to do something I can't do because you're just gonna fire me in a couple months when it doesn't work, right? Glenn: So there's there those, if we were talking about bowling, this would be, you are preventing them from tossing a gutter ball right there. Lyndsey: Yes.

Glenn: But you are also saying, I can't guarantee that when you put the ball down the, even if it's going straight as a narrow down the lane, you may not knock down all the pins. That's Lyndsey: right. Glenn: I think that's important, and I think that the things that humans can do that. Will never be replaced.

'cause that's what it comes down to is a question of, alright, if you and I are, having the same conversation, we're right now in 2026, but let's say it's, 2031 and we're having this conversation, what can we grab a hold of that? We can say, okay, in a few years, no matter what the platforms do, we ought to still have humans in the loop doing. X, YZ. Are there some things like that, that you feel reasonably confident?

And I say this because you yourself have to eyeball a payroll every two weeks. And that's a question that has to be made. It has to be satisfied in your head. Yeah.

Despite all the nuttiness of what all of these trillion dollar companies are rolling down the pipe. Lyndsey: That's a great question. So I can start it easily with this. There is no member of my team that can be replaced with a robot right now.

There are a lot of reasons for that. One of 'em is just the actual management of a client account. Requires human interaction and collaboration with the human at the client. Glenn: Okay.

Lyndsey: That's what I can't do right now. Not well enough. There always has to be some oversight on platforms and sites. It almost doesn't matter if we're talking about ads or organic, because tools will give you best practices.

Glenn: Yes. Lyndsey: And sometimes best practices don't move the needle at all. So someone has to understand the nuance there. Someone has to tell you what all of it means and what we should do next.

Glenn: And let's remember that, that's not likely to be a junior person either. Lyndsey: No. There's this other thing that I don't know if I will describe but I will try. Glenn: Go for it.

Lyndsey: Humans make mistakes and they hurt. Then they don't make that mistake again. Whereas any of these automations, they're also gonna make mistakes. Yeah.

They are taught from humans so far. Yeah. They, it doesn't hurt at all. Glenn: No.

It's funny when you say that. If I'm having a chat with one, it has a colossal, what I will call brain fart and I will. Call it out on that, and what it says afterwards is just so dismissive of itself. Lyndsey: Oh yeah, I did do the thing you told me not to do.

Sorry about that. Glenn: Yeah, I did completely the opposite. And, you're right. In a human world, we use words like, that's a fireable offense, and you're damn right the person isn't going to do it again.

Yeah. Interesting. Lyndsey: Even if it's not for fire, just for our own egos, right? Yeah.

Glenn: We don't like, shame. We don't like Lyndsey: don't like making mistakes? Glenn: No. And those are learning experiences from when I was younger and dumber.

They shaped me into who I am today because I remember sometimes painfully Lyndsey: yes, Glenn: the exact thing I did when I did it that way, and why I'm not doing it that way ever again. Lyndsey: That's right. And I think that there is something in that element of the joy of the work and the pain of the mistakes. That is why the human always has to be involved.

I don't see, I just think that like human beings care or don't care. Yeah. If you care. It's a really powerful way to drive anything forward, especially a marketing campaign.

Glenn: Yeah. And I think there's actually a role that agencies have that can possibly even, go to a wider catchment area of those mistakes and help to build some processes to avoid them. And I'm thinking of account managers. Lyndsey: Yeah, Glenn: because it's got this it, by the way, I will say to anybody here, if you haven't had the chance to be an account manager or to be the client, the point of contact who works with an account manager on the other side, find some way to get that in.

The account management role for me is one where, let's say the client who's just coming on with you new says, you know what happened and why we ended up leaving our last agency or one of the last straws, it was because they did this. Furiously scribble that down, or the account manager on the inside the team, there's somebody who makes a blunder. The account manager has to wear it, get on the phone, explain to the client, and like they, they also do their own mistakes, but they have this beautiful, 'cause I think it is a gift.

They have the good fortune of piling on top mistakes that are one degree removed from them. Lyndsey: Yes. Glenn: And that's like turbo on how fast you're learning. What makes an account manager so important in this process, and what makes a good one?

Lyndsey: I always say, when a mistake is made, was it ignorance or apathy? Because ignorance can be solved and apathy cannot. We can learn. We can educate, we can teach, right?

Yeah. We cannot make anybody care. So I will say that the number one thing an account manager brings to the table is some level of like actual emotional investment in the success, right? Humans are built to want to win.

We're sitting here in football season and there's a lot of big emotions going on in my hometown. And we want to win. We want to see things succeed. We want to put that badge on our own shirt that we did it right?

Yeah. Look at what we did. That is, irreplaceable. If you don't, and I have told my team, if you don't care about an account that you're managing, we gotta have a conversation and we gotta.

Move it. We you can't hate a client. That's, that doesn't work in marketing, if you don't really like the client, the brand, the business that is gonna present problems, there's no paycheck big enough, right? Glenn: Yeah.

Lyndsey: So you've gotta care about it. I also think account managers are really like great account managers are really good at the insights part of the data. So they don't read you 45 numbers. They might have 45 numbers up on the screen, but they point out this one matters, this one doesn't.

With generative in search last year. Everybody's organic traffic went down, right? Yeah. So if as an SEO agency you've been measuring success on traffic, I have bad news that was Glenn: Oh yeah.

You're Lyndsey: numbers, Awful. If you weren't measuring it closer to revenue, that probably hurt a lot last year, right? Yes. And continues to hurt right now.

So saying, for example our site traffic is down 40%, but our traffic to our service pages is up 30%. That's the metric that matters there, right? They're going to the service pages, they're gonna the pages that someone might convert on if we're losing some of the traffic to the blog. 'cause it's being cited and generative.

That's okay. Glenn: So there's that education piece. But I think what I'm hearing also is if they, instead of being apathetic, they are empathetic. Yes.

They're also gonna figure out, how do I explain this to that client that was just glued to their, click through rates and their organic traffic numbers, help them understand the world has changed. Yeah. And how do I describe it in a way that, how do I make it so it doesn't seem like marketing is voodoo. Lyndsey: There's no voodoo here.

It is. A level of inputs and outputs to make things work and grow and change. And acknowledging what those are and what impact they have and agreeing to what those things would be. I think that's a great account manager.

Yeah. Glenn: It's a necessary skill as are the others inside of an agency. Media buying and traffic and creative and the whole like, agencies are funny things though, and I'd like your take on, I. What does size mean?

In the late 2020s with an agency, you can have a global HoldCo agency. And I know you're in Chicago area and there's a fair number of them there with offices. But also, you can have that digital nomad with a laptop claiming they're an agency too. You, and your agency are somewhere in the middle.

What does size have to do with it? Lyndsey: Here's, but Glenn: it's a little bit of a Goldilocks thing, don't you think? Lyndsey: Oh, yeah. Has to Glenn: be bigger, big enough to blank.

But small enough to blank blank blank. Lyndsey: Yes. The right fit for any different client is gonna be different based on what they actually need, what they're doing in house. Glenn: Yeah.

So that's true. I'll say for a small to medium business Lyndsey: Yeah. Business. I'm always leery of one digital nomad because everybody gets sick.

Everybody takes a vacation. Who's there then? Glenn: Yeah. Lyndsey: That's the only thing.

Now, can you get a hold of, now I know some really good independent people who I absolutely refer out recommend. As long as that part of the conversation is addressed, it's totally workable, right? Yeah, but you gotta address it because everybody gets sick and take vacations. It's like a, like a nanny.

Somebody still has to take care of the children, right? I somebody has take care of the ad dollars, right? So That's Glenn: right. Lyndsey: Instead of a nanny, maybe GETT daycare.

Daycare has a little more coverage. Somebody's out sick, you can still go. Glenn: Yeah. But of course.

Comparing a, high-end platform, a digital platform to a toddler. There's a whole bunch of other associations. Lyndsey: Oh, yeah. Glenn: Oh yeah.

You look away for a second and you look back and the room is just destroyed. Yes, I've seen that with a platform Lyndsey: and they're both, Glenn: you gotta stay on Lyndsey: top of it. Both getting really expensive in my experience. Coming off the holidays here.

Yeah. I think that the. What happens then for the size of the agency beyond an independent DE, is totally dependent on the team itself. We had a client, who years ago in the sales process told me we're debating between you and a very large agency.

and the challenge I have is that they are assigning like 13 or 14 people to our account, and you are telling me three or four. And I said, who are they? Because here's who mine are, right? Everyone on my team.

Is your senior level experience. No one's learning the fundamentals right now on your account. Glenn: Yeah. Lyndsey: So you may have one person with that level of experience on that account and 12 or 13 more junior people and now the size doesn't matter at all because having 14 people manage account or having three people manage account.

It really depends on who those people are, right? Glenn: Yep. Yeah. Some of them could be, if we equate it to physical good shipping, are, am I receiving three or four gold bars or am I receiving 13 big boxes of, goose feathers?

Like one, I definitely put more worth in not apples and apples. Lyndsey: Yes. Glenn: That's a really good way of putting it. And I think the other thing that is possibly concerning about those holding company agencies is they will, they may give you those individuals names and you may be able to.

See, impressive resumes behind them. But what you won't see is a HR table somewhere in their system, which allocates 6.25% of that person's time. And we've been talking all along about humans and how humans work.

One thing I know to be true about humans is they don't switch channels very quickly. So if they are supposed to, in that. 17 minutes at the end of a Friday. Make up for the fact that they were supposed to spend some time on your account this week is 17 minutes.

Looking through their own internal emails and CRM and a few dashboards, is that a substantial Lyndsey: right, Glenn: Impact to you? Or is it a check in the box for them? Lyndsey: The other element that I think happens with larger entities is it really depends who you get. There's no way that your key leaders who founded the business manage the business have the highest level of expertise, can totally manage the work of thousands of people or hundreds of people.

So every time we get another step removed, the more likely it is that someone who's not great works there for a little longer than they should. Whereas I can tell you at an agency of 20, It's, obvious when someone doesn't fit. Glenn: Everybody's gotta pull their weight. You spot it.

You can even tell if somebody's having an off day. Lyndsey: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, so that's a Glenn: very good point.

Lyndsey: I don't know how to manage those, larger teams 'cause I've never done it. But I do know that when we've competed against larger agencies, it has largely been the same theme, which is, I had someone great and it moved, or it wasn't great, but then they moved me to someone who was. Because the individual skill levels are different and you can write SOPs till the cows come home and you're still gonna have differences in how people run different campaigns. Glenn: Really like how you said that.

And this isn't, we're not aiming for perfection here. If people wanted to have that stellar person, they would have to do in olden days with farms, if you wanna have milk all the time, you gotta buy the cow. And so if they have them on staff, that's great, but they're paying for them whether they need them or not, day in, day out. And the whole agency model makes sense because it makes, economically expensive resources economically priced.

And whichever way someone wants to decide on how to resource this, there's no wrong answer. They're trade-offs. Lyndsey: That's exactly right. You can do it any number of ways and ultimately I think so much of it depends on the capacity of the person running the programs.

Can I take on more headcount and manage another human? Could I. Put an agency in here and defend that cost. And there's all these different factors that can come into play about when and where and how you do that.

Glenn: And for people who wanna find out about your agency, tell us what it is, tell us where you are, how people can get ahold of you. Lyndsey: Thank you so much. Digital Third Coast. You can find us at digitalthirdcoast.

com. You can email me at l madox@digitalthirdcoast.net just for fun. Glenn: No problem, Lindsay, thanks again for coming on the show.

Lyndsey: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Glenn: As always, hope that Lindsay's been able to give you some insight into how you do your marketing so you can do it even better.