Inside Waymo’s Growth Playbook

Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Today I had the opportunity to speak with Ori Hirschman, a very talented marketer who has a amazing career, uh, having worked with companies like Waymo, Tesla, Robinhood and Uber. We had a meandering conversation on a variety of topics including the importance of product market fit, how growth marketers can utilize AI. Uh, today, orey's three layers to growth marketing, which include awareness, monetization and engagement, and the most critical marketing tactic that startups can leverage today. I hope that you'll enjoy the conversation. I know I certainly did. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Catching Fire podcast where we talk to founders and marketers about great ideas and how they spread. I am, um, your host, Brian Karras, founder and CEO of Playbook Media and Grow Tell. And today I'm excited to have Ori Hirschman, who is an extraordinary marketer who has had a background at a who's who, uh, of tech companies including Waymo, Tesla, Robinhood and bcg, Uber Box, et cetera, Dapper Labs, you've done it all. Orey, really excited to have you on the podcast today and so you can drop some knowledge on our listeners.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me and I'm really excited to chat with you as well. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, uh, we, we really love that you're here today, so thanks for putting in the effort. So I guess to get started, you've had an impressive work background. As I mentioned, you worked with a lot of great companies like Waymo, Uber, Tesla, et cetera, Boston Consulting Group, and, uh, I'm curious if you were to say there's kind of a through line of all the different things you've done with these companies and the different marketing approaches that they have, what might you say that through line would be?

Speaker B: That's a fantastic question. So a lot of times the work I think that we do and the evolution of growth marketing as well is focused on acquisition, engagement, retention, and also churn work. The channels may change, right? At some points in my career, I was focused on lifecycle marketing. At some points in my career, I've been more focused on paid marketing and also more of the media and strategy as well. But with today in the AI age, I feel like a lot of it is getting blended again, where the generalist and the generalist with experience across different facets is able to kind of flex into these other opportunity zones. But typically pretty core growth marketing work from acquisition work, lifecycle strategy, product positioning, all of the works, essentially.

Speaker A: Interesting. I guess if you were to give us some, some examples of I uh, mean product positioning for example. How do you think product positioning, let's say for one of the companies. I don't want to make you choose which one, but can you give us some examples of how you've thought about product positioning for some of these businesses?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think, you know, it differs by channel when we think about it from a performance marketing perspective. We're thinking of messaging and also creative as well. So we're thinking of what message is going to resonate best to audiences. So if you're with an automotive brand and you're trying to get to a male focused audience or a female focused audience, what creative and what messaging is going to really inspire that audience to take the next click and to take the next step. But that also translates down funnel as well. And I think like what I've seen from some of the larger companies is that uh, personalization is an end to end game versus just unique in silos on channels. Want to cater to users through a personalized experience, end to end and to really try different messaging about the product in different points of the funnel because different, different products have different purchasing cycles. Right. So purchasing a car or taking a ride on rideshare or maybe making a trade on an app, those are all different decisions but those are consumer decisions at the end of the day. So there's, there's a similarity but there's also kind of, you need to understand at the end of the day what is the user really trying to do and what is the end goal.

Speaker A: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. When you think about personalization. I would think about it as a bit of like segmentation. Right. I think uh, a lot of people like to throw around the word personalization as it's going to be a one to one match between messaging and uh, and what somebody's going to see. Right. Uh, but in my experience personalization really comes down to more. How do you segment out those users and then speak to that segment in a way that you think is going to be more related to them? So I guess for example, let's say with Uber, I think uh, I could go into Uber as a consumer. You go, you know, just general consumer. I can go into Uber as a driver, but I can also go into Uber as a business user. And so those are like three different segmentations that I think of that I see. Does it get more granular than that? Are these businesses thinking about more hyper segmentation and personalization and then how does it break it out across the user experience from say acquisition to retention.

Speaker B: Well, you're hitting on a really key point. So I think a lot of, I think a lot of the bigger businesses are trying to get as hyper personalized as they can. So as you're thinking about the different information or touch points to sign up for a business or to purchase a product, they're going to be using that in order to help kind of influence you down the line to that product path or maybe write a different product line depending on the purchase structure as well too. So I think uh, that's the first skill. But I think like, you know, typically when we think about these performance channels, if you're running top of the funnel campaign or awareness campaigns and you're just prospecting on some of the larger media networks, you're. There's only so much personalization you can do if you're not playing around with audiences or trying to segment it that way. Right. Everything is getting simplified today and the algorithm is doing the work for you. So we're really seeing it's more about the, the messaging from that component. So I think as a whole you're, you're completely right. The brands are using a baseline of personalization and then they're trying to get as hyper personalized as they can when they're serving you that offer down the funnel. Eventually.

Speaker A: Got it. So it's really about, you know, you come in a little bit more broad but then over time you're able to learn more about that user. So then you can uh, give them the right offers or the right messages. Push, like push, uh, you know, a push on a mobile app or an email or a text message and say, hey, this is, you're part of this cohort. We're going to try to give you this offer. And um, then they're sort of ab splitting that, saying you have business users on the one end, you can get, you know, 10x points with your Amex card or you know, you get part of the loyalty program. If you take this many rides, you'll get a, you know, one free or something.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And that's I think, why alignment from all marketing functions into product and I think like key decision makers and stakeholders is really critical as you're looking to build this personalization machine. Because it's really one funnel. Right. At the end of the day, maybe there's multiple pathways, but you have, you always have a funnel.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'd, I'd agree with that. You know, one of the things that you mentioned was on the fact that targeting is kind of going away within Your advertising, right. And it becomes more about the creative. And that's something that we've been saying for a long time, which is, you know, creative drives, targeting, uh, and that if you build the right creative to the right audience, then you can break into a new audience. And yes, you could tag that and say, hey, did they come in from this particular creative? And you might be able to segment them a little bit coming in off of a UTM or something. I'm not a huge believer in that. I think that a lot of people end up seeing multiple types of creatives before they end up transacting. But the idea that you can personalize the creative to a segment I think is really important. And a lot of people don't necessarily get that. They don't realize that you could create creative that goes towards, uh, red states versus blue states. You could do towards men versus women, young versus old, different ethnic groups, different psychographic buying behaviors. Right. And so that diversity of creative is what allows you to reach a diverse audience and bring in more people than maybe you've taught the algorithm to be interested in to in today. So you can kind of, you can create that diversification.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Like I, I, I was just having this conversation the other day where I was telling a, you know, reminiscing with a friend about how 10 years ago when we'd log on to Ads Manager or any of the major networks, you would have, you know, 10 to 20 different campaign types, right. Agencies, uh, would really sell the people behind the keys versus some of the other services they had as well too. And the game has completely flipped. Like, you know, you have advantage plus you have performance max and those are gaining more and more market share. And what are you really seeing on that side? The creative is really the impactful lever that's really changing it. And you're getting more control in these. Like finally you're able to do some more just regional based testing and maybe you're able to do a little bit more with age, but we're seeing that simplification in real time where I wouldn't be surprised one day if it was like one to two different objectives. Right? Like maybe just reach out, simple conversion and uh, maybe it would go that way. But you remember the days, right, when the agencies would really sell the wizards behind the keys, right? And that kind of, I feel like that's kind of gone away. Right.

Speaker A: So yeah, I don't think it's as strong as it used to be. For better or worse. You know, I have a, I have a theory on all of this PMAX advantage plus stuff. My theory is this, I'm curious to get your, your feedback on this, but I think that they're taking bad inventory and they're mixing it with good inventory so that way they can monetize all inventory. Right. And uh, we used to do this in lead generation back in my first career out of college. We uh, we used to sell leads to education institutions and we had multiple different sources of those leads. And so our best source of leads, SEO, right. Organic search traffic, highest converting, also the highest profit margin for us. But then we would, the worst converting leads was like co registration paths, hey, get a free ipod if you sign up for this lead form or uh, you know, email marketing, those kinds of things. And we would just blend all that stuff together. So yeah, we could maybe charge a little bit less for that high end stuff but we could, you know, generate tons of volume and sell it at a decent price with the low end crap leads. And at the other end. Right. We could get do a lot more volume that way. And I feel like it's the same thing here, right. It's like you end up on search partner network or you're on some, you know, audience network here or into audiences that they know are low value audiences but that nobody would buy. But if you mix it with the high end stuff, it all kind of comes out fine. Right.

Speaker B: I think, you know, it's, I've, I've, I've seen a lot of different theories and I've heard a ton of different takes on it. What I do know is that the simplification era is 100% here. It's hard to know beneath the hood because you also hear at the same time that some people are having really good success with some of these channels as well too. Right. And if you think about from the advertiser's perspective, onboarding smaller businesses and onboarding some of those medium accounts, the ones that they want to grow, it is becoming a lot easier today too. So you could reach out for somebody to handle your paid media, that's for sure. And there's a lot of different ways today whether you're doing that, you know, offshore, onshore. Right. There's so many different mechanisms to get things done. But it's also becoming a lot easier for the mom and pop shop to log on and to not have too much distraction and to onboard to a campaign. So I think the market of advertising, there's always like a, a lever where to some people that are playing a very sophisticated, very margin based game Right. The E commerce, I think, you know, I've seen over time that they've also become more receptive as a whole to some of the, some of these simplified channels because you know, I think meta, uh, Google, they know that they need to build towards these players as well also. So I think it's definitely, definitely very interesting. But I've definitely heard what you've noted as well. But I've heard many, many theories on this as well.

Speaker A: Well, you know, one of the things that I think a lot about right. Is I would agree that these channels are still as powerful as they've ever been. And I think the algorithms and the AI are extremely powerful. Like one of the things that we focus on the most for our clients and we buy a lot on these is to get the signals right, to teach their systems as much as we possibly can about what's happening with our clients. Right. So strengthening that signal to get their algorithms to lock in to the right, the right people. And I think they do a great job of that. Right. And so for being a black box, absolutely. If you can teach it the right things, go after the right types of people, then I think it, it adds a lot of value. And then on the other end, right. The creative is a big differentiator. If you have great creative and that creative will resonate with the audience and you'll get a higher, much higher click through rate and then you'll be rewarded from their algorithms, um, as a result of having good creative. So there's a lot I think that marketers can still do. It's. But it, to your point, it's a lot less around kind of the guy behind the keyboard launching a thousand ad sets.

Speaker B: Exactly. And I think one of the big changes that marketers have had to really like adopt to. And you know, I think the growth marketer especially is asked to do a lot of different things between analysis to experimentation design, to thinking through all these paid mechanisms. Right. But I've noticed that with this simplification and by making it easier to achieve clicks and to get traffic, which it's getting easier and easier. Right. To launch something and to get some kind of clicks towards there, the impact of those clicks are debatable. Right. But it's getting easier to get that traffic. What the marketers now are really focused on is what is that post click experience. So what is your offer, what is your messaging, what is your flow to actually get somebody in because, and that's where I've seen kind of the next shift and the next focus as well. Too, right. Tightening up that experience, post it. And that's where you're going to see the most impact because, you know, a lot of products need that support and there's some channels like, you know, TikTok, uh, for certain, certain products that works really well, you don't need to leave the platform.

Speaker A: But. Yeah, yeah, well, I think that that one, I mean that makes a lot of sense. You know, the, that was going to be sort of where I was getting at was if you even the playing field for everyone, right, Then everyone has access to the same tools. And so how do you get ahead? How do you get an edge versus your competition? Because marketing is all about having an edge. And it used to be that if you had someone behind the keyboard who's really smart and could launch a ton of, ton of ad sets, that was your edge. But now that's kind of gone. Right. And so people have to figure out what is going to be the next thing that allows them to get better growth. And I think to your point, conversion rate optimization, the right offers and driving customer lifetime value has got to be a big, big component of that 100%.

Speaker B: And I think that's exactly why, because of what you just said. You know, I think in the day of AI, uh, where creating and building is becoming, it seems easier and also cheaper to create and build that engagement mechanism. And the offer past the click is going to start off mattering a lot and a lot more because now, you know, replicating technology or replicating businesses that also work well, it's never been easier to handle, you know, all of these different facets. But how are you able to actually convert your offer, grow community, make people care about what you're trying to pitch? And I think that that's always kind of been the hard part, you know, with trying different digital businesses as well. But I, I feel like now it's just even more of an emphasis.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%. You mentioned, you know, the AI era. I'm curious, what are you seeing in AI? What are you seeing marketers use and are you using any AI tools in your everyday.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, I, I have the, the AI tools that are. Must have, which I say ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, you know, I have different use, you know, and everybody I've heard likes them for, for different things. So it's becoming kind of, you know, what, what is your taste for some of this stuff?

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: But there's also so many opportunities today, you know, if I'm just thinking about the marketer, you know, Part of what I've seen just having worked in growth marketing is that there's always different teams and resourcing inside of companies but it's always, you know, a game of prioritization and advocating for those resources. So a lot of times marketers would need to analyze, visualize, be able to sell different teams on these projects and getting these initiatives done. And even from the agency perspective, right, you need a good partner internally to get the plans done so you can get the results that you want to achieve and succeed as well too. And today AI, ah, just really helps polish and round up the marketer, right? Like, and I really think for people starting their careers like learning how to master these tools and understanding that at uh, a lot of companies you may be asked to utilize SQL, right to query or that uh, or that there are marketers today that are learning Python so they're able to run their own visualizations and be kind of their own data orgs and prove out the impact of their work as well. These are very common things that are happening today. And a couple years ago you would need to invest months if not years into these skills to really understand them. And today you have a partner with AI that's able to help get you to the next level. And if you're able to polish like around these edges, I think the success you're going to get is amazing. So I think you should be using AI in every way. Like even if you're a creative person and ideas come to your head 24, 7 utilize AI to pick at those ideas, ask it to give you negatives and positives and also suggest 10 more ideas that are similar to it, uh, to 10x your creative output as well too. So I see it as being able to help us strategize, also being able to help us get work done. But the impacts are amazing. You don't 100% of the time need to wait for somebody on the data side to analyze some of this information as long as you have the proper safeguards and in order to have the AI analyze it as well too. Right? So you know, there's, there's so much that we can do with it in my opinion.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I totally agree. It's amazing how fast it's moving and how much it's improving productivity. I've been reading about companies that, you know, they're able to do what usually take a hundred to 200 engineers and they have, you know, 20 people. Uh, I got a friend who runs a uh, a business and he says that him and his CTO have learned to really lean into the AI. And now it feels like they have a team of 20. That's just the two of them. Right? It's 10xing the engineers. And I think it has the same capacity to do it with marketers in a lot of ways. One of the interesting things I've been seeing is vibe coding. Have you gotten into vibe coding at all?

Speaker B: I have, but, uh, I'm still trying to get a, uh, project end to end. So I've noted, you know, I've had that aha moment. Feels like the Matrix, right? It's coding. You feel like you have that next app, but then, you know, taking that, the last mile solution for taking that and making that a thing. I think that's, that's the part I'm still working on. And like, for an idea person, sometimes having AI, uh, you can, you can get stuck in the conceptualization. Right. So gotta choose one of them and take it and take it. And I feel like that that's the next part of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I haven't started on it yet, uh, because I feel like it's a slippery slope. I got so many priorities, it's hard to add that, that, uh, that hobby into it. The Catching Fire podcast is brought to you by growtal. Growtal is a network of freelance marketing professionals for all of your marketing needs. If you're looking to build your own marketing team, you can do it through Grotel. Starting with a fractional CMO and then building out all of the team members, including your paid social, paid search experts, your SEO, SEO experts, and everyone in between. Go to grow tell.com www.gr and get started today. But I love that, you know, I have another buddy who's showing me, he's like, oh, yeah, I create these amazing landing pages at five minutes. You know, five minutes, repl it, bang. It just pops out, landing page and you, uh, know. Whereas usually it's gonna take at least a day from someone who really knows what they're doing, and lots of go through three design phases and then it's going to go over to dad and put together. Then there's going to be a bug, you know, just to get a landing page up. Next thing you know, it's been a month, right?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Yeah, Five minutes is really nice.

Speaker B: When I think about some of those technologies and I think about like, you know, like the evolution to get there, like, you know, the wicks and the squarespace and the lead pages, which made, you know, starting any digital business super easy. And then Eventually. Now we have the Replit and the Lovables, which you can take like, you know, if you have a custom local business and you have a unique booking structure, you could explain it and really own your own infrastructure end to end. And I've seen Replit's amazing. I love Lovable for also design and also being able to visualize and, you know, they all have their unique strengths. So I feel like we're not probably very far away from the 2 to 3 click launch. Like, I feel like soon there'll be that integration, right? Like launch on iOS, launch on Android 5, code it all the way in. Because I think in some ways, as long as there's still quality control, everybody wins, I think by just making it easier and easier.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, it's a really crazy time we live in. Okay, so, uh, let's getting back to my canned question. So what, in your opinion, in your opinion and experience, what are the top three fundamental foundations for growth in a business?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think, number one, understanding your awareness layer. So who are you actually targeting? Who are you trying to get to? Your offering to your business to your landing pages as well too? I think the second thing is understanding how you make money. Right. A lot of times when we target growth, we may target it to the overall business, but is there just one business line that's really driving the revenue and the profit? So really understanding the unit economics and aligning specifically your growth to how, uh, you're monetizing is super, super important. And I think the final component of that is that engagement layer as well too. How are you communicating? Which channels are you using? Are you constantly optimizing? Are your offers coming in right. Accordingly? And are you able to reach users at these magic moments? And if you're doing all of those together, I think that makes for really great growth. And also, finally, I will say one more thing. I know you asked for three, but I think product market fit. I, uh, really do believe that the best growth happens when there's a product that people want and a product that people love. And I really think that's when marketing is most impactful as well, because we've all been there. When we've gotten a product that we've expected it to be A and maybe it's B, and we haven't had that good moment. But when you want a product and the marketing and growth also align, then I think it's very powerful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I feel like that's one of the hardest ones, is that there are a lot of People that build products and they don't have product market fit. Right. And you can get traction even though you don't have product market fit. And I feel like that's probably one of the hardest things, right? You're getting traction. Your customers aren't really sticking around. The churn is too high, the CAC is higher than you want it to be and you get obsessed with these unit economics. If I can just get the CAC down to $20 instead of 40 then I can make it work, you know, 200 versus 800 or whatever is in the case of maybe a SaaS product. Right. Or if I can just get the churn rate down. Right now it's at uh, 30%, but I really need it at ah, 15. Right. And it's like these entire, you know, one to two order orders of magnitude away, but somehow they think it's gonna be doable if I can just improve this little piece or that little piece. But what they don't realize is that they don't really have product market fit. If you shut off the advertising in the top of the funnel, the business is gonna go away in one to two years because everyone's just gonna churn out. And that's, that's a hard thing. I think, uh, you know, a lot of times people don't wanna admit that they don't have the right mousetrap and they just are gonna go turn around and blame sales, blame marketing, rather than coming back and saying, are we really building what we say we're building? And is the customer really want what we say we're building? Right.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. That's what, you know, having worked with some of these bigger brands, I've seen, especially when somebody really wants a product and marketing understands a customer like you noted, and is able to really deliver on the messaging and on those magic moments, then that's when it works out really well. And I think that's exactly why. Also, you know, there were so many companies during kind of the rise of E commerce in the last 10 to 15 years that were really performance driven. And we've seen that if you haven't a invested in some of these more organic and awareness channels. So if you're not utilizing all the, I call it the video scroll economy. So TikTok YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels. Right. Even on, um, Facebook as well. If you're not producing content there, if you're not trying to rank in your SEO and really getting into the AI rankings today too, in giving yourself that awareness layer and you're always Spending for awareness and conversion, then it's going to get, it's definitely going to get a little bit sticky. And I think like conceptually sometimes you know, companies are really in the weeds of maybe designing and trimming some costs. Right. In terms of production, marketing costs historically have kind of always gone up. Right. It costs more and more to invest, it's more and more competitive to compete and it's not getting any cheaper. Right. Like there's ways to get more awareness but like we said, getting a click doesn't always mean you're going to get that purchase. So as a whole like all these factors together, like you mentioned, if, if you're only performance driven fully and you don't have that product market fit, it's going to be very difficult.

Speaker A: Yeah, well you know it's funny, one of the things you mentioned on is, is that everything is getting more expensive. And I, and I generally agree with that. Especially uh, if you look at Google or you look at Meta or you look at the kind of the obvious players in the market. But one of the things I'm really obsessed with and I think you're hitting on is the initial layer of awareness, right? And what are people looking for from that awareness layer? And I think that they've gotten duped over the years into thinking that they need an immediate return, they need this trackable return within a seven day period or maybe a 30 day period. Right. And you know the 30 day has largely gone away because of cookie windows. And so you know, used to be you had one 730 day attribution but now almost everyone's looking at one or seven day attribution. Uh, and they're looking for some UTM click to come in and they're thinking about that as what success looks like. And so as a result the channels that can drive that sort of immediate feedback loop are, they've gotten very expensive. So we all know the cpcs and Google have gone through the roof. But you know the CPMs in Meta where you uh, know when I was working there it was 7, 6, 7 $8 for CPM and now you $20 easy, if not more. But if you're just to take a step back and look at well what are my alternatives here you can buy TV inventory for $8, you can buy it programmatically for $8. Right? Now what's the difference between that and a feed based ad on meta? On a feed based metal on Meta, you scroll right past it. A TV ad, you, you're forced to watch 30 seconds of sound on Storytelling on the big screen. Why are people not going to tv? I don't understand why there isn't a massive gold rush of money going into television.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And also I think with the evolution of connected TV as well, right, Platforms like Mountain that make it super, super simple or even on Hulu natively. And I know Netflix is also expanding. I mean everybody's waiting for, for some audience control and an uh, ads manager there. So, so you're able to launch quickly. But I completely agree with you. And what about some of the old school tactics, right, like direct mail I've seen as being super impactful, right. You are going to try 10 to 20 times. But why do we think Chase, Wells Fargo, bank of America have us all on an endless loop right till the end of time? Because at some point it actually works as well too, Right. And there's a conversion element there. So uh, I think that's, that's, that's a couple things. Another tactic that I've been hearing, I mean like today I feel like the next blend also of go to market and tools like Clay, I've been trying to dive a little bit more into that side of it and learn a little bit more on the account based side because I feel like these tools are making it so easy to go to market today. And there is tools like instantly also, you know, with old emailing and uh, you know, I've been on the receiving end of it. I'm sure you have as well with a lot of different offers that are coming in. And I think that's where it's a hit or miss with the personalization side. But you know, there's so many ways to get that message across and that channel diversification is, is really, really important. And we know that these users aren't just on meta, they're not just on Google. They could be on Reddit, they could be on TikTok, they could be right at home with direct mail. So some of these, some, um, you know, it really depends. But you have to experiment, you have to experiment with the different ones. And if it doesn't work, don't just leave it off forever.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: That's another thing. Sometimes you have to try again.

Speaker A: I feel like the opportunity has moved from the really smart uh, keyboard on Google or in Meta Marketer as being a differentiator to now understanding an omnichannel environment and how to allocate your budget properly across the different channels in a thoughtful manner to where you're not overspending on the same audiences across channels that you're getting incrementality from those and that you're spreading your budget into the right audiences in the right places versus just owning a single channel. Because I just don't think that the opportunity is there any longer. I think that that has shifted under people's feet and they need to really be thinking about this omnichannel, full funnel approach to, you know, being everywhere where the consumers are. Because consumers are everywhere. They don't spend all their time on television, they don't spend all their time on, on Instagram. They're flipping around all over the place. And you want to hit the right people in the right segments.

Speaker B: Exactly. And I think it actually, you know, you mentioned something earlier in the conversation that kind of, you know, stuck with me. You don't always need to expect an immediate return. And I know that's sometimes difficult to hear, but like you mentioned, the point of TV shouldn't always to be make you, hey, I saw this really cool product, let me go buy it. It should be a mechanism, right? A touch point in the journey. And maybe that's not the best channel to get that convers. It's an amazing channel for awareness. Like you said, you can't skip through it. Right. You could hypothetically not pay attention, but that's still going to play out for, for the effect of it. Right. So think. I think it's very interesting. There's going to be multiple touch points as well too. And you need to have some model like you mentioned, that can measure that incrementality, which is a very hot, hot word today. I feel like in the marketing world as a whole. And uh, I think at the end of the day it really just boils down to what is causing impact and what has an effect as well. And you can get complicated with it complex. And there's a lot of solutions out there also that measure it. And I saw Meta recently also added, I think incrementality testing or some kind of metric. I think in the last few days I've been reading a lot about it too. So I think it's, I think it's certainly very interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think like, uh, you know, the awareness layer, a lot of people don't understand the buyer's journey. They don't really think about the buyer's journey. They think the buyer's journey starts at like, oh, I saw something within the last seven days and then I bought it. But no, if anybody's honest with themselves, there's almost zero things that I buy within that time period. And I Like, to use an example, I have, I bought a tonal a couple years ago. Right, Fair enough. It's a workout machine that's on your wall.

Speaker B: LeBron James, I think is what LeBron

Speaker A: James AD was the first one I saw on it. And it was on Instagram. Right. But I researched the hell out of that. I did so many searches. I looked at all the alternatives. I thought peloton, I looked at different apps. I did this, I did that. And. And because it was a high consideration purchase, I wasn't willing to just buy it. It took me over a year before I determined to. I'm going to go in and make this investment. And I'm sure I saw an ad within the last seven days of me buying that and it had nothing to do with it. Uh, the attribution in my mind goes all the way back to the LeBron ad, but it was also everything else in between. It was their website, it was the community of people talking about them, the positive reviews they have, the feature sets they built in, the fact that you can get spotter mode and eccentric and all these different things. Right. So all of that played into my buying decisions.

Speaker B: Think of how much chaos he caused internally with all the teams saying no. We caused him to convert. Yeah, right, we caused him to convert. But yeah, uh, you're 100% right. Like that journey, the more expensive the product and the more critical decision it. It makes, even up to, like the home buying process. Right. I remember earlier on in my career I worked at a real estate startup and I saw kind of the home buying, real estate experience as a whole. Like, consumers are different and sometimes consumers will shock you. Right. Maybe there's that one magic ad that could have one shot converted you as a whole. Unlikely. But there's always those moments, Right. For me, it's typically like the experience needs to be good. That'll happen to me on an Amazon, right? Like I'm on Amazon, get a really personalized product, maybe that's good. You know, in two clicks, especially with the easy buy, you could be out of there. So it's easy. But, you know, the more complex the process, if you need to especially talk to somebody, especially, you know, that can take a little bit of time.

Speaker A: Well, and the thing is, is when you bought that thing on Amazon, you were at the bottom of the buyer's journey. There's very few people who are there who are actually searching. And you bought it because you were searching and uncertain if you would have seen an ad two weeks before about that product that had A celebrity endorsement or it had a really fun jingle or a, uh, really great product demonstration, or they talked about the science behind it or something. Right. That you remembered. And then you're like, I do need that thing. You probably would go and just buy that thing. You wouldn't even have searched on Amazon. Right. For sure.

Speaker B: That's where I think a lot of

Speaker A: marketers are missing today is like, just tell the story up front to your likely buyer and then now you're in their head. And when they get to that point of purchase, guess what? You're the incumbent and the next guy has to upend you for you to lose the sale. You have the sale by default.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And the consumer's path is. Is rarely kind of like in a straight line from end to end. Right. It's squiggly, it goes in different directions, and you kind of zigzag, like you mentioned, until you get that magic moment. And it's why I think a lot of marketers too, especially on the performance side, they've been thinking about frequency. They've been trying to kind of think of what is the right amount that we should be reaching people without tiring them out. What are the right touch points? And like we mentioned before, really connecting the dots digitally and having a different message for every funnel and finding an impact for those messages as well, too.

Speaker A: One more question for you. All right, so you're super plugged into Silicon Valley. Yes. What are some strong marketing trends and ideas that you're seeing? What's the latest? What's helping to move brands forward?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think there's three things, things that I've been noticing lately. I think the first one we've been touching a lot during this conversation. So hyper personalization. Right. So the high touches of the world, the being able to connect all of your data and to find those consumer touch points and making audiences. So one, like I mentioned, company that's really blowing up is High Touch. I've seen a lot of people have gone their way and there is a lot of movement in that space. I think the second one that can't be ignored is incrementality. Like we've mentioned, it is the word, I mean, maybe the word of the year in marketing today and in digital as well. Marketers are looking for impact. They're looking, like we said, to understand what's happening beyond the click. They're looking to understand what is impacting what. And incrementality is becoming such a staple in departments of all sizes that I've seen As well too. Everybody's focused on it. And I think the third trend that absolutely cannot be ignored is just the creative optimization AI today in all of the different apps today that help marketers between video generation to the early days of AI with Jasper.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Jasper is still around and big and serving a lot of marketing teams on the creative and the copy and the templating side to even newcomers like Icon. I've seen recently, which have said they really streamline a lot of the ad creation process from end to end for statics and I think for some UGCs, you have synesthesia, you have Heygen. So it's really, for marketers, look at it this way, it's kind of a buyer's choice market market. You are able to go to any of these tools more than ever and you're able to pilot some of these strategies, right? Like before you go fully into an influencer kind of strategy, maybe you utilize AI influencers. I've seen a lot of smaller brands have been utilizing them and see if you're getting pull, if that content style is working better before you fully invest into going down an influencer strategy. Right. Whether you go small or big or for example, right. If you're looking for early impact, you can use tools like Houzz, right. For some of their incrementality testing and some of the aspects that they're pitching as well. So marketers have just an incredible opportunity from end to end. But those, those are kind of the three trends that I've noticed.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree. There are, there are a lot of tools out there that are popping up and I feel like it's a, it's definitely a bit of a buyer's market because there's so much competition. Right. Come in, test a bunch of them out, see what seem working the best, go in, RFP them, you know, talk to a bunch of these guys, talk to their sales teams. And then, you know, I think that there are a lot of tools that kind of do the same thing too, right. There's so many media mix model tools out there and you know, a lot of different things like around copywriting, etc. Etc. And so it just, you know, going out and shopping around and then negotiating on pricing. I think there's a lot of opportunity because the tools are getting really good. The AI behind them is adding a lot of value and you can get good pricing because a lot of people want that growth and they realize the Competition is stiff.

Speaker B: 100%. 100%. I think that's a critical point. Just like for marketers or for anybody starting with some of these tools, like don't be alarmed, like if you Google for one of them and you see a thousand different, similar ones, there's different ones that are going to work better for your niche situation and for what you're trying to do. You just need to experiment a lot with them as well. And a lot of them offer just the ability to start for free. So if you know, pending no legal issues. Right. And especially if you operate your own thing, play around with some of these tools. Right. They're the age of the user friendly kind of tool for all of these products is I think upon us as well, there's a slight learning curve. Right. But I mean if you've been around creative and marketing or you, you like it, I think it, they're pretty intuitive.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I would, I would agree with that. And I would suggest just be careful of snake oil too. There's so many out, so many people out there that are selling things that are, you know, half baked or whatever. So make sure that they have truly strong reputation and try to avoid those year long contracts. I'd say stick to quarterly at a maximum.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, this has been a really, really great conversation. Orey, I guess last question for you. If you were to be talking to any startup right now, what's your number one growth tip?

Speaker B: Fantastic question. Number one growth tip for any startup right now is nail the messaging. Understand what you're selling and if you sit around a room, you know, whether you're a team of three or your team of five and each and every person in the startup has a different description about what you sell or what you do. That is where you need to start. Nail that messaging component. Understand who you're, who you're really selling to, who the consumer is and really work backwards from there and make your strategy map from there. But the messaging today, in a time where it's so easy to create, has never been more critical. And we're seeing this right with AI agents, Right. There's so many amazing technologies where you're there and you're like, oh, this looks like another one of them. The last 5,000 of these I've basically seen, right. So that messaging layer is becoming so, so critical as a whole. That's the number one tip.

Speaker A: Great, great advice. You have to be very clear on who you're servicing and saying the right things to them and be clear about your product differentiation and how you're positioned in the market. You don't get those things right. All the ads in the world aren't going to fix your problems. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks so much again, Orey, for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation. I know our listeners will as well.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.