1031: AI Challenges Solved: Specificity’s Data-Driven Marketing Mastery with Marketing Consultant Jason A. Wood

Robert Plank 0:06 Welcome back. This is the marketer of the J podcast. Jason a wood is here, and he's the CEO of specificity. They are a cutting edge digital marketing firm, and they are rewriting the rulebook for strategy. Now Jason is a trailblazer in the world of digital marketing. He's all about that disruptive approach. He's a sales visionary. So we're going to be finding out about Jason's marketing strategies, his successes and failures, what has him excited? So Jason, glad to be speaking with you.

Jason Wood 0:36 Yeah. Thanks for having me. Oh, man, I appreciate it. Appreciate you too. And

Robert Plank 0:39 so we give a little bit of an intro about you. But as far as like, in like elevator pitch terms, right, what has you excited? And what do you have going on? That should be exciting. Us too.

Jason Wood 0:49 Yeah, so the evolution of tech stacks has new really excited right now, not just ours. But others I'm seeing around, I'm finally seeing some traction get get taken to the market about this whole audience identification piece, I mean, big tech is, has gone all in on their data. And it's garbage. It's not it's not garbage. But it's not nearly what they claim it is the iOS app date killing app tracking data. And there's just so much waste in ad tech and social media right now, because of the date of volatility. So I'm loving, seeing a lot of tools come out some of the AI space, some of the building addressable audiences outside of the ad tech space, like we're doing a specificity. And I think that's a positive step in the right direction for

Robert Plank 1:30 our industry. And that sounds wonderful. And that's what they've always promised us right? That you can just narrow that down that exact customer and leave everyone else alone and just get like you're exactly dialed in. And so So how do we get there, like you said, that kind of the what social media has done is kind of garbage. But then when you kind of take it in your own hands and like use some of these these tools, these tech stocks on your own, then you can get things figured out. And so so like, what what do you do along those lines? Like, what have you figured out? What can you share with us?

Jason Wood 1:59 Well, you know, I mean, we figured out a lot. I mean, we've been at this for quite a while one thing I would tell you is that I don't trust any of these platforms to build the audience. And whether you're talking about programmatic DSP, whether you're talking about connecting TV platforms, whether you're talking about social media platforms, you're going to build these audiences. And they are not what they used to be. I mean, you want to target some simple on Mattis platform with you know, say Facebook and Instagram, and each one homeowners a significant percentage of that home that audience want on the property they live in. So it's all weighted and contextual data now, and it's all this. And they claim it's not as they remove, you know, literally hundreds of 1000s of targeting selects out of their platform, that the big tech industry has grossly underplay the net negative effect, the iOS 14 Five update had on their ability to, in a creepy way, track our data. So what we're doing is we're building these audiences outside of the ad tech universe in the data market. And instead of going through, you know, the second problem in our market is these activation platforms, where you go in and you say, Okay, here's I built this data set your profile, or we were just talking to a client who gets you know, Insurance Claim profiles in the healthcare space, and they want to activate the audience to publish, you know, ads to it, you go into those platforms, and half of them are being sued right now for such a large percentage of bot traffic, because they grabbed a bit, oh, they grabbed every made possible. That's how they monetize these mobile ad IDs and volume. And then you got an audience, it's 20, or 25, or 35%, bot traffic. And it really has a net negative effect. Because the analytics that come out of those campaigns, they're just not impactful anymore. So we solved that problem by building the audiences and activating ourselves, and we just eliminate the ability for these nefarious players. In our industry. It's kind of counterintuitive to say it, because most industries, the bigger the companies, the better the credibility in our industry, what we're finding what I think a lot of people are finding, the bigger the entity, the more disparate their data sets are, and the more errands or data is, and

Robert Plank 3:58 I can see what how that could be where they like, I mean, meta has grown to be so huge. I don't even I can't even begin to imagine the amount of junk on there, right, the amount of bot traffic and when they're trying to link up like this person's Facebook account, and like, are they a homeowner, and they do like merge all these tables and all this, like big data? Like, it just it boggles my mind how any of that would even even make sense or even, you know, like, line up the way that it should. And so you're saying that it's not a magic bullet. You can't just say, hey, Meda Can Can I trust you? And can I just target the homeowners, you say you need to kind of take it into your own hands and maybe work with a company such as yours, such a specificity. And so what kind of stories like that do you have to unpack for us? You mentioned the insurance a little bit but like, Do you have a fun story to share with us to get a give us an idea of some company came to you they had a problem? You worked your magic you meet things super rosy, what do you have to tell us? Well,

Jason Wood 4:57 we've got dozens of stories like that that are there. current campaigns we've got hundreds over the last few years. I mean, when you focus your digital marketing strategy by taking the first step intelligent, which is that audience ID piece, we say this all the time, the biggest second order to conversion is not creative. Despite all the agencies monetizing creative, it is accuracy in the data, you can take the very best branded creation or creative in the world, the dope is slick is video, whatever you want to an audience, it's not in the market and doesn't care about your product, you'll make no money. Conversely, you can take a horribly produced piece to create a to an audience of high intent buyers make some money. So the goal being to marry the two together the good creative with the right audience. So we've been in like the home services business comes to mind, I've got a lot of clients in that space, solar and Windows. And this, this data accuracy issue really speaks to the ROI of these campaigns, when you have such a obvious baseline set of criteria that needs to be present for those videos and needs to be worth the time to serve the ads do things like you're gonna sell high, you got to own your house. And if you're selling $80,000 window jobs, that house can't be a, you know, dilapidated piece of junk, it's got to be a high analysis, you know, say 500k, in value are more at that, at that price point. There's always variables, but we come into like our window company or the Gulf Coast, this comes to mind. And we're looking at their data, we pull their data from their campaigns or run a man that they got it through an agency and they're looking at these data sets and say it activated in the published data meta, and then the audience that they had, that they built inside of matter. So we're looking at this and deciphering this, and we're seeing that a third of the traffic, they're driving people that are actually clicking down on the house they live in. So that's eliminated. So we said, look, we're gonna, we're gonna have your ad budget, we're gonna, we're gonna cut it in half. But we're going to point it at this audience. And the net result of that campaign was about eight times the ROI, not on their dollar, it was way higher than that eight times what they were getting with their marketing spend with less spend, so they spent less dollars all in. And that's the power of accurate data, when you know, you're talking to the right audience. Not only is your conversion model now making sense, but any analytics that come out of there that informed the brand that informed the campaign on things like creative and calls to action and messaging and all these variables. We love the tests as marketers, now it's impactful. And it's not so much when you know, 30, your data set is not part of high conversion, or high intent audience, you know, so you get to statistical anomalies, the misinform your brand. And

Robert Plank 7:27 I find that really interesting, I find that helpful that you're saying that. So like when we put out advertising, there's that tendency to just think about the creative. And when you're saying that the audience is more important, and ideally, to have good both. But that makes a lot of sense where like you think, okay, am I really, if someone doesn't want the $80,000 windows? Or if they just haven't even heard of it before? Are they really going to be convinced by a Facebook ad? Well, probably not. And vice versa, right? Like, you can probably have just an okay, have mine video and landing page. But if they're already, if they're actively looking for this, and yours looks like the best solution, then you don't have to have it like 110% Perfect. So I like that a lot. And then you're saying that when some of these companies are just kind of using the what meta gives them, then the this audience is polluted right? Where they are, they're trying to they're like, is agonizing about the conversion rate and the click through rate. And it's like, it'll never get past a certain point because they're, it's just mixed in with all of this bad data. So that's why they they kind of need your help. And so as far as the so that's like a huge problem, right? And cleaning up your data getting the right audience. And then when you work with these companies, is there like a common mistake? Or do they all like, you know, make the same mistake with their with their ad creatives that are landing pages? Like do you just see like a recurring problem in your industry these days?

Jason Wood 8:53 Yeah, you know, I mean, when it comes to like some of the really mechanical pieces to marketing, we do see a lot of mistakes. You see, companies that either were their agency, you know, we do have clients that are usually using an agency and we compete for that business. And what we see a lot of is in the sequencing and pacing on the ads bought ads, Ben, everybody, so CPM focused, right? And the bigger the higher the CPM, and the more CPMs we can sell the better we do big tech setup that way agencies to interface they take a 20% management fee, all that stuff. So it's it's baked into their model, their profitability model to go after and rich media. So if you're trying to run an awareness campaign, or if you're trying to drive a conversion funnel, and you're going after six, eight, $10 CPMs all the time, you're wasting a ton of money when so many of those impressions need to be at that two $3 CPM level, just for awareness to then start to cycle in that enrich Media Design more for the conversion. So that's that's the sequencing that errors that we see all the time and, you know, big brands that are spending, you know, six figures a month and that's kind of the space we're live in those brands. I mean, that's millions of dollars. That is Millions of dollars wasted span. When you're spending all in on $8.50 cent CPM for a conversion funnel that requires 40 impressions to convert 30 of those impressions should have come out of $3. CPM, it just should have been that way. Because the impact is the same. You rotate in that the more rich media that the more disparate ads that stand out better that are banner ads, for example, or the better video platform for the conversion model. But to go all in and just have a monolithic approach, in terms of where and how you place an ADS is an error we see a lot.

Robert Plank 10:32 And I can see how that would happen if some company tries to do it themselves. And they try to like hire someone who's just kind of like doing it on the cheap, so to speak, then there's not like the bedrock keeping up with what's what's what's current. And they're also just not really that detail oriented, right? They just feel okay wash in place, and then bid it at this school, call it a day. And so it makes a lot of sense how there's just like, it's too easy to not know what you don't know. And and just kind of not and wonder why like nothing's working. Because you don't you haven't applied all the steps, you've just looked at what's fun for you, or you just got like a base level of learning a few facts and just kind of went off to the races there. And so one thing that I know that that you are, you're passionate about, and you like a lot is this whole idea of like incubating startups. So can you tell us about that and what that entails?

Jason Wood 11:25 Yeah, you know, I've got kind of a unique perspective on technology. And that is that I don't like to marry technology, I like to date it, we will never build a self serve platform. For example, we I shouldn't say we will build a self serve platform. But the technology and we are but the technology behind it will never be static. It'll never be a you know, you look at the trouble companies get it through all the time. Because technology is evolving so fast, right? HubSpot, I mean, for those of us that are 30, and up, we remember HubSpot back in the day when they were a marketing, conquest, go get your market type of platform. Well, now what are they now they're a CRM and a data pusher, you know, that's what they are. Why, because it's the crux of their marketing toolbox was email marketing. And seven, eight years ago, put rates and conversion rates died, I mean, on a vine almost with with that type of email marketing. And so what we're doing is we always look for innovators in technology, we can take technology, and we have taken technology that wasn't even designed for marketing, and then repurposed it because we see a brilliant marketing application. So we'd like to get involved in those companies find out the continuation of the build out, take an equity position and and help spin them off and that their own thing and have an exclusive right to sell the the technology in that aims to model. So it gives us a proprietary advantage. And it's great revenue for companies trying to scale, you know, in their direction. So we love to get involved in start up pre IPO phase, ad tech companies and more tech companies.

Robert Plank 12:53 Wonderful, what I love your energy and in all this with the whole idea of just not staying comfortable and always being on the move and looking at the future. And some of these ideas of you mentioning right of just like not being married to the technology. And we all have gotten at some point stuck in that way or know someone like that, right? We know someone who's just like stuck on WordPress and or everything's got to be Laravel or something like that. And you're saying that you shouldn't it should be the other way around, right? Like that technology should serve you. And then there's some of these other situations where there's some startup and they have like a really great solution. And they just don't see, but you see it, that they could be applying it in some other way to some other industry. And so with all these things that you've done, and Bill and people that you've worked with, have there been any surprises that are worth mentioning? Like what has surprised you in your journey?

Jason Wood 13:44 You know, the adoption rate of vernacular over usability in this in this market is is absolutely insane. This company is about three years old, we decided we got our hands on some really fundamental proprietary technology in this audience IDPs we feel it's an industry disrupter, We're disrupting the industry with it. And because of that, we took the company public, but I've been in this emerging tech space on the digital marketing ad tech space for 15 years. And what always happens in our industry and AI is just a perfect example of it is in our industry, binocular trends and gets popular and adoption rates skyrocket. Two years before its functional usability. So you're looking at AI right now. And you've got you've got companies doing 910 figures in revenue, leveraging, you know, artificial intelligence for optimization of ad tech campaigns seems like a smart thing. Where are you getting your data from? Supermetrics where they get it from Google, you to Mata get it from all these data sources that we know don't have accurate data. So you're feeding an AI algo really diluted data, or at least statistically errant data to it to a large enough degree that it can build rabbit holes for capital in terms of trying to chase conversion funnels that will just crush your money. So 10 months ago, all of our clients were talking about wanting to do it, oh, we got to do this optimization. Now we're talking to CMOS. They're like, yeah, no, we've been there, we've done that. What we do with investments is different, right? So we're building an AI ad tech. I mean, we're in AI, we see the usability of it. But to make it work, it's got to have smart data. And I don't mean cardio smart, it's got to have ironclad data. And you can't assume that AI will ever get to a place to take a b2c low end consumer product and somehow learn from that, how to how to deploy a seven figure b2b product campaign, like those two are so disparate, that there's no corollary. That's, that's really true. So what's it going to find? It's going to find false corollaries? Well, you know, demographically income is this. So you need to go down that rabbit hole, it just doesn't work that way. So we're building AI tools, but we're closing them off to the sandbox and our clients audiences. So the market that our client wants to engage, we build AI. We're building an AI ad tech audience ID tool that will learn from your campaign about the audiences and the segments that you have pursued traditionally want to pursue moving forward that does and automates testing into new markets, new growth opportunities. And then as those tests start to take, hold, and build traction, moves money into those conversion funnels, to grow businesses, but to think you're going to be successful, leveraging that for a healthcare company, because it learned from a car dealership or not a group for marketing for over a year. It's error, and defeated data coming out of big tech is just it's a bad play. I mean, all of big tech is incentivized for CPM as many CPMs as they can sell cost per 1000 impression that runs counterintuitive to strategy that narrowly defines a very high internet age. They're just counterintuitive.

Robert Plank 16:51 And it seems like this is a recurring theme, right? That you can have these amazing tools and this amazing process and this amazing solutions. But if it's a garbage in garbage out situation, if you're feeding your AI bad data to run your ads, then it's kind of it's it's hurting you right, it's like it's even worse than having no trouble because it's sending you down off of these rabbit holes. And so we don't want that. And so there's these many exciting problems to be solved, right? Like just even, even just earlier, I was moving like huge files to the cloud. And I was talking to chat GPT. And imagine even telling yourself 510 years ago that some of these things were possible, like you might not even have believed it. So imagine what were you able to do five and 10 years in the future? And so people are listening to this podcast who need your help, right? So how does somebody know if moving into the future and doing some of these amazing things that we're talking about solving these big problems? How does somebody know if their company is a good fit for what you provide? And if they are? What's the next step? What's the call to action? Yeah,

Jason Wood 17:51 so I mean, look, if you if you have a business, or if you're marketing for a business in a competitive landscape, and you're putting any significant money into ad tech, there's no doubt you need to use this type of approach. I don't care if your budget is 5000 A month or 500k a month, you need to use this approach. At the very least even in a smaller budget. You know, that's not enough to where you're gonna have, you know, 20x somebody's money, audiences big enough. However, the learning that comes from better target audiences will better inform that marketing team to make better decisions moving forward to grow to that direction. There's no reason not to do it this way. Especially with that, you know, the availability of it, if marketers will just kind of get back. And that's the way we're training a whole generation of marketers to be really good at algos promises countless changes all the time, right. They change intentionally. So you're getting marketers really good at algos, they're using data that's not real great. And that's that's not a sustainable strategy. So you can go to specificity inc.com. And check out you know, a lot. There's a lot of links on there outside of our site to do homework on this. There's a forum fill if you want to talk to my team. But I would say if you're spending 10 510 or 15 or more 1000 a month, and digital marketing, you absolutely need this strategy. There's no doubt about it. It'll save you money, and better inform your campaigns.

Robert Plank 19:09 Wonderful. So the magic number, the sweet spot, not required, but ideal is five to 15,000 per month ad spend, then you need to

Jason Wood 19:17 be using five Yeah, yeah, at about 5k. Anything

Robert Plank 19:21 above five, as you said, when you're working with these larger numbers, if your audience is not targeted, you're throwing away huge amounts of money, it really adds up once you get to that size. And so you need to go to specificity inc.com right now and do one of two things. If you're kind of not quite there yet, then go around and read and learn some of the stuff but if you say, you know, I'm tired of waiting, I'm trying to playing small, I need to get Jason and his team on this and to get my ads dialed in and not have Naki wasting money on Metis weird data, then go and find that button to schedule that call. And we'll see you at specificity inc.com And as we're winding down our conversation here, Jason it's fun. to end on a unique note, right? So think about like a special quote or lesson that can help us out. So what comes to mind from you as far as a quote or lesson just to cap things off here

Jason Wood 20:13 as like a special quote, I

Robert Plank 20:15 can be special or not special, just what jumps out at you? Well,

Jason Wood 20:19 you know, for me, those who can do and those who can't teach, so understand, if you're a marketing student, everything you really need to know about marketing, you're going to learn in the field, you're not going to learn in the classroom.

Robert Plank 20:32 I love it. So it get that on the job training, so to speak, or in the trenches, or whatever metaphor that you want to figure out is as learning and getting educated and learning how things are proper and clean and nice. That's a good starting point. But we need to get some of that that blue collar action and go out there and run the ads and get down and dirty. And the very first step for that is by going to specificity inc.com and talk to Jason and his team and get this ad targeting figured out. So Jason, it's been wonderful speaking with you today.

Jason Wood 21:02 Robert, thanks a lot for having me on man. I greatly appreciate it.

Robert Plank 21:05 Likewise. Thank you for tuning in to the marketer of the day podcast. marketer of the day is managed by dF why a podcast claim your 12 podcast boosters at Def Why podcast.com/free