S1E20 - Frederick Vallaeys - From Google to Optmyzr Navigating the Complex World of Ad Tech

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
To today's episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. I'm joined today by Fred Vallaeys, who has been a friend of mine for quite a while. He's the CEO of Optmyzr. Previously he was an evangelist at Google. And we're going to talk about both of those scenarios today. But I'm delighted to have you on the show. Fred, thanks for agreeing to kind of come on and talk to me.

Fred Vallaeys [00:00:23]:
Yeah, I mean, how could I say no to you, Jim? Such a great friend for such a long time. So thanks for having me on your new show.

Jim Banks [00:00:30]:
So let's go back to the beginning. How did you get into being a digital marketer in the first place? How did you get your job at Google?

Fred Vallaeys [00:00:37]:
Well, the real backstory is that in 1998 I was at Stanford University and I wanted to make a little bit of money and I figured out that blockbuster, the video cassette chain, was selling these big popular movies. They would sell these cassettes rather cheap compared to what they would cost on the primary market. But I needed people to know that I had these cassettes. So I found goto.com and I could buy PPC clicks. And I was like, oh yeah, that's pretty cool. So right here's a hit movie. Like let me buy some keywords for the actors names and then let me lead that to a listing on eBay and sell these cassettes. So that was really my first foray into PPC.

Fred Vallaeys [00:01:16]:
Now, buying a few cassettes at your local blockbuster, you can imagine, like, I wasn't raking in the dough, right? I was selling a couple of cassettes here and there. And then, you know, I joined a consulting company in 2000 after I graduate from Stanford. It's sapient, but the doc combo bubble is at its peak. It's starting to implode. And fairly shortly after joining Sapient, I'm on the bench and then I get laid off. And so now it's 2002 and I'm looking for a job and there's this like weird little search engine that seems to be gaining momentum. It's called Google. And I'm like, I don't really get it because I'm used to going to excite and Yahoo and like these portals and like the homepage is full of stuff that you can interact with.

Fred Vallaeys [00:02:00]:
And then there's this search box on Google. But slowly I start catching onto the fact that the search is actually quite good and maybe that's why people are talking about it. So I'm like, okay, maybe if I can get into this company, that'll be cool. So I was able to get into Google because they needed someone who spoke Dutch. I'm originally from Belgium, and so I get brought in. And so that's then I basically started working in Google Ads in August of 2002, but started in PPC before that. And then when I was at Google, that's when the light started shining. And I was like, oh my God, there's so much money going through these ads.

Fred Vallaeys [00:02:39]:
And I started actually dabbling a little bit more in affiliate programs. And it was funny because I was working at Google and I was a big advertiser at Google, sort of this unusual dual role. And that led into me being an evangelist.

Jim Banks [00:02:54]:
Yeah. Because, I mean, it's quite interesting. You talk about the kind of the go to. I mean, that was my kind of first foray as well, was like buying traffic for a penny a click, right? And you look at what the cost of traffic is now. It's like crazy money. And you think, wow, imagine if you could go on and buy your traffic now, one, if you could even buy clicks first off. But, yeah, I mean, if you can buy them for a penny. I remember all the advertisers were outraged when they kind of raised the floor from one cent to two cents.

Jim Banks [00:03:23]:
Right. And everyone went ballistic and said, how can you possibly charge two cent for a pig?

Fred Vallaeys [00:03:29]:
Exactly. I mean, those were the kids. And then, no, and I'm also thinking, like. And then we were doing bid jamming, right? Because it was this whole transparent auction mechanism and you knew exactly what the second person was bidding. And you're like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna mess with them. I'm gonna raise my bid to just one penny below. But then your whole day was not marketing. It was like literally watching the bids because people would lower their bids and now you'd be the one jammed up to the top.

Fred Vallaeys [00:03:53]:
We've come a long way for sure.

Jim Banks [00:03:55]:
Yeah, because as you say, I mean, a lot of the time, a lot of what we were doing was forcing our competitors to bid an awful lot more money for the traffic that they were buying. Right. Because the way it worked was whatever they were paying. So if they said, I'm prepared to pay $15, and in a lot of cases, lazy advertisers and agencies would do that, they would say, hell, I'm going to pay $15 because I know I can still make the numbers back out on the back end for me. But if the second advertiser bid $14.99, then they would be forced to pay $15. But if the next one in the auction was like $0.05. They would only pay six cents to actually be in that position. And its sort of like, it was, again, quirky the way the auction model worked.

Jim Banks [00:04:42]:
But, yeah, I mean, as you say, it was always sort of a strategic sort of game that people played. Right. And in some respects, I mean, I know that youre current business optimizer is a SaaS business that helps marketers with that sort of automation and tracking and analytics and just getting everything dialed in. But way back again, I don't know if you remember there was a company called Gotoast. It was one of the very original bid management tools that existed way back in the day. I remember going to one of the industry events, and the guy, I think his name is Dave Carlson, was the guy running it. And I basically said, look, Dave, I will put my people against your machine any day of the week. I think my people will understand so much more about the clients that we're working for and the way in which everything works.

Jim Banks [00:05:37]:
So it's much more than just what are you prepared to bid? There was so much more strategy to add copy and things like that. He never took the bet. I wish he had, because I would have loved to have seen whether it kind of like whether that would transpire or not. And in some respects, I mean, if you kind of fast forward to exactly where we are now, I still think we're almost in the same situation now with AI. Right. Because, again, I know that you're a big, a big, big fan of AI, and in some respects, I'm a big fan of AI as well. But I think the challenge is that you've got to layer in what you know about things into the AI. And I don't think there's, there's none of that opportunity.

Jim Banks [00:06:19]:
I mean, I came off a call with my Facebook rep just recently, and we were talking about, I know the demographic of my clients, and at no point in time has Facebook ever said, what's the demographic of your client? What's your ideal customer avatar, what's their makeup, what gender, what age groups, what are their interests, all that sort of stuff. None of that. It's almost like, well, we're the only people that could possibly know what people are interested in, and you haven't got a clue, and I'll just be interested to kind of know what your thoughts were on it.

Fred Vallaeys [00:06:49]:
Well, I mean, there's so many fascinating topics in that. Right. And I completely agree on the premise that humans plus machines are better than the machines alone or the humans alone. And I think the other thing that we keep saying is we're not competing against AI, but we're competing against other advertisers who figured out how to use AI and technology better. Right? So it's, again, that human plus machine sort of angle. And it's fascinating too, because when you look at meta and Facebook, they sort of grew up many years after Google AdWords, and machine learning was at a much further stage. And so they could really come in and they could say, listen, just kind of tell us what your website is and we'll figure it out. We got it from here.

Fred Vallaeys [00:07:32]:
Whereas the Google Adwords advertiser came in when machine learning was nascent. It didn't really work very well. And so we had to do everything from choosing the keyword to writing the ad. And it wasn't just a keyword, but it was every spelling mistake of that keyword. And then for each of those individually, we had to set bids and it was all of this complex manual work. And then as machine learning got better, Google sort of tried to make that shift towards, oh, let us figure it out. And that's where we are today with performance max campaigns. But there's this underlying frustration because we are used to that control.

Fred Vallaeys [00:08:09]:
We want that control. We know we can do things better in some cases with that control. And even if it's as simple as, like you're saying, right, like, what is your target audience? Well, sure, Facebook and machine learning, they'll figure it out eventually, but are they going to spend $10,000 of your budget to get to that insight where you could have just gone in and said, okay, we already know this, you don't need to spend $10,000 of mine to get there. Like spend that $10,000 on the audience that I can already tell you works better. And so that's sort of the interesting dilemma. And I also think that the ad platforms, they're really making a push for democratizing advertising, if you will. So they want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to get decent enough results to do well with this. If you do well enough, you're going to keep investing in Google Ads.

Fred Vallaeys [00:08:58]:
And that's a good thing for Google because it creates auction depth, it creates auction pressure, so they make more revenue that way. But for us, as more advanced advertisers who know all the controls that we should be taking advantage of, it's frustrating when it gets taken away for the sake of giving a level playing field to everyone else.

Jim Banks [00:09:17]:
Yeah. Cause I think one of the challenges was always things again. I mean, I think I talked to narva about it. One of the challenges was always, there will be some advertisers that have got YouTube and Google display network and historically Gmail campaigns completely dialed in and working for them. And it's almost like Google have taken away the secret sauce that they've had and given some of that secret sauce to everyone else by introducing these, if you like, watered down versions of what was working before. Again, I think a lot of advertisers either ran YouTube, GDN got success, or ran YouTube, GDN had horrible results and stopped doing it. Google didn't want that. They didn't want people to be able to pick and choose which part of their ecosystem you played in.

Jim Banks [00:10:05]:
They want you to be able to play in all of it. Right. Because that way you're going to spend more money in theory. And I just was, again, I've always been sort of fascinated by sort of the context that, again, some elements of AI I love. I absolutely love that. There are elements that if you have like a static image and you want to be able to create a video, you can kind of create a video from that, like really easily now. Right? Whereas historically that was, you'd probably have to go to a design agency and spend thousands of dollars to get a video created. If you wanted like a six second YouTube short, it used to take forever to get it right.

Jim Banks [00:10:40]:
Whereas now, with the kind of the YouTube builder, you can basically just say, here's a couple of texts, here's a couple of pictures, here's a couple of call to actions, and they'll make the video for you, which again, I think they've given you templates to be able to do that. So I think more and more advertisers are in a position to be able to create assets now than ever before, which that element I absolutely love. Right. But as you say, like, I think, I think you should be able to kind of have input into, I mean, like with Facebook, they have this thing where they do the optimization and they give you a score they started. I almost think they must collectively be sort of meeting somewhere and talking about what shitty ideas can we come up with that we can implement this and force upon our appetite? Because they're not going to turn their back on us. We're too powerful. No, they're not going to kind of walk away and take their money and spend it elsewhere. Right.

Jim Banks [00:11:33]:
But it's horribly frustrating sometimes. Again, I mean, like, we're a performance agency, right? So we get paid on results. So we have clients that are cutting back on their spends now because they can't kind of make things work, they can't make things back out the way they used to. Right. And we kind of pinpointed it to. Most of the changes have come when they've introduced sort of elements of AI that they've mandated have to use this, or they basically said this is the best practice. Now, that's, again, made some elements of the performance really not that well. Again, if you look at it, not all businesses are the same.

Jim Banks [00:12:14]:
Not all businesses are small businesses, not all businesses are enterprises. And I think they're trying to shoehorn one set of rules into to fit all advertisers just because they're all advertisers and they're all different.

Fred Vallaeys [00:12:31]:
Exactly. That sort of, you know, everybody goes through PMAX, everybody advertises across all of the platforms that, that touches or the surfaces, I guess. But it takes away that capability for the experts to, as I call it, unlevel the playing field to take advantage of that secret sauce. And then there's also the bigger question with AI and these, these automation campaigns from Google, like, to what degree did your success in a Gmail campaign teach the system that's now driving performance Max how to do it for everyone else? And it's almost like, well, I invented that secret, so I was like, why are you giving that to everyone else? Now? What's in it for me? And with AI broadly, because it's scanning basically the whole Internet. And like one thing, you can go through a script and you can say, sorry, you can go to GPT and ask it to write a Google Ads. How does it know how to write an ad script? Well, because there's a handful of people who've written a lot of scripts, myself being one of those. And so clearly it's learned something from me. Now, I'm not particularly upset over that.

Fred Vallaeys [00:13:41]:
I do sort of equate it to, if you're a student in school, you read books, you look at examples that others have written, and you learn from that. It's just that GPT happens to be a much quicker and faster learner and can ingest much more data and it's not necessarily violating copyrights. But I think it a broader question for humanity, like, where are you going to focus your efforts if you know that automation is just going to take the best of what you just did and apply it to everyone else? And so the thing that you have as an agency, like your secret sauce, is that still the thing that you can sell, or is the thing that you innovate faster, you test faster? Like, I think the value propositions that we've had just need to be kind of questioned and potentially reevaluated.

Jim Banks [00:14:25]:
Yeah, it's funny, like, have you got reactions on your computer?

Fred Vallaeys [00:14:31]:
Because I don't know how to turn these off. If someone can teach. I should ask GPT how to do this. It just frustrates. Like, I'll put my hands behind my.

Jim Banks [00:14:41]:
Back if you go up at the top. So, like, I presume you're on a Mac, right? I am, yeah. So up at the top there should be like a little sort of green icon with a camera on it. And if you click on that, that should tell you which camera you have chose and you'll see that there's reactions. If you turn reactions off.

Fred Vallaeys [00:15:03]:
That's right, it's off. Thank you, Jim.

Jim Banks [00:15:07]:
I might leave that one in the final edit, but you never know. I'll probably chop it out. So, Fred, like, so you spent sort of, you went to Stanford, you did a bit of affiliate marketing. To all intents and purposes, you then joined Google and you worked for Google for a period of time. How long were you actually at Google for in total?

Fred Vallaeys [00:15:31]:
So I was very close to ten years. And normally I would have stayed around longer because you generally get a nice gift at a ten year anniversary at a company. But I was led to understand that it was a paper printout of one of the Google doodles for the Google ten year anniversary. And I was like, yeah, I can print it out myself at home. So when it's time to go, it's time to go.

Jim Banks [00:15:53]:
So you're a pre IPO Googler. Right. And again, I talked to Nava and I basically said, I love the pre IPO Google more than the post IPO Google. Right. Because I think what their objectives were, what they were trying to achieve as a business were very different then. They were very accommodating of feedback and, you know, actively sorted out again. I mean, if you think about it, all of the agency partners like me, who back in the day sort of sat in a room with their engineers, right, we were basically unpaid consultants. We were helping them to improve their product.

Jim Banks [00:16:28]:
Right. Unfortunately they did, which made it better for everyone. Right? Again, it would have been nice if they kind of had chucked us a bit of cash at the time for, you know, for our time. I mean, we get invited to research events now and we get, you know, 80 pounds for kind of doing a 45 minutes, you know, feedback also.

Fred Vallaeys [00:16:49]:
But hopefully you made some money by being an agency and by like being able to say, hey, listen, I'm one of the people who got to be at Google and influence this product, so I know it better than anyone.

Jim Banks [00:16:59]:
Yeah, I always, I always say to people, I basically helped create the, my client center and Google Ads editor because again, I sat in a room and I said, look, I'm going backwards and forwards. At the time I was going backwards and forwards to, I think, Hong Kong. I said, I'm going backwards and forwards to Hong Kong. It'd be really good if I could download an account, do some work on the plane, because there was no Internet on the plane at that time. Do some work on the plane and then upload the work at the other end. When I got there, they went, yeah, that's a good idea. And that's when part of where that came from, when I said the same thing with my client center, I basically said, look, I've got 50 8000 accounts and every single one I have to log in. It's like a complete pain.

Jim Banks [00:17:40]:
It would be great if we had a toggle button. We could just toggle in and go in and have a drop down that would show us everything, kind of what we had. And yeah, that's a good idea. So I say I had some input into making that a kind of better product. I'm sure I wasn't the only agency that did, but, you know.

Fred Vallaeys [00:17:58]:
For sure. Thank you for putting that feedback in. Right. And it was. And I think Google for a long time did continue to listen to advertisers and to a degree they still do. But the matter of the fact is that once you become a public company, you become beholden to a whole set of investors and things will change. I think Larry was afraid of that and didn't really want to go public. But then at the same time, you have this whole contingent of engineers and product managers and you need to keep them happy, you need to keep them on board, and they have choices in the Silicon Valley, there were so many other startups, Facebook was coming about, and if you didn't give them a financial incentive through an IPO, they would have all just left and Google probably wouldn't have been in the shape it is in today.

Fred Vallaeys [00:18:44]:
It would have been a far less impressive company.

Jim Banks [00:18:48]:
Yeah, it's funny, I always remember one of the very early Google Ads, again, you mentioned there, we hope you got some money. One of the things we had in the early days was there was an agency kickback. We used to get 15% discount on the media that we spent. Right. For traffic. So if we spent $1,000 on media, we only spent. It only cost us $850. But we had to bankroll the media, so we had to cover the cost for that.

Jim Banks [00:19:17]:
So we were kind of on the hook. So at the time, I mean, our turnover was really high. Our profit margins were quite low. Right. But for us in the world, yeah.

Fred Vallaeys [00:19:29]:
I mean, it's kickback on all the media spend.

Jim Banks [00:19:34]:
I mean, really, they kind of did it because they needed to compete with tv, radio and print. And that's what happened there. Right. So all the agencies got kicked back on tv buying, and Google wanted to kind of compete with it. And what happened? I mean, again, I'm trying to think. I think it was like 2007. I think maybe when they took it away and basically they said, well, you know, we think it's creating an unleveled playing field because some agencies are getting it and some agencies are not getting it, so we're taking it away. I'm like, why don't you give it to all agencies then, rather than leveling the playing field against us, why don't you level the playing field by giving it to everyone? Oh, no, we don't want to do it.

Fred Vallaeys [00:20:16]:
But then, by that token, I guess if you were an in house company and you didn't use an agency, then you would have paid the extra 15%. And I think that was always the argument, right? Google tries to be fair by running the ads in an auction. And, I mean, you were there, too, when it was a CPM priced model. So the initial ad words was, you'd buy ads on a CPM basis and they'd show at the top of the page.

Jim Banks [00:20:40]:
Yeah.

Fred Vallaeys [00:20:43]:
I ran, and he's like, hey, we're going to make sure the ads are relevant and look at the CTR component of the ad, and that's going to be the thing that ranks it. And then very quickly, all of these CPM brands, or CPM ads from big brands at the top of the page, they start making less money than all of these, like mom and pops bidding CPC clicks, and they're like, whoa, what's going on here? Like, that's really unusual. Like, why? Why is General Motors paying far less for their ad than Jimmy's car dealership?

Jim Banks [00:21:21]:
Yeah.

Fred Vallaeys [00:21:21]:
And that's when the light went on for Google. And they were like, okay, everybody needs to be on the CPC advertising system. But then to make that fair, you couldn't just sort of give these discounts to some people and not to other people because then the auction would get out of back.

Jim Banks [00:21:38]:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it exists now, but I think in certain markets there probably still exists where there's some form of agency incentive to promote or something.

Fred Vallaeys [00:21:49]:
It's sort of unspoken. Right. Even in 2007, when they got rid of it, it was like, well, never really had this, but we kind of did and we don't want to talk about it. But now it definitely doesn't exist. Like, if you thought it didn't exist before, now it definitely doesn't exist. But there's people like you who actually had that discount. So clearly it was around. And I also think it was different between Europe and the United States for a while.

Fred Vallaeys [00:22:13]:
It was deprecated in some markets before others. As I understand it today we're not able to get anything from Google.

Jim Banks [00:22:22]:
Yeah, I mean, obviously when I was getting the discount, I was able to use it to kind of recruit more people to provide better service to the clients I had get more clients. So for me, there was a kind of like an added value to the relationship that I was bringing to the table. And again, fortunately for me, I was in a good position that we weren't just, I mean, I know some agencies, that's all they were charging. They were just charging the kind of kickback. They were just getting the money from Google. And basically, to all intents purposes, the clients thought they were doing the ads for free. Again, some big agencies would use the PPC ads as a way of getting tv. So we'll run your PPC for free if you give us your tv ads.

Jim Banks [00:23:08]:
And some people gave them their tv spend on the back of that, which, again, I thought was quite interesting. That's what they did.

Fred Vallaeys [00:23:18]:
And in terms of bad decisions, I would say that probably falls in the category of a bad decision. Right. Like, if you start basically undermining the value of what you're charging. Right. So if you're an agency, you're basically making the client believe that you don't pay us anything yet. We have all this expertise in house and we do these amazing things, and then Google pulls the rug from under you and that kickback goes away. Now you're there and you have to explain to the client, well, actually, we do have to charge you 10% of ad spend, and even then we're making less money than before. So, like, you're not going to get as much service.

Jim Banks [00:23:58]:
Yeah, I mean, we lost a couple of clients at the time when, when that sort of transition happened. But I know there were quite a few agencies that kind of went out of business because as you say, they talked to all their clients and said, hey, I'm going to have to pass on some of the costs that Google's imposing on me, I'm going to have to impose it on you. And they basically said we'll just go with another agency. So that's what they did. So they lost those clients.

Fred Vallaeys [00:24:23]:
Yeah. And optimizer, when we think about how we run business, it's really, it's about making sure our customers are happy that we have the subscriptions in place. All of these incentive programs that exist or relationships with the bigger companies, that's not what you should base a business on because that could be pulled away at any moment from you. Whereas if you have a happy user of your software and you keep building better products to keep them happy, that seems like a much that's within our control. Now, of course there's economic factors, right? So a company may have a directive from the top saying, hey listen, we need to cut cost, go and figure out where you want to cut. And maybe they decide to cut the optimizer subscription, but it's not because our product wasn't good enough, right? The product continues to provide value, improves value as we start integrating performance, Max, as we start integrating social platforms and all the new things that Google is doing, there's a ton of AI that we put throughout our platform. So that's how we really think about protecting our business. So that these, whatever Google decides to do, whatever Microsoft decides to do, that's not going to kill our business or even be a significant impact if something happens.

Jim Banks [00:25:43]:
Yeah. I mean, again, so I've been an optimizer customer for quite a while, right. Love the product. I mean again, I think when I first started looking at it, I think I was working at cheap flights at the time and I've told the story where I hadn't even taken my jacket off and I managed to kind of get them to agree that they were going to kick the existing bid management tool into touch, right? And the reason that they were going to kick it into touch was because it was using a sort of, you know, the company basically had all the travel companies as clients, right? All using the same software, all doing the same thing, all making bids, adjustments once a day, right. That was, that was their kind of their motors operandi. And I'm thinking, well it basically means like if I'm bidding, say fifty cents and then somebody else comes in and bids 51 and somebody else is 52, before, you know, we're kind of up there. And then you might go, right, I'm going to bring them all back down. Right.

Jim Banks [00:26:39]:
And then you start that process again. And it just, it was like a complete, never ending ladder. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Right. And it was based on the number of keywords you had in the account. Right. When I looked at it, we had probably 75, 80% of all the keywords, had never had an impression, never had a click. But they went and made a review of the bids and made an adjustment anyway.

Jim Banks [00:27:01]:
Right. Which to me seems crazy, but, you know, so again, I made the decision to kind of to keep that into touch. I was looking for an alternative solution at the time and an optimizer. Again, I think partly because of your time at Google, I figured you would absolutely know what this was all about. Again, I think you'd been quite prolific at the time in writing community stuff. You put out your knowledge into the public, which again, I think is a phenomenal thing that everyone should be doing. They should be taking what they know and kind of cascading it out there to let people know what they're capable of. Again, I think a lot of people will hire you based upon those sorts of things rather than necessarily what it says on your website.

Fred Vallaeys [00:27:54]:
Yeah, no, I totally, I couldn't agree more. And a little anecdote. So my wife, now, at the time, she was a product manager or product marketing manager at Google, and she was running some feedback sessions with agents for an event. And she's like, hey, can you come in? And like, as sort of the expert help guide the conversation, we're going to have two groups. We're going to have a group of sort of the smaller agencies first, and then we're going to have a group of the bigger agencies. And one of.

Jim Banks [00:28:32]:
Sorry, all good. Yeah.

Fred Vallaeys [00:28:41]:
And one of the first things we asked them was, how do you think about sharing your knowledge with the community? And in the group of small agencies, they were all like, well, we can't because it's my secret sauce. And like, if I tell someone else what we're doing, like, everyone's gonna do it, and like, then I'm gonna not have a successful agency. Okay, fine. We go on to the next session, the big agencies, and same question. They're all like, oh, yeah, we have, like, people blogging and we have people doing podcasts and we share everything we know and, like, it's driving so much business for us. And so again, clearly, like, the big agencies, the ones that had become more successful were the ones that were willing to share. And like you said, they get clients because people judge you based on the expertise that you're exhibiting in that way. And then, like, the point that you're making about a bid management system, I don't think the expectation is that you're going to hire an agency, and the agency is going to do exactly what they did for everyone else, but they've exhibited the expertise and the thought process, and so they can apply that and do something really unique for your business and help you grow.

Fred Vallaeys [00:29:46]:
And so, yeah, I'm like, it's social arbitrage, right? Like, if you know stuff because of the space that you work in, the types of clients that you have, like, leverage that into gaining more clients. And that's the arbitrage that you do, is your knowledge turns into money through more clients. So don't sit on it, don't hide a bit. Because, by the way, if you like, you're not the only one who figured out how to do that secret sauce. Somebody else is going to talk about it. And guess who's going to get that next client? Well, it's the person who was public about it, who talked about it.

Jim Banks [00:30:17]:
Yeah. And again, I always say that there's no such thing as a secret sauce. I mean, it may be a better process, but again, nobody's. I don't even think Google knows the algorithm. Right. There's probably. There's probably a couple of people that understand it at a really super granular level. Right.

Jim Banks [00:30:38]:
But most people, again, a lot of it's trial and error. I'm not a fan of trial and error. I mean, I don't want to be testing things. I want to be, like, running things that work. Right. And I think that's. Again, I think that's where some agencies can kind of really kind of cut the mustard, is they've got the track record of being able to kind of go, we got this process of bringing things in, which means that you don't have to spend a lot of money trying to test stuff out. You don't have to spend ten grand.

Jim Banks [00:31:04]:
While we work out how this all works, you can kind of get to success much quicker as a result of following a sort of a very systematic thought out process that talks about tracking analytics and all that stuff.

Fred Vallaeys [00:31:19]:
And I would argue that you have two types of clients. You have the client who comes in and demands that from you says, like, listen, we don't want to go down the path of testing. We just need results right now. And what you said makes total sense, but then you get some clients who are like, hey, Jim, you've been doing an amazing job. Like, let's give you $10,000 a budget to maybe try something new. And that's great, because now through that trust that you've built, that opens up your ability to experiment and sort of get that knowledge that you need for the next phase. Because face it, right, the Google Ads, like, sometimes I wish it wasn't changing as much as it did because it's a lot of work for my team to keep up with all the changes that Google's doing. It's a lot of work for agencies, but we have to experiment.

Fred Vallaeys [00:32:01]:
We have to figure out, okay, given that something in the algorithm changed, which Google may not be telling us, or given that there's now generative search results, sure, that's going to have an impact on how people interact with ads. That's going to impact how we message in the ads, that's going to impact how we do bidding. And all of these things we have to test so that we're ready for that next wave of innovation and we continue to have success with the ads, just like we did in the past.

Jim Banks [00:32:29]:
And one of the things I really like about you as a person, but also kind of like, just, again, just optimizer as a company, is your involvement in the community. So you run your PPC town halls. What was the kind of, like, what made you think about sort of setting those up in the first place?

Fred Vallaeys [00:32:49]:
Well, so I know you from conferences, so obviously I was on the conference circuit for a long time, and then the pandemic hit. And as a result of the pandemic, all of the in person stuff went away. And that was a huge part of my job. I was like, what am I going to do now? And so Zoom was just up and coming, and everybody started to do these Zoom webinars. I was like, yeah, sure, let me do Zoom webinar. But then everybody was doing them. They started looking so boring, so ugly, like the four little screens next to each other. I was like, let's do something better.

Fred Vallaeys [00:33:22]:
So discovered streamyard, much like you started experimenting a lot with nicer studio setups and, like, better sound and just making it kind of giving production value. And that became the replacement for speaking at conferences. And then it was amazing, too, because, you know, you go to a conference in the search industry and, you know, a good audience is 200 people in your room. I mean, sometimes you get a keynote, you get a little bit more than that. But if you're in the PPC track, like listen, there's just not that many people. And here I can do something online where I don't have to travel, fly to New York for a day, where I don't have to get a hotel, and I can literally out of my house in an hour of my time, interview some interesting guests, and we have 700 people watching or listening. Much more of an impact. And so that was the whole thing.

Fred Vallaeys [00:34:09]:
Then like, yeah, let's double down on this. And then the town hall format was initially, I guess it was election time and these town halls were happening. I was like, oh, yeah, people should be able to ask questions. We need to do this live. We're going to have a couple of experts now. We've gotten away from the town hall format, so there's actually a rebrand coming to make it more in line with what it really is. But just the quality of guests that we had and you've been on and many other grades, and it's fantastic. I mean, we just have a conversation about what's on your mind in the industry today.

Fred Vallaeys [00:34:43]:
How are you dealing with it? How are you working with automation? How are you handling PMAX? We've had googlers come on. We've had people from Microsoft ads and they all just share very candidly what's working, what's not working. And I think people want those conversations. They want to be a fly on the wall in that room and learn from it.

Jim Banks [00:35:02]:
Yeah. And I think what a lot of people don't realize, I mean, again, I think this is probably episode 21 or 22 or something like that of my podcast. I mean, it's very time consuming to kind of create content like this long format with guests. I mean, you got to invite the guests and get everything set up and everything. And again, for me, I'm very passionate about it. I think, again, I want to help educate the next generation of digital marketers that kind of come into the industry to learn from some of the people that I get. I've spent all my formative years in the industry learning from and hanging out with and everything else. Right.

Jim Banks [00:35:39]:
Because eventually we're all going to go, right, I'm done now. I don't want to do this anymore. Right. And, yeah, and I just think that some, in some respects, I kind of want it to be there as a kind of in perpetuity because if you upload it to YouTube and stuff like that there forever.

Fred Vallaeys [00:35:54]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:35:55]:
So, you know, at some point in time in the future, people can go in 20 years time. Look at what this old gig, this old clown is talking about AI and.

Fred Vallaeys [00:36:03]:
What is, and the topics are going to change. Right. But I very much agree with what you're saying. And so from my perspective, one of the things in PPC town hall was we would bring in at least two guests, and I would always try to get one guest who had some name recognition, who I was, a known value, and then give a platform to someone who was a little bit newer, who maybe hadn't done webinars in the past. And for me, that's just maybe selfishly, but I want to be the one who launches that person, who gives them the opportunity to become a brand in the industry, like you and me. Because eventually when they become the brands, like, I want them to be my friends, I want them to remember me fondly, and if I need something, have them help me back. Right. So, and that's what community at the end of the day is.

Fred Vallaeys [00:36:49]:
It's about like, being nice to other people and helping them in ways that you eventually want to be helped and not hogging all the credit and the stage for yourself. And then as far as you and your legacy, let's make the virtual Jim banks, right? Let's turn you into an AI avatar. Let's feed it all of the things you've written, all your podcasts. And that's the beauty of AI, is that we don't have to really die anymore. I mean, sure, our physical presentations will die, but everything we've said, the way we say, the way we look, that can all be digitized. And someone in 100 years from now can have a conversation with the virtual gym banks. And sure, your ideas on bid management may seem outdated in that 21 30, but they can have a conversation. They can ask you why you did what you did, and that AI will probably represent you pretty well.

Jim Banks [00:37:47]:
Yeah. And it's funny like you're talking about that. I mean, some of the, the books that I read when I was starting out in sort of like marketing and digital marketing and advertising, trying to write good ads and everything. Again, I'm reading books from like Claude Hopkins from like the 1920s, right? He was a kind of door to door salesman. But if you read the book and try and put your 2024 brain on it, you can really see the context of what he was trying to achieve. I mean, scientific advertising was one of his books, you know, and he's talking about using primarily coupons to try and track down what success you have by launching a particular product in a particular location. You look at it and go, well, really, the modern day coupon is probably a QR code or something like that, you can think of what they were thinking of back then in today's terms, and still go, well, that strategy would still hold true today, even though it's nearly 100 years old.

Fred Vallaeys [00:38:48]:
Exactly. Has remained the same. And the means that we used to achieve that end, that's just the thing that's evolving. A little interesting stat that I recently found, but 60% of the job titles from today didn't exist 100 years ago. And so in that example that you just gave, like digital data science or digital advertising analyst like, that would not have existed as a title. But what they were trying to do and what they were trying to achieve, that's exactly the same thing. And I also think it's fascinating that to some degree, as more of the data analysis is being handled by machines, which, by the way, machines are really good at data analysis, much better than humans. So we can actually go back and figure out, well, it's not about how to track the coupons, but what should we say in the coupon? Like, what is it that's motivating people in 2024 to want to buy this product? Is there some recent news about the science of food? Does that change how people think about food and nutrition? And how do we position our coupons to speak to that newly evolving perception in the market and what consumers are going to care about? And that's the marketing we can now once again focus on, because tracking the coupons is handled for us.

Jim Banks [00:40:12]:
Yeah, funny. I remember back in 2006, not long after I sold my original agency, I went over to, we opened an office in Hong Kong, and we were on exactly the same floor as Google. Right? We were in the international financial center, the one that kind of appears in one of the Batman movies. I'm not sure which one it is, where he stands on the top of it gets hooked off by Morgan Freeman in a helicopter. So we were in that building, but I went to Shanghai for a conference. I went to the ad tech conference that was taking place in Shanghai right now. I landed at the airport again, huge, huge airport. Never been there before, you know, and I'm thinking, I don't know where to go, right? So I kind of walked outside.

Jim Banks [00:40:57]:
Somebody said, oh, you need to get the bullet train into town. So I got the bullet train, you know, the kind of maglev train that kind of goes at 400 km an hour straight into Shanghai in like next to no time at all. But I got off at the train, I'm like, I have no idea. Everything's in sort of Mandarin I couldn't understand any of it, right? So I got back on the train, went back to the airport, and got a taxi from the airport to my hotel, because I thought, I'm never going to find my hotel in a million years. So that was kind of a bad decision, getting the train in the first place. But then I got into the taxi, and fortunately, the hotel had sent me a QR code. And when I got into the taxi, I just held the QR code up to this sort of reader, and that told the taxi driver exactly where I wanted to go. And everything in China at that time, 2006, that 18 years ago, was being done by QR codes.

Jim Banks [00:41:47]:
You wanted to go for a restaurant for a meal. You go and see the concierge in your hotel. They would send you a QR code. You'd go to the taxi driver, scan it. That would tell you where to take you. You go into the hotel, goes to the restaurant, they scan the QR code. That way, they can confirm that it's you and it came from a particular hotel that I'm sure probably meant that the concierge at the hotel would get a kickback for recommending that restaurant. So, again, closed loop affiliate marketing in its finest.

Jim Banks [00:42:21]:
But again, you look at it and go, and it seemed like QR codes should have been the absolute future, but they died a death. And now, all of a sudden, again, I think partly because of COVID it's come back, and they're now kind of much more prominent in everything that kind of goes on.

Fred Vallaeys [00:42:38]:
Yeah. And again, I mean, let's call it a means, right? So it's a means of communicating some piece of information. And I think with the new wave of meta AI glasses, for example, and the AI assistant buttons, the rabbit, the humane button, there's a couple of others. They're still not that good. But the whole premise is that, listen, we don't need QR codes to help guide people. It should visually be able to understand what we're looking at and help guide you. And so the text happens to be in Mandarin. Like, I can have my meta glasses.

Fred Vallaeys [00:43:14]:
It'll translate it for me. I mean, not that innovative. When you think about Google Glass, they pull out your phone like they've been doing that for a long time. But I think where we're sort of getting to is a world where the processors are smaller, the AI is faster, so now you have it sitting in your glasses, and they don't look like the dorky Google Glass. Right? It just looks like a pair of sunglasses. Nobody knows that it's translating stuff for me.

Jim Banks [00:43:37]:
You're a glass.

Fred Vallaeys [00:43:37]:
I never had one. I have my little museum of Google memorabilia. I have Larry's Segway. I have a Google bike. I have a bunch of other stuff. I have my Google original hockey jersey when I played with Sergey and Larry. But a Google Glass, I was never able to score one. So if anyone has one.

Jim Banks [00:43:58]:
Yeah, I think Barry Schwartz has got one. I don't know if he still uses it. He's probably the ultimate Google fanboy, Apple fanboy. I think every single iPhone from the very beginning, he's like, got it on day one. And, you know, but again, I mean, I think when you're an innovator like he is, then it's definitely something that you probably need to kind of do. It's funny going back to job titles. I always kind of used to say to people when people would come in for an interview, stuff like that, they'd be, what would my job title be? And I'm like, well, what would you like your job title to be? What your title is isn't going to dictate what your job is. I mean, the job is going to be the job, right? And I've always maintained that a job title is only important when you're looking for a job with that as the title.

Jim Banks [00:44:46]:
So if you're looking for a job as a sales manager, if you're a sales associate, you're going to struggle to get a job against other people who are already sales managers in other companies. Right? And the reality of it is that, you know, those job titles only matter for you actually getting job. Bit like, you know, education. You know, you need a certain education to go on to the next step in education, which then takes you to potentially university. You get your degree, that gets your first job, and then after that, most of the time, the companies that you work for don't really care about what you did at university. They care about what you did in your first job. And really, you're only as good as your last, your last role. Right.

Jim Banks [00:45:25]:
And in some respects, if that last role was a disaster, then you may well kind of want to skip some time and jump over it.

Fred Vallaeys [00:45:32]:
But yeah. And in your job, provide value and be invaluable. And did the one. This was a good decision, not a bad one, but always remaining very close to the customer and understanding what it is they want. Because then if you get laid off or something else happens, you'll know exactly what people are willing to pay for. And you can either solve that as a service, you can solve it as a software, but you'll be in a position to know what to do next. Too often, people go into job roles, and it's like middle management, where they kind of talk to upper management and they talk to the people talking to the customers, but they live in that void where everything is secondhand information, and that's a dangerous place to be, I think. If you lose your job and you're like, well, I heard such and so say these things about customers, but you don't know who the customers are, so you can't go and be like, hey, just lost my job.

Fred Vallaeys [00:46:28]:
Like, I can help you solve this problem, right? I can make some money that way. Yeah. So be invaluable and provide value. And don't ask for that job file, because in terms of a bad decision. So there was a woman who came in to Google in 2002. She was also belgian, so she was competing against me for that job to be the original Adwords person to start the dutch product. But one of the first things she asked was like, where's my office? And where's my assistant? And meanwhile, I was sitting in a room with, you know, at the time, it was only seven people, seven other people, sort of like, working on adwords. And I was like, that's fine.

Fred Vallaeys [00:47:08]:
Like, it's a shared conference room. It's the I'm feeling lucky lounge at Google building zero. And I don't need an assistant. I don't need an office. Like, I'm here to hopefully get a job at this company that seems to be going somewhere. And she was very quickly shown the door because for her it was about prestige and title and, like, certain amenities that she had to have as opposed to coming in and proving that she'd be valuable.

Jim Banks [00:47:34]:
Yeah, I had somebody come in and they said in the interview, I said, do you have any questions? And they said, what's your sick policy? I said, well, you know, if you're sick, we'll pay you if it's legitimately sick. And they said, what's the holiday policy? I said, you actually want this job, or do you just want to have something where you can either be off on holiday or be off sick? It seemed like that was the kind of conversation that we were having.

Fred Vallaeys [00:48:05]:
That's terrible. Regenerative AI people should totally prep for interviews. If you have a hard time knowing what questions to ask, tell GPT, okay, here's the company I'm applying to. What would be some smart questions to ask when I have an interview? And then you can even role play with GPT as if you're talking to the interviewer and get some feedback on it. So, and that's where I think the whole generative AI and technology, I'm so excited about it because it really changes the landscape from, you know, saying I can't to saying I haven't yet. There's so many more opportunities. And like you were alluding to, you can generate video, you can do images. So even if you're not a graphic artist, like I can't is no longer a good answer.

Fred Vallaeys [00:48:49]:
And if you work with a client in marketing and they want a video proof of concept, I mean, sure, talk to GPT, talk to Dolly, like, they'll figure something out. And I really learned this in scripting, too. When you talk to a developer, the more that you can show them a prototype of what it is you want, the better they will build it and the quicker they will build it. So as opposed to being like, hey, I need a script that helps me manage my keywords, that's vague, that's non specific, like, they probably don't even know what a keyword is because they've never done Google Ads. If I go to them and we're like, here's a little script, and it doesn't work that well, it doesn't scale that well, but it shows you the logic that I'm going through for identifying what is a good keyword. And GPT helped me write this. I can give that to an engineer and it's a script and they can say, oh, totally get it. That's the logic.

Fred Vallaeys [00:49:34]:
I'll turn it into an API tool which scales to accounts of millions of keywords. And so that to me is the promise of the future of AI. And generative AI is just like, we can do things we couldn't do in the past, and that just makes things really exciting.

Jim Banks [00:49:50]:
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm kind of, I'm upbeat about the future. Obviously, I have my grievances. I'll always kind of air them because that's just the type of person I am. But, you know, but at the same time, I am quite upbeat about the kind of the future of the advertising ecosystem as a whole, my role in it, my involvement in it, what I'm trying to do for the community. Again, I really appreciate your involvement in the community as well. That for me is like, what you guys do, optimizer is definitely community led. You're trying to, yes, you want to make money for the company because that enables you to grow the company, which enables you to kind of invest into the community and invest into sponsoring events and things like that, which, again, if you didn't do that, then we'd all be working in isolation, which isn't really kind of what agency want to be doing. So.

Jim Banks [00:50:41]:
Yeah, so people like, yeah, exactly.

Fred Vallaeys [00:50:44]:
Thank you for all you do. Like, there's very few people who've been doing this longer than I have, and it's really nice to have an OG who's sounds like you're ready for another 30 years of more of this. Right? So let's do it together.

Jim Banks [00:50:56]:
My wife keeps saying to me, you know, when are you going to retire? I'm like, well, I enjoy working. I mean, the day I'm going to stop retiring is when I start retiring is probably when I don't enjoy work anymore. Right. But I really enjoy what I do. I enjoy the clients I work with. I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy the community I work with as a whole. Right, sure.

Jim Banks [00:51:14]:
I mean, I have issues that I'm trying to address and I'm trying to do it in the best way and most positive way I can. Sometimes that's always difficult. Like I said, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, a bit of a grumpy old sod, so it's not always the easiest thing to do. Very sarcastic. I sometimes wish my sarcasm kind of wasn't as evident and prominent as it is, but unfortunately, that's just who you are, right? You can't change. You can't change your spots. You are who you are, right?

Fred Vallaeys [00:51:41]:
Well, you know, it's for, as negatively as you may talk about yourself, you're a great guy. And that sarcasm is well placed. So.

Jim Banks [00:51:48]:
Well, I really enjoy talking. So, Fred, obviously we've been on for a while. Really appreciate you taking time out your busy day to come and talk to me today. All your contact details, information will be available in the show notes. I'll also leave a link to optimizer, definitely. If you're involved in digital marketing, advertising in any way, Optmyzr is by far and away the best tool I've ever used for that particular purpose. Again, I could be in a customer forever. And I think you've written some books as well, haven't you? So I'll leave links to your books as well.

Fred Vallaeys [00:52:21]:
Yeah, digital marketing in an AI world wrote that back in 2018. Super relevant today in the world of Genai. And then the second book was unlevel, the playing field, basically talking about as everything becomes automated, what is it we can still do to give ourselves a little bit of an edge.

Jim Banks [00:52:38]:
Good. And at some point in time. I know we saw each other fairly recently, but hopefully at some point in time in the near future we'll be able to grab another drink in person. If you get over to I think.

Fred Vallaeys [00:52:50]:
Brighton SEO is definitely one thing that both of us will be at in San Diego. So if you haven't bought tickets for that everyone watching, come hang out with Jim and me.

Jim Banks [00:53:01]:
Cool. I'll leave links to Brightnessio in the show notes as well. Thanks again, Fred, for kind of listening in. And if you haven't already followed the podcast, make sure you do. If you're watching it on YouTube, which I hope you are, make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll catch you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.