From Google to Optmyzr Navigating the Complex World of Ad Tech

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. 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. 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? 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. Right. And everyone went

ballistic and said, how can you possibly charge two cent for a

pig? 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.

We've come a long way for sure. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Yeah,

it's funny, like, have you got reactions

on your computer? 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. 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. That's

right, it's off. Thank you, Jim.

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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. It would have been a far

less impressive company. 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.

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. I mean, it's

kickback on all the media spend. 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. 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. Yeah.

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?

Yeah. 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. 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. 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. It was deprecated in some markets before

others. As I understand it today

we're not able to get anything from Google. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Sorry, all good. Yeah.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Right. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. You're

a glass. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Yeah, so people like, yeah, exactly.

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. 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. 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?

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.