If You're Not Adopting AI, F**k You. You Will Be A Burden On Society, Unilever To Hire 20-30x More Influencers, How We're Handling Influencer Pitches, LLM Marketing Will Be Controlled By The Brand Side, Not SEO., How To Triple Your Form Conversion Rate

0:01I listened to a podcast with the Fiver CEO with Harry Stebbings the 20 BC dude uh-huh so So I'm paraphrasing here, but the quote is, if you're not adopting AI, F you, you will be a burden on society. So I think that's a little intense. Yeah, I understand his premise of it. But it's like his whole thing is, look, is it your spouse's job to make you a better person? No, you have to want to be a better person. Is it my job to help you have a fitter body or something? No, it's you have to want a fitter body or to eat well. Right. And so his point is like, same thing here. If you're not willing to adopt this on your own, you don't belong in my company.

0:38You are a burden on society. I have no sympathy for you, right? Versus if you are willing, like we mentioned earlier, if you're willing to learn this stuff, happy to teach you this stuff. Yep. So I'm looking up Fiverr stock right now. And when I look at their stock, because I'm trying to see how much they're affected by AI, March 2025, when you look at their quarterly earnings, they're up 14.61%. So they're still growing in this economy. I mean, people are still using him for a lot of small tasks. Yeah. Well, you know, people think he was intense. I know like some CEOs try to walk back what they were saying.

1:11I think the Duolingo CEO walked it back. Wait, was the Fiverr CEO the one who said if you don't implement AI, like F you? Literally F you. So that wasn't Harry from 20 Minute VC? No, no. Harry was interviewing him. And Fiverr, like he's just, he literally says F you. Like the fully. So. Ah. So, but yeah, I don't think people need to implement it everywhere. Just like in life, you look at some of these corporations that sell artwork, for example. Yeah, you can implement AI like in systems and processes. But like just me personally, if I'm buying art for a house, I don't want AI created art. That's interesting because there's NFT AI created art that's sold for a lot during the NFT craze and they're starting to come back now.

1:58I'm also the person, if I was buying art for a house, I want the cheapest art. and I probably don't care for art in my walls. Yeah, same there. But if I had to buy it and I had to pay the money, I'd rather pay for a human piece, a created piece of art versus AI. But that's just my personal viewpoint. You know, we had an interesting conversation at that AI Founders Dinner the other day where it's like, hey, Eric, are you optimistic or pessimistic in general, right? And I don't know if we talked about this before, but what's your philosophy? Do you find yourself to be more of a pessimist or optimist?

2:29About AI or just in general? In general. I'm more a pessimist. Okay. And do you think it's, if you could choose, what do you think would be more optimal? On how I should be? Yeah. I would prefer to be an optimist. Why? I'd probably be happier in life. So this might actually, I don't know, I want to see how you react to this. So if you think about it, okay, if you're a pessimist, right? You start off negative thinking about something. Now, if it goes, if the outcome is negative, you've been negative twice. Are you following so far? wait repeat okay so if you start off as a pessimist right if you're thinking about a like a situation if that situation turns out to suck and you're right so you're actually double negative negative initially and then negative again are you following yes so if i'm a pessimist and then be right i'm i'm negative you're double negative right yeah but if you're optimist and it goes wrong you're at least happy and then sad right yeah but if you're optimist like you're happy and then it goes right you're double happy right so you're better off actually being an optimist yeah that's a good way to think about it yeah i'm optimistic on some marketing initiatives but generally you know someone gave me an example of this other uh other day with me they're like dude you tend to be negative and they're like talking about the market and interest rates and they're like look at the s &p it's close to all-time highs i'm like ah it's inflated because a lot of these ai stocks and tech yeah but i'm like other than that i'm like i i don't feel optimistic about consumer sentiment and I'm just negative.

3:57And the reason being is, is the economy globally is just terrible. I think maybe the right way to think about this is I'm short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. And then I think you're actually the same way too. Yeah. But, but it gets, if you're more pessimist, it gets people to do things with higher urgency. But I'm optimistic in certain areas in life. Like when I look at marketing as a channel, I love how it adapts all the time. It makes our jobs harder, but it weeds out the crappy people.

4:28And it's entertaining for me like a soap opera. I don't really watch soap operas, but the soap operas take you a lot of ups and downs. I kind of like how marketing changes frequently. Like, oh, Google releasing ARVs is going to affect clips. Oh, everyone's starting to use ChatGPT. It's going to be hard to track impressions. How do you rank on ChatGPT? Oh, now there's AI mode. I like all the change. I like the chaos. Yeah. I like the chaos too. You know, I was listening to Adam Newman being interviewed by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Adam Newman of WeWork fame. And Mark Andreessen, so Andreessen Horowitz was like, hey, Adam, like, if there's one pattern I've identified with you, because he had this fiasco with WeWork, right?

5:06He still ended up getting paid a lot. But he's like, Adam, are you going to stop being that CEO who enjoys chaos and enjoys putting the company back into chaos every time, right? Because they tend to see in their portfolio companies, there's a lot of CEOs that love chaos. Really? Yeah. And I actually, I'm like, oh damn, I think that's me too. Right. Like I function better in chaos. Right. But it's like, no, you should stop like risking it. I think I do take more risks than I should. I think you're, you're probably more conservative, which is the right. But I am chaotic and I'll change my mind very frequently on more personal stuff recently.

5:37And even business. Yeah. A business I'm way better than I used to be, but I'm still bad. Yeah. Yeah. Personal. I'm terrible, but I'm getting better on personal, but it's causing business to get worse. I'm not talking about from a revenue standpoint, but my decision-making changes. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that yesterday. Yeah. Dream home, sold it in a finished building after two years, sold it in a month. It's like, had some homes here, got rid of it. Who knows what's going to happen with this one? Yeah. You have this highlighted. I don't know if you want to talk about this one, but I saw that Unilever is looking to hire 20 to 30 X more influencers.

6:11And I thought this would be interesting to talk about too, Neil, because you've got a lot of influencer pitches. You've I'm finding that I'm getting more pitches in my inbox from companies like Meta, Snapchat, and Adobe. And so I want to talk about how we think about maybe handling these, but we could start off maybe with why Unilever is hiring 20 to 30x more influencers. I think Unilever is making a smart move because they see the power of influencer marketing. They tend to have their own communities, and when they back something, it elevates a brand. Publicists double down on influencer marketing.

6:46They've been buying up influencer marketing companies to scale up their offering. They think it's the future. They've been paying an arm and a leg for some of these influencer shops. You guys bought some too, right? We haven't bought any influencer marketing agencies. From scratch. We do influencer marketing, but we started from scratch. But it's never been on a roadmap to buy an influencer marketing agency. We do have B2C and B2B clients, but influencer marketing isn't the biggest request we get. We tend to buy in areas that we get more requests for. We bought Yodel because we had more apps for optimization requests.

7:18And we were starting to lose some RFPs because not enough good case studies. So we bought a company who's been in business for like 17 or 20 years or something crazy like that for apps for optimization. I don't know what the timeframe was, but I know they launched when there was the first iPhone. Yeah. I think also the reason why they're spending so much more is because I do think influencers, influencers, it's so mispriced because it's such a, it's not like you can log into Google ads or meta. And so when I see some of these offers, and you've gotten great offers too, not anymore. Really? Well, technically, we don't open them up and we don't respond to them anymore.

7:52Yeah. Every once in a while, we'll respond to them because some of them are our clients. So we will respond to those. But every other one that's an influencer, I don't know if I'm getting hit up that often anymore, more or less. I know a lot of them don't come to me, but we have a mandate internally to just turn down all influencer campaigns. So that's a good place to start. So why turn them down? We're talking about influencer pitches to you directly. Because the best use of my social clout, whatever I have, I'm not saying I have a big clout, nowhere near a Kardashian or anything like that. But whatever small clout I do have, it's better used to promote our own products, our own services, and our own business.

8:28Because that not only drives revenue, but that increases my net worth. On the flip side, if I go promote a company like Microsoft, I got paid. But the only value I'm adding is whatever I got paid. when I put my own stuff, yes, I'm getting paid or I'm technically not getting paid, but I'm driving revenue for the company. And that revenue has a certain profit and I'm worth either a multiple of revenue or profit. So it increases my net worth and creates, it's a better leverage than promoting someone else's when I look at the total ROI. Yep, I agree. And some of these deals, by the way, they're like, okay, we like to start at like, you know, 60, 70 grand or something like that.

9:05And we'd like you to do this and that. And my response is the same. one, I can just run my business and I can grow that faster. And I can also promote my own products, right? And services. You know, ironically for this podcast, Neil, I make the ads for you, for your business. Really? Yeah. There's an MP digital ad for you too. And so just to make sure it's balanced, right? So if you want an ad to the public one, whatever, just throw it in there. But that's my take on it. Cause we actually do get good leads, at least from my YouTube channel, this YouTube channel yet for marketing school right now, it's not that big yet, But as it gets bigger, you should have your own ads.

9:38So, yeah. Yeah. But look, I think it's nice to see pitches from Meta, Snap, and Adobe and all that. And so that's a signal to me that they're ramping it up for B2B. It's mispriced. But if you run a business and you're getting influencer pitches as a business creator, it's probably still worth it to just pitch your own things because it's better for you the long term and the short term. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think if you're going to be an influencer, you can look at monetizing your profiles and your channels and your brand in the short run. But in the long run, you got to figure out how to promote your own stuff.

10:14Yep. B2B CTV ads. You have this one. I'm assuming you're going to talk about some case studies here. No, kind of. But I can't reveal the company, but we've been running more B2B CTV ads. It's not that competitive. Inventory is great. It's actually very affordable. the ROI we're seeing is way higher than B2C. Not too many B2B companies want to run CTV ads. I think B2B companies, they just like to do what's tried and true. And they're never really original. And if they're willing to take a shot like on things like this, ideally you're trying to get your clients to carve out like maybe a 10, 15 % fun budget to go on things like this.

10:52That's what one of my friends said recently. He's like, hey, we want to work with you guys, but we also want to carve out a fun budget. We won't measure anything and just see where it goes. And he's the type of guy that will like buy like airplane banners. That's cool. He'll wrap his car with his logo on it. Like you'll try stuff like that. Must have a nice car. No, it's a Tesla Model 3, which is a nice car. It's a luxury car. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game.

11:21Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code. It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together.

11:51No issues with versions or miscommunication, whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

12:22I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.

12:54Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school but speaking of brand dollars that's where we're actually because with B2B CTV as a lot of it is brand dollars we're seeing LLM money come from branding more than the SEO side like if someone wants if a company wants to optimize chat GPT or optimize for chat GPT or perplexity or any of the other solutions out there we're seeing the money come from the brand side We're actually not seeing it come from the SEO side.

13:47Interesting. So are they just not measuring? Like, what are they measuring? The ranking? They're measuring the mentions, how many times they're being mentioned versus the competitors and the sentiment analysis. But we're seeing more of that money being controlled by the brand side versus the SEO side. What do you think about all these? So there's a lot more case studies coming out from like H4Fs, AirOps, and then they're showing, you know, AI overviews. They're showing how many times you're popping up chat TV. There's tools like Profound. I think a lot of this is just, these tools are just showing you the rankings.

14:15but like it doesn't ultimately help you like rank higher or do it doesn't help you rank higher yeah there's another one called scrunch i think it's called it shows you sentiment analysis as well semrush has one a version as well but when we look at a lot of this data it's not 100 accurate because people don't have the depth of a keyword base that they do for google so let's say these seo tools scraped and crawled seven billion keywords on google i'm just making up a number but it's something large like that. They can track literally for any variation is a company showing up in the search fund because you're getting this data, a lot of it from Google.

14:53When you look at the LLMs, you type in a prompt, you're getting more suggested prompts. They're leveraging those to see how many times your brand's mentioned, but that database isn't really robust yet. So the true sentiment analysis, or not sentiment, the true frequency of how often your brand's being mentioned is quite off. Are you guys building anything for this? Yeah, it should be released. And ours will be a quote unquote freemium version and we'll just give a lot away for free. Do you want to share the idea, the experiment that I gave you on this podcast? Yes. So Eric and I were spitballing on this podcast a few weeks ago or a month ago.

15:35And there was an idea on Answer the Public or some of my properties that we're going to collect more agency leads from the tools. So when you register, it's just email, password, authenticate through Google. And then I wanted to collect data for like name, phone number, marketing budget, URL. So then that way I can get more data. So Eric had a brilliant idea on, you know, you should tell him you're almost done registering, complete the rest of the information and you'll unlock premium features for free. The text wasn't that long. I'm paraphrasing here. Eric wasn't recommending that text, but that was a concept.

16:10saying, hey, you can unlock more premium features if you just fill out the rest of the information. So we did that, but instead of forcing people to, my team put a skip button at the bottom. And then we changed the skip button. I changed it the other day to, no thanks, I don't want premium features for free. And we were getting roughly 11 % from registrant to completing the lead when there was a skip button to now it is closer to 30-ish percent. I thought it was 100%, but it was a glitch on how we were tracking. So for a day and a half, it showed up as almost 100%. But I was wrong. But it's roughly triple, which is still good.

16:50But what we're finding when we start calling and dialing the leads is most of them wanted either a help on how to use the tool more, but the majority of them was, oh, we're just using the tool for our own internal marketing department. We're not interested in any consulting. So then I'm reshifting how the team is thinking instead of saying, hey, let's go and create tons of decks or tons of call to actions and lead forms. Think about the flow. Like is someone clicking on a keyword and will they say you like, yes, help me rank for this keyword. Okay, then for that, collect a lead. It's more relevant.

17:31Then reach out. You'll have way less leads, but the leads will be higher qualified. You're not making as many dials, but it could be much more profitable. Yeah, that's interesting. So it's interesting because you tested it very quickly after the idea. And that was just from a conversation. Minus the AI call. Remember I was telling you how we want to test the AI call of having every lead being called by AI. Hey, this is like so-and-so from answer the public. We're an AI bot. We're actually using AI to grow our business. Do you want us to help you grow your business through AI as well? And this is how we're implementing technology and marketing, et cetera, to grow.

18:07We thought that could convert really well. That wouldn't be the script, but I'm just paraphrasing. Yeah, we would fine tune it through copywriters or I would sit down and write copy over an hour. We haven't done it yet. We talked about us doing it. Again, there's a lot of laws with AI because the way a lot of these tools that are dialing have in their terms of service on what they can do with our data, it would breach a lot of privacy laws and we can't just use dialers. We got to find ones that'll comply with the regulations and the rules that our customers or potential customers put us through.

18:47So we haven't been able to test that out yet. We want to, we're just working around the legal hurdles. This is the problem of having established business. I'm not saying anyone should break laws, but when you have a startup, you just go because what's the real risk? Oh, you get in trouble? What is someone going to really sue you for? When you have a company that's big like a Google and we are nowhere near that size or even a fraction or a fraction of a percent, we're not even that big, right? Like we're a speck in their universe compared to their size. But you look at like the Googles of the world, the reason they're not agile and they can't move isn't because they don't have the labor.

19:25It's not because they don't have the culture. They have talented people who believe in it and want to execute fast. it's bureaucracy that gets in your way because of the size. You just have to deal with all these regulation issues because you constantly have a target on your back. Yeah. Bigger you get, the more bureaucracy. Speaking of bureaucracy, by the way, maybe this is not bureaucracy, but I do think it's interesting. I didn't really think about how these, you know, this is more political, but the ICE stuff that's going on. So obviously, we live in LA and downtown, there's a lot of protests going on and things like that.

19:55And it doesn't affect you and I directly because it's not like my friends that have e-commerce businesses where their workers are scared to show up now. So they're scared to show up to work. And then you look at one of the open markets in downtown where there's usually a lot of trade happening. I think it's called Santee Row or something like that. Nobody's there, right? And so this is a situation where it's like, man, the way the media spins something, it's like it really causes a lot of issues. And so a lot of my friends, again, who have these warehouse businesses, people don't want to come to work anymore because it's too scary.

20:30I look at what's happening. I'm not saying it's good or bad. You know, we're not a political show. But I can tell you with Eric and I living in California, the media has blown it out of proportion by far. They're saying it's much bigger than it really is. If you ask most people who live in Los Angeles, I would say like 99 % will tell you the media is making it a much bigger story than it is. Both sides blew it off. Both sides, right? And just to, so my point of saying this is that sometimes this is when marketing goes the wrong way and there's unintended consequences and people end up hurting for it.

21:03Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.