Is Marketing Picking Up or Slowing Down? What We Are Seeing, Does There Really Need to be a GEO? Why SEO Is More Important Than Ever Now, The One Thing Holding Google Back With AI

0:00Remember what I called in December I said inflation is going to run hot right so one month annualized core PCE so inflation numbers is at 4.5. percent um i thought it was 2.8 so it is it is 2.8 but that's um that's on a different metric i'm actually looking at this okay so uh core pca inflation came in hot rising to an annual rate of 2.8 percent from the initially reported 2.6 percent in january right but this we're talking about one month one month is 4.5 does that make sense uh oh so not annualized yeah this is month over month yeah so one month 4.5 three months is 3.6 six months is 3.1 12 months is 2.8 Does that make sense?

0:38No, because if your number is bigger from one month over the next, wouldn't it just start going larger and larger? In the red. So, of course, 4.5, three months is 3.6. But from a math equation standpoint, because I'm confused on this, if your growth rate for hopefully your iPad didn't mess up. Okay. If your growth rate on a year over year perspective is 3%, just to keep math simple, but we're in March right now at the very end. But if your growth rate from February to March is 4%, then your growth rate from year over year wouldn't be 3%. It would be higher. I think this is saying it's accelerating, which is what I called in December when we made the predictions.

1:21I think this is what it says. It's on one month, month over month, it's accelerating. Yeah, but if month over month is accelerating, it would show in your annualized number too. Yeah. Your annualized number would be bigger. This is pulled from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, macro bond, author's calculations. So this makes me want to hit the grok button and then ask what you've been asking over here. So I think it's right to question it. But let's call out some other stuff too. So after inflation data was released, the Atlanta Fed updated their Q1 2025 GDP estimate. So do you think we're good, equal, or bad?

1:56So depending on how you want to categorize good or bad, I'm just going to actually say number wise, I think the number is going to go up because of tariffs. Inflation is going to increase. OK, so the Q1 2025 estimate for GDP was negative 0.5 percent or negative 2.8 percent when including gold and exports, imports and exports. So the Atlanta Fed now sees a GDP contraction for the first time since 2022. And it certainly feels like that, which is what we're going to. We're about the economy. Yeah, I agree. I don't think the economy feels great. So the last thing I'll call out, and then this is where we'll go into what we're seeing with the economy right now.

2:32Why is this huge? Because if the economy is slowing and inflation is rising, the Fed's higher rates for longer strategy is dead. We are now entering a period of, what did I call a couple years ago? And I kept calling and finally it seems like it's going into and I'm not happy about it. Stagflation? Stagflation. Yeah. So we are now in a lose-lose situation. And so the thing that Scott Besson has been saying, and it might get worse before it gets better, it certainly feels like that's what we're going into. And you have a topic on this. Yeah. And these government people are going to talk about what's going to happen.

3:06And I'm not saying they're right or wrong. They're smarter than I am. But what really matters at the end of the day is the actual numbers that are released. and are things improving or not. But hopefully in the long run, things do improve. And what was the topic? Oh, how marketing is doing right now in this economy. We're seeing a big increase in corporations looking for help in marketing and planning. We're seeing a massive slowdown on large enterprises, like big companies. I'm talking about publicly traded worth billions of dollars, signing agreements. They're being way more patient. We're seeing a slowdown in smaller businesses interested in marketing.

3:51We're seeing them slower to make a decision. And we're seeing them wanting more flexible terms because they don't know what's going to happen with tariffs and their products, you know, cost wise and their margins. So just to recap, large businesses, we're seeing more inquiries, but we're seeing them take way longer to make a decision. Smaller business, less inquiries, hesitant, and they want really flexible terms. terms and the reason being is they don't know what's going to happen to their business in the next 30 days or 60 days i'm not here to pick on anyone or any political system but at least in the news we can all say definitively that we've seen news on there's tariffs one day there's not or we're going to increase by this much or it's not going to be as bad because the news is all in flux it makes companies really nervous right now so yesterday i mentioned this in our call yesterday, but I was sitting in an Uber going to the airport and I was in Vegas.

4:54Right. And so this week, last week was spring break and it's March Madness too. Typically it is wild during this time. So actually backing up two days before that, when I landed, when I land, usually you go from the airport, you go around side streets or you go on the freeway to get to your hotel. Right. Um, in Vegas. Now in this case, this guy just drove straight shot local and there's no, there's no traffic like and i've never seen that before right what time did you land this is like 3 p.m or something wow yeah and so usually there's traffic at that time yeah i used to live in vegas yeah and so here's the thing i was like so what's going on he's like dude the economy is so bad right now there are days where i only make 50 and he drives like he drives like a you know like an infinity right it's a it's a nice car um he's like there's days where i only make 50 uh january february there's like no business right and he's like this week there's not that much and there's a couple of conferences shop talk was happening um our mutual friend you need was there for like another like channel partners conference.

5:47There's some, some like, I don't know, some apple pie conference or something like that. So they all need conferences. Right. Uh, and the thing is nothing was that busy. It was pretty dead. And then, so going back to my conversation yesterday, he's like, yeah, my driver, yes. I was like, so how many rides did you use to get per hour? He's like, at least three per hour. Easy. Right. I'm like, what do you get now? He's like, if I'm lucky one per hour. So, so massive decrease. Right. And then the other problem is, um, was this Uber or taxi? This is Uber. And then he was like, he's like, yeah, it's spring break, March madness or whatever.

6:16But going from three to one, I mean, that's a that's a massive dip. Right. That's that's 66 percent down. And he's like, yeah, I just I guess I got to find like another job. I'm like, you should while you wait, you should start to study up for something else. I didn't mention, you know, AI taxi drivers or anything, but he's like, yeah, you're probably right. But my point is Vegas is a good indicator of how things are going. I'm seeing the same things with you are the sales cycles are slower. There's still a good amount of leads. I think leads are very strong right now, I would say. but what we discussed on a call to the agency owners group yesterday, which we'll talk about on how we're, you know, kind of moving on from that.

6:49But we talked about flexible terms. And so instead of saying, Hey, you have to do 12 months with us. We're saying, Hey, maybe it's 12 months with 30 day outs, or you start with 60 day out, see if they take it, or maybe you go to 30 day outs. Um, some people, some, your salespeople typically want to do month to month. Cause it's easier to close a deal that way. But whatever you can to do to secure the deal right now, if your team does a good job, you just hope for the best that they can retain the client. It's better to have some revenue to no revenue if they're good customers. Yeah. And when I look at the economy, one thing that I like what Eric does, and he's been doing this for so many years, is whenever he travels or whenever he gets in an Uber, he starts talking to the drivers, because they're a really good signal of what's happening just in the world.

7:36If people are doing less Uber Eats deliveries or less Uber rides or taxi rides or hotels are saying, hey, it's really slow and empty when it's normally busy, it kind of gives you a good sense on the sentiment that people have when it comes to spending money. Yeah, and consumer sentiment is the worst it's been since 2022, I think. Yeah, I saw like they have this Michigan consumer sentiment thing or whatever. But yeah, go on. You have this topic over here. Does there really need to be a GEO? It's the same thing. Whether it's GEO or someone saying we're doing growth hacking, this is just marketing.

8:08People just want to coin these terms. And, you know, I'm not going to, I hate on it, but at the same time I've used it myself. I say SEO is no longer search engine optimization. It's search everywhere optimization. It's just a version of it. Search engine optimization, whether it's for Pinterest or Instagram, they have search engines built in. It's the same thing. People are just changing the vernaculars or they're creating new terms because they want to ride a coattail. I mean, I totally stole search everywhere from you, but let me put it to you this way. The reason I like search everywhere optimization is it's halfway there.

8:43It's still SEO, right? It's still SEO. You haven't completely changed it, so I can still call it SEO. Yes, and the reason we still say SEO, but we call it search everywhere optimization, when we talk to companies and we say SEO, they believe SEO is just for Google. and when we told them before you need to do seo everywhere on instagram facebook etc it doesn't resonate but when you say search everywhere optimization look at the data and how people search they're like oh okay yeah yeah so that's why we started changing how we explain it but when people talk about like oh we're gonna do growth hacking so what do you do to growth hack um well we're gonna do paid ads we're gonna do conversion optimization we do email marketing we're gonna do SEO so you're just doing digital marketing oh we're gonna do GEO okay so how do you do GEO oh so you break down all the tactics these are pretty much the same way you would do SEO yeah optimize for the uh the answer box you know the h1 tags make sure your site is fast uh-huh so SEO yeah exactly so okay you need to get your brand queries up you need to get your brand everywhere well let's talk about where this does make sense because digital marketing makes a lot of sense because you have marketing, which is very broad.

9:55When you make it digital, that makes sense. Now there's no need to just rebrand these things just to rebrand it. Now, when you say inbound marketing, for example, that does kind of make some sense. Or performance marketing, same thing. Or affiliate marketing makes sense. When Drift did conversational marketing, okay, I can see it. But there's no need to do this, guys. Don't make it harder for us marketers. Like back in the day when we're like you were 25, I was 24. You know, Heaton actually co-coined the phrase growth hacker, I believe, with Sean Ellis, right? And I just couldn't get myself into it.

10:31Like I'm a very like I try to be a very forward thinking guy. I try to be a pretty progressive guy with these things. I'm just like, yeah, I never once called myself a growth hacker. And thank God I didn't. Because what ended up happening was all the affiliate marketers started calling themselves growth hackers right after that. Same with like the lean startup. Like I know Eric Ries, smart guy. I love what he's doing with his latest startup, the long-term stock exchange. But when you look at lean startups, it's like, okay, cool. You just make your engineers more efficient. Yep. You have this one that's related, why SEO is more important than ever now.

11:02Yeah. The reason being is you have no choice but to leverage all these platforms because search is turning into social media. When you look at social media, according to Sprout Social, the average person, I believe, logs into 6.7 platforms per month. So they're not just, Hey, I have an account on X and Facebook. They're logging in. So if they're logging in, they're using. And if you look at search, it's the same way, dude, how much time do you talk or how much, how many times have you told me you love using Grok now to do your searches instead of Google? Like all the time. Yeah. And I tell you, I still love using Google and you still use Google.

11:41Yeah, I do. And I use chat GPT sometimes and i've used grok as well and i've used perplexity and i even do searches on instagram now when i'm buying stuff oh you do because it gives me ideas oh yeah because you can just see the images and it's just really i prefer it over google images yeah especially for things like clothes like for certain things like don't you just buy from one spot i was talking to you about this he only has one place and you only have one place typically uh what yes you're i I mainly spend at Brunello Cuccinelli and Loro Piana. So he's no more Loro. He's just Brunello. I'm like, yeah, that's nice.

12:18Same too. Like all my new pants, I ordered them from Brunello. I'm ordering less and less from Loro and more and more from Brunello. Nice. Okay, you guys are the same. Yeah, at a random. But I still prefer, like, if I just want a sweater, I still just go to Loro Piana because they just have a ton of comfortable sweaters. 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. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes.

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14:29Sign 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. Brunello is nice, but they don't make the basics as well as I have a hack for you there. I will talk about it after this. Okay. But going back to that, like i'm now starting to not wear dress pants anymore like i'm speaking later today i'm going to a conference i'm going to wear this i'm wearing viore legging where are you going or joggers what are they called leggings or joggers yeah uh i'm wearing all viore too some real estate conference uh later on so i'm going to wear this but i go to instagram to find the latest uh joggers ah and that's where i like i just search because they have the most amount of insert and i've ordered so many and i haven't found any better than viore yet yeah but that's where i will go and look for images and people talking about and i'll read the comments dude this is why i like living near the century city mall because they have the largest fury on the west coast and yeah so i walked in here yesterday because i forgot my shorts i was uh walking from the we have a little office right across from the the mall and i was like oh i need to get shorts walked to the very got my shorts went into work the gym and went home oh i've i've never tried buying my uh what What is it called?

15:48I've never tried buying my clothes from a store like Viori or anything. Dude, it's nice there. You can take the kids to the Century City. Well, OK, let's pick one more here. I got I got one on. Let's talk about the one thing holding Google back with AI. Do you want to know what it is? What is it? So I believe Google has they're pretty up there when it comes to our tech like Gemini 2.5 came out. It's the best coding one. It beat almost all the other models with scoring and everything. and you can actually, I think you can put like a million tokens in there. And so for coding now, I believe it's best.

16:22And I think our developers will probably switch, try it out versus Sonnet when they use Cursor. But my point of saying all this, let me try to simplify this for marketer. So the one thing holding Google back with AI right now is not necessarily the tech because when they came out with Notebook LM to summarize your content, the problem with it is a lot of their stuff is hard to use, right? So Notebook LM, it's not the perfect UI. if you want to use Gemini 2.5, you have to open up like AI studio and you have to pick the right model and all that stuff. So when they made fun of wrappers, the way you kind of wrap the UX and the UI and everything, Google is usually, they were good at user experience in the past, not so much anymore.

17:01And I think user experience is still going to matter a lot with whatever you build, at least really forever. But that's fixable. That's easier to fix than creating good tech. So they have the good tech. They have the great models. They have all the data in the world. I think they need to have someone that is assigned to UI, UX for all these things. And I think they're going to do a lot better. So I don't think we should sleep on Google. People are like, Google is dead. Google is not dead. Guys, Google is still growing. They're still a multi-trillion dollar company. And they have some of the best data sets in the world.

17:31Yes. And I think Google is just going to get bigger. And I do believe they'll fix UI, UX. I don't think that's the biggest challenge. But the problem with what's happening is they're moving fast, especially for their size and scale. in which they're just putting stuff out there and they'll worry about fixing it later on. Yep, okay, that one went fast. I have another one here for you. So I'm gonna give you guys, okay, this AI prompt will create practical, realistic ads instantly. So Neil, have you seen this? Where you basically, oh, it's gonna fall off again. So I'm showing this to Neil, but we'll show this in the video.

18:01But you can see there's this product, right? And this prompt basically says, create image, chat, chpd images, right? So pretend you're a TikTok beauty influencer with over 1 million followers. You are in your luxurious bathroom doing your skincare routine. Take a photo of this using an iPhone. Quality should be of iPhone 14 or lower. It should not feel like a professional photo shoot. Pretend like you are posting this picture on your Instagram stories. Use text overlay that says the only product that actually took away my turkey neck. Yeah, that's pretty good. Come on. That's not pretty good. That's great.

18:36That's, that's, that's, that's effing good, man. Yeah, that's really good. That's effing good. Okay. So when I say this, now I think you're more of a believer in this chativity images, right? No, I've never had the issue that the quality of the image isn't good. The problem that I have with AI images is most corporations, and I'll give you that real example right there because I was with the skincare company in Australia a few days ago. doing things like that like this is a true solution to remove the turkey neck or doing instagram videos or images of hey i'm going to a vet let me try on a dress which one should i wear and you're showcasing multiple dresses from the same company those things don't convert that well today but they did like a year year and a half ago and where this ai is useful is testing the concepts to figure out what works and then go and double down on it.

19:34I thought you were going to go in a different direction. So this guy responds in here. So by the way, this post was from Dara Denny. But this guy Rob responds and says, well, this would violate FTC's rules regarding endorsements if published by a brand, unless it was made clear that this is AI generated. So good to know, right? But to Neil's point, a lot of the meta, so the meta is the most optimized way of playing a game. This might have been the meta like two years ago or so. that's not to say you shouldn't retest it, but you should always consider what the current meta is. And marketers, going back to original marketing, the best way to do this, I don't know if you do this right now, you probably do, but I always have a bookmark for my swipe file.

20:10So marketers, if you see ads that you like on Instagram, hit the bookmark button, create a swipe file folder. And then I hope in the future, when you want to create ads, it will just look at your swipe files and then make ads based off of that. But I think it's going to be even more valuable to have a swipe file going forward. So again, save your favorite ad copies, your favorite landing pages and all that type of stuff. Cause I think, you know, again, that's your taste. And if it, if it worked on you, it'll probably work on other people. Last thing before we leave, cause we're pretty much out of time.

20:42I was in Latin America. I haven't been this year, but last year I was in Latin America. I talked to quite a few people in the government when I was in Brazil. I was in Italy as well towards the end of last year talked to quite a few different government officials as well one thing that I've seen that's really common because everyone at these market conferences wants to talk about AI they want things super disclosed that is going to be AI and I don't know what the laws are around every country what they have implemented what's not implemented I think we're going to move into a role four or five years from now at the latest where pretty much most countries, you have to disclose that the content is AI created and big bold areas or letters, and it's gonna be, they'll know it right when they see the image or the video, which is just gonna screw up conversions for anything that's AI related, especially when it comes to influencer marketing.

21:33And then when that happens, we will report on that. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.