AI Changed Marketing Forever - Ryan Nelsen

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Ryan Nelson, Chief Marketing Officer at StackAdapt. Now, if you're not familiar with StackAdapt, think of it as the engine behind a lot of the digital advertising you actually notice.

0:37Not the spray and pray banner ads that follow you around like a bad decision, but the smarter, more intentional kind. The kind that uses data, AI, and programmatic technology to put the right message in front of the right person at the right moment without feeling like it's shouting at you. And that's where Ryan comes in. A CMO, he's leading everything from global marketing to brand to communications, helping shape how a company like StackAdapt shows up in a space that's crowded, noisy, and constantly evolving. Because when you're operating in ad tech, you're not just competing for attention, you're competing for relevance.

1:14Ryan Nelson, welcome to the show. Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. My pleasure, my friend. We got a lot to cover, and let's just rock and roll.

1:23Ryan Nelsen:What do you think? Let's do it. Let's do it. Excited to be here. Yeah. Okay. Let's do the 30 ,000 foot, which I hate that term, but I want to say it anyway. When you zoom out, let's just look at marketing. I was going to ask you what feels different about marketing today versus a few years ago, but I can ask you what feels marketing five minutes ago. It's changing, but you pick a timeframe. What feels different than say a year, three, five years ago about marketing? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think there's all the playbooks are being shooken up and obviously AI is here. So as if the internet, has been created like 20 years ago, 25, 30 years ago.

1:57Ryan Nelsen:It's an exciting time to be alive with all the technology and tools we have available to us. And I think it's up to those marketers that are going to get after it, get gritty, get scrappy and understand and just be deep learners. And for older guys like me, having to relearn things and getting after it, it's an exciting time for sure. Yeah. Like you said, I mean, there's so much that's changing and I could have asked you what's changing 30 seconds ago to three months ago to three years ago. It's just so fast. But my next question has to do with from where you're sitting in your role, is there one, two or three things you're seeing that a lot of marketers are just not fully appreciating or taking advantage of what they have today?

2:37Ryan Nelsen:I think a lot of marketers right now are looking out in front of them, looking at short-term goals, long-term goals. And a lot of them are prioritizing performance. Right now I'm trying to just hit those targets, hit those revenue targets and not building the long-term infrastructure and systems to connect data, to connect systems and really move beyond projects to more process. And I think the more we can build process in place to start automating the, not just the process, but the distribution of our marketing campaigns with AI, I think that the ones that do that are going to be set up to win long-term.

3:09Ryan Nelsen:And it's that short-term, long-term thinking and making sure you get the balance right. I could not agree more. Could not agree more. Okay, here's the topic. Oh, my gosh. We could spend the rest of the time talking about the age-old brand versus performance topic. It feels like it's been around forever. But I get the sense that that divide now is starting to collapse. Do you agree? And if so, why? Yeah, I think back to even just the thoughts on short-term, long-term. I see it as marketers think about short-term metrics around performance, hitting from a B2B standpoint, MQLs to SQLs to opportunities to close one business.

3:44Ryan Nelsen:What's that funnel look like? from our B2C brands? What are you doing in terms of driving product revenue? We just actually did a study a little while ago with ad perceptions and found that about 70 % of marketers are prioritizing performance over brand. And then we actually did a follow-on study with Cantar to kind of diversify it. And we found that actually brands that focus more on a 50-50 split of brand and performance actually have an increase of sales of about 10%. And so I thought it was a fascinating sort of license to go take to as marketers. Let's go a little harder on the brand side.

4:16Ryan Nelsen:We know that's going to be the long-term benefit anyway of building the brand, but that ultimately pays up. And in the days, if you're a CMO, if you're not focusing on performance right away, you're probably going to get fired by the time you build that brand. But if you're also, if you're not focusing about the brand, your top of funnel is going to dry up and it's going to be a lot more difficult. It's going to be uphill slug to go do that. So definitely finding a good balance is awesome. Go a little step further. What does that look like? Not just at your own company, but any company when you really hit that sweet spot, the balance of brand and performance, what's that look like in practical application?

4:50Ryan Nelsen:Yeah, I think I'll think about it from a B2B standpoint for a moment here. There's obviously, you know, a lot of marketers historically like have been, you know, the old school way of things may be doing is you're measured on leads. Like what's the top of funnel look like? Are you driving enough demand? And you can always look at the ratios of quality and quantity and what does that look like? And at the end of the day, nothing matters but revenue. And so how do you back into that revenue funnel? Maybe there's a smaller top of funnel, but you have a higher conversion rate through the funnel. And so thinking about that from our mix, we obviously stack it up to ourselves, to be going out there and across every single channel, connect to TV, digital out of home, podcasts, video display, et cetera, making sure that we're showing up in front of the right audiences with the right message at the right time, but also leveraging LinkedIn and the B2B platform, obviously all of our Google work, meta work, but then, you know, you know, content syndication, having strong thought leadership out there, our own content as well, partnering, our partner ecosystem.

5:44Ryan Nelsen:And I'm sharing a lot of just different like tactics as well, but that whole kind of, you know, puzzle comes together into kind of a picture that brings together enough volume, enough quality, and ultimately enough demand that's going to go drive that. And now once you have that muscle and that machine and your data and your systems and your campaigns are all flowing sort of on a kind of a highly well-oiled demand gen machine, you can then start overlaying some bigger bets on brand showing up. We did a Times Square takeover on the New Year's Eve. And so when the ball dropped, you saw stack it up next to the ball on the buildings there.

6:17Ryan Nelsen:And our CEO got like 15 text messages right away saying, hey, I didn't know you guys were that big. I didn't know you were advertising there. And so some of it's like the softer side of things where it's just like an anecdote that Like, you know, you get a text from your CEO and the founders say, Hey, good job on this. Cause like we're, we're showing up in cool places. And so balancing the art and science, the heart and mind of all that ultimately, I think is the end of the day is the sweet spot of where brands really grow. That would have been a good KPI to have, by the way. Like how many texts does your CEO get?

6:47Ryan Nelsen:Yeah. You know, I think I've always joked about like marketers just start like targeting, you know showing ads to just different you know audiences that would have more pull or say on budgets or other things because you know it's working but we do it the right way we definitely are spending our budgets focusing on you know our audiences but there's other ways for sure for CMOs listening out there now and whether they're new or a bit in the role whatever and there's that imbalance where do you suggest they start to even that out I'd say it depends on your tenure in the company, you obviously get some quick wins and it starts with surrounding yourself with the best people and people that are scrappy, learning, leaning in really hard on new technology.

7:29Ryan Nelsen:And I'll tell you one time I joined a company, they had an established CMO who was exiting and I joined. And what was happening in the company is they were doing these infographics that would take three or four months, really beautiful infographics, incredible data, really valuable for the industry. And then they launched it and like 50 people looked at it. And so I just flipped that completely and I was like, all right, like we'd go get distribution. And so I built a diagnostic that was like this future of at the time, future of banking diagnostic. And it helped the audience stack themselves up against their competitors.

8:00Ryan Nelsen:And we had in a week, 7 ,000 people take that. And it was more leads than they had the previous two years combined, just because it was something compelling that was low friction for somebody to engage with. And that was the kind of just like a quick win that I did in the first month of joining that, you know, built some trust and built some confidence that we could go really like crank this up. And then from there could make some bigger bets and long-term shots. So once, okay, once the CMO tries to bring branded performance together, right, it kind of becomes a leadership question, specifically, how should the CMO and CRO be working together?

8:34Ryan Nelsen:Yeah, that's a good question. I've always tried to make the CRO one, like just best friends, but two, the most successful person in the business because revenue solves pretty much every problem. And so if the CRO and revenue team and leaders are crushing revenue targets, everything else flows. So I tend to, we disagree and commit and debate, but we lock arms and we just get after it together. I think I'll always try to be at a company that I'm really, really close with the CRO and just a lot of mutual trust between, but it comes down to just us talking their language. I don't talk in marketing speak, or I try to speak with the CFO, the CEO, CRO the same way that we're business drivers.

9:13Ryan Nelsen:We grow businesses together. And that means that our marketing goals line up to our revenue goals, line up to our company goals, and all that's threaded all the way throughout. And when we start to kind of pat ourselves on the back of a campaign that maybe drove some leads, I definitely celebrate some of those wins, but we definitely follow up to see what the impact of that was. And if it didn't work, we reassess and we work on that. So at the end of the day, sometimes marketing rolls up to a CRO. Sometimes there's different structure layers, but I've always found that having a CMO report to the CEO and have that solid pillar in the business to not just be a marketer, but a business grower, I think is critical for businesses.

9:53So you mentioned language, you know, speaking the same language. Is that the single biggest disconnect or are there other reasons or other ways that CMOs and CROs can coexist?

10:04Ryan Nelsen:It's building trust. It's not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. We got to back it up with our efforts and with the outcomes and the results that we drive. We got to also be honest and really radically candid on what's working and what's not. So yeah, I think about the way that I manage the marketing team and try to be a leader is, you know, we set really big, aggressive goals. We figure out, is there a path and what path is going to be the best path to get there? We get ruthlessly and prioritize really ruthlessly around that. I kind of talk about four Ps instead of like the traditional business school four Ps.

10:38Ryan Nelsen:I talk about what was our purpose? What are we passionate about? And what really fires us up? What are our priorities? And then what's our pace? And those four driving the four Ps that I think really drive a team. But starting with your purpose, what's your why? What are you here to do? Yeah. Is where we all begin. Okay. So I'm going to connect some dots that should be connected. And that's connecting data to revenue, right? Everybody talks about data-driven. We get it. Everybody listening, we know. You're data-driven. We get it. But very few can connect those dots clingily to revenue, right? Where do you think that usually falls apart that disconnects from data to revenue?

11:18Ryan Nelsen:I think every business is on a different journey. I think, you know, I've always been a data company. So I've always been a marketer marketing to marketers or a marketer marketing data technology. And so I've always valued this conversion of data to insights. And what is that data is only as good as, you know, the data in the outputs are only as good as the data in and sort of garbage in garbage out kind of concept. As you think about that, we have dashboards. We also have now in Slack, everything embedded in we're pulling in Salesforce data, gong data that I can just ask, tell me the top 10 customers in Raleigh, North Carolina.

11:51Ryan Nelsen:And it tells me in 30 seconds what those are. Okay. What's their spend? What channels are they using us for? And now some of the AI functionality and technology we have, we're able to just be able to get these answers in real time. And so that changes the role of a data analyst to be more prescriptive on what are some of the signals that you're seeing that maybe on a weekly, monthly basis, we can make fine adjustments to. So we work our marketing operations team just to kind of get more tactical on this. Our marketing operations team works very closely with our revenue operations team. We think about what is the overall revenue goal for the year.

12:23Ryan Nelsen:We then back into, okay, what's our average deal size? What's our average opportunity size, average SQL value? we look in sort of the math of what that looks like and, you know, make sure that the connected systems between, you know, a hand raiser and somebody picking up that, picking up the ball, progressing that, driving more efficiency in that sales function, and then ultimately taking it to a close that we're just always just ruthlessly optimizing that. How do we just win business faster, expand existing customers faster? What I love about StackAdapt, it's also just like, we're very customer first.

12:56Ryan Nelsen:It's like, we're going to do what's right for the customer. We're not going to sell something they don't need. I love being a part of companies that are that way. Really, really high level question here, but just are marketers drowning in data or are we still just not using it the way we should? I say it's an interesting time right now where, so there's a moment in time where AI, when we started to kind of kick things off that there was not enough data to feed the models. And for the first time in history, there was not enough data. And I think now we're kind of finding a better balance with that.

13:23Ryan Nelsen:I think it all depends on the, the, I'm not super technical. And so I always have to surround myself with, you know, jokingly sort of nerdier folks that we joke about the data nerds, because I love those groups that can connect systems and connect data for me to be able to like find the signal from the noise and go into a meeting and make decisions and have a meetings be really productive that way versus just kicking the can down the road. And so I think many marketers, and certainly that's a good question because I think many marketers are drowning in data. I think the bigger challenge right now is connecting systems and connecting data.

13:59Ryan Nelsen:We have OpenAI, we have Cloud, we're doing a lot in Cloud. You can't, OpenAI turns off their exports. We can't export info into Cloud. And we have seven or eight other tools popping up all the time that are point solutions for AI. as a CMO, connecting all those different systems and saying, okay, what is going to really truly move the needle? How do we then also go create guardrails and brand guidelines for all the other AI users in the company to be able to pull from the same repository of brand guidelines, style guides, messaging, positioning? That's the stuff that I think that we can really do as marketers right now is lay that foundation because if we don't, it's going to get out of hand and content is going to get worse.

14:39Ryan Nelsen:It's going to get further and further from the core of what we're trying to say. Yeah. And then it's also, does it sure not run the risk of now with AI in the mix becoming less, sorry to be so obvious, but less human? Absolutely. Yeah. I think my viewpoint on this is that we should certainly be automating all of our process and our distribution, but we shouldn't be automating our point of view as marketers. And that is unique to us. So anytime we can automate campaigns, systems, technology, StackAdapt is definitely moving towards an area where we're automating channels and helping marketers and advertisers do that as well from an end-to-end orchestration standpoint for both advertising and marketing.

15:15Ryan Nelsen:And we see that that's just where the future is going. So yeah, process distribution is critical. Okay. Look, it's obviously the worst kept secret. AI is everywhere right now, but I want you to look at it just from a very, very high level. When it comes to AI, what's real versus just noise? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think most marketers right now, that some are on the leading edge, some are just getting started, some are getting really curious. I think a lot of marketers are so busy, they don't have the time to dive in really, really deep on things. And so I'm blocking hours and Friday evenings to try to just get up to speed and learn faster.

15:49Ryan Nelsen:But I think Claude and OpenAI and some of the ChatGPT work and then Claude with Cowork is incredibly, incredibly valuable for marketers right now. If you're not diving in on Claude, I think there's huge, huge potential for improving workflows and just getting things done. And so I think that's very real. I think both are going to be enormous companies. And in fact, also for all the marketers that are in certain different industries, I think all of us are feeling the pressure of what does Claude and OpenAI, what are they going to go disrupt? Because sometimes you could say that AI will eat the world as Claude Design comes out last week and competing now with Figma and Adobe.

16:27Ryan Nelsen:OpenAI is now competing with some of those things as well and launching some things as well recently. Businesses that have built a moat and have built unique differentiation, I think are going to be good, but you never know what's going to, a new use case that's going to come out that's going to be paradigm shifting for the industry and for our roles. Is AI making marketing better, faster, lazier, more productive to be determined, all of the above? How do you answer that AI is making marketing better? Yes or no? And then go from there. Definitely making it better. I think early on, maybe too, as ChatGPT was launched, I think you could see that some of the most early adopters you could argue that they were very smart, but a lot of them were just looking for easier ways to get things done.

17:08Ryan Nelsen:Yeah. I wouldn't say they were lazy, but some of you've heard quotes before, where sometimes the, if you hire somebody that's kind of lazy to do something, they're going to find the easiest way to get it done. And I think there's a lot of that in that sense that like, how do you go become a really not lazy marketer, a really fast paced, high performing marketer, but also think differently than what you've always done and take the time to stop and say, okay, if I go take these two hours and build out this deck and this presentation, this speech for next week, or I can do it in three minutes with AI and then go tweak it.

17:40Ryan Nelsen:I think most marketers are doing that level, like kind of basic level of AI use, but then now take it a step further of like, how do you then go integrate your systems? How do you pull all your data together? How do you go create workflows now, outputs, sites, landing pages, video, design, all of that is getting so much better on a weekly basis. Definitely getting better, but I want to keep the human element in it as well. And I've said that, you know, I think others have said this, AI is not going to take marketers jobs, but marketers using AI will. And it's on us to make sure we're on the front foot.

18:11Yeah. And it's a perfect segue. What I wanted to get into about the human connection, right? And everything is becoming more and more automated. And I know you've wrote big, believe in-person experiences, right? Are becoming more and more important. Why is that?

18:23Ryan Nelsen:There's going to be, there always will be a need for human connection and relationship building. When you meet somebody in person or face-to-face and you build a connection, you have a genuine connection that goes well beyond business. I think people, you know, work can be about friendships. People work with people. They want to work with people they enjoy working with. And so we tend to lean in quite hard on creating experiences. And I use maybe the analogy of the best brands make more deposits than they make withdrawals in your, in your life. And so they're constantly, consistently making deposits.

18:54Ryan Nelsen:Like what was that, you know, that valuable report or that experience or that blog that was shared that, or that commercial that you saw that inspired you and maybe like looked around and like rethought your life. Like those things all make a difference. The moment that you have more withdrawals and are asking more than you're taking or taking more than you're giving, I think is where brands get sideways. And so that in-person experience is just another way to go do a really big deposit into the relationship you have with that person. And so we tend to do large annual summits. I've done things where we've done really high-end things for folks.

19:32Ryan Nelsen:And you leave there basically best friends. You're texting. You're following up. You're asking how the family's doing. And that's really what I think is a powerful thing about business. It doesn't have to be so rigorous or robotic. It can be friendly, personable, and fun. So I think that's what I love about the in-person experience. It's something I promise not to get on my soapbox at least too long, but it's when I coach people and even like people in college, when I talk to them, I said a relationship is a relationship is a relationship. It doesn't matter if it's personal or professional. There's still some fundamental things that apply and that's honesty, transparency, communication.

20:09It's no different than your relationship with your parents, your children, your partner. But somewhere along the line, some people got, well, Brian is my client, so I can't speak to him about how his kid's soccer game went. Where is that written? Like, it's just fascinating, right?

20:25Ryan Nelsen:Definitely, yeah. All of us love working with people that we trust and, you know, get to know. And I think I've always tried to work with teams and have teams that trust each other but, you know, also really care about each other in terms of our families. At the end of the day, I take a lot of pride in being a part of a company that's growing really, really fast because that impacts. We've hired about 1 ,000 people in the last year and a half since I've joined. And that's 1 ,000 families that we're making hopefully their life better, their quality of life, but also, yeah, just giving them an opportunity to build a really strong career.

20:56Ryan Nelsen:So it means something. And then that expands to our partners and clients and everybody else. And the word we're kind of not dancing around, but I'm going to say it, is community. Yeah. Right? Absolutely. Do you think marketers are underestimating the role and really the power of community? I think there is. I joined a chat this morning with some of the top marketing leaders here in my area. It's normally a busy schedule, but I blocked it this morning because we're talking about what's working in AI, what's not. It's a fully remote company, so I work at home. And so I'm just normally cranking all day long.

21:28Ryan Nelsen:And so it's good to sometimes to hop out, meet some folks, get perspective, understand what they're doing. And so that was a nice community moment I think I had today. that I valued a lot. Yeah. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to put on your forecasting hat and we're going to check back to this in a couple of years. What's a belief about marketing today that you, you think won't hold up a couple of years from now? It's a good question. I think there is a general notion right now for marketers that marketers can do it better than AI. And I think what we've learned over the last, even just a couple of months is that even imagery and videos and design was pretty bad, you know, you know, and even just even the last several weeks, new models coming out where it's going to be very, very difficult to compete and say that anymore because you have the smartest machine in the world and we're going to say that we're going to be smarter than that.