Escape The AI Paralysis - Mike Lane

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 Mike Lane, CEO and co-founder of Fluency, the digital advertising operating system helping agencies scale paid media campaigns across every major digital ad channel. Fluency manages more than 250 ,000 campaigns monthly and nearly$3 billion in annual media spend, giving Mike a unique lens into our advertising, automation, and AI are all-headed.

0:51The company recently raised the$40 million Series A to accelerate its growing agentic AI capabilities. And today, we're going to dig into what all that actually means for CMOs, marketing teams, and the future of advertising operations. Before Fluency, though, Mike was COO and co-founder of Deora.com, which became the automotive retail industry's largest marketing and advertising platform. And finally, he's also an active angel investor, board advisor, and serves on several nonprofit boards. Mike Lane, my new brother, my new friend. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Steve. Pleasure to be here.

1:26Yeah, very, very much looking. I'm going to start right where ad dollars is really going. Hmm. When you look across the advertising landscape right now, where are brands actually moving their money and what's driving those shifts?

1:39Mike Lane:I mean, there's still the big block and tackle work, right? For anyone like in local or anything like transactional, like Google still rules there, right? But of interest, right? Where people are looking to extend their reach. Like TikTok is getting hot, right? Things are happening there. People want to be, you know, working with Amazon. Now I can reach and easily get on NFL, the games, like, right? There's all these things that are happening and people are seeing that reach more. but tried and true it's like you see these slow experiments going on while people are trying to figure out the new channels and what's possible with them and like it's still very early days right for like yeah ai stuff on what you can do with that so like that that that is still like so early at this point absolutely and but is it is it too i don't want to say easy to say but is ai driving a lot of these shifts that we're seeing and going to see i mean ai is like pervasive right google just last week everything they talked about ai headline of everything right and that isn't going to change and from what i see in like the near future but like how ai is incorporated like into search or into like these other things or how you're even generating creative kind of going forward is it's all ai related so you can look at that from like three different ways right very easily yeah and then of course they have it's the you know the consumers obviously those buying habits are constantly shifting right absolutely probably see it in your own searches right on how you're like interacting with it today and you're getting better at prompting and like getting getting to the root of your question and getting your answer faster and faster so right and like you said tiktok right is really going fast and furious now but you and i both know something else will come along at some point exactly so there's always something new exactly so what are the smartest the brightest cmos doing it differently now when it comes to things like like balancing performance, efficiency, long-term brand building.

3:37Give us some insight into what do you think the smart CMOs are doing right now?

3:40Mike Lane:The smart CMOs are, you know, everyone 10 years ago built their data warehouses or data lakes, whatever we want to call them. They have already like figured out how to use that data in their systems to like drive advertising, right? Whether that's like building their own audiences or like mining their own data or using their inventory data and like making that really rich and like using that in their advertising. The smart CMOs have like figured that out already. Even smarter CMOs are looking at what they've been doing historically and adopting the latest and greatest, right? Whether you're looking, talking to Google or Meta or even TikTok now, like they have multiple iterations of different ad types out there, right?

4:19Mike Lane:And they have tons of data, right, that shows that these advertising formats or these solutions like drive better results. They're looking at how all the consumers and users on their web platforms, right? and they're trying to like match your retail product with buyers, right? Or the plumber would like the person that's looking for a plumber in that local market, right? It doesn't matter what it is. If you're using the old ad formats, your performance isn't going to be as good. And they talk about this, right? The application of old ad types and like the smarter CMOs are able to adopt that, which means you can't have, it gets complex, right?

4:56Mike Lane:When you have thousands of campaigns or thousands of clients to be able to go back and update all the formats for everyone, you got to have like a way to do that, like a system that you can easily like adopt and change, you know, potentially millions of dollars in days or hours, not months of project work for a team of people to do to like get those those campaigns like in the modern formats that perform better. And I assume that's a big part where AI plays in just making productivity so much faster when it comes to that. So much faster, right? But you still need like the framework for that to operate in, right?

5:32Mike Lane:That's the trick is to be able to like have the guardrails up. You know, there's different industries have different regulatory compliance. You're going to be able to like understand how AI is going to influence that. There are several companies I know that are like nothing AI can touch any of our advertising. Like even the creative stuff at this point and be like, that's an interesting thought. But like, how long are you going to say that when, you know, increased costs and then suddenly you need you talking about like the marketing team wants to produce 1500 videos for TikTok for all all your locations.

6:04Mike Lane:Right. And you're suddenly like, well, that's not going to be done by humans. Right. Yeah. You're not going to pay three thousand dollars a video for production when you can do it for five dollars per video. Right. So the world is changing rapidly and people are learning how to operate in that AI world now, which is new. And sometimes it's scary for lawyers, for sure. They have massive job security. At this moment. At this moment. Yes. Exactly. Agentic AI. I want to get into that and automation specifically. Yeah. A lot of people talking about that, right? But what does that actually look like inside an advertising operation?

6:40Agentic AI?

6:41Mike Lane:Yeah. Yeah, like the whole term like agentic, like everyone looks at that as like being new, but like agentic has been around for a long, long time. Like all the RPA companies that have existed, like they all operate in an agentic way now. But like AI is really like flammed on to this word agentic, which is like super interesting because it's almost like the evolution of agentic and AI come together. What does it look like inside a company? Just in terms of like how to activate that? How much of campaign management do you realistically see becoming automated over the next five years? I mean, we automate a tremendous amount.

7:15Mike Lane:Like the entire premise of Fluency, right? When we started this business was, you know, we had worked at a previous company and we built that to like one of the largest automotive portfolios in the world, if not the largest, right? And the thing, it wasn't hard to go run ads, right? that the hard part was like, how do you operationalize like a billion dollars of advertising over thousands, many thousands of clients, right? Running hundreds of thousands of campaigns and millions of keywords just on Google alone, right? That was like, how do you operationalize that? That's the challenge. So when we like look at that and say like, what is agentic?

7:51Mike Lane:And like, how do you like think about hands on keyboard today? Like I would never think about if you are, you know, managing, call it even a few hundred thousand dollars of media, right? And bringing on a new client and you say like, oh, it's going to be like 16 hours of labor to go set that up and be like, that's crazy. Like that can be done in five minutes by systems today. Like, why would you even lay your hands on a keyboard for that? Like that is the level of like where Agentic has been for years. And the premise of like fluency was to like bring that to other organizations out there. And knowing that like all these other things are coming.

8:31Mike Lane:Like when we started fluency, Snapchat was like hot. It's not hot right now, right? But like this is going to be a place. And TikTok has kind of taken that void right these days. But Amazon's DSP, like Trade Desk, like different formats, like everything is like just grown over time. And now you can see, you know, you go to your ad ops teams and you say like, hey, I know your guys are overstretched right now, but I need you to like go experiment and run campaigns on TikTok. And I need you to go run, run, pick up another DSP to manage. And the reality is like, that's an impossible task. Yeah. That task is really like, if you can solve that different ways for folks today, just with automation, never mind like agentic AI, just simple automations, business process automation.

9:20Mike Lane:And saying like, you can do all these things. You can link all these systems. You can link all this data. There's no more button clicks to do all that stuff. You can set up accounts. But then the agentic AI part really comes in to say like, okay, now I've automated and we've done this for folks already, like to the tune, call it 60 to 92 % is the highest I think we've seen. 92 % less button clicks. So imagine your team of, I don't know, maybe they're 10, maybe they're 20, maybe they're 50. You take away 92 % of their button clicks. Now you want them, you can take on so much more business. You can be more strategic.

9:54Mike Lane:You can do all the things you say you want to be able to do. Now you add the AI superpowers that we're really focused on at this point to say like, now you can like build a creative way faster. You can get insights and reporting. I can build client reporting in seconds instead of spending 90 minutes cutting and pasting and figuring out how to put a client report together. Like AI can look at every single account. It can tell a story better than you can by looking at it for three minutes, right? to analyze that, write a narrative, build a PowerPoint for you automatically and do all that in seconds.

10:28Mike Lane:And then you can go review that, right? There's always the human in the loop here too. Like we're not trying to get rid of humans here. Like you still need someone to look at this stuff, to understand it, to explain it to someone, to get on the phone. So exactly. Those will never go, at least they should never go away. They should never go away, right? And we're not a company that's out there like saying like, yeah, AI is going to take over everything. That's not realistic. So what skills become more important when people will stop manually executing campaigns and start managing AI driven? Yeah, it's not like just being Google AdWords certified, right?

11:01Mike Lane:It's understanding how data drives advertising, right? In your business, how to link systems together, right? Understanding data hygiene, right? If people say like, oh, yeah, I can dump stuff to an Excel spreadsheet, right? But like now understanding like, is the data good coming out of that system? whether you're pulling that from Salesforce or your ERP system or some other thing, some other spreadsheet and understanding that uphill, like upstream data inputs can affect your advertising downstream now today. And understanding like that whole ecosystem, it's more about that and understanding that, but also understanding like what world-class advertising needs to look like and the components you need to put in place.

11:43Mike Lane:So we've like kind of pioneered like two new job titles in the space, right? There's analysts and digital strategists, digital analysts, like are typically like what folks are called. We have like a lot of advertising engineers and advertising architects. And those are people that are more focused on that bigger picture, understand how engineering, how data flows through and has an outcome for your for your advertising. And the architects are the ones that are like very talented folks. And you've met these folks before where they can just like see the ones and zeros coming together. Right. And how that works and how you're going to be able to build prompts based on something.

12:22Mike Lane:A salesperson puts in Salesforce somewhere else, you know, days earlier at the point of sale and understand how that all comes together. And your attribution is going to be all pulled together and you're reporting. They're really like the architects of that. And that's probably one of the most important jobs going forward are those folks. We still understand, like, the best practices at Google and Meta and whatever other platform you're on, but also understand, like, the ecosystem and how to, like, architect that together. Well, and you can add in, I mean, where do the chat, GPTs, and claws of the world play in all this?

12:55Mike Lane:Well, in terms of being a channel to spend money on? Yeah. I mean, they got to make money someday or something someday, right? I know it's a Pandora's box right now, but we both know it's coming. It's not that far away either. This reckoning comes to anyone that spends that much money that fast, right? I mean, it's going to come. They're already search engines. We know that. Yeah, exactly. And they're like trying to figure out right now how to insert ads and make it not look so ad driven, right? I mean, Google's doing it. They've been in the business, right? You can start to see the stuff happening like real time in front of us where they're going to get inserted.

13:31Mike Lane:And Google's not shy about it. they're like this is our business model right now and we're gonna keep doing it when you're using gemini and it's google when you're in that context to see an ad nobody thinks twice because you're used to seeing ads what's that yeah no one thinks twice you're you're used to seeing ads being served on that platform to now and now to put ads into a chat and a claude and a perplexity you named a tool that's going to be a bigger kind of pill to swallow i think yeah and they're betting right People are going to stop going to Google. It now has Gemini built into it or going to Gemini, right?

14:08Mike Lane:And start using Cloud, ChatGPT. And there are certain people that are doing that for sure, right? But is there going to be a mass migration? I don't know, right? I've been going to Google for years. I'm trained on that. And now they're giving me good results, right? In the form of, you know, an interaction now, not just the direct search. So, right. Time will tell though. Time will tell. And speaking of time will tell, knowing I'm going to caveat this next question, knowing we don't know what's going to happen five minutes from now. But over the next, say, two, three, five years, how do you think AI is going to reshape marketing and advertising teams over the next two, three, five years?

14:47Mike Lane:Yeah, I mean, it already has in the sense of like, you know, younger folks trying to get into the business. It's it's tough to ask right now. I even have a son who's trying to like break into that that space. Right. And he's just fresh out of college. there's a lot of like headwinds as teams look to become more efficient, right? Just to operationalize the, that in terms of like just marketing teams operating, just like every other business, especially here in like 2026, when we're recording this, right? Is every board has got every executive team focused on the planets on like, how are we going to leverage AI to get more efficient?

15:25Mike Lane:Like it's not hire as many folks and like get more profitable. while not having a million dollar a month AI expense, you know, that is what everyone's going to figure out this year, right? Yeah. But going forward, the expectation like, you know, video production, I always go back to video production. That's been like the thing, right? If I wanted a 30 second, two minute, whatever, I'm talking between three and$10 ,000 of production time. I'm talking like 60 days to get a finished product, right? When I can like get that down to someone working with a tool in a day at, you know, hundreds of dollars, if even that, right, that changes a lot very rapidly.

16:06Mike Lane:So the headwinds, right, to, you know, just video advertising in place. I think that's going to change and open up a whole door. I mean, there's tons of inventory out there, right, already. So that's going to open up very soon. like you're starting to see like cool stuff in video production i feel like we're on the cusp of that so that's going to change everything in terms of like where people advertise and what they can do because the cost structure is going to be changed interesting there's a difference between buying a tool and operationalizing it right yeah totally in your opinion what's preventing most organizations today from actually just unlocking or using those tools for meaningful business impact from ai right now change management the same old like thing i we we see it i see it a lot of companies either invested in advised for like in this industry outside like all over the place like it's hard to drive change it is people are like creatures of habit and especially like ad ops teams they are looking at a lot of the stuff being like what is my purpose after i implement this like is am i literally putting the thing in that's going to kill my job And if so, I'm going to resist this.

17:16Mike Lane:At the same time, they're overworked. To the nth degree, a lot of teams, right, especially on the agency side, right, they're just like chiseled all the meat off the bone already, and people are just grinding it out. And these tools can help better their lives, and I've seen that over and over where teams that have gone through this evolution to be like, we don't want to just be doers and grinders. We want to be like the strategists that we want to be advising our clients and really getting into like helping, helping them. And the teams that do that often are are just like reshaped culturally.

17:53Mike Lane:I've talked to many folks that say like the culture in my company is different today because we have been able to get through that change management. that there were leaders and advocates all up and down inside of teams that at the end of the day, they were able to like make the change happen that they wanted to see in their org and shape that to like what they wanted to be. But a lot of teams are still resistant to like learning AI and like understanding like what can be operated and to just let go. It's hard. It's hard. And this is, I don't do hyperbole ever. And this is not hyperbolic at all.

18:28But this time in our lives, really, this is a seismic shift. It's happening fast, too. It's happening fast. And if you go back to when social came into Vogue, right? And people are like, oh, what's social media? And it became a tool, right? But no one thought social media was taking anyone's job, for example, right? And it was like this new tool. Okay, we can use it to our benefit. This is just like anything anybody who's living today has ever seen before.

18:53Mike Lane:I know. I tried to explain to my son, the one that just graduated, because he's like, everything's changing. And I was like, you know, farmers got tractors and they wanted that change, right? The computer came out and people were resistant, never said that I'm never going to use a computer. And every business like uses a computer. Everyone has a computer now. Then the internet came, right? And people were resistant to that. But that was like, you know, the computer era was like 20 years, right? That happened. And the internet was like, call it five, right? Late 90s, early 2000s, right? Right. And now we're in this like next generation of AI.

19:27Mike Lane:And this is happening in 12 months, 18 months from the, I mean, it's massive in terms of like, it's been being worked on, but like the massive adoption of it is just happening rapidly. It's just like a tsunami, right? It's not drip. It's a tsunami of change. And if you're not ready for it, or if you're not open to it, I should say, like to back to your point about being resistant, you're going to get swept away, you know, sorry to keep that analogy, but. Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, people, there are companies and I've seen them and even coach some of them. Like you cannot be caught in this AI paralysis of like decision making at this point in time.

20:02Mike Lane:And right after that, someone sent me an article that more CEOs are resigning this year than they've seen in a long time. That's because CEOs don't want to drive through this older. Because it's like a whole new thing that's very risky, very rapid. Right. And it's like, do I have the energy for this? but a lot of companies are just caught in this AI paralysis moments of like, and maybe they're not even using AI, just the concept of the pressure of what AI is. And the noise. The noise is just creating so much pressure. They can't make any decisions on how to move forward, how to hire, like how to pivot, how to drive change in their orgs.

20:37Mike Lane:It's definitely an interesting time. It is. Winners and losers. Exactly. And that's even more prevalent in the role of CMO, who everybody knows is the shortest average tenure in the C-suite, yada, yada, yada. that's even more exacerbated lately like pressure's on right pressure's on unlike ever before yeah and it's yeah exactly that's that's why you know the the best cmos to what we talked about before is acknowledging number one it's okay to know what you don't know right but you don't want to be stuck in that paralysis like you said where you're literally doing nothing that's that's a really really slippery slope to be in uh where's the company going like where's fluency gonna Where do you see the company in three to five years?

21:18Three to five years. Or in the next 30 minutes.

21:22Mike Lane:Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, we're in the agentic space. We have been, right? We are applying rapidly the scale and the superpowers to make everything we do AI now empowered as well. So you can just, people can do more, right? Well, we say like, you know, people lift their hands off keyboards and stop pounding so much and be like, OK, now I can give you superhero powers to do even more, to test more. We are opening up and integrating with more channels out there. That is like just the demands. And that's the way the world's going, right? You're not going to, you know, if you started on Google and then went to meta, like that's never enough.

22:01Mike Lane:People want to keep going and want to be able to integrate with all channels. That's a big push for us to be able to do that faster. And then we look at our book of business. We have more brands and agencies now in our pipeline just this year than we have in the previous seven years. Just this year alone. Everyone is seeking solutions. They know they need systems of record to like run their advertising on, use their data and control AI and have AI tools at their fingertips. Future us next year, we'll be working on marketplace, which will allow other vendors to integrate right in and seamlessly work inside our platform.

22:39Mike Lane:And for us, right, we have 3 billion under management right now. We've got another 3 billion that signed on this year alone. We are looking to grow that or in talks to grow that exponentially at this point. So exciting times for sure. For sure. Okay. If you've heard any of my episodes, you know how I end every episode with the random five. It's five random personal questions. bring it on they're harmless i promise you okay here we go what is your all-time favorite holiday and why it's just christmas family get together it's like that moment i just love it got it do you think founders are born that way or created to experience oh i i would put there there's two specific types like there are people that are just born to be entrepreneurs and there's people that see it and get addicted to it okay so all right i understand what's the best concert you've ever been to best concert probably a pearl jam show a couple of them like come to mind in new york city and one in quebec city they were just super fun okay what's the best piece of advice you've ever ignored write less sometimes in the early days people say like no you gotta say this in less words and you just wrote way too much stuff and wasted too much time.

23:54Mike Lane:Interesting. Okay, last one. If you could jump on a plane tomorrow and disappear for a week, where are you going? Oh, probably Turks and Caicos. Best beaches. With no cell phone, no one can reach you. That would be perfect right now. Well, congratulations, Mike. No, I'm kidding. We have a special surprise. I sound like a game show host. Listen, Mike Lane, what an absolute treat, my friend. Thank Thank you for coming on. Appreciate you having me. Great conversation as always. Well, that wraps up another episode of the CMO Whisperer Show. I hope you shared this episode with your friends. And if you have not already, please subscribe to be kept up to date on all the latest episodes.

24:29And if you're so inclined, leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.