2381 - Boosting Advertising Performance Through AI with Plurio’s Seva Ustinov

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it is Siva Yustinov. Siva, you are the founder of Plurio by Ellie Analytics. You're on the web at ellianalytics.com. Can't wait to learn all about what Plurio is. Before we get into that, first off, thank you so much for being here, Siva. Thanks for having me here. Yep. You're based in the Bay Area in San Francisco. It's great to have you. and you know one thing I always love finding you know when we talk to you know founders and you know people who create great things is they tend to be multi-passionate have a lot of hobbies a lot of fun things what have you been geeking out on lately well actually like last year I started to play pickleball like first time and then another time and then every week and then two times a week with multiple different friends and that like really catched me up and I enjoyed so much uh so who was it a friend that got you in yeah he just like invited me once like hey do you want to hang out do you want to play and i went sure why not i used to play uh tennis when i was a child uh and it's uh kind of similar simpler uh and but that like i was uh blown away like how fun it is and how easy it is to start.

2:13And like from there, I'm like now part of this meme about what do people do after 30? Yeah, well, it is. It's such an accessible sport. And you're right. You get a lot of endorphins out of it because you're like, oh, hey, we're playing a real game here. We're volleying back and forth quite a bit. Like it's just easy to kind of pick up and feel like you're doing pretty well. And then, of course, then you start getting strategic. And I've played against some seniors here in my in our big development here. And let me tell you, they wipe the mat with me or that not the mat, I guess the court with me.

2:57And they do so without even breaking a sweat. You know, they're just like standing in one place, returning everything. And I'm flying all over the place. So, yeah, you could definitely it's one that you can get pretty good at. Well, Siva, tell us about Plurio. So I've got it pulled up on my website right now. It says, one AI agent to run your performance marketing growth. I'm intrigued. So it actually started as a marketing data platform. So think about all the companies and business owners and marketers that run lots of Google ads, meta ads, TikTok, and others channels. And when they spend like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, they really want to understand like what's actually working, what's not.

3:45Do I spend my money right? Can I get more out of it? So we started with building a data platform that shows like the true performance of each channel campaign and creative. But then we discovered that analytics is not enough. People don't want to use it, don't know how to use it. It's just sometimes complicated, time-consuming. So we decided to build an AI agent that will do that autonomously, just go through the data, figure out what things could be done better, how to optimize ads, how to improve its performance. And that was a pretty exciting turn of events because now you can just set everything up and just let your agent analyze and optimize everything for you.

4:47It's exciting. So if I understand this correctly, you've got like, so anyone who is, and where might they be advertising? Like what platforms does this work well with?

5:02The analytics part works with any kind of digital ads. AI agent works well with Google and Meta, and the list of platforms will expand soon. So, like, basically, think about all the businesses that run digital ads online. Maybe it's Google, Meta, TikTok, Reddit, influencers, affiliates. if you generate sales or leads or trials or subscriptions from your website or your mobile application, then it's the right thing for you.

5:46Advertising is not my superpower, so I'm going to lean on you to kind of help me out as I ask dumb questions here. But my understanding, you know, from what little I do know, is that if you are running your ad campaigns in a real kind of set it and forget it kind of way, you're going to get hosed. that great ad management requires, I don't want to say babysitting, but certainly a lot of hands-on being very, I don't want to say micromanaging, but typically, you know, that's where you would hire an ad agency because it's their job to babysit every, you know, from minute to minute what's going on so that we can maximize ROI.

6:31Can you help a dummy out like me and help me with my vocabulary and what I'm talking about and why, again, Plurio kind of solves that problem. Because an AI agent, you know, they can work 24-7, right? Is that the general idea? So imagine you run an online school for children to teach them programming languages. And you run ads to attract like new students, new customers. And maybe like you run it in It's an online thing, so you can run ads in multiple regions. You can try different landing pages or quizzes or sales funnels. And when you run ads at scale, you pretty fast get to hundreds of different creatives, sales funnels, and combinations of things that you need to track, like what's actually working and what's not.

7:27And Google and Meta, they do a really good job at optimizing their ads automatically for leads. Like whatever conversions you send there, they will optimize it. But when you have like longer sales funnel, like you got that lead, you get it on a sales call, on a like introductory lesson. and then they subscribe to your product, digital product, or in this case, student class. That takes time, and Google and Meta cannot optimize it because they don't have that data. So marketers end up looking at the ad's performance every day for multiple hours and adjusting the bids, launching new creatives, stopping existing ones, scaling, downscaling, and when they have hundreds of ad items at the same time, that becomes pretty intensive, time-consuming, and just hard because you don't...

8:34Yeah, it's challenging. Have you seen those dashboards with hundreds of lines of data that you have to analyze and make decisions about. And this is where AI agents can actually help because they're not tired. You can say, okay, imagine a prompt like, hey, go analyze all of my campaigns and find things that work really well and scale them. But before that, check that

9:07it didn't start to burn out or creatives inside that campaign are, uh, like fresh and like, it's actually makes sense to scale them. So those things that people will do, marketers will do, um, in their heads, looking at the data. Now you can ask agents to do that and then, and then we'll, they will generate like what's their thought process, what they suggest to do. If you like it, you can confirm it. If you like it even more, you can say, okay, like do that every day for me, please. and just send me reports. Wow. Boy, what's the future of ad agencies? Are they still... They will manage ads even more than employees.

9:54Somebody has to still take responsibility for all those tools, algorithms, and now AI agents, make sure that they are set up correctly, make sure that it makes sense. So I'm not worried about agency people. I actually used to run my own marketing agency with 100 plus employees before Plurio. So I know the stuff. And small business owners, medium-sized businesses, they still need experts to take responsibility for everything, be on the edge of technology and now AI technology. So there is still room for everyone. It's just everything becomes better and easier and faster and more efficient. And like things that used to take hours now take minutes.

10:49But then still, you can spend that time on the creative side or scaling your business or, I don't know, maybe enjoying your life. Yeah, it's that, what's that principle? I'm trying to think of like what that's called. Javon's paradox, right? Yeah. So that's kind of what you're experiencing. And I would imagine now looking at 2026, I mean, this is an exciting year for what's possible and having agents do this. So Siva, who is working with you? Are you working with agencies or are you working just kind of directly with clients that are managing their own ads now? Where does this fit in? So right now we focus on clients, so the end customers who actually manage their ads with their in-house team or with their agencies, but who have their own CMOs, head of paid acquisition or titles like that, that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, sometimes millions of dollars per month on digital channels.

12:02But we plan to expand to mid-sized businesses and to SMBs eventually and start working with agencies. It just makes sense to tweak the technology for larger scale accounts first and then go to self-service later. Well, this is exciting. um so uh next steps like someone that's listening to our conversation and like generally do you mind sharing a little bit about how pricing works

12:39um i think it will end up uh with like just a few percent of the ad spend uh so the the value from agents it's it's not just freeing up time uh but actually improving your metrics so if we improve efficiency by 10%, it just makes sense to charge 1%, 2%, or 3 % of the ad spend as a pricing model. Well, that's amazing. All right. Our friend that's been listening to our conversation, where do they go? What do they do? Just go to ellianalytics.com, subscribe to our waitlist or book a demo call and like me or my co-founder or someone on our sales team will walk you through everything and give you recommendations how to scale your ads with our agents, with our data platform.

13:35All right, the website, ellianalytics.com. We may have a Plurio URL as well. So just check the show notes to our friend that's listening in their podcast app right now. Just go ahead and click. We have direct links, so you can go and experience Plurio for yourself. I would imagine that, you know, for the right person, it's pretty much easy to figure out a positive ROI engagement. So you're only going to invest in Plurio if you are going to out-earn what your investment is. That's probably pretty easy math for you guys to figure out. Yeah, absolutely. Like just do a pilot, like we start with pilot projects and we show the value with like thousand plus percent ROI.

14:19And that's an easy decision from there. Love it. All right. Siva Yustanov, founder of Plurio AI Agent, found on the web at ellianalytics.com. Siva, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me here.

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