2383 - Exploring the Future of Digital Advertising Through AI, Strategy, and Human Creativity with Metadata’s Lisa Sharapata

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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, Lisa Sharapata. Lisa, you are the CMO of Metadata. You're on the web at metadata.io. Lisa, it's great to have you. All right. Great to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Before we get going and talking about your superpowers and what Metadata is, I always love finding out what founders, leaders, or who obviously work very hard, care a whole lot about what they do, usually are multi-passionate, have some hobbies and interests and passions outside of work. What have you been geeking out on lately?

1:34Well, I'm recently an empty nester. And so I'm kind of moving back from the soccer mom phase to the travel and getting outdoors. And I love getting out on the lake or the water, things like that. Okay, something very specific that you've been doing that maybe is new. It's called like water ink painting. Okay, yeah, tell me about this. Yeah, I mean, it's like you kind of swirl it on your paper and move it around, but it's just this very like organic process of painting, and I've never tried it before, but I took a class on it, and it's been kind of fun. Yeah. Is it the same as watercolor? No, it's not.

2:23It's a much more saturated ink than that. And you can like mix alcohol in with it and like blur the edges and try to get it to like go in different directions. But it's not precision. So, you know, with watercolor, you can take a brush. You don't really use a brush. You kind of use like this blower thing. And yeah, it's a whole new thing that I'm trying. I don't know. We'll see where it goes. But yeah. You know, my kids are older as well. My youngest just turned 20. So I have no more teenagers. My two youngest are still at home going to college. But dad's got more free time. So I have probably picked up, and you're not alone.

3:06I have probably picked up more hobbies in the past few years than my entire life in terms of having hobbies. So it's a great time. I love the second stage of life. Well, Lisa, tell me about your work with Mededin. And by the way, I'm looking up pictures of water ink painting. And you're right. This is really cool. And it looks like it'd be a lot of fun. And I see, you know, kind of that blowing technique showing up in some of these art, some of the art. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's fun. And I just found an image that talks about the difference. It shows examples of watercolor versus ink.

3:42And ink looks like it could be a little bit more vibrant at times as well. Yeah, it is. And like I said, it's more of like, I'll go with the flow, which I'm trying to do a better job of versus like painting inside the lines. So, yeah. Love it. Well, okay. So I'm on metadata.io. And here's the headline. It says, you run the media strategy. AI runs the ads. That makes a lot of sense. Listen, tell me, let's start off by talking about metadata. Yeah, so metadata has been around about a decade now. And I'd say very leading edge all along. But they're a digital advertising platform and it's AI driven.

4:31So now everyone knows what that means, but they've been able to run multivariant testing in the background. and now there's dozens and dozens of agents also embedded into the platform that can do things like build audiences or bid on your campaigns to help you optimize your spend or take all the different offers and the different audiences and the different creatives you have and figure out which one is performing the best in which channel and optimize for that. So it's really cool and kind of revolutionary in the world of digital advertising. Yeah, well, how are humans going to compete? Well, I mean, this is where I'm, what I'm super passionate about is I'm seeing AI and these agentic motions really free me up to be more strategic and kind of take on this idea of what I call the ing of marketing, where it's the doing of things that I don't want to do.

5:36Nobody wants to go in and look at how much should I up my bid today on LinkedIn and an hour later your competitor comes in and, you know, outbids you and then you got to go back and bid. Like I would much rather be strategic. I'd much rather be thinking about the next creative campaign I want to do, you know, maybe testing out a new headline, you know, thinking about things like strategy, understanding the market, my brand. How am I going to create a better experience and let the agents, you know, do their thing at a pace no human can, but really doesn't want to anyway. So that's it. So, you know, when you've got an agent watching over this, you know, obviously, you know, the good and bad of agents, obviously agents can do things that, you know, humans don't want to do.

6:31I mean, just be incredibly labor intensive. How do you control for like we, you know, obviously the risk with agents is you don't want the agent making a mistake. Can you talk about like that, you know, controlling so that we don't make expensive mistakes? Because, you know, for some folks, their advertising budget is pretty sacred and, you know, they don't want to get themselves in trouble. So I don't know if there's like guardrails or stopgaps or like how you control to make sure that an agent is doing only what the agent should be doing. Yeah, I mean, a few things I'd say you still have the same controls.

7:08You have spend limits. You have bid limits. You know, you have parameters. But then this also goes back to where is the human in the loop? Where is the human in the lead? What pieces do you let an agent run? How often do you need to be monitoring and checking in on things? And I think that's the part that, again, to me is the exciting part is as the, you know, owner of, let's say, your advertising campaigns, you figure that out. Like, how much do I need to monitor this? How much can I let this experiment? Where do I need to intervene? When? How often? And, you know, it takes time to get comfortable with that.

7:50I mean, I think we're all in this state of change right now where we're figuring that out. And, you know, in the case of metadata, it still depends upon even like, are you buying our services? Is there someone inside of metadata who's helping you look at that? Or do you have a full, you know, a team of people who are still responsible for some of these things? And how does that change their role? How does it elevate their role? So I think all of this is up for grabs and debate. Yeah. Regarding advertising strategy, and obviously this is kind of what you do as a CMO, what are the trends that you see other than using an agent to do this?

8:38What other broader trends are you seeing in paid ads right now? Oh, I think there's a number of things going on. First of all, there's less people Google searching, right? They're in their LLMs. They're, you know, talking to ChatGPT, for example, where today there's no ads. I'm expecting that to change as well. But I think that there's also this bigger emphasis on the importance of brand and getting out in front of people where they are. So it's more in social channels. It's not just like LinkedIn anymore. If someone's scrolling through their Instagram or Facebook, or even now in Reddit, or Bing is becoming a thing.

9:29Bing is becoming a thing. Because it's connected to chat GPT. We're seeing more channels, a proliferation of channels, and a bigger desire. to get your brand out there and spend on brand than I have in the past. Yeah. Is there a way that you can spend on ads that might, I mean, you know, obviously is when we're recording this, you know, who knows, you know, I know ChatGPT and I suspect other AI platforms, you know, will be implementing advertising, which I think overall is going to be a good thing because it will ensure that, you know, the best tools will be accessible to all people because you can, because the AI companies will actually make money with it so that they can afford to give us the best tools.

10:23But is there anything that you can do from an advertising strategy that might ultimately be good for your AI positioning and, you know, getting AI to talk about you and recommend you? Yeah, I mean, well, a few things. I mean, from one standpoint, like you're paid advertising inside of a Google or a Bing or even a Reddit, I believe it feeds the algorithm. I mean, some of that's unprovable at this point, but we're seeing it definitely. But also knowing that that is, let's say in Reddit, if people are going through it, bots are also going through it. And all of that's getting picked up into the algorithm.

11:13You're feeding the algorithm with every single thing that you do. And so, yes, kind of the short answer is all of the above is impacting go-to-market strategies, the algorithm, how LLMs are serving up information. and then outside of advertising, we're also seeing people are talking about this quite a bit, is a shift from SEO to AEO. And how are you making sure that you're getting mentioned inside the LLMs as well? Well, I like that idea of using advertising just to, if nothing else, get people talking about your product. Tell me about who would be a good fit for metadata? Do they need to have a certain ad spend before it starts making sense to work with you?

12:05Yeah. Great question. So we primarily work with B2B companies. We have some B2B2C and a couple of B2C. But if you're spending money inside of digital ad platforms, then we're a good fit for you. And where we see the most traction is organizations that are spending$40 ,000 a month or more, at least out of the gates. And the reason why is back to this optimization piece and the multivariant testing, because to have enough to work with, to really try to take multiple different pieces. So you might have three audiences, three offers, and three different ad campaign creatives that you're working with and you want to run that across several different channels that's a multiplier right and so it starts to get spread really thin you take like the three times three times three times let's say five and you're in the hundreds of the number of different experiments that are getting run at one time off of a budget and so once you dial in and you figure out what's working what's not you could probably start to scale back a little bit but also like we can prove out all the way to pipeline and revenue.

13:24And so when you start to see the optimization and you start to see the leads coming in and you start to see that it's converting, you know, it starts to become a much more usable, viable channel that you can defend in the boardroom. We usually actually see organizations put more in, but 40 ,000 is what we recommend to start at. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is exciting. Where's the future? Where are we headed, Lisa? I think the future is going to be really interesting and kind of off script here. Every vendor out there, so Meta, LinkedIn, they all are trying to encourage people to go direct to them, right?

14:12And now they're trying to make it easier with creative agents and things like that to set things up. I'm hoping, I'm betting that metadata, for example, is actually has the best product market fit that they've ever had. And that's going to continue to grow because it's vendor agnostic. We're optimizing for each organization what works best for them. not LinkedIn, optimizing for LinkedIn to try to squeeze as much out of you as possible, and then meta doing the same, but we can play them off of each other, right? And figure out that for company A, here's the formula. And for company B, here's the formula, et cetera, et cetera.

15:00So I think that's part one is that there's going to be, I think it's going to get easier to do it yourself, but also it's, I think, going to be riskier. And the bet I'm taking is that the organizations that prioritize an agentic go-to-market strategy where they're really looking at how everything works together and is tied together and figure out how to string things, connect them with AI and agentic workflows. and bring in technology where it makes sense and then build what they need to in-house where it makes sense to connect all the data are going to be the ones that win. But like we've got a creative agent built in right now.

15:55It can go and it'll scrape your website, figure out your brand kit, apply that to an ad campaign and make recommendations for you. And I think I'm seeing that more and more across the board in all sorts of different places. And it's, I think that that's the future is that the ing part of marketing is going to phase out and be pushed over to this AI part. And I'm hoping that makes it a more strategic role, a more creative role and a, you know, a more aligned to the market and the strategy of the organization going forward. Exciting times, exciting times. Well, Lisa, your website, metadata.io, you know, for someone that wants to maybe learn a little bit more about the platform, what would you recommend?

16:53What are, what are next steps from here? Yeah, well, on the website, you can always book a meeting. We're happy to show you more about the platform. There's also like a kind of a demo on the platform. There's definitely a bunch of information on the website. So you can look there or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just DM me, Lisa Sharapata. And I am happy to take time and unpack any of this with anyone. I love talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Metadata.io. We also have a link to your LinkedIn profile as well. So, well, Lisa Sharapata, again, CMO of Metadata, found on the web at metadata.io. Thank you, Lisa, for joining us.

17:38All right. Thanks for having me.

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