2436 - Winning in Online Advertising Through AI and Authenticity with Digital Goliath's Jeremy Yang

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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's Jeremy Yang. Jeremy, you are known as the online ads guy. You're based in Sydney, Australia. You are the founder of Digital Goliath. You're found on the web at digitalgoliath.com.au. Jeremy, it's great to have you. I'm excited to be here, Josh. I'm pumped. Before we get going talking about your superpowers, And I'd very much love to get a State of the Union on where online ads are today because I know a lot has been moving fairly quickly, particularly with AI and a lot of the platforms are leveraging AI now.

1:34So we'll get into that. One thing I just always love learning from other leaders is what they are doing when they are not at work. What are they passionate about? I understand. You have a five-year-old. Yes, yes. I started late. I have a five-year-old and finally, you know, getting to the age where he's old enough to dribble a ball. And I used to coach basketball for a little bit. And, you know, I'm really pumped to see him playing basketball now. Yeah. Very, very exciting stuff. So how do you, how does one teach a five-year-old how to play basketball? That's a long way from where he's at to where the net is.

2:09Yeah. No, he's actually shooting pretty high now. So the problem I had when I was playing basketball, I never had a left hand. so i was right right right and only one dribble or two dribbles on my left so i'm forcing him to go both ways that's that's my my no yeah so that's my number one goal i gotta make sure he doesn't have a weak left hand so you're teaching him to be ambidextrous that that's exactly right yeah it's still very young but he's uh he's a standout so that's how i'm spending my afternoons yeah pumped are you guys doing the playoffs are you still watching the stuff do you follow it i'm not currently that's when we're recording yeah yeah yeah that's cool that's amazing it's a it's a good time man it's a good time to be you know with the with the kid yeah yeah for sure well it sounds like you have a lot of fun um and uh so we'll see so when when is when's the earliest that he can start playing like are there when what's the earliest that youth programs start doing like organized basketball right now oh my gosh wow that is crazy doing it it's already like they double dribble and they travel obviously but you know they let it go yeah so they it's right now so next year under sixes he'll be playing for like with a ref oh my goodness yeah all right so to our friends that are listening right now working out with jeremy get your autographs of that five-year-old right now and they're going to be worth something down the road.

3:33That's it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, tell me about Digital Goliath. Yeah, sure. I think Digital Goliath founded seven years ago. It was born out of my impatience of sticking around marketing departments and not seeing results. And one of my bosses said, you're so impatient. If you want results quickly, you got to go ads. So I started working ads and loved it. Never stopped. Yeah. So it's all about media buying Digital Goliath, Google and Facebook, Instagram ads. Okay. So for those of us who have not been paying attention to that world, catch us up to date with what's been going on over the past six to 12 months in the digital ad space.

4:15Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to tell you. So if you remember when ChatGPT first dropped about two years, a little bit over two years ago, when it got really, really hot, that kind of took Google out of surprise. so that Google had to come out with AR overview, which on top of Google search results, which killed a lot of the advertising space, right? Because that's now, it's completely changed the behavior, how people find things and search for things. And now Google is now slipping ads back into the overview and all that sponsored stuff. And ChatGPT is coming out with ads, so ads are going to dominate again because that's the only way to make money, these platforms, you know?

4:54So that's a lot of that is going on in terms of the Google search space, in terms of Facebook and Instagram, a lot of AI creatives, a lot of AI optimizing, stuff that used to take three to six months to make with UGC, influencers, and all of that stuff is like snap of a fingernail. I'm not saying it's good, but just a lot of noise, a lot of noise. Yeah. So are you so your superpowers extend through paid ad campaigns? Did you mention so you also do influencer work or is it just OK, so it's just the so Google and the meta properties. Yeah. Yeah. How how is performance and ROI looking today versus maybe where it was a couple of years ago?

5:47during covert time just before covert people didn't know what was going to happen right as covert hit during covert just in the first year you couldn't you couldn't put a foot wrong doesn't matter what you did the advertising you go well you're going to make money except if you're in airlines or restaurants of course but if you were in like legion selling courses e-commerce you are killing it right and then slowly the ROAS the return on ad spend petered out as your audience probably will know and right now things are really really expensive because it's super competitive right now because of all the noise so it's it's harder and harder to get cut through and then i'm not sure if you're familiar you probably are with uh alex homozy alex homozy stuff he talks a lot about these uh offers and guarantees so everybody's coming out with these crazy outrageous guarantees you know he goes oh money back i'll buy your steak if it doesn't work like all types of stuff So it makes it harder and harder to advertise because it's harder to get cut through.

6:46Right. A lot of noise. Yeah. Are there, what are you looking at? What are the opportunities to advertise in and around AI platforms that folks might be using? I don't know if you're touching on that yet. Yeah, for sure. I mean, right now, everybody's, I like to call it the concept of Overton window, right? Everybody is trying to use as much AI until it irritates the audience, if that makes sense. They try to do as much as they can with AI until it kills their trust kind of thing. They are kind of like doing the background stuff. But I'll tell you what is currently will continue to work is things like the genuine face-to-camera videos and the unique offers.

7:35That's always going to work. So I'm seeing a lot of that still come through really well. yeah and and do you mind maybe um sharing an example or two of like what would be too much ai that's just going to annoy people and and folks do need to know this right so um yeah so i think especially right now as of when we're recording this we're just seeing more and more evidence of people just kind of burnt out on slop and yeah it just you know the inauthenticity it just feels lazy. It's just like, listen, we've seen it before. You know, I look at, you know, Sora, what happened with Sora, for example.

8:11I mean, it was really cool and fun for me for about a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it's just like, oh, okay. Yeah. I've kind of seen everything. It's kind of, what's going, from your perspective, what's going on there? What's going on there is that for a period of time, influencer marketing was really the hot ticket. So if you're doing e-commerce, you have to get influencer, you have to get user-generated content. Then it became fake user-generated content. So basically you send a product, they pay for it, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. Right. So right now, AI's got so clean and so good that you can pretty much get$1 per creative of AI.

8:54So you just get an image or like a product video and you kind of just pick a face, it'll just create a UGC. Sometimes it's very difficult to tell the difference. So what actually happens isn't that, you know, now it's equal leveling out the playing field. That's not the case at all. Just makes people not treat that category of advertising seriously anymore. So the credibility is completely lost on there. That's an extreme example of AI going too far. I think other ones are just like, for example, Josh, you might have a lot of videos about yourself and ai can already do the like speak on your behalf like with your face there so a lot of people are trying that because in advertising you don't just do one post right you're doing like 16 32 you know to see what works and you don't want to sit there to record 32 videos so you go let me take a shortcut let me you know ai these 32 scripts you know deep fake myself into saying these 32 things and then i can test there's a lot of hype around that but that's not going to work that's going to really burn out so i think the next big thing that's going to come out is how to appear authentic and 100 showing the audience that this is not ai whether it's a weird background whether you're walking your neighborhood like that's going to be the next thing because a certain poses certain way to hold your product and all that that's going to look ai and people just going to scroll straight past it that's what Yeah, there's definitely, I notice in YouTube, I find myself, you know, where they're using those digital avatars.

10:27I don't, I'm just like, if you didn't have enough time to, you know, read from a teleprompter, you know, versus having your AI do it or whatever. No, thanks. I'm moving on. Yeah. So so obviously in ads, you know, so it sounds like, you know, the more human you can be, you're probably going to find some advantage there. What are other elements of ads that are working very well today in 2026? 2026. So I think that if you are a local business, video ads are working, still working very well. so everything so video works in many ways because traditionally search when you search something it just used to be like text but now the video and image and shopping and all those experiences it's all integrated into search so while you have the text you have the video underneath you have the like it's a lot more visual so that's so getting to video is going to be a key thing for people coming in.

11:30And if, um, what I'm also seeing is that a lot of businesses are jumping into advertising too early. So that might be helpful for, for your listeners who are thinking about it to kind of accelerate their growth, but sometimes they're not ready to catch the wave yet. So they're getting too early. And I think advertising should come way later in, in, in the journey of growth. Yeah, you're at digitalgoliath.com.au and I know you produce your own content. Did I see that you record podcast episodes as well? I'm trying to, I'm learning how to do it. Yeah, I'm getting to the game. Oh, okay, cool. Well, we'll talk later.

12:13I got some ideas for you. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, I love that, I love to. You got to get, tell me about Digital Goliath, who you work with and who kind of like your ideal, client or campaign is? Yeah, sure. So I don't think I'm good enough to convince people to use ads if they're not already using it. But if they are already using it, they're not happy with the performance, I do really well. And we have a fair pricing structure and we get a much better return on ad spend than most businesses can get for them. So yeah, so you establish businesses usually between one to$5 million in annual revenue.

12:49And I work really well with founders because they like to talk, they like to explore things. I like to be close up to the action. We hold our fortnightly meetings and reporting and all that. So yeah, they enjoy it. And your website, digitalgoliath.com.au, to our friends, I think you have some resources here. Do you want to maybe share what people might find at your website that they might find valuable? Yeah, for sure. So I think that most businesses, they're going to add a little bit of blind. So I've created a lot of calculators because during those, you know, discovery calls, I was like waving my hands and doing these calculations.

13:27So it wasn't very professional. So I've made these calculators where I share my screen and I can tell them exactly how much they should expect to come back based on their niche, based on their budget. Sorry, and their timeline. so for anyone who's visiting and they go to these resources they can basically calculate their returns without even you know you know going on on uh on a discovery call anything like that so they can see how close they are to how much they're about to make so yeah excellent yeah i know these are really good calculators um these are all available at digitalgoliath.com.au so Well, Jeremy Yang, great quick conversation here with you.

14:12I really appreciate this. And again, for folks that want to grab a call with you or like what do you recommend someone who's like wants to review their current ad plans? Yeah, for sure. Please follow me on LinkedIn, man. I'm pretty active over there. I talk a lot about ads over there. I'm starting more on the, you know, talking to professionals about ads. And if they go to my website, I'm easy to find there. And if they're not happy with how the ads are performing, you know, it's always good to get a second opinion to see what's up. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Jeremy Yang, founder of digitalgoliath.com.au.

14:56Jeremy, thank you so much for the conversation. Great stuff. Thank you so much.

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