Latest / The Marketing Brief / Kayla and Brian Discuss the Boutique Agency POV and AI in the Workplace (S1 E22)
Transcript
- Brian Aucoin: Hello and welcome back to the Marketing Brief Podcast. I am your host Brian Acquan. This is the podcast where we briefly touch on topics across the marketing landscape. And as always, we are joined by an industry expert. Today we are very excited to be joined by Kayla Bryant. Welcome in, Kayla. Kayla Bryant: Hi Brian, thanks for having me. Brian Aucoin: We're so excited to have you. Would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and kind of talk about what it is you do? Kayla Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Kayla. am general manager at Two Trees Digital Marketing. We are a boutique size agency and we support clients in a lot of different realms with a lot of different things. But our main focus is on paid media supported by strong SEO, creative and CRM integration. Brian Aucoin: it's great to have you ⁓ this discussion today. We were talking a little bit before we hit record and we thought that authenticity might be something we could kind of connect on here at Aquan Consulting. My consulting agency, we've kind of ⁓ identified authenticity, and values being three macro trends. How do you view ⁓ authenticity through like clients' eyes and kind of ⁓ how... How do you inform them about it? Is it something that's important to them? And how do you think consumers are reacting to authentic messages these days? Kayla Bryant: Yeah, great questions. think in 2026, authenticity is it's really everything. It's really important. important to consumers and it's becoming I think brands are realizing it's very important for them as well. A of like the conversations that we're having with our current clients right now in relation to their creative and their copy and their campaign strategy revolves around more authentic, more engaging, more relatable because it's just kind of like in this digital world that we all live in where there's so much content all of the time ⁓ it is about creating that like special moment of connection with someone in relation your brand or your product or whatever it may be that they feel ⁓ some sense connection to it rather than just knowing about your brand or thinking about your brand. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I totally see authenticity as a route to connection. I I think there's the wild like AI slop, know, fake videos out there, right, that are very inauthentic, you know, and that's one total end of the spectrum. And then you're trying to connect with consumers ultimately, right? As a brand or a service, you're trying to connect with consumers. a great way to always do that is through authenticity. Kayla Bryant: Thank Brian Aucoin: Yeah. So you guys would describe yourselves as a boutique agency? Yeah. Kayla Bryant: Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. We've got 10 employees and a handful of clients that we work for. Brian Aucoin: Nice. What are some of the biggest challenges you kind of face right now as a boutique agency in 2026? Kayla Bryant: That's a good question. I think something that we run into often is Brian Aucoin: You Kayla Bryant: Kind of this weird time that we're in is like a battle with AI where we're trying to figure out how we best use AI to support our processes and our values and our practices. meanwhile, our clients, a lot of our clients are also figuring out how they use AI. And sometimes it, sometimes it ends up that, ⁓ know, maybe we're a little bit more advanced with it than they are. And so they're bringing some ⁓ to the table that are a little bit out there that you can tell like this was a conversation they had with AI. They don't really know what they're trying to accomplish, but then they're bringing it to us. Like, here's this idea. And we're trying to just navigate, what do we do with this and where do we go? And how do you have that conversation of like, okay, I see, like, I see, like, we're trying to do something here and how do we kind of bring it back to like best practices in marketing. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I mean, that relationship has always been, you you depend on your agency to help you get through these things, right? And like understand them. So maybe look at it from ⁓ your agency. I, you know, on this podcast, we've been talking about AI, AI is any, like anywhere along the spectrum of a tool in terms of like a calculator of our times, right? You'd have the right inputs and it gives you exports ⁓ or Yeah. kind ⁓ I those two words. So anywhere like a calculator to like full infrastructure, kind of where are you guys along that spectrum in terms of implementing AIs as part your processes? Kayla Bryant: Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say we're somewhere in the middle. We're using it definitely in most of our practices, whether that be in LLM itself or an AI tool that's integrated within the platforms that we run ads on. we're definitely not afraid of AI at our agency, but we are still, I think you have to be still a little bit skeptical the and ⁓ of ⁓ Just the tools in general, like a great example is ⁓ AI. There are some things about it that are really helpful ⁓ there are some things about it where ⁓ you ⁓ it do what it wants, it's just gonna totally destroy your campaigns. ⁓ we're in that hybrid, I guess, ⁓ of the tools but very heavily monitoring everything with our human experts. Brian Aucoin: you internally come up against people who don't want engage in it? ⁓ How have been implementing with employees inside your agency? Has there been any pushback to it? Kayla Bryant: No, not at all. I guess we've been lucky in that regard. Everyone is pretty to just give it a try and see what tools work for them. I think everybody in the agency uses at least one tool that has AI, but we're all using the same ones. It's just kind of a testing period and depending on what roles, I mean, we all have very different roles because it's, like I said, a boutique size firm. So everyone's just kind of doing what works for them right now as far as which tools they're implementing. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. And have you had to set any guidelines for how to use it? Or is it still kind of like, go and try it out and see if it makes your job easier. Kayla Bryant: Yeah, I'd say like on a case-by-case basis we've got some guidelines like for certain industries or for certain clients or certain types of content where we either don't want to use it or we want to use it very cautiously or very minimalistically, we don't have like an across-the-board kind of rule, I guess, there. We just have different parameters in place for different things that we do. Brian Aucoin: Figuring it out. That's what we're all doing, Kayla Bryant: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's kind of the space that we're living in. Brian Aucoin: Awesome. Being a boutique agency, really love, well, I'll let you answer, I tell you what I love about boutique agencies. What do you think are the advantages of using a boutique agency in 2026, I guess right now? Kayla Bryant: You Yeah, I mean, I can say for our agency specifically, I don't know if this applies to all of them, when you work with TwoTrees, you're actually, ⁓ a client, speaking directly with the experts that are running your campaigns, which is a little bit unique. I in the larger agency world, there's a lot of kind of like dancing around, like ⁓ a bit of smoke and mirrors of like, okay, we're running your ads and ⁓ here's like vanity metrics for you to look at and it's going great and you should ⁓ give us more money, essentially, has been my experience with the big agency world. And then having the small agency, like everyone on my team really like truly cares about the campaigns that we run. We're in there every day monitoring them. Like I said, the clients communicate directly with like Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Yeah. Kayla Bryant: the Google Ads specialists, the meta ads specialists, the SEO specialists, like they're on emails, they're on meetings, they're on calls together. So it's just kind of that, again, that like personal connection and relationship and communication that we've been able to build with them where they trust us because they know the people doing the work. Brian Aucoin: so I'll tell you like ⁓ reason I think boutique agencies are really working right now. You're able to be nimble obviously with it with a smaller sale, smaller workforce and as you just described, you're closer to the work, right? You're more ⁓ in the hand fingers on keyboards kind of doing the work every day, ⁓ which I especially in a time when Kayla Bryant: Mm-hmm. Brian Aucoin: It seems like a lot of things are changing right now. A lot of landscapes are changing, just the media landscape, but we work, when we'll work, ⁓ kinds of things are all kind of changing right now. So I think it's nice to be attached to a boutique agency that can be nimble and can figure things out with you ⁓ you're figuring out as a marketer. ⁓ Kayla Bryant: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. There's no red tape around here if the client has a request and we think it's reasonable. We'll figure out how to make it happen. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. And I'm definitely familiar with the prove it out and then ask for more money. That's kind of like always the position you're in at an agency, right? It's like, hey, it's working here. Here are the numbers. Yeah, we just need to feed them our money into it and we can scale. Kayla Bryant: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Brian Aucoin: That's awesome. Any kind ⁓ you are deep in the media space. In my career, I was a media planner, back in the ⁓ 2000s. I've seen space so much where we used to be buying websites that were former magazines and there was this huge landscape of used at plan and you figured out which sites you went to and now it seems like there are so much, ⁓ the choices are so more narrow. Is that? Kayla Bryant: Yeah. Brian Aucoin: Kind of what you're seeing too now that there's a couple places you go to buy media. Kayla Bryant: A little bit, yeah. It's more broad and more narrow at the same time, weirdly. yeah, because instead of going to all these different print magazines and all these different radio stations, everything is pretty streamlined. You can go on and just do like, OK, streaming TV, bye. ⁓ you know, seven different streaming TV platforms with the ad all of a sudden. then obviously social platforms, like there's, ⁓ know, there's numerous social platforms, but we all know the top like three that perform and the ones that perform best for specific industries. So yeah, I think you're right. It has kind of. consolidated, maybe even monopolized a little bit. Which who knows if that's good or bad. I think that we are seeing Google's reign break up a little bit with the introduction of LLMs in AI. we'll see how that plays out. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, that's certainly gonna be a disruptor as people move and you guys do so much with search, like move from search to through their AI It'll be an interesting space. ⁓ I what I'd love to ask you about though is when I was a media planner and planning media, I would look at that as my targeting, right? It's like, how do I find the right consumer that way? And now it seems more like Meta and Google are like, just give us your ads. we're gonna find the consumer, know, certainly if it's like a commerce brand, or if like you're, if you're optimizing against leads, or like, we're gonna find those leads, just give it to us. And to me, that means that now the targeting has shifted to the creative, right? Where it's like, you have to build different creative for different targets, because you're not doing the targeted on the media side. Is that something you're seeing? Kayla Bryant: A little bit, yeah, yeah, it's definitely more behaviorally and like interest-based targeting that we're, mean, those are like the levers that we have to pull now on that end. so you are thinking when you're making the creative about like, you know, these are the people we're targeting with the ad, like generally, obviously people are different, but this is like the large bucket of ⁓ that we say we're targeting. What of ⁓ ad and ad copy will... largely speak to them. ⁓ is definitely flipped, whereas before you were like kind of taking a guess at like, I'm assuming these are gonna be the right placements for this audience based on a bunch of different data. It's just kind of opposite data points now. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I'm just old enough to know a world where it's like media did its thing, creative did its thing, and then it came together as the campaign was launched, right? And then during my career in digital media, was like, ⁓ digital and creative need to work together because there's different formats and you want to be the right story at the same time. So yeah, now I think it's moved all the way over to like, hey, we need a thousand different creatives. because that's where all the targeting and the messaging is done and we don't know what's working until we put it up there and start to see numbers. Kayla Bryant: Yeah, lots of dynamic ads, lots of testing, definitely. And the platforms, yeah, the platforms are getting to a place where they will do it for you. It's still not always great though. So it's that space where it's like you still need someone that knows what they're doing with the platforms to actually make it perform. Brian Aucoin: Right. Yes. Yeah, I don't think that's ever gonna change, but see. ⁓ changes. ⁓ something I love to ask all my guests is what is something you are looking forward to? It can be in your professional capacity or in your personal life. ⁓ there anything coming up that you're excited about? Kayla Bryant: We'll see. It might. lot of things, a lot of different things. Hmm, We, Two Trees, are actually getting ready to launch a second brand that's gonna be partner with other agencies, like creative agencies and website agencies, and kind of be their digital and paid media arm. So it's of like a white label thing. yeah. ⁓ So we're ready to launch that in the next probably month or two. Mm-hmm, yeah. ⁓ So that can expand their capabilities and offer. ⁓ Brian Aucoin: find more business. Yeah. ⁓ nice. ⁓ that kind of a plug-in. Gotcha. Nice. Yeah. Kayla Bryant: the things that we do, but under their name. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah. Brian Aucoin: That's exciting. Nice. thank you so much ⁓ ⁓ a guest. We've enjoyed this chat we've had with you, Kayla. Kayla Bryant: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it as well. Thanks for inviting me on. Brian Aucoin: Awesome. Well, thanks for being a guest on the marketing brief podcast. I am your host, Brian Quan and stay curious everyone.