Latest / The Marketing Brief / Adam & Brian Dork Out Over a Shared Love of Consumer Psychology (S2 E13)
Transcript
- Brian: To the Marketing Brief Podcast. I am your host, Brian Aquan, and this is the podcast where we talk about really anything and everything across the marketing landscape. To do that, I can't just talk to myself, so I welcome in a guest. And today we're very excited to be joined by Adam Ortman. Adam, how are you? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: I'm doing good, Brian. How are you doing? Good. Brian: I I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm excited to spend the morning, the morning here on the West Coast with you. how would you introduce yourself to the listeners? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Sure. Yep. My name is Adam Ortman. I'm the CEO and founder of a media agency called Kinetic319. We're based out of Denver, Colorado. However, we have team members all over the United States. We have a roster of clients that are global. So we work primarily in the media buying space, so all of the strategy, the campaign building, the execution optimization. And then the other side of our house is actually SEO and content writing. So we are very much so building bridges between those two practices, and we do that every day. Brian: Yeah, that's awesome. SEO certainly a space that has been turned upside down in the last year or so, right? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Absolutely. No days ever the same, Brian. No days ever the same. Brian: Nope. Well, I was really excited to see your title on LinkedIn because you had consumer psychologist in there. And psychology is the the thing that drew me to marketing and the thing that keeps exciting me is that it's about people and how people respond to trends and messages and how you can try to engage them. why is why is that important for you to have in your title? Why do you kind of describe yourself as a consumer psychologist? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Not only just because I'm a giant nerd in that Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: practice. my master's was in my emphasis and my master's was in consumer psychology as it relates to communications. And I find it to be fascinating. And you just said it, right? Everything has to do with people. Businesses don't do business with businesses. People do business with people. And so that's something that I take with me every single day. And the science behind consumer psychology is inherently a bedrock in everything that we do within my agency. And so understanding behavior, motivations, priorities, goal setting, fears, fear psychology, those are all themes that we inherently play with as marketers and everyone listening on this podcast as marketers too. Every single day we're just not calling it consumer psychology. So It's really nice to actually see formal theory, formal psychological theory actually play out in the real world in our campaigns. So, like I said, understanding an individual's priorities and motivations and fears and translating that into something that actually benefits business is fascinating to me. And so over the last 20 years, I've been, you know, we've been catering to audience creation and you know, creative effectiveness and those types of items. Packing in the consumer psychology kind of academia into those conversations. Yeah. Brian: Great. I I'm fascinated by it as well. are there one or two kind of key consumer trends you're kind of seeing right now? Like what what's top of mind for you where you're like, wow, this is a shift that that we're seeing and we're paying attention to? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah, crowd theory, or herd or herd mentality is something that is really interesting to me. And I always love this I love this visual or this metaphor where if you go to a baseball game and everybody's doing the wave, it's basically c crowd theory. It's ba it's basically what you know, your monkey see, monkey do type situation. And we Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: see this so frequently in every in our day to day lives, not only as businesses but also as consumers. and Brian, I know that we weren't gonna try to avoid this topic, but AI is part of that, right? So leveraging AI, you start to see your neighbor, you know, using AI, your friend using AI, you're starting to see this. So then you go and explore it yourself and use use those types of functionalities with that technology. we see it every single day. So that's that's really interesting. And also social proof is one of my favorites. So understanding how credibility and the different forms that that takes and how that actually relates to a consumer's ability to be introduced to, to trust a new brand, to create loyalty and you know repeat service or purchase over time. those are some of my favorites. Yeah. Brian: That's great. definitely some some of the stuff we've been talking about on this podcast. because I see peer-to-peer messaging as just the epitome of of how you can break through to consumers right now. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Brian: better than a brand talking to you is somebody who has used the brand and can talk to you. And I think it relates to the other thing you said about trust. And I've been exploring this idea of trust networks. Right. When I see something or I hear about something, what is the network I go to to make sure it's like a real product? I'm not getting ripped off, like that Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Yeah. Brian: my money's not just going somewhere because there's a lot of that out there. And I think people are relying more and more on their quote unquote trust networks, whatever makeup that is. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: I agree. I agree with that. Very much so. And it's interesting because you see pockets of this or trends of this where influencers became a function of that trust network in the later twenty teens and early twenty twenties, where now you're actually starting to see the erosion of influencers, credibility, and trust because of the pay-to-play format that influencer kind of became. And so it's Brian: Mm-hmm. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: it's interesting to see that as as that as an example of something that has come into that trust network and then has now kind of fallen away because of how we've managed it. Yeah. Brian: Yeah. Influencer is an interesting one. So I agree with you that like the meta influencer or the really big influencer has kind of fallen to the wayside, but these micro influencers have kind of risen up, right? Which yeah. Is it really? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: That is the only thing I recommend is the micro influencer. Because if you have a million over million followers on in s on Instagram or on TikTok or whatever, who are we talking to? Yeah. If you're Brian: Yeah, yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: talking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. Brian: Yeah. And that might even be a deterrent for people to see, this is just a massive influencer who's just taking money to hawk a product. Whereas in that micro Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Exactly right. Brian: influencer space, they really are people that might be in your community. look more like you, act more like you. You can find someone who kind of like resembles you online, and then that becomes your trust network. Right. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's something that we also see and I'm gonna go back to the AI topic again because AI inherently is on the social proof spectrum where you are as a consumer thinking that this is something that's recommending to you given your preferences and your trusting. this entity. So, you know, you say, hey, ChatGPT, give me three of the best coffee makers, or or what are the best coffee makers? And it gives you three, right? So rather than you going to Google Shopping or just Google or Amazon, where you're where you are shown thousands and thousands of options and you are given the option to choose upon your own criteria, these AI are now giving you three or five. Right, and then you're going through and trusting its recommendations and often buying whatever coffee maker that is. But I do see very similarly with the influencer trend. If ChatGPT and these other AIs go down the pay-to-play model where the trust and the actual you know understanding your personal criteria into choosing a product or service is eroded by the pay-to-play, I Brian: Mm-hmm. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: actually foresee a very similar decline in that trust with AI, as a as it pretends like shopping and you know those types of things. But interest it's fascinating. It's a fascinating time Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: to be a marketing right now. Brian: It it really is. And I I'm as excited as you are. I I think, you know, when you say like it it gives you three options, right? And I I see that too in Chat GPT. And the reason it does that is because that's what you can handle, right? It's like, three, awesome. Now I can make a decision, right? So I think the more people understand how LLMs work and how your GPTs work, is it like it's just trying to make you happy? It's trying to give you the answer. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Brian: That you want as quickly as possible. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Uh-huh. Brian: and that you know, you can challenge it in different ways. But that is a great example of just like, hey, here's here's three examples, right? How easy is this now? You can know, you can just choose from from three that are that are happening. And I guess the question I have for you on that is how has the SEO business changed? Because now you have to to feed into these GPTs? Is that completely changed how how you kind of program that? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Completely changed. And it's i you know, the foundations of standard search with SEO are known, right? The the algorithms change, but we kinda get the recipe. So that inherently it acts as a foundation to the GEO or the generative engine optimization, which is the LLMs in the chat bots. So now we basically have two overlords to start to try to please, which was historically Google and the major search engines, but now it's all of these LLMs and chat chat engines that people are using every single day. And so it has dramatically changed because in I would say in three different ways. In number one is visibility, because with standard search, it's an open source. So we can see how many times something is searched, and if your competitors are searching, or if your competitors are being shown. How are we ranking what is the arena? With LLMs, it's a black box. So our technology allows us to intercept some of those conversations to understand. The one-to-one conversations and understand benchmarking for visibility and sentiment and competitive alignment. So we found a way to align there, but it's completely different than how we would with SEO. And so the second one is how we manage content. So content with SEO was, you know, all about this eat mentality, right? You're wanting to be authoritative and you're wanting to be in useful, which is still very, very much so the case. But what we have found is like the structure of your content into a FAQ or a QA fashion increases your propensity for chat to pick you up by 62% in our studies. So just the formatting of that content is really interesting. And then the third item is What worked yesterday will not be guaranteed to work today. And that's something that we have learned. And so that's again something completely different out of the GEO world or the AI world is that it is writing itself every day. So previously when we would just, you know, all huddle around and feel like the world is crumbling anytime a new penguin update or whatever the hell they're calling it that month comes from Google, we're now having to realize that in a more frequent basis, almost on a daily basis. And so How we approach that is that all of our testing is iterative. So we do a test Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: and we maintain that testing protocol while layering on another test on top of it. So we don't just assume what worked yesterday is going to work today. We need to continuously validate the things that we are testing. So those are really the the three main differences is the visibility, the s content structure that it likes, as well as just the testing rigor that you have to bake into GEO. Completely different than SEO. Yeah. Brian: Yeah. Have you found any bias towards recency with that? As you say Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yes. Brian: it changes every day and it's refreshing every day. So is the more ro more relevant or more recent you you post information kind of getting picked up? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: That's a great question. It's actually something that we just talked about on another on one of our blogs where in Google you could basically say, hey, this is a piece that is ranking and you can consider it to be ranking for a long period of time. The churn is so much higher with AI. So the recency is taken into consideration, but also the rules of its quality are changing. So the studies that we've seen is the end of 2024, I want to guess my dates might be hazy here. The end of 2024 If you ranked in the top five or top ten of Google standard search, you had about an 80% likelihood that you would also be pulled into Chat GPT or these LLMs. Now only about 30%, 30 to 40% of those top ranking are now being pulled into AI LLMs. So Recency is really important. The quality rules are completely changed. But also signals like PR and reviews and you know backling is still important but in a different way. So yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of things happening here, but recency is definitely something we're seeing that you need to be continuously feeding that engine from a content perspective. Brian: That's cool. Well, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about was attribution, because I know that's something you've been working on. I've always found it fascinating that you know we've gone from this space where it's like search drives everything, right? It's the last click. it's we Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Brian: should always maximize our search because that's where everyone goes and and it always got credit for the sale. you Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Always. Brian: guys have kind of taken a different approach where you're not following a consumer now through the consumer journey. Can you explain a little bit of how about how you're looking at attribution? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yes, and I will preface this with the fact that I am not a data scientist. I'm not a statistician, even though sometimes I like to play one. Yes, to your point is we are rolling out some new attribution this summer. So this is actually going live to our clients this month, and we will be rolling it out more to our prospective pool in the next coming months. So it's a offering that we're that we have merchandised as KIQ 360, which is kind of insight in motion is kind of how we're marketing it. But this we started to go down this path about this time last year where my team was really poking holes in traditional multi-touch attribution or MMM modeling and so or media mix modeling. And so really what has happened over the course of a a little bit of a timeline here, if you can give me the time to review it really quick. Back in the two 2010s, attribution was easy, right? We had desktop computers and laptop computers, and you know, even if you had multi- sources, which, you know, back then it wasn't enormous amount. I mean, Facebook only had only come out a few years before. And so and ads weren't even a thing on that medium just yet. And so when you were looking at attribution, there was really one click or maybe two or three clicks that would get you to the website and then you would convert from a commerce perspective. Fast forward a couple of years where mobile became the buzzword of the decade, which I'm glad that we're past that. And so then you started to add in device different types of the device mapping. So new math had to be baked into this analytics to basically say this is the same person coming from this desktop. This is likely to be the same person coming from the mobile device. We need to tie these journeys together and also the different sources from online where are they coming from. So Fast forward to now the early two thousand I would say the late 2010s. So I'd say late 2017s, so 2017. This is when you start to see all the legislation coming out. So privacy is is an enormous item. GDPR is coming out, C CPA has kind of been in the talks by that time. And you're now having Google saying we're gonna remove all of our cookies, right? I think this was around that time. And so the idea there was that you had to mask a lot of the people coming to your website. So new math had to be created again. Brian: Mm-hmm. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: And now as you get into the 2020s, you're seeing Safari remove most tracking. You're seeing all of these ad blockers across the board. You're seeing privacy legislation. continue to increase. And so the idea that we are able to reasonably track a single person through the twenty touch points between awareness introduction all the way to s through to sale across varying privacy scenarios, across varying devices, I think is completely unreasonable in my mind. Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Whether the math whether the best statistician in the world can tell me that, I won't believe them. Brian: Right. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: I won't. I won't believe them. So our attribution actually goes a step further. It's a Bayesian statistical model, which removes the person from the journey. So our models don't track your website, there's no pixels. We don't track a person across their journey. We actually look at the presence of that media tactic in that moment in time. And Brian: Mm-hmm. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: so we understand when that actual piece of Creative, whether it's a TV ad, whether it's a print ad, a billboard ad, a digital ad, is present in that moment of time. And how did that impact our business in the weeks and months ahead? The reason why this works is we have three plus three to five years of data that we train our models in our AI to help understand this predictability. So Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: we then basically train our models using the last three to five years of data. And then we take that data away from it and say, predict. Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: And our prediction rates for our AI is usually in the 95 plus percent. So if Brian: Gotcha. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: we gave it the same data in in a in an isolated period of time and said predict what you think would happen given your knowledge of the past, what would it do? And it and it will predict. And so that allows us to understand this tactic is rolling in at this time. We saw sales do this future activity or this increase decrease. So then we're starting to use statistics and a Bayesian model as well as a SIR. That allows us to understand actual impact and credit those specific tactics without having to have a single person and their journey involved. Brian: Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: And it's and it's fascinating to me. Brian: And ultimately that's the goal you're trying to get to, right? Is like which of my media tactics is driving this attribution? I should give it the credit for it. I should increase its resources and spending. So that makes a lot of sense. How when you remove the consumer though, how do you know that that will work for different demographics, different psychographic groups? Or is it just kind of an overarching look at media vehicles? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah, you're looking at your tactical. So you're you're look you're not necessarily able to dissect the demographics or the psychographics because you're removing the person. You're basically looking at whether or not a piece of media was present and its statistical impact on your sales. So you're wanting to say into your point, which was very valid earlier, is paid search gets 80% of your sales, but we know as marketers that it's influenced by other types of media. Not how many people are typing in your brand name, not just because it came out of the sky, you know what I mean? So it allows us to say actually move the attributed weight of a specific sale or revenue up into the funnel, not only by the tactical level, but also by the creative. So we're able to get to that level, which is really exciting to see. And we're then able to adjust our campaigns and our creative across that. I mean we've seen with the same level of spend, we've increased ROIs by 18%. Brian: Wow. Not a small number. Yeah. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, that's and that's and that's actual math. So where the limitations exist this for this is is that if you're a new business, a startup, without historical data, this won't work for you. Because you need to have a good amount of data in order to to actually use the model to feed the model. Because if it doesn't know anything in the past, then how did how did your sales go up and down dependent on media activation and impact? then it won't know what the actual impact is or what the future could be. so that is a limitation, but I don't I don't think a startup is gonna be looking at multi touch attribution modeling at the gate anyway. So probably Brian: Probably not part of their go to market strategy. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: not part of their go to the market strategy. Yeah, exactly. Brian: Well, that's fascinating. I I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for being a Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Brian: guest. how do people get in touch with you? How do people find out about Kinetic three nineteen and you guys' offerings? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: Yeah. Yeah, look me up on LinkedIn. you'll easily find me at Adam Ortman. Connecticut nineteen dot com is a fantastic resource. We actually use it as a really big informational hub. So we're constantly putting blogs out where we publish all of our own first party analysis. So we do usually one to two major customer surveys a year. We give those out basically for free. also look us up on socials. So LinkedIn, Facebook, X we're constantly posting. We do a sidewalk session series which you know about a minute to two minute videos of me walking my giant golden retrievers and talking about the things that are on my mind that day. So feel free to tap in. Yeah. Brian: That's great. Around around the hiking around your hiking spots or around Denver? Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: On my neighborhood, up in the mountains, you know, wherever we're at in the moment, I frankly can't turn my brain off, so I usually just turn on the camera and talk about whatever's whatever's going on in the a in the marketing world. Brian: That's awesome. Well, I've really enjoyed getting to know you, Adam. I'm sure we'll stay in touch. Adam Ortman | CEO, Kinetic319: You as well, Brian. Brian: thank you for being a guest on the on the Marketing Brief podcast. And to all the listeners out there, stay curious.