Glenn Schmelzle – Funnel Reboot

August 9, 2023July 9, 2023

Episode 155: AdScam, with Bob Hoffman

My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history’s greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That’s right. It’s actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam.

It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing.

He’s not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and led a major international agency’s US operations. He has written numerous books, including “Bad Men” and “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey.”

Nicknamed the “Ad Contrarian,” his writings under that name caused Business Insider to recognize it as one of the world’s leading blogs about marketing. He has been honored as the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club and served as part of the Advertising and Marketing International Network and the California Academy of Sciences. In short, he knows what he’s talking about when he says there is something wrong with advertising.

He and I both agree that there is a war between the privacy-side and the surveillance-side proponents here. And it’s unclear how this dichotomy we’re in is going to be resolved. I will say that his solution for how to fix this – to eliminate all tracking – is harsher than mine. I’d like to end up with some arrangement where buyers receive advertising that gets close to feeling personalized, but that doesn’t track them without their consent.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Bob’s original AdContrarian blog

Bob’s website

Bob’s LinkedIn profile with details on his company, Type A Group

Association of National Advertisers

Stephane Hamel

Oxford philosopher James Williams

August 2, 2023July 9, 2023

Episode 154: Masterful Marketing, with Lisa Larter

Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today’s guest didn’t do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.

Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.

That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.

After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn’t the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book. “Masterful Marketing”

I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I’m so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lisa Larter Consulting

Lisa on LinkedIn

Colleen Francis

Greta Bloskie

July 26, 2023July 9, 2023

Episode 153: Boosting GA4 with BigQuery, with Johan van de Werken

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.

Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several European e-commerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.

Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing what he was learning. Seeing that the domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan to release the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star. Except for when he’s having fun playing in a punk rock cover band.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

SelectStar

GA4BigQuery

Johan on Medium

Funnel Reboot episode with “Learning Google Analytics” author Mark Edmondson

Definition of ETLDefinition of an IDE

July 19, 2023July 8, 2023

Episode 152: Data doesn’t lie…or does it? with Yuliia Tkachova

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you’re connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today’s data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can’t manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data. The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in.

In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there’s a twist here because we’re in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don’t want an observability tool that’s another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there’s an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files – basically metadata – they are just as effective at alerting you to problems.

If you’d like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen’s Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate.

I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Masthead’s YouTube Channel

Connect with Yuliia Tkachova on LinkedIn

Splunk

NewRelic

Image credit: Edmund Dulac in Hans Christian Andersen tales

February 7, 2023January 20, 2023

Episode 130: How to Interview Customers, with Ryan Gibson

Hot to Interview Customers with Ryan Gibson

We spend a lot of time demonstrating who our company is built around. We leave an open chair for them in board meetings. We put notices on the footer of our website, We provide automated feedback mechanisms so we can gauge how they feel, and when we hold in-person events or trade shows where they appear, we make every effort to give them swag and confirm their upcoming purchase plans (hopefully, buying from us). I’m talking about customers, of course, and though we do all these things, there seems to be one thing we dance around; the one simple activity that could give the most intelligence – talking to them.

I’m not saying we don’t talk to customers. But most of that talk is anecdotal. I don’t know about you, but as a marketer, I wouldn’t go to the C-suite and defend a marketing program and budget based on a customer’s anecdotal comment.

But done in the right way, that’s systematic and that follows qualitative Research principles, talking to customers can take the pulse of our market. We can analyze their experiences, making those findings available, doing it in a way that would not only stand up to any Executive’s scrutiny, they’d insist on basing more corporate decisions on this information.

Over his 20 years in marketing. Ryan Gibson has worked with dozens of businesses overseeing programs from the bootstrapped variety, on up to million-dollar budget variety.

Using skills he got early in his career he worked in TV & Radio and film, doing a stint as reporter for Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, which got him so used to interviewing, he kept doing it and figures that he’s now conducted over 1800 of them

He now heads up Content Lift, a Marketing Strategy consultancy centred around Customer Research.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ryan is prolific on LinkedIn

Ryan’s How to Run Customer Interviews course

Wynter online panel

Respondent software