A: Long answer/life story coming.

A: It’s an intriguing idea, but I think it’s an under-baked cake to a degree. It’s relatively basic in terms of ML – basically mad-libs things together until it gets the output you want. I think it was released far too early and lacks the controls needed for real success. I think of it a bit like tuition – we’re paying for it to learn things that we already know. It’s got potential, but I think that potential is still a solid 2-3 years away. I worry that many advertisers will totally block it from their brains bc the first test wasn’t great. We had it in alpha and there were some… learnings. But it’s an alpha. Right now, mostly using it as a supplement, ways to find more volume, and not on every campaign. It’ll get there! But it’s machine learning. It needs time and data to learn… which many smaller advertisers don’t have the patience or appetite for. It’s a good “eh lets try everything at once” scenario! But one of the flaws I see in it for brand conscious advertisers is it makes EVERY ad medium about performance.

A: Okay cheesy Aaron time. I’ve always been a leader. But, sorta serious. To the hatred of awkward silence before, I’ve always been the like, if you see a piece of trash on the ground you pick it up type of person. I hate seeing a lack of initiative, so I just sort of always took it. I’ve always had high standards for myself, strong opinions about how to do things the “right way” (thanks mom) and so I was always uh, loud about it. because of my experience in college (which I think we’ll get to) I actually skipped ever being an entry level employee and had a few people under me after about 8-9 months.

Those looking to get into management, the best thing you can do is mentor and teach peers, including sharing failures. People tend to struggle the most with trust, communication and feedback when they’re getting into management. Teach your team why to do first, how to do second and what to do third. Teach them how to think, trust them to do well and give clear candid feedback when they stray. That goes for your peers and managing up as well. I wish i felt better about that part earlier on – too often I would hold on to uncomfortable or difficult feedback thinking I was protecting people. In reality, I was making them confused, preventing growth and generally holding them back, all because I didn’t want 5 seconds of uncomfortable. I’ll often stop a meeting and go COACHING MOMENTTTT to give real time feedback. the team seems to love it, and I know I personally do when it’s done back to me. My coach would not hesitate to call me on my BS, which honestly I usually knew myself but needed someone else to moonstruck slap me.

A: Kind of a loaded question, but I’d back into it by thinking about a customer value. If your customers are worth $100, or your average profit is $30-40, make sure you have enough money to get at least 5-6 of them. Things will not be perfect the first time you do it (so you might have to think of it a bit like Vegas, only bet what you’re willing to lose). You have to make sure you can give it enough of a college try to figure out if it reallllly worked or not.

A: I’d love to see more tact, more consultative selling etc, rather than trying to hit a quarterly number. Don’t know a practical solution since they can’t really have bajillion support people on staff, but I’d love to see more of a focus on technical support

A: Creativity and moving up/down funnel. We billy bob thornton’ed ourselves. Very typecast as demand capture. Someone searches thing and we sell thing or else PPC bad. Since the industry is so mature, there’s not as many efficiencies to find doing ‘the good ol stuff.’ since the economy is so crowded,

I’m really interested in moving up and down funnel – but I’m intrigued by all the possible things we can do BEYOND getting an instant conversion. creating brand awareness, reactivating lapsed customers, putting Marketing into SEM is something I’m really looking into now.

A:*throws sand on fire for dramatic effect. There’s a few uh, themes of horror story I guess. I’ve seen them a few times. sorta like when a Stephen king movie comes out and you’re like wait didn’t he already make a movie about trucks coming to life to kill us… Ok maybe its just me who’s seen multiple truck related horror movies.

1: Accounts that are completely untouched. I’ve seen some that haven’t been touched for YEARS, and not little spenders either. I’m talking like 6-figure-a-month spenders that had one bid change in a year. Now I have seen it where they’re untouched and it’s fine. But more often they’re untouched and it’s…. very not fine.

2. Trying to frame this diplomatically. Accounts that take engine suggestions too literally and go nuts. Or worse, accounts that were built by the engines’ “growth teams”.

A: Ok more long life stories, going back to 20 year old Aaron with an eyebrow ring (no seriously). Seriously though, my start was complete serendipity. I was a dork (like a cool dork) in college, so my junior year I was interviewing for summer jobs in November of my junior year. I had an interview for a co-op (didn’t know what that was) at DuPont (fortune 100 chemical company). It just so happened interviewer’s daughter went to college at Cornell, where I grew up (in Ithaca). It just so happened her favorite restaurant was the one where I worked for years and was on my resume. I helped with the branding, planned menus etc, so the interview got real friendly real fast.

I worked full time at Dupont for 6 months as a 20 year old – my role was to essentially be an internal evangelist for analytics to various business unit owners. Set up dashboards, helped implement omniture (that was fun) and then at about the half way point my manager and I started “pitching” various product marketers on shiny new google ads. I barely knew what I was doing, a lot of it was taking ‘googles best practices’ but we got some huge leads for some huge business units, which drew the interest of execs. I liked talking to execs as a snotty 20 year old, liked all the things I already described about SEM, so when I graduated I went to an agency in the Philly burbs. Was a jack of all trades of sorts, doing email, affiliate, seo, sem, display. But I reallllly liked SEM as it sort of bridged the gap between all of the channels, the glue that held a marketing strategy together. So I moved to a search-focused career at a smaller agency and the rest is history. I do think however, that my generalist-to-specialist history helped me a TON in client communication.