Google Marketing Live 2025 Takeaways

Tom Nixon (00:01.92)
Well, Curtis, this week on Bullhorns and Bullseyes, it’s just the two of us.

Curtis Hays (00:07.913)
We’re back to two. Yeah. This is, is a, is it the Lone Ranger and Tonto?

Tom Nixon (00:14.926)
I guess it is. but it’s also you missed it, but I already made a Yacht Rock reference within the first 10 seconds of the podcast. So lovers of Yacht Rock will recognize just the two of us or your kids who are on TikTok might recognize it as well. There you go. There you go.

Curtis Hays (00:16.626)
Thanks for

Curtis Hays (00:28.511)
Just the two of us. We can make it if we try. Just the two of us. You and I. You got me listening to biot rock now, by the way. I don’t know if my kids approve, but.

Tom Nixon (00:34.466)
Yeah, why? I got a podcast for you. Yes, but whereas

Good. Well, just the time for summer. It’s the season.

Tom Nixon (00:50.062)
They’ll come around. Trust me. Ask your kids. This is your assignment. can report back next week if they know the song, just the two of us and I guarantee they will. Yeah, cool. Well, we got rock might be retro in old school, but we are talking today something that is very new school with respect to marketing. Something called the Google marketing live 2025, which was an event held here recently.

Curtis Hays (00:51.731)
Yeah, it is addictive.

Curtis Hays (00:58.207)
They do. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Curtis Hays (01:17.885)
Yep, last week, middle of last week, I think it was. I missed it live, unfortunately, and then my social media, my YouTube, everything blew up and I was like, what? I missed something kind of important.

Tom Nixon (01:28.536)
Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And it’s I was thinking back when I first became aware that this event happened, that I stupidly thought to myself, I maybe even said on this podcast that Google’s got to be like very worried about the state and future of search in boy, was I wrong because they had plenty up their sleeve, which they rolled out. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Curtis Hays (01:53.482)
I had a conversation with a client earlier this morning that said something very similar. Gosh, what is Google going to do with everything that’s happening with AI and chat GBT and all this? And I was like, no, I think they’re on it. And they, they proved that this last week that they are paying attention. And I hope today we can talk about some of that. think talk about some of the concerns some of our clients have and colleagues and peers. And then.

At least how it affects things in the world of Google, search, YouTube, all those properties.

Tom Nixon (02:31.05)
advertising and just brand positioning in general. So yeah, we should have known Google was on top of things and probably took another great leap forward. But let’s real quick. What is this Google live? This is an annual event, right? It’s a, is it a symposium that you can attend live Google marketing line?

Curtis Hays (02:48.981)
Yeah, I think they did the first one. I mean, they do have attendees. I don’t know if you need an invite, if it’s invite only. Probably some of the big advertisers are there and, you know, stuff like that. I want to say they said, did they do the first one in 2013 or something like that? But, you know, if you think to when they unveil a new iPhone,

you know, and Apple’s on stage and, you know, they’re going to unveil the new one and talk about all the new technology and all that stuff. That’s basically what this was, where they had subject matter experts in the various divisions like YouTube division and the advertising Google ad side, unveil new products that they are either in development on and are coming soon or that are essentially being rolled out as we speak.

Tom Nixon (03:13.368)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (03:43.158)
So, lots of excitement, lot of, you know, rah rah. You know, let’s get excited about these new features and functionalities and those types of things. But there’s a lot of good insights and data into, you know, them sharing decisions behind where they’re taking the technology and those types of things, which I thought was interesting. And I think falls in line with some of the things that we’ve been seeing and sharing with our audience as well.

Tom Nixon (04:10.466)
Yeah, and we’re to get into some of those specific tools as we go. But before we do what, what was your overall impression? My takeaway was that the future is very daunting, but also very exciting. And I think the big tech like Google, I think their job is to make it accessible as possible for people like you and I to execute or companies trying to do it themselves. But the takeaway was it like this is an amazing

ball of energy that we can barely harness. was like, we’re going to empower all the stuff and create some nice packageable solutions for you to apply in this case to marketing or to branding or to advertising. That was my, what was your just high level take?

Curtis Hays (04:52.265)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (04:56.383)
I walked away from it with the feeling that Google really is working hard to understand user behaviors. I think a lot of people look at Google and they think about the algorithm and the ranking factors and those types of things. But they often miss that Google pays a lot of attention to actually how people are using the search results page, how they’re using other platforms that they own, like YouTube.

YouTube, by the way, is now the number one streaming platform in the United States. So it’s surpassed Netflix and Amazon. Yep, all video streaming, know, connected TV included. YouTube is now number one. So my takeaway was they’re paying attention to the way that us as human beings are now consuming content, and that has evolved over years. How we ask questions, how we find information.

Tom Nixon (05:33.058)
Yeah, all video video stream. Yep.

Curtis Hays (05:54.28)
on the internet and they’re not, my impression is, is they’re not trying to change our behaviors. They’re responding to our natural language and how we naturally go to try to use the technology. I think the statistic was 15 % of new searches every single day are searches that never happened before. So 15 % of searches are new searches that never happened before. We’re moving towards more and more complex queries.

and how we click. And they’ve been collecting this data for 25 years. You gotta remember like chat, GPT and these other technologies that are out there, like they’re just new and receiving information, but you’ve got years of data that their algorithm has on user behaviors. And I think they’re responding to saying, you know, we’re going to be the number one search engine. We’re going to be the number one platform for content because we’re going to meet the needs.

of our consumer. And that’s how they win. And the conversation I had with a client earlier this morning was like, what is Google going to do? I find myself now always using ChatGBT, and I’m using all these other platforms. They’re responding to that, and they see your behavior. And I think they’re ahead of even you. They’re anticipating what your behavior is going to look like a year from now, and they’re going to be ready with technology to respond to that.

Tom Nixon (07:18.798)
Yep. it, the search is so different. God, it’s quick. It’s amazing how quickly this has changed where we used to want options. We’d say, here’s a general topic, restaurants near me and give me a list of options. Right. And I think what Google’s discovering is that users want, um, like a more curated sort of path. Like, um, this is the restaurant that you’re looking for based on your intent, your past, your interest, all of the stuff, like I said, all the data. But to me, it’s like,

SEO, as we used to understand, is so different now and going forward because they are trying to replicate sort of the chat GPT experience because it was AI summaries is the first thing you resolve. Is that what it’s called? Google AI summary. So they’re trying to understand. Yeah. All the. Overviews. Yeah, you can still scroll down and see all these.

Curtis Hays (08:04.755)
Yeah. AI overview is what it’s called, AI overview.

Tom Nixon (08:12.244)
options which we’ll come to in a minute, but at the very top is here’s what we think you’re looking for, why you’re looking for, and let us give you the answer that you’re seeking as opposed to go find it somewhere. So what does this mean for SEO? That’s one of the things that they said. SEO writing for keyword search engine indexers, bots, that’s gone like starting now.

Curtis Hays (08:34.641)
Right. I’ve been using this example and if I could summarize this hopefully quickly, the difference between AI and then the ranking algorithm. Right? So, chat GPT and these other AI platforms, Gemini, which is Google’s and even the AI overviews are not a ranking factor. And here’s the example I’ve been providing. Imagine a library.

and you and I, Tom, are old enough to have when we were in school and we’re writing a research paper for a class, you know, say it’s on the Civil War, we need to pick a topic on the Civil War. We went to the school library, the public library, and we had, was it the Dewey Decimal System for indexing, right? And we’d either go to the librarian who knew where all the books were within the library, or we would

go to the drawer and we would pull out a section and we would go through the cards and those cards would say, hey, if you’re interested in the Civil War, okay, what part of the Civil War? Okay, Gettysburg. I’m interested in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, okay. The librarian or that card system would give you 10 books to go and check out, right? We would go and check out those 10 books. That’s essentially Google is a library.

It indexes all that content, it puts it into the library for you and makes it easily accessible. But you are the one that has to go and read that content. It’s just presenting to you based on title, based on book description. You might choose based on the cover one book over another. And the librarian sees, people seem to really enjoy this book here. So I’m going to go ahead and recommend that one. But it doesn’t mean the librarian has ever read that book, so to speak. Right? That’s Google’s traditional search is the librarian.

AI is a researcher. So now you have an employee at the library who’s actually reading all the books. Now they’re not ranking them, but if you were to come in and say, researcher, I want to do a research paper on the Gettysburg Address, the researchers are going to hand you a bunch of books. The researcher is going to give you some summaries. Well, let me tell you about the Gettysburg Address. And then the researcher will reference where it got that information.

Curtis Hays (10:47.795)
It’s not a ranking. It’s not saying this is better than this or people prefer this over this. It’s just summaries and where it got those summaries. And then you can continue a dialogue with that researcher to drill down. And during that drill down, you might get more specific answers and more specific references that then if you want to do further research, you have those reference points, those citations that you can go and look at. That’s AI, whether it’s chach, GPT, Gemini, Proluxity.

That’s essentially what you’re doing. So I want people to know you don’t rank in an AI platform, an LLM. There’s no ranking. They don’t have algorithms. They don’t crawl websites the same way. They are researchers. They’re just gathering content and being trained, and they’re learning based off that content so that they can give us information when we ask questions. And Google sees that, right? So you’re going to have a search result page now that is the combination of both, essentially. Understand you mentioned intent.

That’s like key in this whole thing is like Google wants to anticipate your intent. Actually based on a question you ask, which you’ll like the answer to this Tom is like they want to understand the why behind your question. Not just the what it’s like, hey, I’m looking for no running shoes. Why are you looking for new running shoes? Now let me based on that why match you with the right brand.

Tom Nixon (11:59.81)
Bingo.

Tom Nixon (12:06.274)
Right?

Curtis Hays (12:13.174)
and here’s why this is the right fit. mean, that’s where we’re going. That’s where we’re going, where Google can anticipate those and provide you that information.

Tom Nixon (12:13.282)
Yeah, in.

Tom Nixon (12:20.642)
Well, here’s the example that they used in the address, which, you know, I’m going to link to there’s a 14 minute video. That’s a summary. It’s a quick shot of everything. I’ll link to that in the show notes. So look for that if you’re interested in watching it. the example that they use was something along the lines of a search query. How am I allowed to carry my pet on an airplane? Something like that. And so the AI overview was a combination of, know, just a quick summary on maybe what some of the federal guidelines are.

Maybe a reference to what the airline policies are. Every airline might be a little bit different and then underneath that. So once you get your summary underneath that it’s trying to understand the intent is that you’re planning to fly soon with your pet, right? So we can also curate maybe some products that that person might be interested in buying, say a new pet carrier case that is federally locked, you know, compliant with the guidelines and everything. So that’s how it weaves everything into your point. It’s like.

Here’s what we think you’re asking. Here’s why we think you’re asking, and here’s how we can serve that need both with information and potentially products. So we’re not going to rank, as you say, in the overview, but is the future of search for your out a way to position your content in your why such that the AI overview matches your product or service to a searcher’s intent? That could be the holy grail. In this case, if you’re selling those cages for

airplanes, you want to make sure that you’re in that ecosystem where the searchers looking for answers. So how do.

Curtis Hays (13:55.252)
Yep. And so the question we’re asking ourselves now is how do we do that? Right? How is advertisers, how is businesses make sure that we show up? I mean, that’s what everybody’s asking. How do I show up in AI answers? How I show up in chat GPT? Because the old method was sort of simple. You ranked for keywords and it was keyword focused. I think we’re moving towards a better world, right? Tom, we’re focused on it really solving our customers’ problems, which is really what having a business and doing marketing is all about.

Tom Nixon (14:23.618)
Well, real quick before you finish that thought, because the old way was when we say old way, just some people who maybe aren’t into SEO know you would quote unquote stuff keywords into your copy so that the indexers would find it. And it’s almost a way of tricking someone into your storefront. Right. You search for this. Ha ha. I put the little cheese on the mouse trap and you smell the cheese and now you’re here and now I’ve got you. Right. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve been doing that for years. Right. But what Google is trying to say now is understand what makes that mouse tick.

And if you have a product that is going to serve that mouses need, then you’re organically going to end up in the places you need to end up. You’re not going to be able to trick the algorithms anymore. And why you think my eyes light up here is because going back to that, why is that brands need to figure out what those customers? Why are what’s the mouses cheese? Why are they looking for it? Where might they go to find it? And how can we prove to the world that we best serve that need? And that’s what great content is going to be about. It’s what it’s always been about. But now

The focus is more there than it was on the trickster method, you know? So that’s exciting for me.

Curtis Hays (15:27.125)
100 % Yeah, yeah, I gave you an example the other day where I’ve been doing some experimentation with us using the AI platforms to figure out solutions for clients related more so around technology, but basically give the prompt. This is the industry I’m in. This is the technology I’m currently using. This is a problem I’m trying to solve. And

asking AI to give me recommendations on how to solve that problem. And most of the reference points it’s giving me, so again, not ranking, but it’s referencing websites, and a large number of those references lead to case studies. So here’s a software company that solved this problem for another company that’s in the industry that I’m asking about that also has a WordPress website or a Shopify website or a big commerce website, right? And they solved this problem with X. And that’s where I’m led to.

So this is exactly what you want your content marketing to be doing if you’re writing case studies or white papers or those types of things. I’m in that learning phase. I’m trying to solve a problem. And here it is content that’s not being ranked. It’s just being referenced that allows me to, as a consumer, to discover and then say, hmm, is this a product or service that I might consider to help me solve this problem? Which is ultimately what my intent was in the first place.

Tom Nixon (16:46.254)
Exactly. It’s going to be interesting to understand at some point if we’ll ever understand it. What goes into the AI’s thinking in terms of which case studies seem like the ones I should be drawing from and which ones should not. There’s got to be something, right? They have to somehow make a choice.

Curtis Hays (17:01.897)
I think there’s yeah, I think there’s some trust earned. So similar to what I guess we would call backlinks or domain authority in the old school SEO world. think there’s some trust in reputation factors. That’s part of the LLM. And I think the signal for my clients is you can’t, if we think of the peso model and your website is, would be your own media, right?

I always got to check with you, Tom, make sure I’m using the right terminology. Okay. So, if I own my website and a lot of people just put content there and they don’t do anything else, we got to look at these other channels and these other assets that you have available to you, PR, guest blogging, being a guest on a podcast, for example, like, you know, great ways for you to get your brand out there and talk about the problems that you’re solving.

Tom Nixon (17:32.152)
Yep. That’s right. Yep. Yep. You own it.

Curtis Hays (18:01.279)
so that you’re discovered in a larger ecosystem that now there’s more inputs for that LLM to draw from, more trust signals centrally for it to take a look at. And I would say the other big thing is reviews. So there is definitely sentiment analysis happening within both Google’s AI, looking at reviews on your Google business, if you’re looking for a restaurant and those types of things. which restaurant has the best New York style crust?

Like, you know, people are gonna put in their review, best New York style pizza I’ve ever had. so it’s finding that sentiment, it’s pulling out that context and now saying, hey, I’m gonna serve to this person based off the sentiment that I saw. This is an option for you. Again, the decision making, at least at this point, is still up to us, but I think we’re very quickly moving to a world where you won’t have to make the decision. I think you can just say to Alexa, you know, hey Alexa,

order us the best New York style pizza in town. You didn’t say order me Little Caesars. You didn’t say get me Jets. Yeah, which is not. It just orders. Uber It phones into Uber Eats. It’s got your credit card and a pizza shows up at the door. To me, I think then about brand. So you have sentiment and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, you honestly don’t want customers making decisions that way. You want them saying, Alexa,

Tom Nixon (19:08.728)
which is not the best New Yorker.

Curtis Hays (19:31.815)
Order me jets. You and you’ve done a good job with your brand at that point, if that’s what they’re asking for. And we really got to be thinking about brand again when we are in a world that’s going to be largely driven by convenience and these AI platforms.

Tom Nixon (19:47.512)
Yep. So that is kind of an overview of intent. But let’s talk about the demand gen because there’s also tools that you can. This is going to be even more important for the people who haven’t yet even expressed intent. But now you’re trying to generate demand and interest and awareness and all of those things. And there that Google has a new suite of tools for that as well. And it does go back to YouTube being the number one stream service.

Curtis Hays (20:12.329)
Yep. Yep. The number one streaming service. I’m a big fan. I’m on it all the time. Our videos are up there. I see what it can do for a lot of brands. And I think YouTube does as well. One of the things that’s really driving it that they talked about was the creators with what they call creators YouTube work where YouTube creators time would create content.

put it up on their platform, right? So what they want to do is connect creators with products, essentially, or other brands, right? So to give the opportunity, let’s say I’m like a lead gen software, and you and I talk a lot about lead gen and marketing and those types of things, and our content we’re publishing in YouTube, they want a platform that gives that.

a lead gen platform, an opportunity to connect with us inside their platform and offer partnerships for them to do advertising within our content. Right. So I think there’s going to be big opportunities for creators, new revenue streams, other than just bumper ads and asking their subscribers for money, which are essentially their revenue channels right now. But really connecting with brands to say,

You know what? I’m going to select, and this is sort of like influencer marketing, right? I’m going to select 10 brands that have the opportunity to show up alongside my content. This reminds me a little bit of the approach that the email marketing company we talked to the other day and had them on the podcast, right? Where they’re connecting creators who create content in their newsletters to advertisers and allow them to sort of publish together. YouTube’s going to do that same thing with video.

Tom Nixon (21:48.28)
Be high.

Tom Nixon (21:59.768)
Yep, and we keep begging this drum YouTube currently still is very economical in most cases to advertise on so while that’s the case and it is. Yeah, and it’s remaining the number one streaming service in the world. Let’s let’s get on that people.

Curtis Hays (22:07.622)
yeah, mean right now it’s two cents a view.

Curtis Hays (22:16.809)
Well, and let me say, Tom, let me just add to this that like, don’t think that this doesn’t apply to you if you’re a business. Like I’m thinking an HVAC company, like, okay, it’s we’re hitting the summer months here. I go for the first time to turn my air conditioner on and it doesn’t turn on. Okay. A lot of consumers now, what are they going to do? They’re going to go to YouTube and they’re going to do a search and try to figure out how to troubleshoot this. Now, as an HVAC company, would you like to have a companion banner?

Tom Nixon (22:22.626)
Yeah, that’s my point.

Curtis Hays (22:45.745)
next to the educational videos that tell me how to try to fix it myself, because at some point, a large number of those people aren’t going to be able to fix it themselves, but your companion banner was right next to it. go ahead.

Tom Nixon (22:57.196)
I was just going to say, and you could hyper target localities, right? So it’s not just any old person in the world watching a video. It’s someone in your neck in your market who is in market for your services. I mean, it’s perfect. And that goes back to this AI. This is what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to match searchers or just solution seekers in the moment and give them as much rich content and solutions as possible, even if that means hiring a company or buying a product.

Curtis Hays (23:01.045)
Yeah. Yep.

Curtis Hays (23:24.947)
Yeah, and what Google knows that we need to do, so historically, you and I talk a lot about the funnel. Historically, what we’ve done is pick solutions that hit certain parts of the funnel. So we’re going to do high-intent search ads, exact match, people looking to solve a problem, a HVAC company near me, HVAC repair, whatever. Those are at the bottom of the funnel, right? What Google is saying is…

you need to have a marketing mix of assets across all of our channels. This whole demand gen model, we’re to talk about demand gen that says, again, if we’re trying to figure out that person’s intent prior to them realizing they actually have a problem, wouldn’t you want your brand to potentially appear? I guess maybe I should do the funnel this way in awareness and in consideration and in intent and when they have the action, like to be part of that whole process because they might

that their journey might not be linear. Their journey might start here at awareness, but then quickly go somewhere else and you have the opportunity to potentially follow them across that journey.

Tom Nixon (24:21.73)
Right.

Tom Nixon (24:30.54)
Yes. The one thing that I had a quibble with is they said the funnel is not linear, which I disagree with. And I’ll come back to why the journey. I definitely agree is not linear linear to me. They’re two different things. The funnel is a state of mind, right? It’s a psychological state. Am I aware or am I not aware of this company? I’m not probably not going to buy something from a company I’ve never heard of and know nothing about, especially if I not even problem aware. I’m not just going to buy a product just because

Curtis Hays (24:43.613)
Yeah, the journey. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (24:59.384)
Curtis says I should buy a cowboy hat. Actually, I might make, but I’m already aware that you know what cowboy hats are. Right? So maybe now I need to be psychologically moved to interest to desire, and then I’ll take the action. So I think that doesn’t change. What does change is where people are at any one point in that psychological state of mind based on where they are in respect to your brand. And that is not linear at all. So you can’t assume. And this is part of the problem. I think the people make with digital marketing is they assume that they’re going to

handhold that prospect through that entire journey. And that’s not the case. They’re going to be here, there, and everywhere. They might come back to you. I always use this example of me. I already know I’m not going to buy a car for the next three years because I’m in the middle of a lease that I’m not going to get out of. in my mind, I’m always shopping, right? And so advertisers need to understand what’s driving my interests, you know, me specifically, not just people like me.

It’s a Google through the AI and all the tools they’ve had historically now is going to have more and more access to that information and can weaponize it more on the, for the sake of advertisers. So anyways, that was just my own little sort of aside about the funnel. think we still need to think in terms of, because it maps to that why, how, what thing that we’re talking about. So you need to still position your brand in that same way. So, but the journey is a linear.

Curtis Hays (26:13.0)
Yep, 100%.

Curtis Hays (26:17.685)
Well, right. So the journey is a linear, means how we serve, what we serve, when we serve it, where we serve it then is going to be more, it’s more complicated. So it’s not like when we set up these campaigns as advertisers or your business and you want to set up these campaigns that you can just sort of plug them in at these touch points anymore. Right. You still need to have the assets and you still need to have that.

Tom Nixon (26:33.752)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (26:47.667)
that ideal, you have the ideal customer, you have the ideal journey, you still need to map that part out. What Google is trying to do in these from at least an AI advertising standpoint is say, give us all those assets, tell us who your customer is, your ideal customer, then we’ll collect the data and get the signals so that then at what we feel are the right moments for that.

person and we have more visibility into who that person is and their income level and where they’re at in their journey and everything than you could ever imagine, which is scary, but that’s the truth. So let us, we were essentially having to put trust into the platforms to say, you know, here, serve up our content at the right moments. Now, I do think in order to earn that trust, and maybe we’ll get to this here soon,

is on the data management sort of attribution side of things. There needs to be a level of transparency that doesn’t exist today as far as, where are our ads serving? Where is the leads coming from? Different things like that. I do have some exciting stuff to share on that, which we’ll get to, but I do think there’s going to be, there has to be some transparency on Google side for that.

Tom Nixon (28:04.076)
Yeah, that’s where I was going to go next. You know, the cynic might think that there isn’t transparency because there’s something they don’t want to tell you. But I understand that. Right. There could be some there could be some counterfeit data in terms of who’s actually clicking on what. Is it a bot? Is it a person? I know. But at the end of the day, Google needs this to work. Right. This needs to end up in revenue and sales or people aren’t going to invest any money in it. So.

Curtis Hays (28:27.231)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (28:31.584)
They’re vested in this working. And so you sort of have to trust with an article of faith that they’ve engineered this AI to maximize outcomes. That’s going to maybe be a leap of faith that some aren’t going to want to take early on. But I think we’re even learning this with something as simple as the performance max campaigns is that those get really, really smart if you feed data back into it. So

Going back to data management and attribution and measurement. That was what I called the third rail for marketers last week. How are we going to be able to feed? Our authentic data into these algorithms at AI so that it learns what we wanted to learn, which is this was a great lead. This customer is awesome. This you keep sending us these horrible leads. We don’t want any of those.

Curtis Hays (29:03.125)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (29:20.819)
Yeah, that’s the most important thing, at least in the lead gen world right now. We refuse to do advertising for any business that’s doing lead gen that doesn’t import the offline conversion data, essentially give and tell Google what does a qualified lead mean, who are the qualified leads and

what’s the lead value or what’s the conversion value and who are your customers because that’s what the AI needs to learn off of. can’t learn off of just a simple phone call or form submission or a download of a white paper or newsletter subscribe. It needs to know your ideal. If you create an ideal customer profile, Google needs to know who those ideal customers are. And you might start with some assumptions when you originally create your campaigns, but you fine tune the campaigns by giving it data over time that tunes the algorithm that finds again these touch points of

when and where people convert, at what stages are they’re at, and find you similar audiences of people who are also likely to convert based off of their similar behaviors, their similar demographics. And again, all these things that we don’t have insight and touch to, but the algorithms do. so at least on the attribution side, there’s going to be more of that, and you need to be giving them that data. And so from a technology perspective, you need to have the systems in order to be able to.

collect and give that feedback and send it back to Google. actually, in one of our clients right now, that feedback loop did break. And our performance dropped significantly. So we kind of now have a true test accidentally. But the feedback loop broke. We doubled CPCs. Our quality of leads dropped. We have it now fixed. And we’ll watch to see how it recovers.

Tom Nixon (31:10.638)
Now, was that human error? Not to tell too many tales out of school. Was that human error? Okay, interesting.

Curtis Hays (31:13.033)
Technology error, technology error. Human error in a sense that some things were updated, but not the realization that like it broke some connectivity and it didn’t 100 % break. So just some weird things about the nuances of the technology, but we weren’t capturing every lead and therefore every lead wasn’t being sent back to Google through the conversion APIs. So we were getting some leads. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (31:38.264)
There’s the importance of human oversight.

Curtis Hays (31:41.812)
Yeah, so I mean, and then there’s a need for AI to tell us and say, you know, hey, you had an 80 % decrease in qualified leads. There’s an anomaly here, you need to address it, right? So those AI recommendations, more or less in real time, I unfortunately caught it in a dashboard, but not a dashboard I look at every single day. Right? And so by the time I caught it and then fixed it, you know, a couple of weeks went gone by and

It was enough to suffer some performance, but we’ll see how quickly we get back on track. I guess this is a good incidental test, I guess, in how the algorithm works.

Tom Nixon (32:19.682)
Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, I don’t know you heard me the importance of human oversight to like, so the algorithm should report to you like that. There’s warning Will Robinson, but you need to be on top of that, too, because you can’t just this is the other thing is you can’t just set these things and just say, okay, well, I’m just going to go to the bank and now collect my earnings. You got to have an active participation. You talked about reporting of what’s a good lead and.

Curtis Hays (32:32.084)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (32:45.398)
We always used to ask people we still do but we’re saying hey, whenever you get a phone call, make sure you ask how they heard about us, right? There’s sometimes not perfect training of how that situation should go. So it was how’d you hear about us? on the web. Okay. Like that’s next to useless. What do mean on the web? But then you would say, well, ask them. Was it Google? Was it somewhere else? You know, ask them. So where on the web is Google? Okay, Google. Like that’s not enough either.

What did you search for? Now what you’d really want to know, but you’re not going to keep these poor saps on the phone for three hours. But what you really want to know is what did you search for? What was the exact query? Why did you search for that? Where were you looking? Where else? What website were you on when you thought you decided that you discovered that you’re probably aware? How long has this been going on? Right? All that stuff that you would never ask somebody. Google knows all that stuff. So all you have to do is plug in the good conversions.

Curtis Hays (33:14.899)
Yeah, no.

Curtis Hays (33:39.391)
They do.

Tom Nixon (33:43.478)
And Google knows all of that stuff, but not everyone’s doing that. So we need to get on our soapbox and say offline conversions are huge part of this.

Curtis Hays (33:52.342)
Yep. Yeah. 100 % accurate there. And the exciting thing that I’m excited about, I’m really excited about what they’re doing on the YouTube side. I said excited a few times there. It is. So, you know, I’ve talked to clients about YouTube, and I’ve said, hey, you should be doing YouTube campaigns. Well, it’s really hard to measure that.

Tom Nixon (34:05.582)
This sounds like it’s going to be exciting.

Curtis Hays (34:16.169)
Nobody clicks those ads. How do we measure brand awareness and those types of things? And my go-to has been, we’ll monitor your search impressions for your brand name in Google. Theoretically thinking 10,000 people watch a commercial, maybe you have a 10 % increase in brand search impressions while the commercial was running. We had to make some assumptions in that. Well, Google, of the promises they gave to us was actually transparency there.

So actually they’re going to connect those numbers to say, hey, if you had a 10 % increase in search impressions, say it was a thousand of the 10,000 people who watched the video, they’re going to tell you that now. They’re going to report on you had 10,000 views and a thousand brand searches from those viewers, which is pretty cool. So, so more is goes back to the trust. I was talking about it. They want advertisers to advertise in those platforms away from search. They’ve got to provide.

some data that tells us as advertisers and the businesses if what we’re doing there is working or not. And I think that’s one step in the right direction.

Tom Nixon (35:24.044)
Yep, exactly. Well, in terms of wrapping up, I have a question that I got from a client yesterday and it’s a loaded question. It’s very open ended. It was what’s new in AI and how can we use AI for marketing and lead gen, right? So it’s like where do I start? So what I’m going to do is I’m going to send her this podcast episode. So hi, if you’re listening.

Here’s my takeaway based on what we were just talking about the video that we’re to put in the show notes and just AI in general. Three things. One is AI is built into everything you and I do, Curtis, day to day, right? I mean, it would take me forever to explain to anyone how I use AI at any given moment, but everything from research to doing some, you know, correlation and curation of massive amounts of content to, even some development of some initial copy concepts. Like there’s

We’re using you and I are using AI and we have been even like before AI became a thing. We weren’t calling it AI. So trust that the people that you’re trusting to do this type of work already using AI. happened to is furthermore trust that big tech is going to have a way better handle on how to leverage and empower AI than we mere mortals will. Well, it’s so I think people need to rather than asking how they can sort of go use AI for themselves.

Curtis Hays (36:20.607)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (36:46.626)
How can they leverage the tools that Apple, Microsoft, Google, all of those are already putting into their platforms and how can we get better at using those platforms because they understand AI. Those are my two big takeaways. The third one is find people who embrace the disruption of AI.

and let them stay smart on it for you so that you don’t have to, because if you are not in this business and you’re going to try to figure out what to do at AI, I could tell you on Friday, but on Monday it would be different. So that’s kind of where I’m at with this whole Google thing. This is awesome. This is exciting. You know, three months ago I thought, Google must be quaking in the boots. Now, if I was competing with Google, I would be quaking in my boots. So that’s my wrap up a takeaway. What’s your overarching takeaways?

Curtis Hays (37:36.266)
Yeah, well, we didn’t even get into talking about all the AI creator features that are part of Marketing Live, right? So from uploading product images that you might have on your phone and allowing AI to enhance them and actually put them on a person and then have that person walk and be animated. in in VO3, which is their video AI program, you can’t tell the difference.

Tom Nixon (37:40.77)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (38:00.718)
good luck.

Curtis Hays (38:05.523)
without looking really, really close that these aren’t real people and just go look at some of the examples of commercials that people are putting together out there. It’s, yeah, that’s a great one.

Tom Nixon (38:14.766)
I’m going to put Pupperin in the show notes too, by the way. Watch the Pupperin commercial, either Google it or look at our show notes and click the link.

Curtis Hays (38:21.523)
Yeah. So, and that’s here. I mean, I think it was Tim Poole who said recently after watching that, that like we’re a year away from somebody taking a movie script and uploading it into one of these AI platforms and it generates a movie for them without the need for actors. Like we’re a year away from that. Or what? Or music, sound? Yeah. All of those things. So for creators, and this is what I would say for businesses, you’ve

Tom Nixon (38:39.106)
or music or sound or…

Curtis Hays (38:50.441)
to you get to leverage these AI tools where say your stuff wasn’t good quality, like I said, you know, taking pictures with your phones of your products, or filming video internally of, you know, staff and, you know, interviews and those types of things that AI is going to have the ability to enhance all of that sort of professionalize it. That might make you feel more comfortable with with publishing it. So the publishing side of it’s going to be a lot easier. My advice

to business leaders is you can’t ignore this anymore. And the biggest reason I think you can’t ignore this, not just because it’s coming, but if you don’t figure out how to strategically adopt AI into your organization, the younger employees within your organizations, they’re already using it, and they’re using it without your guidance, and they don’t know how the use of it aligns to your vision and your business goals.

And you run the risk of, you know, it not aligning basically, right? So it’s not just about, you know, leveraging it, but it’s people are already using it in your organization. And don’t you want to have some sort of oversight on that? Not just an acceptable use policy. It needs to be part of your strategic business plan now. How are we going to use AI and marketing? How are we going to use it in HR?

How are we going to use it in our business operations? It needs to be part of your strategic planning. And if you’re not doing it in 2025, you’re going to be too late. You’re going to be left behind because your competitors likely are going to get ahead.

Tom Nixon (40:35.17)
And I’m going to put a pin in that for now because I want to do a future episode on what is the humans role in all of this because it will replace some functions that humans are currently doing. But there’s going to be an opportunity for brands to stand apart based on the humans that they have using AI. To give you one example, I could ask AI right now to write an essay on any topic of the world and it would do it instantly. What it wouldn’t know unless somebody told it was why.

And how do you want this to be different? And what do you want the person to feel? And how does that tie to the business objectives? The people who understand that and can bridge that to what AI can do, which is amazing, those are gonna be the important folks going forward. So, all right, well, to us, I think a better note to end on would be this. Just the two of us. All right guys, see you next time on Bullhoarns and Bullseyes.

Curtis Hays (41:19.445)
I think that’s a great note to end on.