YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Becker

lines on the record: 106
first: 2023-05-07
most recent: 2023-05-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You for having me again, by the way, this was a lot of fun. So I'm available through Thrive. So, Thrive Digital.com. You can contact us through our site by accessing the contact form. Personally, I'm on LinkedIn under my name, Jonathan Becker, or Twitter, JZ Becker. And then, you know, things that would be interesting from the audience, always looking for feedback in terms of whether people agree or disagree, you know, with thoughts and feelings that we have about what we do. And obviously always looking for amazing people, you know, ultimately to join our team at Thrive. So if you're a practitioner of growth marketing or performance marketing and you're looking for a top place, you know, to spend some time, would love to talk to you. And also, I suppose if you need some help making this stuff work within the context of your own organization, we'd love to be at your service.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thrive stack. So it's a tool that we built in house that allows us to pipe third party data and customer anonymized customer level data into a database. And then ultimately visualize it in a format like Data Studio, Google Data Studio, which I think now is called Looker Studio. That has been a profoundly powerful platform from which we're capable of delivering insights that are built upon the data as opposed to just regurgitated data, if that makes sense. We have not released this technology yet. It's basically a tool we use in-house with our clients. But to a certain extent, I mentioned SuperMetrics, which is another ETL, and has some of the same capabilities, but isn't quite as powerful.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm kind of sidestepping the question a little bit, but it is the cultural willingness to adapt that I think has been a strong suit for us as a company.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tools that we use in performance marketing change constantly. So the channels themselves change and therefore what problems exist and what SaaS companies or different types of platforms offer as solutions to problems change. And so I don't think it's one thing necessarily. This might be a bit of a roundabout answer here, but I mentioned that change itself earlier is something that humans seem to not love, whereas in our industry, and I don't think we're alone here, but there's a culture of change. And so a welcoming of change, aptitude around change, implementing, you know, having a playful mindset with new technology and tools rather than being upset about the fact that, you know, AI exists or third party cookies are being deprecated or iOS 14 removed IDFA and trying to be creative around those types of solutions has been like a constant for us so it's”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's still great. And the reason why I like it is because someone found truth in the data they were analyzing and then capitalized on it, which is really an analog for what we do in performance marketing. And then recently, I have fallen in love with Whitelotus for no particular reason. It's just raw entertainment.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story of the startup of the Silk Road, which was like this dark web marketplace for some pretty bad stuff. But it is half tech story startup story and half gangster kind of kingpin story. It honestly should be a Hollywood movie. It reads like a Hollywood thriller. So awesome. Great book.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as a marketer, story worthy by Matthew Dix is a wonderful book. He is like a world-class storyteller. I don't know if you know him. And he wrote this book about how to structure and think about the art of storytelling and every marketer should read storyworthy. It was a huge contributor to how I think about what we do at Thrive. As an entrepreneur, I love startup stories. So shoe dog, which is the startup story of Nike. It's basically, you know, Phil Knight talking about all the ups and downs. And it's crazy. Like Nike shouldn't be a company at this, you know, based on all the turmoil and challenges that they overcame. And so, you know, fascinating read about taking risk and doing what you think is right and ultimately, you know, succeeding and building Nike. And then a book by Nick Bilton called American Kingpin, which is the”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not all of them are this dramatic, but there have been some pretty dramatic ones. And I think part of running a business and running an agency has been the curation and experience around all these fun, crazy stories that have accumulated as we run this really interesting services business.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that you have to trust yourself and understand your strengths and weaknesses? And in situations where someone is well-meaning but may not understand what they need, be brave and tell them what they need rather than just conforming to what they're asking for. Because sometimes inadvertently that leads you down the wrong path. And so we took a big risk and it had a wonderful payoff and we have, in addition to this story, we had a wonderful relationship with them for a couple years.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They thank us for our RFP response. Lots of handshakes and smiling faces, but we don't know whether we're going to land the client or not. And then about two hours later, I was driving to San Francisco with a friend immediately leave LA for SF because I had a bunch of follow-on meetings. And I get a phone call and they were like, we loved your approach. Congratulations, you're hired. And so, you know, these days, I think Snap is still a really interesting organization, but at the time they were kind of bringing the future of a social platform or what a social platform could be in the same way that we think about TikTok right now. TikTok wasn't on the scene yet. And Facebook was very worried about Snap. And there was tons of engagement on Snack. So this was like, you know, the it client of the day and it felt amazing. And essentially, you know, the lesson.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hire us. And if you do not agree with MyLogic and you think that we're out to lunch, then you should not hire us. Everybody, you could hear a pin drop in the room. My own team, I think, was a little bit surprised. We had a whole bunch of like technical difficulties that day, like someone who was supposed to zoom in couldn't make it. And so I have to add lib part of the pitch that I wasn't prepared for. Lots of zig and zags.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to have a completely unique take on how to respond to this, and we're going to build a deck that's bespoke around like X, Y, and Z. And so we work till like six in the morning. I think we get a couple hours of sleep. And then by like 10 o'clock, we're sitting in their offices. And essentially the pitch is something like this. I stand there in front of about 20 different executives from their organization and I say you have thoughtfully curated an RFP for us to respond to today and you have asked us to respond to about 20 to 30 different questions with the utmost respect I am not going to answer any of your questions today. I'm standing here because you are looking for a marketing partner and you need expertise in this area. And instead of telling you the answers to the questions that you asked, I'm going to tell you what I think you need to do to get where you want to go. And if you agree with me and my logic and what I talk to you about here today, then you should hire.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely what we were doing. And I kind of had this Eureka moment where I was like, here's what we're going to do. It was Brent MacArthur, my business partner and I kind of arrived at this together, but we're kind of like, here's what we're going to do.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“List of questions and the respondents have to respond to all of this. The RFP process for SNAP was somewhat complex and they asked a range of different questions. And we find ourselves in LA at a hotel the night before. It's two o'clock in the morning. My business partner and I and another team member that we had brought down are sweating and we're like, how are we going to build a presentation out of this? Like they're asking so many well-meaning but difficult questions that are zigging and zagging and like, you know, in a pitch situation, you want to tell a story. It's important. And that story has to have a beginning, middle, and end. And it was just difficult. And yet here we were. And we had worked with like all these really cool organizations. And I was very confident that we knew.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fun story, and I think it's about ultimately confidence and knowing your craft. And so I believe it was like 2015 or 2016. We're essentially contacted to participate in an RFP down in Los Angeles. And RFPs are difficult processes. And essentially, you know, a department of a company is saying we want performance marketing. And here are all the questions that we're going to ask you and exercises you need to complete in order to vet you as to whether you're the right partner or not. And so sometimes RFPs are incredibly thoughtful and they're run by people who have either done a lot of RFPs in the context of what we do or they know specifically what the outcome is. And then in other cases, they're very experienced marketing departments with senior people and an approach that they may take is like every stakeholder within that department gets to submit one or two questions to a long”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen so many different names for this. So I think, again, if the intention is to grow out a growth marketing capability, which again is not exclusive to performance marketing, then you're looking for a manager role of growth marketing manager. I've seen paid acquisition specialists for people who just manage channels. I've seen paid acquisition manager performance marketing manager media planner and buyer. I've seen all kinds of different When we are launching a new role these days, there's such wonderful tools like everything from Glassdoor to LinkedIn to PayScale, you know, where you can essentially just look at what other people are calling it and borrow from their role descriptions and then create your own role description and then determine what role is meaningful in the context of your own organization.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you want to make sure that they can just do that. And I would say it's less about the years of experience. A lot of times people only want to do those types of jobs for a couple years before they're like, hey, what's your plan for me? Like I'm tired of running ads and building campaigns. I want to manage the people who do that now. And so the people who tend to really do that are often somewhat earlier on in their careers. And so that's just a reality that we see.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen people who have like 10 years of experience in the industry not be that great. And then I've seen people who have like one year of experience be absolutely phenomenal. So I would say that like, again, like, you know, the years of service under their belt is one clue or piece of evidence to their potential aptitude. But really, you know, you want someone who can clearly demonstrate to you that they can competently run the channels, I suppose. If what you're asking is like literally like at the level where someone is managing, you know, pay-per-click and programmatic media buying, then.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just do the arithmetic of saying, like, you know, there's so many buildings per hectare or square mile or whatever it is. And it's division multiplication type stuff. But also from a client services point of view, I'm trying to see whether in a scenario where I've asked them something that they obviously probably weren't prepared for that is a strange thing to ask and probably makes them feel a little bit uncomfortable how they react in that situation. So do they remain composed or do they lose their composure to get frustrated or even angry, you know, that I ask them something that's pretty weird to ask their reaction there is often a good leading indicator of whether or not in a client scenario working with our clients they can compose themselves in a difficult situation.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say just fundamentally, those are some of the areas that when we are interviewing, we're looking for as an agency too, we are looking for the ability to work with people and be excellent at client services. And so one of the questions we might ask, I actually borrowed a Jeff Bezos question from early stage Amazon where I asked people without much warning in an interview, I'll ask them whether it's okay to do a bit of a thought experiment together and whether they are comfortable asking a logic or responding to a logic question. And I'll ask the question of how many windows are there in New York City. And so there's two things that I look for in this scenario. One is, can they think on their feet? So I'm not actually looking for the correct answer. It's a pretty difficult question to solve. But like number one, do you realize that windows are not just built? And, you know, windows are also in cars and trucks and stuff like that. So there's more than one type of window.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left mathematics and become performance marketers, people who left finance, full stack engineering, like all kinds of stuff, those are technical fields where people tend to be good at math and good at problem solving. And so that's like a strong piece of evidence that they might have a strong aptitude for performance marketing and managing this. Another thing is just literally do they have experience in this discipline? So like have they managed on any level, you know, meta ads, Google ads, TikTok, Amazon, some of the things we talked about. Do they have an appreciation for some of the inputs that we just discussed today that ultimately make for, create the conditions for success within a performance marketing environment? So do they understand the role of creative? Do they understand the role of proper attribution and are they capable of understanding the mechanics of your business and so on and so forth?”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a couple of competencies that I think are very important. I found that, so I was like a nerd as a child, if you can't tell. I don't know, super nerdy geeky kid. I would like I would take apart my parents' computers. I try and rebuild them. I was fooling around with bulletin boards before websites existed, stuff like that. And then I became a web developer. And as I transitioned into a performance marketing role, I realized that being technical and having technical aptitudes was extraordinarily helpful in terms of being on the front line of what we were doing and solving problems. So if you're making your first hire, you probably want them to be to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. So number one, do they have a technical background? That can be multidisciplinary. At Thrive, you know, we have someone who is a nuclear physicist that left, you know, that discipline and became a performance marketer. We have people who have a”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thrive saying, hey, we're top of our game, we have really strong people. You know, they absolutely know what they're doing, which is always the case, by the way. But we're looking for extra sophistication and additional capabilities that are very difficult to create in an in-house organization. It's why we work with Uber for 10 years. It was tough to replace us.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one more thing. So as agencies, we're constantly solving people's problems in the market. And as a result of that, I have a fairly large team of 130 people that think about performance marketing all day long. It's the first thing we think about when we have our morning coffee and it's the last thing we think about is we're like leaving the office kind of thing. We have very sophisticated and built out capabilities is where as well as all kinds of software and processes and capabilities, I guess, that we've created that most in-house teams just don't have because they're smaller or newer or, you know, someone might be really sophisticated, but they don't have the resources to implement it and stuff. And so in the same way that really sophisticated organization might go to Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey to say, hey, like we did this, but you do more of this all day long and we need advice on how to be more efficient. People come to.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think we have any projects that we're working on where there's not like a professional marketing person as our POC. And generally the people that we report to have a background in what we do, whether they ended up doing something different and now they're like a VP or a director level and not directly managing channels themselves is one thing or another.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're implementing sophisticated testing. We're working on attribution. We're building beautiful reporting. But in a sense, we're maintaining like this machine that already exists. Earlier stage, we're doing a lot more of net new experimentation, trying to discover what is working and what sequence of audience targeting versus creative asset display will work, what channel mix works and all of that. And so a lot of times the body of work that's required to nail that and the inputs to like literally like out front, like what questions to be asking isn't something that a small in-house team possesses. And so they will work with an agency to scale faster to get where they're going quicker, to bring in more resources quickly, basically, and then later stage, sometimes it's a permutation of the same thing, or we're really just managing a whole bunch of different capabilities.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we need people in house to do our jobs properly. So agencies are not mutually exclusive to personnel in-house. If we don't have a point of contact, for instance, at an earlier stage company and we're supposed to report to like the CEO, CEOs tend to be very busy people. And we often just like can't get the information and approvals that we need to be successful. So if you think that growth marketing is an opportunity and that performance marketing is a subset of growth marketing that you want some focus on, the reality is you're going to need expertise and you probably should start in-house and then hire an agency. Again, there's different stages of companies and different examples of like what makes sense at different stages. And the nature of the work that we do at different stages changes. Very, very late stage. We're kind of doing a lot of this like sophisticated production work.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This generation of people will be upset, and then there will be a subsequent generation that never knew anything different. People growing up these days have always had the internet, whereas you and I probably remember a time before the internet existed. AI is a platform like the internet. And just as when the internet was launched, you couldn't conceive of Amazon.com or all of these wonderful or social networks or whatever it was, the permutations of what AI will become, even in the current GPT-4 context or DALI context or whatever it may be. We don't know what people are going to create with this. And so it's difficult for the generation that knew what life was like beforehand, before iPhone, before internet, before AI. But there will be people who know nothing but this eventually. And to them, you know, it'll just be normal.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to pretend like I know whether that's a good or bad thing. And I'm also not a poster child for AI. I am really just using the technology that's available to us to run our business the best way we can. We haven't let anybody go yet because of these efficiencies. The people who used to do the artwork are the ones using these tools. And I think they're excited that they're more productive. Is there going to be nuance around that? Of course. Are some people going to be sad about the changes? Yes. I think human nature is that people generally don't like change. But I think over time we've seen change has been a productive and positive thing for society, not a negative thing.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we invented something called the printing press. And the printing press took over what was a cottage industry for very specific individuals that allowed them to control the flow of information. Yet today, it's not like we have fewer writers or creative thinkers. They're just using different tools to arrive at the same place. You could say the same thing of the Loom. There used to be people who would stitch your t-shirt together or your sweater together, and none of those people have work anymore. There's still people who knit, I suppose. But your clothes are made in factories with machines and the quality of the clothing is arguably a lot better than it was. Maybe I'm wrong about that point, but you can make more of it and more sophisticated clothing. There's no question that AI is going to displace and replace certain industries of people, certain roles.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not an incredible artist, but now I can take those thoughts in my mind and output them, just as well as like someone who's pretty skilled in artwork. So in a sense, I'm excited because this technology democratizes the ability to do this across everyone. Anyone who can think a thought can generate an image on an AI image generator. How many scribes do you know”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can present my screen. And if you don't like the output of Dolly that I just prompted, I can reprompt based on your feedback in real time.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing there is that these concepts often live inside of someone's head, and we do this thing as humans where we verbally discuss it. And I try and put the image in my mind's eye, in your mind's eye, which is an inherently inefficient process and actually hurts our ability to be creative leaders. Someone might just see it slightly differently than you do. Now that person theoretically can use Dolly to output what is inside their head and they can refine that easily through subsequent prompts in Dolly or midjourney or whatever it may be and then just say do you like this this is my idea and so in a way it's helped humans connect more easily in that context than we were capable of doing before and then in the context of like pitching a client on ideas we are capable of generating more ideas faster and iterating upon them live so i can i can you know have a zoom call with you”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of these AI driven organizations that allow you to type in a prompt and it spits out an image. On our creative group, we can come up with mockups in literally like 1% of the time that it took. So you no longer have to draw the initial mockups for art. Suddenly, you know, what might have taken one person a week of work on a campaign takes like an afternoon type thing. And so you still have to understand what questions to ask of the AI and be capable of iterating. But these like rough drafts that you might show, like the artwork of, you know, to a client to say like, do we like this more? Do we like this more? That's like AI generated. It's really interesting.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening now, literally right now type thing, all of what I just said. And, you know, there's a lot of different ways that we are beginning to use AI to do more with less, basically. So that's kind of how I see it influencing not just our industry, but other people's businesses as well.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 80% good and still requires 10 hours of work to massage to the point where we can send it off to a client. But that replaces a week of work with five or six people that it would have previously taken.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is I assume that if you work in an architecture office, that you'll be doing less of like the drafting. And it's kind of already been a change that's occurred in those offices, but you'll be doing less of the drafting and more of the strategic problem solving around what kind of building is necessary for the client in this scenario type thing. And so on a practical level, though, some of these conversational AI-like models are very interesting for us in that when I think about creative testing, for instance, we can have chat GPT come up with all kinds of variants of copy that we would not have necessarily thought of, it can do a lot of drafting of things like RFP responses so we can feed ChatGPT 100 previous RFP responses that we've done and have it spit out net new responses to net new questions in a net new RFP.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interestingly, and I think I alluded to this earlier, but our industry has been influenced by AI for over a decade. So Google, Facebook, other, even Microsoft, these are some of the organizations that historically have been at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. And their goal was always to automate as much as possible within these platforms. And so the effect ultimately that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. So we're actually, we have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's more about modeling validation, asking the right questions, being focused around creative levers, like some of the things that we've talked about, and less so the like trench work of implementation and bid modifiers at the keyword level on Google search and some of the like really hardcore manual analysis we had to do. So I think if we are like the canary in the coal mine for other industries, what will be interesting.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding in terms of an organization's determination of whether they want to continually invest, take budget out of these channels or invest into other areas.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The advice is that there's no single source of truth. Anyone who claims that they are a single source of truth, whether it's an individual, you know, a model that they've created or a tool that they've created is not being accurate. I believe that the approach that works to attribution is that it's an ongoing investigation and it never stops. And essentially what you're doing is looking for evidence that validates the outcome of your performance marketing campaigns one way or the other. There have been plenty of incredibly sophisticated attribution models that we've helped build and invalidated with like MMM or other types of tools that have indicated that the campaigns do not work. So I will repeat that. We, a very sophisticated organization, have stood up campaigns that we measure and ultimately determine do not work. And that is an important.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really up to this point is now one of the ways that we would look at this, but we would also include things like various forms of statistical modeling, customer surveys, population surveys. There's a number of different ways kind of to the same place here. Statistical modeling, by the way, one thing that's very popular these days, which is I think was originally created in the 1950s, is a form of statistical modeling called media mix modeling. It's essentially regression analysis. it is trying to determine the causal relationship between again what you did and what the effect was on revenue that's very topical in the industry these days if you're looking for a tool kind of off the shelf that can help with this recast is something that i see people using but a lot of organizations build these like highly customized bespoke models that ultimately feed the algorithm you know inside of an mmm model in a customized manner”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make attribution more airtight and ultimately validate its advertising. And so because we can no longer validate attribution on Facebook as seamlessly, we're in a situation where we're not sure any longer which audiences to target. And we're not sure how to run all of our creative testing. And ultimately, we can't even determine, you know, the degree of revenue that's coming from particular campaigns that we've launched and whatnot. And so it created quite a stir in the world of attribution, which is obviously like this core discussion to is it working or not. People want to answer, you know, John Wanamaker's question, but the modern methodology now is through a number of different approaches to validation. So the cookie-based attribution, which had been probably the most popular version of attribution in the”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Privacy changes. I believe in mid 2021. Overnight, it allows users to say, well, I don't want to share that information. I'm not going to share my IDFA anymore. Or yes, I do want to, you know, share my IDFA. And so what you see as a result.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single brand might do television advertising, they might buy media in magazines, they might buy billboards, they might get impressions from Facebook, they might do paid search. And so there's a big argument over how to ultimately model this. So there was something called an IDFA that Apple allowed advertisers to use. And essentially what that was, it literally means ID for advertisers. And it allowed Facebook, Google, and other advertisers, Snap, TikTok, whoever, you know, was essentially selling ads that were predicated on being displayed on a Apple mobile device or a desktop device. It allowed the advertiser to provide attribution metrics and certain types of customer metrics in their own platforms. And so when Apple ultimately launches its”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in an audience that doesn't know about my service or my brand. And so the first click that I get should be given all the credit for that sale. And then there's multi-touch attribution, which can take several different forms, but essentially is saying it's not one way or the other of the two first versus last click options. It's somewhere in between. So I'm going to create a weighted attribution model where the first touch gets so much of the credit and the last touch gets so much of the credit. This is very subjective, as you can see. I am essentially looking at my business model, determining what my goals are, and then I'm backing out into an attribution methodology that I think adheres to both the economics of my business and the capabilities of these platforms. And again, we live in a world where”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple of examples. So, number one around attribution, it's important to determine whether an organization, a company, a client is focused on profitability or growth. Whether I use one attribution lens or another will drive those outcomes. And so these days for a number of different reasons, we saw, you mentioned iOS 14.5, in addition to third-party cookie deprecation and whatnot. There's no one way necessarily of approaching attribution. The most classic and like commonly held version of attribution used to be a cookie-based form of attribution called last click attribution, meaning that the last click click in the sequence of clicks that yielded a conversion would be attributed with all the revenue from that conversion. Other models in a cookie-based world involved first touch attribution. So it's actually the first click. So like I launch an”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I love that you knew that. He said this in 1919, you know, the world was a very different place there, but oddly enough, we still have these types of problems today. And it's because the world of what I did and what happened because of what I did is very complicated. There's so many variables, some of which we know and then some of which we don't know that we don't know type thing. And so attribution as it stands in our industry is still an incredibly subjective art and somewhat of a science. It doesn't mean that it's impossible and it doesn't mean that there aren't varying degrees of sophistication as it relates to attribution, but we're still in a place where we have to understand the business and its goals and then start to work on an attribution model. An attribution model is probably something that is never solved, but I'll give you a”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really, really great and pertinent question in the industry. And it has a lot of focus on it now, but attribution has always been a conversation that's been very important. So just to kick things off, attribution essentially is how we determine the relationship between what we did and what happened in the context of performance marketing. This means what ads did we serve? What campaigns did we launch? And generally, what was the revenue ultimately that was derived from these campaigns? And so there's a funny quote that I love. Someone named John Wanamaker in 1919 said, I know.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is known as a lead scoring model, which allows you to bid in real time on the audiences that have a higher likelihood to convert to high revenue generating customers? And so the magic there, we talked a little bit about rates of return and instant gratification in the performance marketing world. Lead generation inherently is a slow gratification process. And so the problem is that if my pipeline is full of opportunities that yield revenue in two months, six months, sometimes 12 months, how do I determine how heavily to bid on different leads today in order to predictively have an outcome where I'm maximizing revenue and a lead scoring model basically solves for that?”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is interesting. So Thrive developed an ETL tool and extract transfer load tool called ThriveStack. It's not commercially available, but if you wanted a commercially available version of this, you can use something called SuperMetrics. Basically SuperMetrics is a data connector. There's a world of different data connectors out there, but it allows you to pipe via an API revenue data from your CRM into a third-party database that can then be joined with data from the channel itself. You can build tables within a database and normalize them together in a manner where you can start to determine the relationship between, again, the audience that a particular”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source