Future of media & advertising: AI, AR, VR, and the evolving landscape of marketing with Mindgruve

Jess Gondolfo:
We have a really special treat for you today. Two mangrove experts have agreed to join our industry expert session to give us the lowdown on basically what they're hearing, trends they're seeing and what we should be looking out for. So without further due, please welcome Ellyn Savage, who's the VP of Media and Haven Brady, who's the VP of strategy. And before we dive in, I'd love for you guys to give a little introduction about yourself. What you do. Yeah, what you do at Mindgruve.

Ellyn Savage:
Sure, sounds good. I can kick it off. So I'm Ellen Savage and I am the VP of Media, and that's mostly on the paid media side. I've been at Mindgruve for about almost nine years now, and I've spent my whole career on the agency side in both New York and San Diego. And my background is pretty much all in digital media with a focus on programmatic and social, and that's been across both B2B and B2C brands. So thanks for having me.

Brandon Cohen:
Ellyn, if you wouldn't mind, could you just tell us a little bit about what you do as a VP of media, just high level responsibilities or anything that you could speak to high level?

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, so I oversee currently a team of planners, traders as well as the paid social team and also our PR and organic social team. So I mostly help with media strategy. I partner closely with Haven on coming up with strategies for our clients and then just helping with team management and structuring and all that kind of good stuff.

Haven Brandy:
Great. So I'll kick it off about me. So short and sweet is the last 17 years I've really been in the digital marketing space. I actually cut my teeth on the agency side when I first started and then spent the majority of my career on the client side in which actually for a good chunk of it, I worked with Mindgruve for nearly a decade and decided, Hey, why am I on this side of the fence? I should be over there. I love everyone at Mindgruve and I really love what I do, so might as well be at the forefront of it. And so I actually just recently came over to Mindgruve within the last four months, believe it or not, to spearhead strategy. So over the last 17 years on the client side, really I've been driving acting as the head of marketing or most previously a CMO role for the largest financial litigation financing company in the nation, mostly focused on demand generation, anything spanning really in that field, B2B and B2C.

But now here on the Mindgruve side, when you think of strategy, it's kind of a catch-all umbrella term. So when I came over, what that really entailed was on the business side. So since I had so much experience on the client side spearheading what the company strategy should be to drive growth, whether it's B2B or B2C, how do we connect the dots between marketing and finance and then tell that story to our board of investors? I can bring all that knowledge now on the Mindgruve side to make sure we're keeping that picture in mind while we think about media strategy while we think about our analytic support while we think about all the services we provide, laddering it all back up to how does this help our clients and then how can our clients benefit from us being able to tell the right story so they can do less work and keep on moving forward. So that's really my whole role and a little bit about myself.

Jess Gondolfo:
That's fantastic. Thank you both so much for joining because you both have such different perspectives, most likely on some of these. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on a lot of these questions. Maybe starting with you Haven as the VP of strategy, what are some of the biggest challenges facing advertising and media agencies in 2024?

Haven Brandy:
Yeah, when I think about challenges, I think it can span the gamut. I think one of the biggest challenges, and I think it will always be a challenge on the agency side, is ensuring right upfront we capture exactly what our client's goals are and specifically defining not only what that goal is, but the objectives, our strategic focus and the initiatives that are going to support that. So commonly throughout my tenure, I've had the pleasure of working with a ton of different agencies and that always seems to be something that's missed upfront. So the challenge is where does the agency come into that partnership from a standpoint of discovery to lay out and understand exactly how does your business work, what do you need to ensure that you grow, whether that's sales or a specific unit that drives revenue. And then how can we ensure everything we plan to do ties back to that measurable output. So it's very easy for A CMO or senior marketing executive to then tell that story to their suite of executives so we can keep this ball rolling. So I think that's always been a challenge and something I've come in to help spearhead on the mine group side and formalize and put a template to. I would say that's probably the biggest one I have my eye on right now. I mean, Ellen, what do you think? Any other ones that kind of come to mind?

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's really interesting. There's a lot of pressure on agencies right now. I think it's been kind of tough over the last few years for agencies to grow and you see a lot of layoffs. You see agencies shuttering their doors. So I think it is really about that partnership. Like Hay was saying, we can't just be a vendor. We need to be a lockstep partner with our clients where they feel like we're part of their team. So that's kind of always been our goal, but I think having Haven on board now and just the investments we've been making across hiring various teammates and the way we're structuring, I think that's where we're hoping to go. And then I think just going back to the question of challenges specifically facing us in 2024, I think we're kind of thinking, and I was talking to my CFO about this because he's very up to speed on the economy, then he's thinking that this is going to be a pretty tough year just with the election and there's high interest rates.

And so that could mean that clients hold off on some projects, but then we are anticipating that 2025 will look really good. So we just need to ensure that we can focus on growth, client retention, try to bring new clients on board, make sure our value prop is solid, and then just be really good partners to them. And I think as an industry, the cookie thing is huge as cookies are finally sunsetting. I mean that's where media and analytics we have to be partnered and I think mine group does pretty good at that compared to other agencies, but that's where you guys come into play too. It's like we need to be really good at leveraging AI and making sure we're identity resolution is going to be really big. Tapping into walled garden data, secure rooms, all that is going to be what everyone's talking about. So it's not easy to figure out, but I think having partnerships and making sure that we're on top of everything and ahead of the curve is where we need to focus.

Jess Gondolfo:
That's great. Follow up question actually for both of you. So for Ellen, on what you just said, how are you using Supermetrics or are you using supermetrics to solve some of the needs or with some of the challenges of cookies disappearing for your clients and setting up that expectation with them?

Ellyn Savage:
That's a good question. I don't know the details of what our analytics team does. I wish I did, but it's like a fancy secret world that I just don't know. But I have been talking more to our data engineering team about, for one thing, tapping into the log level data of our programmatic buys and kind of exporting that data and making sure that we can make optimizations off of it. So it's not necessarily using cookies, it's leveraging other data that we can then optimize to. And it is very specific to who we're trying to target and then trying to partner with companies like a LiveRamp to ensure that we're targeting the right people and we're not relying on cookies to do that. So typically our analytics team would handle that sort of relationship and then media would come in and target with it. So it is kind of like we have to be together to come up with the solutions, what are we going to do? What are the issues, and then we have to come up with a solve.

Jess Gondolfo:
That's great. Actually, you mentioned in the last conversation your partnership with the data analytics team, so that's super interesting and Haven, I want to back up to you really quickly. As the VP of strategy, is this something that really is like during the onboarding of a client or are you consistently building strategies throughout that whole customer life cycle?

Haven Brandy:
Yeah, so I would say our foundation is built during the onboarding and then we leverage what we learn through discovery of how the business works, how they make money, what ladders up to that, where are there gaps in the current processes that we could potentially improve upon and use that as our foundation moving forward for everything. So if they decide they want to go down and offer a new service, we still know how the business operates, we just need to now isolate. Now, how is that going to fit into the overall understanding of your business? Because nothing really is going to change besides maybe you're selling a new tchotchke or it's a new type of specific focus of service offering, but it's still under your suite. So for us, the core importance of understanding all that at the beginning so that as they scale, we can scale along with them and not hold them back is the whole approach that we're defining.

And then we continue to iterate on those strategies. So let's say that a client comes in today and their whole focus on the B2B side is to drive lead generation for automotive offering. Well, for us, once we have that foundation defined, we're always looking to iterate. So we take the understanding from platforms like yourself to say, well, there's additional customer journeys we can improve on. There's messaging we could tighten up, there's targeting, we could isolate and focus further into rather than maybe a national reach, defining it based on geo and kind of getting more effective that way. Again, those will require new strategic deliverables so we can lay out what we're thinking and how we're going to do it, but it's always tied back to however it ladders up to this objective we define that's going to help you achieve a business goal that was clearly articulated at the very start of our relationship

Brandon Cohen:
Haven. If you wouldn't mind, could you give an example or two that come to mind? What are those objectives that you typically hear? Just high level if you're willing to share a few of those?

Haven Brandy:
Actually a lot of the time we're defining them, believe it or not. So I would say, for example, we had a client recently come to us who has a site built around a specific segment who needs a registry for celebrations? Well, with that registry, they have a specific goal of only improving platform monetization, but no objective defined and no strategic focus clarified on how we're going to improve platform monetization. So during our discovery, what we learned was in order to impact platform monetization, it was really only two inputs driving that. It was receiving funds that go into the registry and then influencing higher commission payouts when they pull those funds out. Because right now you offer 'em a lot of selections, Hey, your guest funded the following registered items for you. Great, well now you want to take that cash out of the platform so you can go buy those items or pay for whatever you're going to do.

Well, currently you have all these options to select from, but we weren't influencing the user on what the highest commissioned options they should select. So those two objectives right there allowed us to show them, okay, platform monetization was your goal, but let's go ahead and achieve that through these specific objectives. And our strategic focus was then defining, well, who is going to drive those two objectives? The people creating the event and the people contributing to the registry. And so we were able to then say, okay with that we know what channels to use to influence both of those parties. That again, laddered back up to that process I just laid out. So that helped us now go from a situation where I think a lot of agencies commonly get caught in, which is, okay, you told us you want to drive growth. Got it, we can do this, this, this, this. And then it's like, okay, we did all those things. You're asking us what to do next. Well, we could also do this, this, this, this. And so you get into this hamster wheel just doing tactical items and never really tying it back to, well, hold on, do any of the suggested items actually drive the objective? We defined, which were these specific two items that will help platform monetization? And I think it will lay out a very clear focus for us going forward as we iterate down the road.

Jess Gondolfo:
We talked about some of the challenges coming in 2024, but let's talk about some opportunities. I think we started with Hayden last time. So Ellen, I can kick this off to you. Looking through the media lens, where do you see the biggest opportunity for agencies in 2024?

Ellyn Savage:
I think, I'm sure a lot of people would say this, but I feel like we're hearing so much about AI and I know you guys are leveraging AI as well. A lot of our media platforms are doing it. Our analytics team is using ai, they're building their own approaches to, we have a detection system that can flag issues with our campaigns that they built really cool stuff. And that's just in the last year. So I'm really excited to see what happens with that in 2024 and beyond. It's a little scary too, but I think if we do it the right way, it'll only help us as an industry. It won't necessarily take jobs, but it'll just enhance what we're doing and make it smarter. So I'm really excited about that. And then the other one I think I would say is we're kind of unique.

We have a sister agency that is based in Denver and they have offices in Europe and Brazil and Mexico that's very focused on retail. So retail is something that we hone in on a lot and we've lots of expansions that have happened in the retail space. Just last year with you'll see lots of new players popping up to compete with Amazon. So more going on target. Disney just announced that they're going to have a platform. You are seeing so many dollars just move online just in terms of where people are spending money. So retail is something that we're very invested in and that we keep a close eye on, and I think that's another opportunity too. And then I think lastly is just I think an opportunity is developing proprietary solutions and softwares that you can offer to clients just to stand out. I think that's where you see agencies going, that's where we're going. So just making sure that we can stay on the forefront and just stay very on top of the tech side and be smart Haven.

Jess Gondolfo:
What are you seeing from the strategic lens as some of the biggest opportunities in 2024 for agencies?

Haven Brandy:
Yeah, I think going back to what Ellen had brought up as one of them is, and the buzzword being anything marketing related power by ai. So in our specific niche right now, we're probably kind of annoyed with how much is being brought up. And actually it's been a part of our marketing efforts for a very, very long time, just in a very beta form. As it's starting to get more awareness, it's very interesting to see how people are using it, but the opportunity for us on the agency side with clients is not to shy them away from using these tools, it's how to properly use them. Because my biggest concern from a strategy standpoint is that clients will want to clamor towards using the chat gpt of the world and forget about the ability to personalize and have that be the bridge of sure, use it to be a shortcut or to help provide additional research or input or direction to something that might be pretty complicated.

And sure, it does great at writing ad messaging sometimes, however, you can get very lazy, very quick leaning on those tools. And we'll end up going back to 1990 when basically every ad was just buy me, buy me, buy me. So my concern is that they'll lose the thought of taking such a great advanced tool and then not embedding personalized messaging or personalized experience along with it. So the opportunity for us is to make sure that those two are discussed in the same reference versus yeah, let's just go leverage whatever tool. I also think new technology is something that we should continue to chip away at from a standpoint of how do we incorporate into our service offerings. So like VR and augmented reality. So for me, it's getting creative with some of our more capable clients that offer pretty high quality, high ticket items and seeing if we could play in those spaces to be a brand differentiator for them and cause a little bit of disruption where maybe they're considered now the leader because all of a sudden they're being a lot more creative with how they approach their product offering in spaces like that because right now there's not too much competition there.

So people are kind of dipping their toe in with how they might tie their brand to a VR or AR experience, but not really anyone making the flag in the sand where all you do is see that specific brand there all the time, or at least reference in the same vein. So I think those are cool new opportunities for us to consider and try to incorporate into our offerings with our clients.

Jess Gondolfo:
That's awesome. And it kind of leads me a little bit into the next one. Taking a broader look at the market and where you're seeing the market shifting, what are some of the insights you can share about some of the upcoming digital trends and maybe channels Haven? I know that you're touching on VR and AR is a huge one. Is there anything else that we should be looking at or that your clients are starting to lean into?

Haven Brandy:
Yeah, from a data standpoint, I can even reference a specific example. It is bridging third party data such as you might get from experience. So census data, leveraging that to build a profile that allows you to define the propensity of that person to become your client or to purchase your product and then actually apply it to a specific geo approach so that you're super targeted and super effective. So when I was on the client side working with mine group, actually we were able to bring this to life and I'm seeing now more on the B2B side, the demand to do a similar approach. So let's build that profile. Let's lay based on our own consumers, what does the ideal consumer look like? Let's then build that profile, leverage it with the census data to find them, and now we can incorporate that in market to target them specifically on a zip code based level.

And now we're super focused, super effective with our dollars and we don't need a lot to have a huge impact. So molding those words worlds together is allowing people, or at least B2B clients with smaller budgets be hyper effective. And that's something that I think is kind of an ongoing trend I'm seeing in lead generation where now they know who to go after or before it was just I need leads. So now it's like, no, I know exactly who I need. Can you tell me how to approach that very in an advanced way and then make sure we know what to say to them because you can kind of slice those cohorts into a bunch of different buckets. They just want this. They like to be talked like that they're over here and looking for this. So I know that's a little long-winded, but to me molding those two worlds to have an ideal profile for extremely accurate targeting, that's a huge trend on the B2B side that I think is starting to pick up steam.

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, I think that's a good one. I think it is no longer, we can't just go say we're going to drive leads and you're going to get this cost per lead and good luck. It's really about customer journey and making sure that we're driving actual qualified leads. So it's a big job and I think you really need to have all of your media analytics, strategy, content, everyone has to be really working together and it's not easy to execute that. So I think as much as clients can partner with an agency that has all the capabilities to be a team together with the clients is smart because it's a lot and it's not easy. But the other trend that I am super excited about is on the programmatic side. So there's a lot of talk about programmatic sustainability and SPO, which is something I hadn't really heard about until 2023.

Earlier 2023. I listened to a podcast about it and I was like, what? My mind is blown that we have to think about this, but there's a stat that says that serving 1000 impressions uses the same amount of energy as running a load of laundry. So it's because there's so much waste in programmatic and we're competing against ourselves. There's a lot of overlap and buys. It's literally contributing to global warming. So that was a huge opener to me, and that's a trend that we're very focused on as a programmatic team. So making sure that we can optimize our SSP buys, make sure we're doing lots of programmatic guaranteed deals. You can't just go open market and hope for the best. It's just so wasteful. You might get a good cost, but to haven's point earlier, it doesn't matter. You have to ladder to the business goal. So I think more brands and agencies will start talking about that in the coming years. And I think it was the a and a, but they just released a report that was talking about that too. So we actually had some clients asking about it. So I was thankful that we were already on top of it, but I think that's going to be a big trend this year. Are you using

Jess Gondolfo:
Supermetrics to help you with any of that optimization?

Ellyn Savage:
So that's what I mentioned earlier, so we're not really yet, but I think that is an opportunity that we can tap into that log level data to help us optimize better. And so right now it's pretty manual. I think potentially there's ways that we could make it faster and more automated so that we're not having to pull all these reports that they take an hour, two hours to even download. I think that's a big opportunity. I'll talk to Tim about that. It's on my radar.

Brandon Cohen:
Ellen, you had mentioned some of the resources that you use to stay up to speed on industry trends and where you're learning. Are you comfortable sharing any of your favorite resources that keep you at the cutting edge?

Ellyn Savage:
I feel like I subscribe to too many newsletters and I just kind of read the headlines and see what catches my eye, but one that I de read a lot, I like the digit A contents, anything from a NA adage is another one. I actually, sometimes I'll just Google keywords and find related podcasts that I want. I was looking for a podcast about programmatic, and that's how I found out about SPO in the first place earlier in 2023. So sometimes I just do that too and I have to sometimes strap to the office and I have a long commute, so I'm always looking for industry related podcasts to listen to. So those are just some tips that I have. And then we also, just as an agency, we have a little industry trends chat channel, so people are always sharing news in there, which is kind of cool, a nice idea just to stay on top of things. I feel like sometimes that can fall off your plate when it gets super busy. So

Jess Gondolfo:
Haven, I heard you earlier, allude to a B2B client and having a specific strategy for them. So I want to dive a little deeper there. What is the difference in approach when working with a B2B client versus a B2C client?

Haven Brandy:
Yeah, sure. So I've always dreamed about working with a B2C client because I've always been on the B2B side and what I've experienced at least trying to tell the story with, Hey, we're driving results for the business. The challenges there are trying to ensure that you're correctly tying or at least calculating ROI on your efforts. So yes, the first thing is we drove so many leads, great. As a marketer, that's what we wanted to do. That was the home run. 99% of the time it's usually considered done, okay, complete. However, the second part of it that I've learned is the biggest challenge is all the cost inputs that go along with then saying that lead equated to this type of revenue, which then equated to this type of ROI. The cost components kill you every single time. I think unless you have a very strong finance partner within that organization, or at least as a part of your client, you won't be able to have the credibility to say you actually drove an accurate ROI, unless you can say, okay, you are looking at it from a lead led to a sale, which then led to this much revenue.

However certain times they want to have you incorporate not just ad spend into that equation. They want ad spend, platform fees, sometimes your media fees, you have anything that was scopes creep in there, they want the whole bucket in there. And then are we still favorable? Yeah, we are. Oh, you forgot to include actually the cost of our workforce. We wanted to have that included, especially when you're on the client side. So all these little items start to chip away, and unless you accurately define those upfront again during discovery, how do you properly calculate ROI? Then you can put yourself in hot water pretty quickly. So I think that is really the most important thing on the B2B side is lead piece. You could always get to that pretty easily, but explaining the impact on the business post lead and accurately tying that to the correct financial metrics, that to me is always the challenge.

And it has been the challenge since I've been on that space. On the B2C side, I think it has to do more with ensuring that you're keeping to a correct cost definition. So for me, the partners that I've worked with on the B2C side, they typically would say, great, okay, we drove this many sales or have a specific average order of whatever. Now let's ensure we stay below a certain threshold so we can keep our margins on those products ideal. If you don't understand what that is out the gate, then you can't properly format to, alright, well all of our channel costs and whatever we're running need to stay underneath this threshold. So no matter what, we all know where the line in the sand is. So we can accurately define an ROI on the B2C side. Typically it would be like we drove so many purchases, awesome, but your average order size has gone down, so not good eroding margins. How did we do that? Too much cost on the table. So to me, I see those as differentiators, but a common thread, understand the finances, be best friends with the CFO ensure you understand how you impact the margin, not just ad spend led to a result because that's only half the story.

Jess Gondolfo:
That's super fair. Thanks Alan. I'm wondering from your perspective if it's whether it's a channel mix or where you are recommending people spend their money, whether they're B2B or B2C, how do you approach those strategies?

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, so typically before we even go to market, we have a media brief that we also put together a measurement framework with the analytics team. So we understand at each portion of the funnel what are the KPIs that we care about. So even if the goal is brand awareness, it's never just brand awareness, it's also what are those trigger points? What are people doing on the site that makes us feel like they're being pushed down the funnel eventually. So it's just really putting that together upfront and making sure you have that framework, you understand what goals you're trying to drive, and then you have your KPIs all listed out. And then from there, how do we put together a medium mix is kind of a tricky question, but really just kind of based on past results, historical data, understanding the different costs per channel, the cost per market, if there's a geography component.

And then it's also, we're very flexible with media. So as we see results, we flex and change it constantly. So a lot of our clients are pretty performance based, every client's performance base I would say in the world. So it is making sure that you can be looking at the data and always optimizing to it and not just set it and forget it. It's really like you hands on keyboards looking at the numbers on a daily basis. So I think it's just having that upfront framework and then planning from there. And in terms of channels, I would say most of our budget goes to channels like programmatic search and social, where we're managing that self-serve and really making the bids and making the changes. And that just allows us the flexibility to make changes on a dime. So our teams are constantly talking and the search person can say, Hey, I am seeing really good performance right now. Can anyone spare some budget because your numbers aren't looking as good as mine this month, so let's move money. So we just are always doing it that way.

Jess Gondolfo:
Thanks so much. And I want to be mindful of time and open the floor to some questions. Thank you for entertaining all of mine as I threw them at you of course. But I know there's probably a lot of folks here who do have some questions for you. So I'd like to open the floor for people on the team.

Carlos Barrero:
I guess I'm curious on, I guess the non-paid side of things, like any own channels that support their website or offline things like for example, text messaging or email. Do any tools come up in that space that are more popular than others?

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, we've been trying to push text messaging. I feel like that's an interesting space and we haven't really had the clients bite on it, but it's just these days people depending on the product, they don't want to answer the phone. And you're not saying that you would necessarily pick up a phone for a retail client, but it's so common as a consumer to get text messages from brands that you buy a lot. I have two kids, so I get text messages from Hannah Anderson when they're having a sale, and I appreciate that. I'm not bothered by it. So I think that's a space that more retail clients probably will play in just making sure that it's a good user experience. And you could even use it for something like customer service too. So if people have questions, just making sure they can use the chat feature, they can use text messaging or whatever's easiest for them. It's really about just making it a good experience for the user and thinking about them

Haven Brandy:
First. Yeah, they're definitely racing to leverage, at least now with chat CCPT allowing you to really kind of create your own language models. Now with the latest release, a lot of these chat products are racing and have that integrated. So you could build your own language model based off of internal PDFs. So let's say you have a very specific brand identity guideline you want to follow, as long as you've outlined all that in a very formal way, you can add all of that to your own model. And now your chat feature on your property is perfectly tailored to be personalized to whoever your consumer is and answer the questions about your product. So to me, I'm seeing it's not one specific maybe tech tool like Postscript or somebody that's actually at the forefront of providing that experience. It's like they're all doing it right now, and I'm interested to see who's going to rise at the top, to be honest with you.

Ellyn Savage:
Yeah, that's actually really cool. I'm excited to see that too, because you're going to see so many personalized and just customized solutions. It is just kind of like a DIY thing. Now,

Brandon Cohen:
This has been phenomenal. I can't thank you both enough for the time that you spent with us, but this has been absolutely incredible. So thank you both enough for the time that you spent with us here today and your willingness to help us to level up. So thank you.