How brands and creators are fighting for your attention — and your money

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Hank Green, the cofounder of Complexly, where we make SciShow, Crash Course, and a bunch of other educational YouTube channels. I’m back in the Decoder guest host chair for another couple of episodes while Nilay is out on parental leave.

Today, I’m talking with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi, who runs a major marketing and ad agency. You might remember Amy; Nilay interviewed her for Decoder live at an event in New York City almost a year ago. But Nilay, who runs what might be called the last website on Earth, has a very different perspective on the world of digital marketing than I do. So, as a career YouTuber, I had a lot of questions for someone in a position like Amy’s.

I’ve been making videos on the internet for close to two decades now, and all the while, I’ve relied on advertising for a healthy chunk of the revenue my channels take in. I also run an e-commerce site, Good.Shop, and then, of course, my big online education brand, Complexly.

One might think I’m a marketing and advertising expert. But this stuff is really, really complicated — almost like they’re trying to make it that way, and, frankly, there is a whole lot of it that I do not understand. For a lot of us, I suspect the world of digital marketing is a bit of a mystery. So, I was happy to have Amy really break down how some of this works and why her industry feels like it sits at the center of almost everything that happens on the internet today.

On the surface, this all sounds pretty simple. You build a brand, you try to create a story around that brand so people associate ideas and loyalties and all sorts of other warm fuzzy feelings with the brand, and then you show them some ads to sell products or experiences or subscriptions or whatever it is you sell. But I know from experience that that is far from the whole story. And as you’ll hear Amy say, that old-school Mad Men-style of advertising is really a relic of the past.

Today, marketing and advertising are increasingly digital and diversified, spread out across a lot of different channels and coming in all shapes and sizes. The ads you see are different from the ones I see, and the ways that brands market themselves online can involve everything from brand deals with creators like me, big TV and movie promotion tie-ins, and then really analytics-driven, algorithmic tech stuff that can feel almost impenetrable to the average person.

Yet, as you’ll hear Amy lay out, there is still a huge, expensive draw for what you might call a collective shared experience, something that resonates with a lot of different people all at once. Like, say, a Super Bowl commercial that plays on TV — even if more people might watch it after the fact on YouTube.

There’s also the AI of it all, which really seems like it’s on a collision course with both the creator economy and the entire economic structure of the open web. I know this because Nilay can’t stop talking about it on Decoder.

So, I also had Amy walk me through what a modern digital marketing company really does, how different kinds of ads operate in this ecosystem, and how she sees all this changing in the future. And we had to hash out the difference between influencer and creator, because that debate isn’t dying anytime soon.

Okay: Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Amy Lanzi, you are the CEO of Digitas. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be back.

I’ve been on Decoder. It’s kind of scary. Is it scary sometimes?

It’s not kind of scary, but it’s good scary, because it makes you, I don’t know, really be with it on what you’re going to be talking about, because we know the audience is very with it, so I like that.

I was just talking to your colleague before you showed up, and we were saying, “Hey, if the questions aren’t hard, you don’t get a chance to look smart.”

We have faith that you’re going to look smart. I have a question, though, that may be a weird one. I did a deep dive on your whole career, and I want to ask you a question.

For most of my life, I had assumed that the number of seats on an airplane determined the number of tickets sold for that airplane, and now I have in front of me a person who can tell me why that is not the case. So, of course, we all have heard that our airplane is in an oversold situation, and they start giving away free things in order for people not to use their ticket, and you used to be part of that system.

How does it work? And back when you did this decades ago, what was the algorithm? How did you decide this?

Well, it was at a time when it was really all human, which is interesting. We did have models. It was my first job after college. I went to SMU, and I was a yield management analyst at American Airlines, and basically, that job is how do you extract the most yield out of each flight? And the assumption is that all seats are sold at the same price, as well as you can only sell the number of seats that exist, but have you ever missed a flight?

Yes. That’s why there’s this whole team called yield management, and so you essentially look at the patterns of the flight. So I was assigned to LaGuardia, New York. I’m sorry, from Dallas to LaGuardia.

Yeah, we would get assigned different routes.

Or not a flight, but a route.

Yeah, you’d get assigned different routes, so I’ll give you two points here. The first was LaGuardia to Dallas, and so you assume a lot of business travel. Someone may, like you or me now, think, “Okay, I’m on the 6AM, maybe on the 7AM, or my meeting’s running late, so I’ll get on a later flight.” So, therefore, you get to make some assumptions on how many x-

That’s really specific.

How much can you overbook this flight?

This makes sense. So, if it’s like a bunch of families going to Orlando, it’s much less likely that they’re going to miss their flight.

Yes. So as a kid, I really didn’t pick up some of those consumer triggers as we would today, and I was assigned Dallas to Albuquerque. I didn’t really think much about it, but that was also when the hot air balloon festival was taking place. I did not calibrate accordingly, and we had a gigantic oversold problem because everyone showed up, because this is a big sojourn for many. I totally missed it.

Yeah. There’s a takeoff time. You have to make it.

I missed that people were traveling and planning to go from Dallas to Albuquerque to make the flight, and they weren’t going to risk it like you and I might risk it if we are going for a business meeting or whatever it is. And so then you get into that oversold situation, and then you’re the one who’s figuring out how you are basically burning the profitability of this flight because you’re prompting people to get off a plane for a planned trip, which is very different now if you’re getting off for a business trip, for example.

So yeah, that was it, and what was great about that job — and I was also right out of college — was that it was non-revenue travel, so you could fly for free in the places that were a low load factor. You could basically just pay for the taxes on it, so we would play gate roulette, and we would pick places that we could all go to. For the weekend, we went to Des Moines, to all kinds of weird places we wouldn’t plan.

You never know where you’re going to go. I love a weird accidental travel trip, like you get stuck in Denver for 48 hours and you’re like, “I guess Denver. Sure. It’s got stuff. We’re going to Meow Wolf, I guess.”

But it was great, and my thing too is just wow, I had a front row seat to customer service and what that means.

I bet they don’t do that anymore. I bet they don’t, because I read this, that they also were like, “And now you have to go and actually do the job of telling people that their flight is oversold.”

Yes. American Airlines was great about this. They had us go work at an airport, so I worked in Miami, which then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Hi, Hank. I see you’re a Super Whiz Bang traveler and you’re oversold, and I’m not going to get you on this flight.” And then you’re calling the people, and you’re like, “Oh, do me a solid. I got to get them on the flight.”

So yeah, it was great. It was a reminder of customer service, everything matters. Decisions you make in one place have a real impact on other people, even if they’re invisible to you in the moment. It was a fantastic experience.

Well, now you’re the CEO of Digitas, which is an advertising agency inside of an advertising agency inside of an advertising agency, as far as I can tell, something like that. Is that right?

Something like that, yes.

[Laughs] And your parent company has been around for 100 years.

Next year is 100 years, yes.

Wow. Oh wow. So that’s real. I was guessing.

No, it’s real. Next year is 100 years.

My god. So I have to say, I don’t understand advertising, and I know that you also don’t, all the way, because what a mystery it all is to try and change people’s behavior with messages that are paid for. But I want you to explain something else that I have never understood, and I really want to know.

So, you’ve told me about how overbooked flights work, so now help me with this. I’ve been part of the advertising industry for 20 years now because I make stuff and then I sell ads on that stuff. It feels like magic, though, how any of this works. I guess, how does it work? What are you doing?

That’s a big, wide question.

How do you explain it? I don’t know. It feels like it’s all obvious and everybody’s seeing it all the time, but I’m in it and I still am very confused.

Yes. A couple of things. First, I would say there’s a bit of a reframe from advertising, like the Mad Men days, where you were in a room and you made a thing, and then you watched ABC, NBC, or CBS, and you saw this, or you saw a bus. Like in New York, it’s great to go see the Out-of-Home ad that was inside a bus, and those were the only things. We lived in a very static world.

There’s so much now, it’s so fractured now, which I feel like maybe is good for you?

Well, so for me, Digitas is really a modern marketing agency versus an advertising agency, so that’s a shift — because the job is really building out a capability versus just the wallpaper you see. It’s so that I can figure out how much more I know about you through data, and I can magically surprise and delight Hank by understanding, “I think I can get Hank to do the one more thing.” Whether it’s buying a confectionery brand or booking a trip to wherever, I know a little bit about you because I’m picking up on the signals that you’re putting out there. Then I’m able to, one, create a relationship with you, but two, get you to do the thing that I think will make you better, faster, stronger. That’s how it works.

In the past, like 100 years ago, it was much more static. You had a story, you saw a thing, and most people did that thing. Now, everyone is so distributed. You talk a lot about this in terms of distribution when you think about where you and Nilay speak. This is really about understanding how to make meaning around the machines. This is what has become very hard.

So, if you are constantly just trying to win that algorithm, that gets hard unless you really stand for something in the world of AI. You need to actually make the market for yourself before you’re just trying to bid through terms to be able to beat the algorithms. It’s very difficult to do that. You have to really break through with real stories, but then you also have to be very smart about being in tune and picking up those signals to then say, “Okay, I see you. I see that you’re interested in something, and now I’m going to stay with you along that path to purchase or path to loyalty,” or whatever the job to be done is from the client.

This sounds extremely personalized. You’re going for me specifically, you’re talking about my story and how you connect with Hank Green, which is wild. Of course, you’re not theoretically marketing to any individual, though with certain products, it feels like maybe you’re aiming for a total of 25 people who make decisions, but whatever.

Well, there are cohorts that exist that then enable us to do this in a scaled manner. It’s a very good question. That’s where the magic of media and creative come together, so I can start to understand that there’s a sizable group. I’m not going to be weird, and also, no one can afford to go find 25 people to be able to say, “Okay, how do I do a better job with first-time expectant moms? How do I become the brand of choice for first-time expectant parents?”

That’s the way to think about it, and there are a lot of people — and we think about ages and stages — that are in similar spots to create these big frameworks. So then you can start using the power of all the data and technology that’s in the market to be able to fine-tune those messages to feel relevant to you.

And follow me through that. Can I ask a YouTuber-specific question, and then I’m going to zoom back out?

So imagine that there are two ways to advertise, to show a 15-second spot, and one of those ways lets you target people with a ton of specificity, there are relatively fewer ads per minute of content. It’s newer, it’s a hipper place, it has higher-value demographics, and it has really good analytics for you.

And then another place, you have no idea whether the people are watching the ads, the targeting is really broad. You’re often only able to hit people over 65 years old. Your ad’s going to be sandwiched between five other ads. Which one of those would you think would have a higher [cost-per-mille]? Which one of those would you think I would be getting paid more for as a creator on that platform?

I would think that the first one.

Yeah. And yet I feel as if, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I get paid less per advertisement (by a lot) than somebody who’s making content for cable TV.

I think this is where you get into the definition of, first of all, the way in. Did I find you on a creator platform, or did I find you because I went through and did a deal with one of these previously known as broadcast networks, or whatever? So now the entry point is much more around a media approach, versus I really want to find people who are into Hank. Those are two different ways in.

I’m confused by the difference between those two things.

So, let’s say I want to do something on one of those major cable networks. I might go in because I’m going through the media partner that represents those assets that are on that cable network, and I’m going to do a media deal that also enables me to have access to one of their stars.

Oh, really? It’s like part of a package deal, and one of those stars is like a Property Brother or something.

Yeah, potentially, and you’re leveraging your position to be able to then create a special integration for the brand they’re representing. That’s one way to do it. That’s a different value, that’s a different pricing mechanism than going into a creator platform, which is, for us, we have Influential, and I want to find someone who is very into someone like you.

I’m talking about buying just on YouTube, like buying through YouTube.

Well, but the logic is a little similar in terms of how it happens, where YouTube is a whole different process in terms of the engagement model, on how you’re able to think about buying within that world.

I’m going to act like a little baby and ask you to tell me what an engagement model is. I feel confused.

That means in terms of how I go out to the market and buy certain things. So if you’re asking about why one is more valuable than the other, the market controls what is priced at what level. Also, YouTube is very dynamic.

Aren’t you the market? Aren’t you the buyer? So you determine what the prices are. You determine what you’re willing to pay, right?

Well, it’s a big market first of all.

But you, the advertising industry. I would assume it’s worth more to you to advertise on TV than it is to advertise on YouTube per 15-second spot. I know that because you pay more for it. Why is it worth more to be on TV?

Do you think that the people in television are just better at selling you stuff? They work with you more, or it’s not an auction?

I think it’s just a different market. So that’s what I mean by engagement model. So the model is different in terms of how we are able to buy things from different partners, just like it’s different when you buy something at Walmart versus somewhere else.

So, that’s why I’m saying the engagement model is different, and so biddable spaces are different. There’s so much more dynamic activity that’s happening on digitally native platforms versus some of the other ones, although they are starting to converge with the rise of [connected TV]. So you are seeing these worlds more blurred, but that doesn’t mean the commercial models have converged.

The models and measurements for each of these are different, so there’s a little bit of making all of those things work together. Because they’re not exactly all the same, but some companies use certain analytic modeling that is also favorable for certain channels.

So it’s not as simple as it seems, in terms of putting money in like it’s a calculator, and voila, this is what happens. That’s not how it works because they’re not all the same. Some are brand new. TikTok is relatively new versus some of these other partners you’re talking about, and so they’re all not exactly the same. Every impression isn’t the same, I guess, is the way to think of it, and they’re not all measured the same.

For sure. Yeah. Well, that is a real mess, like how you measure an impression. Maybe we should get into this for a second: what do you think of a platform where everybody can skip the ad instantaneously and has been trained by the platform to skip the ad? So with all these swipeable platforms, there’s no ad that you hit that you can’t swipe away from. Does that pose even some kind of threat to you?

It’s wild. And then what you see on those platforms, what you get, is just a preponderance of ads for things that you can really tightly measure how much you spend versus how much you make. So it’s a very Home Shopping Network kind of experience.

Yes, it is a threat, or compare that to someone who is watching a more traditional experience, and they have their phone in front of them, so they’re passively paying attention. In one way, you’re actually legitimately measuring whether someone skips or not, if you think about it, versus if you’re like my mother’s phrase, “I leave my TV on for company.” That’s also a whole other thing that I don’t think we’ve talked about that exists.

That’s an amazing thing that makes me feel like YouTube is a really valuable place to advertise. Not to rep my home base here. For an unskippable ad on YouTube or… YouTube reports whether or not someone skipped a skippable ad; you know that that person is there. They could mute their phone or their monitor or TV or whatever, but they aren’t probably for the most part. And maybe for some of those mid-roll ads, people could be in the other room, and they’re leaving YouTube on for company, just like they did with TV.

But it just feels like, at this point, YouTube is TV, and it’s surprising. If I were an advertiser, I’d be like, “Why would I ever, ever — unless I was trying to reach a very specific demographic — go on TV, where it remains more expensive?”

It depends. If you’re in sports, that’s an interesting place. There are some moments that push you to not be on YouTube. I am a big fan of YouTube. Many of my clients love the YouTube experience. If you can search, shop, socialize, and have all of those things coexisting in one place, and it is the most watched thing that is horizontal in your living room.

If I look at my 11-year-old, where they spend time, it’s watching Minecraft creators on YouTube in our living room, when I would have watched whatever show was on. So, I agree with you, but sometimes you’re not going to get things like the Super Bowl.

For sure. Those things you can’t get, for sure. So help me understand what Digitas does, because I think that Digitas is a very interesting piece of the advertising industry. To really get down to the nuts and bolts, can you imagine for a moment that you are approached by a brand? They do about $10 million in business per year; they’re small. They donate all their profit to charity, and they sell a variety of products. The idea is they’re a store, maybe it’s Good.Store. This is a thing that I run.

So they have coffee and they have soap, and they’re to figure out how to do marketing. If they approached you and were like, “We’re going to go big. We’ve got some money. We’re going to try and get into this space,” what would Digitas do? What services would they provide? How would they start? How would we start working together? What does that look like?

Sure. So first, we would think about how we describe the value prop of this company. What is your right to win, and how do we start to tell our story?

Yes. Why are you better than somebody else?

That’s why you’re in this business. My right to win. I deserve your money. I deserve to destroy my competition.

[Laughs] Yes. So what is the single thing that these consumers are going to rush to your connected ecosystem to purchase and tell everyone about? So what do we stand for? How are we going to tell our story to the world? That’s part one.

Second, how are we investing those dollars you might have to recruit and retain consumers? What makes sense? Are we spending all of our money on YouTube? It sounds like that’s what you would like to do.

[Laughs] I’ve had success on a variety of platforms, but I don’t think that we’re going to hit HDTV anytime soon.

So then we think about how we are going to be able to both recruit and retain the consumers you want so that you can grow. Third, and I am guessing, but this feels like a very socially relevant type of organization, as well as the value prop you’re putting out there. We might want to have creators who are also loving this and want to make the market for you. That’s something we call “social as a system.”

Now I’m going to go out and say, “We know that cat video makers and people that make cooking videos and travel videos, those that follow those types of creators are also going to want to come and buy something from our store, so we’re going to co-create with them so that they are then able to bring more understanding of our offering as well as eventually drive more sales,” as an example.

It’s interesting, and I like this, that you talk about the role of marketing in the acquisition of a customer, but also the retention of that customer, which I completely agree with. I often find that when I’m working with marketing agencies, it’s very acquisition cost-focused and not thought about later. Retention is on us. We think about retention, and that’s not really integrated into our marketing strategy.

To me, I grew up on the 80/20 rule.

In this context, what is the 80/20 rule?

That 80 percent of your sales come from 20% of your customer base. So, when you’re obsessed with acquisition, you might not be getting incremental value out of your core. You also might be losing them because you’re doing things to drive acquisition that may turn off your core audience. So you should be thinking about recruiting and retaining always as a way to think about creating your own brand flywheel.

Well, thank you for my free consultation.

So tell me about Digitas. I guess we should Decoder it. You’ve been here before, but how is Digitas structured?

Digitas is structured… We are a modern marketing agency. We have five different practices that work together to deliver what we call network experiences. That means, “How do I build experiences to be able to get Hank to move from like to love to loyalty with the brands that we represent?” The practices are creative experiences, integrated media, CRM, commerce, and social transformation. We are powered by data and analytics.

Okay, I’ve got to make you define all those terms now.

So you asked me about creative experiences. You asked me about this mythical company. That means, what do I sound like? What do I look like? What are the types of creative that I need to be able to engage with the consumers? Integrated media: how am I able to take the money that you have to spend in media, and I’m going to tell you where to spend it.

CRM, or customer relationship management — this is loyalty. How am I texting and sending you emails so that you do more things with me and like me even more? Commerce is about how I make sure that I’m showing up in easy and seamless ways for you to buy my things. And then the last one is social: how am I using creators? How am I showing up on social so I am making the market for myself?

So Digitas refers to itself, describes itself, as a networked experience agency.

Again, I’ve got to ask you to define the terms. There are so many words in that order. I’m not quite sure. I think… actually, I’ve done a little research. So I think I know, but please tell me.

Sure. Networked experience is essentially how we’re delivering an experience around the consumer so that we earn our way into your networks. You can’t just put comms out there and put any communication out there and think that consumers are just going to take it. They’re very hard to find, and we are in an attention battle, so I have to earn my way in as a brand that you go to and you pay attention to.

That comes from a combination of the things I talked about, which is: what I stand for. How am I going to, as a brand, make you faster, smarter, stronger? How am I going to find you in the places you’re spending your attention, whether you’re watching sports or whatever that is? And then how do I bring in some of those other services I talked about so that I’m continuing to drive growth for the brands we work with?

So we have also noticed in our background research that things at Digitas are described as unicorns. Digitas AI is the unicorn of AI operating systems, and SWOT is run by our team of social unicorns. The headline on your careers page is “Unicorns welcome.” I was just talking to your colleague, and in the background, there was an inflatable unicorn.

[Laughs] Yes. So our people are unicorns, and the people power the offerings from Digitas.

Part of this… It’s a weird thing. So Publicis has a bunch of different agencies inside of it, so I assume to some extent, you’re competing with your colleagues for business.

We are not competing with each other. So that’s a very good question.

Does it ever feel like you are?

No, because the culture of Publicis Groupe is very much around, we have the promise of the power of one, which is what my boss’s boss’s boss says to our clients. What that means is we are committed to bringing the very best talent and solutions to clients, and those come from all different types of agencies, not just one agency. We’re not biased by the one agency perimeter. This is very true. This is not true for every holding company. This is very much the core of Publicis Groupe. Otherwise, it’s bad for clients. If I’m in a fight for revenue for me versus my sister agency, that’s just not good for clients. That’s a distraction.

For me, Digitas, when we think about ourselves as unicorns, the culture of Digitas is we’re fearless, inventive, and generous, and our role is really finding those new inventive things that clients that come to us want and expect. That’s a little different than some of the places my sister agencies sit and where they focus on.

So, I’ll give you an example. We worked with Reddit to build out their community insights AI product. This is something that we co-created with them, because we found so many of our strategic planners were coming in looking for unique insights around what’s going on on Reddit. How are people talking about these brands? What can we find that would help me understand my right to win? See, I used it again?

So then we said to Reddit, “Let’s make a product, because this is something that we can do more with.” That’s a little bit of the things that Digitas would do. Some of the other agencies may not focus on that, and then we build that into our value prop to clients. It also might be something that we give to other clients through the power of one model.

Sure. And can you explain that product to me? So, if I have a brand, if I sell candy, is Reddit providing you reports of the buzz of communication of what’s going on with M&Ms or whatever?

That’s exactly right, and it’s basically what I can learn from the chatter on Reddit that bubbles up into insights, so I can learn something that may not be expected but is showing up there. Reddit is the gossip channel of the internet.

And so this is a place for you to be able to look for those insights that might be the edges that then help you break through for that confectionery brand, for example.

And then you can do a Harry Styles-flavored Oreo, because that’s what everybody wants.

Exactly. I’ll give you a real example. When we were working on Rivian, we were pitching their business, and Rivian is one of the most talked-about auto brands on Reddit. You [wouldn’t] think that just because they’re an EV and they’re not as giant as some of the other brands you might think of, but because the core of Reddit is really quite tech-oriented, or the original power users of Reddit, it makes sense.

Yeah. This is a place for Rivian. You may not spend more money on Reddit. You may spend more money on other places because they’re trying to get moms to buy their product, so don’t fish where you already have won the people. This is your recruit and retain story.

So that was an example. And so we had a couple of those come our way, and then we said to Reddit, “Hey, we think this could be a really interesting product for us to build together so that we can get to these insights faster for our clients.”

Have you thought about doing that with other platforms? Twitter, YouTube? It seems like there’s a lot of insight, a lot of what happens in comments and various places.

We have different engagement models and products with different partners. Four years ago, we built the TikTok community commerce effort. This was really before TikTok understood the power or potential of TikTok Shops.

Oh, I think they understood it.

In the US, this is a US story. So what does that mean if a brand wants to do something on TikTok Shops? What do they need? What does TikTok need to do? What do I, as a brand, need to do to be able to stand that up, etc.?

So we worked with them to build that out, and then part of it is being able to get the connection so that you’re able to understand what’s possible, and also, is it moving? What insights are driving that assortment I should be selling on TikTok shops, for example?

And is that a revenue generator for Reddit? Are you paying for that insight?

No, it’s not something like that. It’s more like the more you use a product like that, the more partners want to do more things with Reddit. Whether it’s more media investment or more content, they’re creating content specific to Reddit. So think of it as more of a lead-gen opportunity for Reddit.

Right. And that’s something that you helped Reddit build internally?

Yes, we helped them on the product roadmap.

Interesting. Weird. We’re talking about AI. We’re talking about AI. Everybody’s talking about AI. We’ve brought up AI several times already.

I don’t know. First, is there a threat there? Is there a world where a lot of this work is just being done by machines?

This is the big hot topic in my industry, and of course, there is a threat that there is a CMO who decides they’re just going to pick an AI partner and dump everything into that, and let the robots take over. But I think we’ve also determined that humans matter. Humans matter to be able to come up with actual creative ideas, not just content. It also matters when you think about brand governance and brand safety.

When you think about AI for creative, and if you’re familiar with programmatic and the amount of brand safety that’s required to make sure that you are putting content in the right areas, all of that is even more important. So there’s governance that’s required so that the brand is holding up to the integrity of what the brand should be and what it stands for, and that’s still humans that need to be able to do that.

To me, the future is around how these things work together. As you mentioned, Digitas AI, for me, we’ve been working on that for two years, and it really is about how we create agents to minimize low-value activity that our clients don’t care about, but we need to do. So then you’re freeing up your time to do things that are human-based and more strategic, and that’s more valuable to them.

So, like reporting, pulling a report. Sure, we did the report, great. The insights around the report come from your brain, so let’s make sure that, whether it’s through automation or it’s through AI agents, we are able to get to that level of output, but then be able to take the brand and our clients to the next place they should be based on what we’ve learned from this assessment because we’ve done that much faster.

I don’t know, I’m of the opinion that this transition happens more slowly than we might expect it otherwise would, because people have relationships with people, and ultimately, Digitas, an advertising agency, might be able to introduce some efficiencies.

But ultimately, a lot of what I would be paying for if Good.Store was working with Digitas, would be someone whom I trust. [Someone] who can explain the choices that are being made with my money, and then start from a place of a little bit of trust and work toward a lot of trust.

I guess I could probably develop that with an AI agent at some point, but I feel as if that is going to take a lot of time. And a lot of CMOs… I don’t know, you let me know, but maybe they’re not actually the most innovative thinkers? I’m sorry, I feel mean saying that.

No, no, I think it is a people business. Clients call me because they say, “I don’t know what to do. What should I do?” And that sometimes is a technical question, and to your point, CMOs need to now be full-stack operators, and that means you now need to be technically advanced to be able to choose between all these AI products that are coming at you, which is not really the core of most of them.

It’s not that they can’t get there. It’s just that they don’t have a new team as well as that. That’s a full other day job to be able to determine all of that and the modern tech stack. The promise of it is great, not to mention that brand managers aren’t trained in business school to figure out how to use the Adobe or Salesforce AI products.

So, let’s pretend everything turns over. Then all of a sudden, they graduate and they suddenly get out of business school or whatever, and they go to CPG XYZ. They don’t know how to use that. They don’t know how to use Adobe Journey Manager. It gets very technical very fast, and it’s important because we want to have — where we started the call — greater personalization.

You’re a busy person, so I would hope the communications I send you are more on par with what you need versus waste, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to thoughtfully think about the brand, what it stands for, what you want to engage with through culture, or what you don’t. What kind of new products you want to make, that takes time. And so I agree with you. I think it’s an important thing to bring into the fold, but I don’t see it completely just collapsing in the next quarter.

Can I hit you with an assumption, and you can tell me where my assumption lies in your view of the world? There’s this narrative that this has all gotten really hard for advertising agencies because it’s very fractured, and there’s so much more data. So instead of vibing and being like, “Well, this is the kind of advertisement that would resonate with me, so maybe it’s going to resonate with other people,” that has made it much more difficult for advertising agencies.

But I think that while that might be true, my assumption is that this is better for advertising agencies because when things are more complicated, people are more likely to need a partner who understands that world rather than trying to figure it all out themselves.

So, two things: it’s an exciting time to be in an agency because all of the complexity enables us to see what actually worked, because we have so much data. At the core of Digitas is data and analytics. It was born to compete with the more traditional creative agencies that were just making ads for TV, and it was born on the promise of direct marketing. If I know more about you, I can think about what I should be sending to your house.

Now, when you think about what’s happening, it’s like I can tell you, no, no, no. Your question earlier was, “Did this perform? Is my investment in YouTube performing harder than my investment in other places?” When we think about closed-loop measurement, I can pretty much start to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. So that’s pretty exciting, and if you’re okay with following the data versus wanting to put out things you think are cool, you’re in the right business. And I think that’s a change in the market where you need big ideas, but the ability to be humble to say, “Well, that didn’t work,” and we need to do something else faster.

I do not know you, but do you feel like on the scale of quant to creative, that you are more in the quant part?

I’m a quant. My dad was a physicist.

Yeah, I’m a quant. I don’t know. I grew up in finance as an analyst and in yield management.

But then you’re managing a lot of creative people.

How does that go? Is that ever a source of friction and conflict?

No, because the business is really about balancing art and science. So the founder that I worked for at an agency that was eventually acquired by Omnicom, he would say, “There are people who are linear thinkers and gut thinkers. Know the difference, and you need to be able to walk right down the middle.”

So if you’re always leaning on the data, you may do nothing that’s very interesting perhaps, but if you’re always focused on that gut feeling of “I think this is cool,” that may not be the thing that breaks through. You have to be able to harness both to really do something that’s going to deliver breakthrough thinking and growth.

The nice thing about being a creator in this day and age is that you can make something and then get direct feedback from an audience very quickly, and I assume that that is also the case for the creators who work for Digitas, making things with brands.

I wanted to ask also, so there’s Publicis and there’s Omnicom, which are two giants in this space, and there’s a ton of smaller agencies that they now have gobbled up, and they’re part of them. When you get down to it, it’s basically just two very large companies controlling a lot of this world. What else is the competition for y’all?

The competition is wider than what I’ll call the holding companies, or holdcos, you’ve identified. So there’s Publicis, there’s Omnicom, there’s WPP, there’s a handful of them. I think there are about six that you would look at in terms of holdcos, then there are many independents that come in with a point solution that are fantastic at creative product, or they’re fantastic at CRM, and there are many of those that may be part of a holding company or are more independent.

What is the advantage of the holding company? Can you articulate?

So what’s the scale advantage? Just having HR and finance?

No, it’s like that Reddit example because they’re a gigantic partner of ours, so I’m able to work with them because we are a scaled partner, and I’m able to make things because of that scale. That is really important.

So in my world, if I don’t have that and a client calls me and says, “I want sports consulting,” that is not what we do. I can say, “Great, I can call Agency X, and I’m going to bring my friends into this session. They’re trusted partners.” I brief them, it’s much faster for the client. They don’t have to worry about all the other things.

This is such a complicated and multifaceted world with so much expertise necessary. It sounds like it would be very difficult to compete as a smaller agency.

You need to be very good to compete as a small agency, and if you’re very good, you can do well because most scaled clients also have determined a partner that’s large that can do the big things like media, your media partner, so then that enables some of these smaller players to come in and out because someone else has solved the big infrastructure need in the marketing world.

Okay, last question, maybe a bit of a biggie. So I was listening to the last time you were talking to Nilay, and you talked last year about advertising being a thing that usually runs with some other kind of media, so it runs against a YouTube video, against a TV show, against a print magazine.

I think we’re in a transitional moment, a bit of a crisis moment for media. I think media is getting passed over by Google. Those page views aren’t coming in because there are a lot of different ways that Google is eating up that traffic. [Journalism] has had its revenue eaten by platforms like Facebook and Google; that’s been going on for decades now. So, where does advertising go when there isn’t any media left for it to be placed upon?

Every brand has a different version of this depending on how they-

Every brand, like a partner, like someone you’re partnering with?

Yeah, think of a retailer versus a packaged good brand versus a travel partner. Some of them are more dependent on paid than others. So if you’re a brand today, you have to really be thinking about how you get closer to my consumers so that I can act as a brand, as a publisher.

So think about certain brands that you might’ve downloaded their app, and they’re already in your phone. You already have a relationship with that brand, and therefore, I’m not as dependent on investing more dollars in Meta or Google or whoever, because I have you already. I’ve won the battle of the storefront on your phone.

Gotcha. That is a battle.

Especially in the world of search and AI, this is an interesting thing when you’re watching that shift. You, as a brand, really have to be the answer for something. So then I know, “Oh, this brand is the answer for this, and then how they’re going to help me be a better runner, how they’re helping me to be a better parent.” I’m not dependent on what is fed to me through search platforms, and I’m going to make that decision: “Oh, I know that this brand is going to be my brand.”

You’re probably thinking of certain brands you just automatically go to, and you need to be able to figure out how you’re balancing out your need for paid to basically engage with those that are your fans, and then you keep them to be your superfans.

What you just described is making content, right?

Content distribution. Brands need to be content distribution systems to be able to play within and outside.

Do you think that the bigger part of that will be partnering with influencers and creators and stuff?

Or will it be themselves as the internal content creation?

I think that creator collabs are a must for modern brands. Bringing creators in is like bringing in a series of best friends. We all follow creators who feel like they’re your friend, and then all of a sudden, you’re believing them.

But even that is very fractional. It’s not like there’s a Michael Jordan anymore. If you’re working with creators on Instagram… In a market that I’m super interested in, like science communicators, there might be somebody who has 100,000 or 500,000 followers that I have never heard of, and that’s my business. So it’s crazy how much work that can be, and I assume that you’ve acquired or built a big thing like that internally.

Yes. We first acquired Influential and then Captivate. This enables us to have access to 15 million creators globally. And so then that enables you to quickly find these micro-influencers or creators, whatever language you want to use. We had a lot of debate about this the last time I was on.

Yeah, actually, I wanted to ask you about that.

Yeah, my position is the same. Every time I hear it and I see a client brief, it’s wildly “is it a creator? Is it an influencer?” I would say creators don’t want to be treated as influencers, but they all really want to be Hollywood stars eventually, so it is still a very interesting, fluid space. It hasn’t changed incidentally.

[Laughs] I’ll push back against that. So “influencer” is a big pet peeve of mine, and I have appreciated that you don’t default to that term. And I think that there are definitely people who are influencers. I think that we may use that [label] differently, though. What I hear you say, influencer tends to mean that it’s a person with a larger following.

Is that how you consider it?

That’s how I consider it, and to me, the future is collaborating with creators big and small. Your brand has to show up with a place and a point of view so that the creator feels connected to it authentically, and then you co-create what makes sense. And then the community can feed back on how I should make the next product extension. What is that thing that I should be doing? The community is fantastic at feeding your pipeline, and I think the more you have a fluid relationship with creators, the more you will be successful, because consumers see themselves in creators before they see themselves in a brand.

Agreed, yes. This is why creators are creating brands, because it’s easier to draw the line for your audience from, “This is me to this is the thing I made,” than it is from, “This is me to this is the thing someone else made that I like.”

Yes. But then I think some creators, that’s their hope and dream is to create a brand, but also you get into supply chain dynamics and distribution.

It gets hard. It sounds great, but it’s hard.

No, it is. It’s not something I would have gotten into if I hadn’t had 15 years of messing around in this space before.

I’ll hit you with my influencer definition, which is that the reason I don’t like it is because it defines my job as what I do for you rather than what I do for my audience. So my job isn’t to influence my audience. My job is to make things that they will like, and then I am paid to influence them by companies sometimes.

So my job isn’t influencer, my job is a creator, but absolutely, I see that the job that I do when someone buys a brand deal on Hank’s channel, the job that I do for that person is influencing. But the job that I do for my audience is delighting and educating and having a good time, and giving them something that they’re part of and having fun with.

Yeah, I love that distinction. I’m going to steal it.

Great. This is the whole reason I agreed to do this for Nilay, so that that would happen.

I’m starting today. But I would say that one of the main reasons I stay away from using the word influencer is when I watch my daughter, who’s in college, react, she’s like, “Ugh.” She can tell.

Right. Well, that’s the good thing, is that the people whose whole job is working for marketing companies, they’re not making very authentic content.

Right. So I don’t love the influencer concept. I like the idea of creators informing, and again, being a brand’s best friend and saying, “Hey, maybe you should do this.” That’s how I think of creators and how I counsel our brands, and how creators are a meaningful part of almost their marketing organization, really.

Okay, last last question. Is advertising getting easier or harder right now?

Okay. That is the hottest take I could have imagined you having. Everything feels like it’s changing so much right now.

Right, but it’s always been changing, and here’s why I think it’s the same. My orientation is around: did this drive my client’s business? So if that’s always been your orientation and you’re using the data to say: did this sell more things, did I recruit more consumers in? It’s the same. If you’re holding on to what you think it used to be, which is that we’re setting culture, everyone will do exactly what we want them to do, then it’s really hard.

Again, I’m a quant. The founder that I work for picked people who weren’t really marketing and advertising people, and he trained all of us to have a consulting point of view. The only thing that matters is if you’re surprising and delighting consumers and if they’re buying more things, so if that’s always been your North Star, it’s the same.

Well, but is it not harder to get people to buy more things? I guess not. People are buying.

So what’s harder now is determining what the single source of truth is and how you measure that. That’s hard because there are a lot of new ways to get to that same North Star.

Do you mean the truth in terms of the message you’re getting to consumers?

No. When you think about all the different data and tech partners, everyone comes in with, “It did this, it did that, it did this, it did that.” And to our previous commentary on different media partners and how they measure things, it’s not all the same, so getting to the single point of truth is hard.

That’s got to be so frustrating.

Who’s the worst at it? Who do you trust the least with their data that they show you in terms of how your answers might-

[Laughs] I can’t. I’ll get in trouble if I answer that.

Okay. But there’s somebody in there?

Of course. And my thing is that you can’t trust any of them. You need a healthy, unbiased partner to look across to be able to really have the right point of view on what happened in the market. And again, sales matter. Sales are a pretty good outcome of “Did we sell more things?”

Versus brand favorability or some of these other loose things that do matter, but can be a little squishy.

Yep. Yeah, I wish there were more brand-favorable advertising in my world. I feel like I’m really sales-focused. The partners that I work with are very much like, “I don’t really care how you did. As long as we made more money than it cost us to advertise with you, that’s all we care about,” which is understandable, but sometimes I just wish I could have a big old Toyota sponsorship or something.

Well, brands need both. You need to be thinking fast and slow, because if everything is focused on, “Buy now, do this,” then you don’t remember that brand. So you do need to create these emotional structures with consumers.

Well, keep me in mind, that’s all I’ll say.

I’ve got a whole company of educational media. It’s very brand safe, good people doing interesting things. A big halo around it. You can help make the world better. Just advertise with Complexly.

All right. I’m into it. Send me your stuff, okay?

Oh, well, of course. All right, Amy, thank you so much. For coming on Decoder.

It was great. Thanks for having me.

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