How is AI changing marketing ~ Steve Robinson + AI Won’t Fix Bad Marketing ~ James Katz

SPONSOR MESSAGE - TICKETPORTX SPONSOR MESSAGE Introducing TicketportX multi-day events. Hosting a festival, seminar, conference, tournament, or event series. No more manually sending tickets 24 hours later. No more scrambling to issue comps and catch up with attendees. With TicketportX, everything happens in real time. Sell tickets for multiple events on one page. Create ticket packages across different dates. Manage entire event series from a single storefront. And spend less money marketing multiple links and event pages. One platform, one link, endless possibilities. TicketportX, powering your brand, your events, and your growth. INTERVIEW 1 - STEVE ROBINSON / PATH3 MEDIA PAUL WRIGHT & STEVE ROBINSON And welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. Well, I'm thrilled to introduce a guest who's not just talking about what's broken in B2B marketing, he's building the tools and methodology to fix it. Steve Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of PAL3, a self-service B2B advertising platform that helps companies bring advertising in-house without hiring them experts. He started the B2B Marketing Breakfast, a monthly in-person gathering for sharing knowledge among B2B marketing practitioners in three cities and county. Well, Steve Robinson, welcome to the Link Thru Social podcast. I'm so excited to be here, Paul. Thank you. Oh, we're excited to have you. before we get into things, maybe you could give us a little bit more about your background. Absolutely. I actually started out in software development and fell into marketing sort of by accident. I was a friend of mine who was starting an ad agency said, Hey, we need to build these websites. And I said, Oh, I can do that. And so I ended up building a company that did web development for for ad agencies, and next thing you know, I'm I'm starting the digital team at an ad agency, and then I find out that you know hacking people is way more fun than hacking computers. Yeah. But along along the way, I I I always wanted to take some of that that agile software development mindset, some of the my my father's an engineer, some of that lean manufacturing sort of mindset into marketing and really really put more system and structure around it. And so that's been sort of my life's mission is to really make marketing just a little bit more repeatable, a little bit more science, a little bit more structure, and and take some of the waste out of it. Right, right. Now your website is path3.media, and just wanted to let the viewers and listeners know. so let's let's get into this. and you know what, I want to ask you something, and I I hear this a lot from people that reach out to me online, and I see a lot of chatter about it throughout social media. what specific ways are ad platforms designed to make you overspent? You know, that this is something that is a big concern for a lot of people. And and how do you fight back from these platforms that are are really designed to make you overspent? Yeah, and they're they're really designed to find that sweet spot where you're spending the absolute most money you possibly can while feeling like you're getting just enough return to stick around, right? And and there there are actually a lot of different ways that these these they call them dark patterns work their way into the ad networks. I think the the most nefarious one is is is the one you'll find on LinkedIn and on on meta-ads, and that's the one where they don't have enough inventory on their platform. By inventory, they don't have enough users scrolling on their platforms to really meet the insatiable need of their advertisers. And so to free up more inventory, they introduced a checkbox to advertise on the quote audience network. So the LinkedIn audience network, the meta audience network. And when that box is checked, and it's checked by default, they go and take what you made as a beautiful social ad and turn it into an ugly web banner and go and run it on the on the on the open web, which in and of itself wouldn't be that bad, except for when you run ads on the open web, you have to also fight ad fraud. And so this is where you have people that are standing up fake websites and then putting a whole bunch of fake people at those fake websites to go and and and view and click on ads and and make themselves money, right? So now they're both the advertiser and they're the audience, and and and it's it's it's easy money. and and the the social networks just don't have the best ad fraud controls in place to prevent that. And so you end up driving a whole bunch of traffic back to your website that looks legitimate because the fraudsters want their traffic looking legitimate, and then it doesn't convert, and you're left going, well, why? Why didn't this convert? And the answer is because it wasn't it wasn't real traffic. Yeah, you know. Now, do you do you think you mentioned the social platforms don't have a lot of safeguards in place? Do you think that's on purpose? I don't know. You know, there's the the the the phrase never attribute to malevolence that which can be attributed to ignorance or something like that, right? Something like that. I I I I I think I think it really it comes down to not so much on purpose as much as are the are they economically incentivized to fix the problem? And the answer is no. Did they create the problem? No. Are they doing anything to actively enable the problem? Probably not, but they're not economically incentivized to fix the problem. And I think when you when you look through the lens of economic incentives, that's when you really start to see where things are broken. And I just did a post on LinkedIn about this yesterday, as a matter of fact, where when you when you post an ad on on any of the platforms really, but Meta in particular had some good data on, it will show your ad to two people or so, or to I'm sure your ad twice to one person before it'll move on to the next person. Oh. And that's on average, so some people are getting it more than that, some people are getting it less than that. But they're looking for signals of engagement, and if they don't see those signals of engagement right away, they move on to the next person. And this is if you use the default settings. when you run ads through path three, we we we kind of adjust those settings. So but i if you're trying to build a brand, it takes what, on average, seven impressions in order to build a brand. And if the platform is actively shifting from person to person to person after an average of two, how are you ever gonna build a brand that way? But if if we come back to incentives, Meta is in the business of keeping people glued to their Facebook and their Instagram. And so if they're showing ads that don't spark an immediate engagement, they're potentially going to lose someone. And so they have an economic incentive to introduce novelty. You as an advertiser have an economic incentive to get repeated exposure. And all of a sudden we realize wait, our incentives aren't aligned. Yeah, it's it's it's it's a it's a constant battle when you're when you're advertising through a lot of these different social platforms. Now you mentioned LinkedIn that a few minutes ago that you made a post yesterday. How effective personally do you find LinkedIn in your business? And is it still relevant today? I think it is. personally, I worry for the platform as the quality of the overall organic content that I'm experiencing on and on the platform seems to be seems to be going down. I think there's a lot more posts that are you know, the average of the internet spewed out by AI these days. That said, I know personally I'm finding a lot of efficacy on the platform as far as building an audience myself. and I I as I've worked with you know clients over the years, I think that's been the key is if you're trying to build an audience organically there, do it through your people. And I think that's even more true today. And that's still that's been working for me personally as I've been growing path three and building my own and building the the B2B marketing breakfast and building my own audience and tribe. On the paid side, LinkedIn can be very effective, but again, not with the settings out of the box. Right. and and that's where their big thing is they have an even worse inventory constraint. if you think about how most people use LinkedIn, they really fall into one of two buckets. They're either really active users and they're on that platform almost daily as if it were a Facebook or an Instagram or some other you know social network that that you're you're you're addicted to for all lack of a better better term, right? Or you're on that platform once a month or once every couple of weeks, right? As you're just gonna go and see what it what was I missing, or you know, look for job opportunities or whatever it might be. And when you add when you advertise, behind the scenes, this platform is setting a bid. And then every time an ad opportunity comes up, an auction ensues. And if it's one of those people that's on the platform once or twice a month, when they hit the platform, everybody has been waiting to bid on that auction for that individual. And so there is a massive bidding war that occurs. And if you leave the settings inside of the platform when you place the ad as they are by default, there's no real bid cap. It you can end up paying thousands of dollars in CPMs, and I know because we ran a test, right? you can end up paying thousands of dollars in CPMs in in trying to reach those really infrequent LinkedIn users because you're in this massive bidding war with a whole bunch of other advertisers trying to get those same eyeballs. And so what our platform does, and what I'd recommend to everyone, is set a manual bid cap inside of LinkedIn because it prevents that massive bidding war. And that's the only way to get value out of it on the paid side, and then just expect you're not gonna be able to spend that much money there. You're not gonna be able to have as much reach there as you would on Google Ads or on Meta ads, but you're gonna get exactly the targeting you want, and that is worth the effort, even if it is at a lower reach. Absolutely, and and this seems to be the trend lately. large amounts of followers and rations alike isn't as important as the quality, smaller communities. And and this is why I think I I've interviewed a few developers in the last few months, and those episodes will be coming out soon, where they've created these social platforms that kind of weed out all that. are also these new social platforms. How is AI changing marketing? Why is that both an opportunity and and maybe a trap as well? I mean, we all see it, and I mentioned it earlier with with my personal experience in the feed on LinkedIn. It's increasing the volume of messaging out there right now massively. and that that creates a lot of noise, right? So now you're in a position where you have to figure out how to rise above that noise, both from a messaging perspective, like how can you say something that is novel, interesting, and exciting? and also how can you how can you reach audiences when there are so many other people trying to reach them on the same channels? So you look at like email today and the rise in cold email, especially cold email being driven by AI where it's hyper-personalized and you know people's inboxes are just flooded right now. Organic social is the same thing. You see this in your LinkedIn and your meta and your your Instagram and your Facebook feeds, all of these posts that are you know, they just sound kind of blah because they're they're the average of the internet. I think I think where the opportunity lies there is that it's not that hard to rise above that and and have a unique point of view and really, really stand out. And as marketers, I think that's what our job is. Our job is to go find in B2B the subject matter experts inside of our company that have that that that slightly controversial view on how the world works or ought to work and get that out there because people will engage with it, people will find that interesting. and then the other side of it, I think, is is and this makes me hopeful for the the the the practice of marketing overall. I I think we're going to see a resurgence in brand. I think we're going to see a resurgence in positioning because the flip side of all of this, we talked about the marketers' habits changing, is the consumers' habits are changing as well. And so there is a step in the buying journey, buyer's journey right now where people will go and research in Chat GPT in Claude, or if they're Googling something, they're getting an AI overview instead of getting you know search results. And when they're doing that, they're not just typing in, you know, best widget, they're typing in and I'll give you an example. Like I bought a refrigerator not too long ago, and I did my research on Chat GPT, and I didn't type in best refrigerator in 2026. I typed in I have a family of five. I have a wife who who really needs ice in her drinks. Like this is her one incredibly like like low-key on everything except for this one thing, right? So we need a good ice maker, right? Ice is important. We have a tendency to overbuy groceries, so we need lots of space. you know, what what refrigerator would you recommend? I gave it a lot of context there. And I also mentioned that I like to repair my own appliances, so I want something that's repairable, right? And so it recommended a particular model of frigid air refrigerator and said, and frigid air is known for being repairable, and this model has a giant ice maker and it's it's huge, right? And and I'm like, perfect. Now, if you flip that over into whatever business you're in, chances are you stick out in certain ways. Your brand, your products are positioned in a certain way to be different from the market. And you're you're a different type of company when it feels what it feels like to work with you. And those things are the things that the the AI can do the pattern matching on. It can find and match your brand against the people that are in market for exactly that thing. Yeah. But you have to do the upfront work to position your brand, to position your products and actually move away from the average of the internet for the AI to make those connections. And I think over the course of the last several years, marketing has gotten so used to let's go find people in market right now and put an ad in front of them or put a message in front of them right now. And it doesn't matter whether we're different or how we're different because we're in the right place at the right time. And that was the game, be in the right place at the right time, not necessarily with the right offer or the right message. And so I'm I'm excited to see the industry kind of come back to basics and do that positioning and build those brands and really emphasize how you're different and and how that makes you perfect for the person that types in that big long description into Chat GPT of what they're looking for. Exactly. You're you're educating the consumer about what makes you stand out, what features that you have opposed to perhaps one of your competitors. And it's always been about education. you know, oh, I have this new can opener. It can do four other things that the the other models out there can't do. But when you go to an an ad agency or something, they say, well, we have to spend a lot of money to educate the consumer to them for them to know what kind of features that you offer that set you apart. So yeah, it's it's a it's it's it's it's a bit of a game, really. And but but you have to build your brand. It's it's it's and you have to build it in that structured way where those kind of things are gonna stand out to the people that you know are searching and putting in these intricate searches into Chat GPT because or you know, Claude or whichever platform they're using. I think it's happened so fast, like in the last two and a half, two years, but people are slowly coming around to getting more in-depth with your searches when they're working. Yeah, you set up your brand accordingly. And and when you build a brand, you build a little bit of insurance policy because let's say I sit down to the AI or to the search, and I I'm looking for the the the best whatever for my circumstance, and and and I'm very familiar with a particular brand. So I'm looking for, let's say I'm looking for a podcast to listen to. And so I type in there, I'm looking for a podcast to listen to about social media marketing, and it lists three or four, and and I I know about the Link Thru Social Podcast, right? So then I I I go and I say, well, what about the Link Thru Social Podcast? And and now that gets entered into that conversation and and gets surfaced as an idea. And if AI continues to be the way that it is, it's going to immediately say, Great idea, Steve. The Link Thru Social Podcast is a wonderful podcast, right? And validate what I just typed into it. So if you can be in that buyer's head before they ever sit down to the computer, then you've already won. Right, exactly. And the Link Thru Social Podcast is a wonderful podcast. It is. It is. Yeah, the the AI is not blowing smoke in that particular instance. You're right. Well, Steve, I mentioned off the top you've started the B2B marketing breakfast, and you're in a few cities already and county. tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, this came out of the fact that I I I I I I went through the stage of life where you have young children, right? And so when you have young children, you don't get out much. And my children were getting a little bit older, and I had an opportunity to start to get out and do more networking, and I started looking at the best opportunities to share knowledge and learn and and make deep, meaningful connections with other B2B marketers, and found out there really wasn't a good forum or venue to do that in my city in Milwaukee. As I started looking, there really isn't much of one anywhere. we used to have the the the the the BMA, the business marketing association, it was bought by the ANA, and and it it it isn't what it used to be in most cities, and so there is this void. And I said, Well, if I can't find it, why don't I just make it? And so I started getting a group of marketers together every month, and we would sit and we do a round table style conversation and share what's on our mind. So that could be something that we've read about that we'd like to know if people are actually using, right? How is this how is this happening in the real world? It could be a problem that we're having in our own work. it could just be something that we're curious or excited about, and we go we go and throw out topics and then someone moderates and surfaces the the the cut the topics that are going to add the most value to the group and we chat about it. I have learned. So much from this group, and I've made such deep connections, and so I was super excited to bring it to other cities. So we're in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we're in Madison, Wisconsin, we're in Minneapolis now, the Twin Cities. And I have talks with people in Denver and Schaumburg to bring it to Schaumburg is a suburb of Chicago to bring it to to two more cities. So definitely if if you're interested in having the style of a of a meetup and I'm talking to your listeners in in your city, then please do reach out. It's b2bmb.org. And there's a place on there where you can contact me. And I'd love to love to learn about your your town and and and get get more of this knowledge sharing because business to business is slightly different from business to consumer and and just enough different that some of the tactics and some of the the the the the ideas just don't translate and and it's really nice to be surrounded by a bunch of other B2B practitioners. Absolutely. Maybe we should be setting up one of those here in Toronto. I I would I would love that. Yeah, we're we're gonna reach out after the program for sure, Steve. and your main website is path3.media. we only have a couple minutes left. maybe you can just go over a few of the services that you do offer. Yeah, path3.media lets individuals who have limited advertising expertise run ads for B2B cross-platform. So you log in, you create an account, you can post an ad once, and it will go to LinkedIn, it'll go to Meta, it will go to the broader web. That can be video, that can be animated web banners, that can be regular social image posts, and and it's you create one ad with different formats built into it, and it just goes out. and it it it it thinks in terms of B2B. So you target things based on ideal account profile and and personas and and and the buyer's journey rather than trying to get into all of the little check boxes and widgets and the platforms. Wonderful. Well, Steve, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. And I encourage everyone to go to path3.media. That's pathnumber three.media. And we wish you all the best in the future and would love to have you on the program again. As things quickly are changing. you know, it's it's hard to keep up, and we would love to have you on again at some point. I would love to come back, and this is this has been delightful. You have a Link Thru Social is an awesome podcast, so anytime. Thank you so much, Steve. And the Link Thru Social podcast will be back right after this short break. SPONSOR MESSAGE - SMART POST APP SPONSOR MESSAGE Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? Meet Smart Post App, your all-in-one solution to create, schedule, and grow your content effortlessly. In just a few taps, you can generate engaging posts, stay consistent, and keep your audience coming back for more. No more guessing, no more burnout, just smarter content faster. Whether you're a business owner, creator, or entrepreneur, Smart Post App offers both premium and pro plans. In addition, we have new features that have been recently added that include instantly viewing public links to your posts on any network, weekly view allowing you to plan hour by hour, account groups, group your accounts to save time and simplify your workflow, and a desktop version which offers a simpler way to stay consistent. Start posting Smarter Today at smartpostapp.com. Smart Post App App because your content should work for you. INTERVIEW 2 - JAMES KAATZ / ILLUMINATION MARKETING & SOLO CMO PAUL WRIGHT & JAMES KAATZ And he's the co-founder and CEO of Illumination Marketing and award-winning Houston Marketing Agency, and the founder of Solo CMO, a marketing technology platform built to help businesses simplify, strengthen, and scale their marketing. James helps business owners cut through the noise, focus on what actually drives revenue, and build practical marketing systems for sustainable growth. James, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me on. Yes. Well, it's a pleasure having you. before we get into things here, why don't you maybe share a little bit more about your background? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is James Kaatz. I've been in marketing and branding for the better part of 20 years now, actually over 20 years. My how time flies when you're having fun, you know. I actually started off in the entertainment industry. So for the first eight years of my career, I was a professional wrestler, but I used to tell people I was a piano player to brothel because I wanted them to think I had a dignified career. but it was it was a great experience. I started it when I was 17 years old. It took me all the way through college. I went all the way around the United States. I wrestled internationally, I wrestled tons of famous people. I was on TV in multiple states. I wrestled international Mexican movie stars. I was even a part of WrestleMania. So I did a lot of really cool things with it. But I felt figured out that I was beating up my brain for not nearly enough money. So I went to college, graduated with a degree in radio and television, and thought I will never in the history of ever use this degree. but I got a degree, and that was the important part. And so right after college, I moved to Houston, where I ended up getting a job at an ad agency here in town and started using my radio television degree almost immediately. So small world, right? where I became a media buyer for Fortune 500 companies. So some of my clients included ATT, Sotostream, RB, Sleep Number, FanDuel. I helped to relaunch Zest in Canada, which was a really cool project, Zest the Soap. wanted a different project and or a different change. So I went over to a marketing agency that was based in the automotive vertical, which is where I found my love of marketing and figured out really what marketing is and how marketing is different than advertising. And they are very different, and you know, don't be confused, right? And so many people interchange those terms, but they're not. but I I did really well at that job, and I actually got promoted into management fairly quickly, and I helped to take my section of the company from losing $400,000 a year to making just under $2 million in two years. And I grew my team from a team of four people to a team of 10 people who each had about 10 people under them. and we were very, very successful. Our average dealership grew six and a half percent in the first six months, which is just unheard of in market share because it's so competitive of an industry here in the United States, automotive is but I don't know what you know about automotive here in the United States, but it's a lot like oh yeah. everyone's job is on the line every single month. And so if you start off the first seven days of the month poorly, you have dealers calling you out, cursing you out, saying unkind things about you, your character, your family. and it was no longer an environment that was conducive to personal or professional growth. So I explored other opportunities and transitioned over to be becoming a marketing executive in the healthcare industry for a smaller business in the Houston, Texas area. And in the first year there, we rebuilt everything from the ground up the website, the SEO strategy, the video strategies, how we transitioned it from the antiquated healthcare type of videos to new age animations with lights and and all types of swirly thingies, and it was neat. all the way to the trade show strategy, the collateral. And so we did all of this, and the results were really, really good, and that they hit their first $20 million year in their 20-year company history. And they're like, Thank you so much, James. You did a lot to help our company. I'm like, Oh, great. So, around that point, me and my wife had an autistic daughter, she was about 10 years old at the time. and being autistic, I don't know what you know about autistic kids, but there's only about three places in the entire world that she would eat. and one of those places was called the Houston Texans Grill here in Houston. And it had like everything you could possibly want it. It had great food, great bar, great staff, great ambiance, great location, everything. So one day we pick my daughter up after school and after work, and we could take her to go eat dinner there. And she runs up to the door and she just tries to open it, and it's it's locked. and my wife makes our way up there, and we see that there's just a sign on the door that says, Thank you for the last five years. We've gone out of business. And my daughter being autistic, she's like, I want to go in and eat. Why can't we go in and eat? And we're like, Well, the funny thing about capitalism is and we had to start explaining a lot of socioec or economic principles to her at a young age that she wasn't ready to explore yet, but that's okay. we took her down to another restaurant she liked, and my wife and I started talking, and we're like, Why did this business go out of business? They had everything. And then we finally just realized they didn't do marketing. And my wife and I, who both had 10, 15 years of marketing experience at that point, go, man, we have the skills that could have helped this business stay in business and this business owner continue their dream. And the light bulb went on, and that's when illumination marketing was born, and that was back in 2017. And since that point, we've helped everything from upstarts with zero clients all the way to the big guys like GE Healthcare, Kelsey Siebel, Group One Automotive, Allied Power Group, and everything in between. and this is a really, really long-winded story of saying that we've helped to drive over $350 million in revenue in the last five years, and we've made several million dollars along the way for ourselves. That is absolutely amazing. What a story. And yeah, I and you asked me a few times as you were explaining it if if you know about what I'm talking about, and I've checked about three or four of the boxes. First of all, let's let's let's recap here. You were a professional wrestler too. No, I wasn't, but this past weekend I was an official social media partner for a couple of significant wrestling organizations here in Toronto and Indies. Oh wow, and been a professional wrestling fan all my life, so wrestling tick. Autism. I have a few people in my family that have autism. So I I understand when you like you said, they go to a restaurant and that's what they like and they don't want anything else, totally get that as well. And I was in the automotive manufacturing industry before Link Thru Social. So quite a few things in common. Oh my gosh, yeah, we're kindred spirits for sure. Absolutely. Now, what you've what you've built is absolutely amazing, James. And though you you said back in 2017, now we're in 2026. The emergence of AI is on on a speed train steaming through everything. what do you think, as far as AI is concerned, is fundamentally changing the way businesses compete? Yeah, great question. yeah, I talk about this one a lot with everyone who will listen to me talk, you know. it's completely changed the world and the way that we see it and the way that we perceive it. AI has. and I look at it like this this is the next revolution of everything, right? So you look back, we had radio come and it revolutionized the entire world. We had television come, it revolutionized the entire world. Cable, same thing. Fast forward, the internet, same thing, right? And then we had Google, same thing, revolutionized the entire world, YouTube revolutionized the entire world, social media around 2004 through 2006, revolutionized the entire world. And then we've kind of just been going along with those same things, so it's been about almost 20 years, right? You're right, and now we have AI that came along. You know, it started in 2017 with the BERT update. Google developed the transformer technology, the the T in ChatGPT, you know. they implemented it around 2019, so they stopped ranking keywords and they started ranking entities, and then it just kept going and kept going, and then ChatGPT came along in 2022, and that's when it really started to revolutionize things. And so the way that we do things today, from a tactics standpoint, is drastically different than the way we did things 20 years ago, and it's only going to continue to do that. So, what AI has done is it has made the output the commodity, which was always the hardest part of business, which was having the right people in the right place in order to do the job. It's been the bottleneck since the history of business. But now, what AI is doing is it is making that part of it the commodity so anybody can get it at a very cost-effective rate. But most people don't know how to use AI, they still use it as modules, they ask it a question and want an answer. But the power in AI has been in building operating systems, and this is what all of the big CEOs of all the LLMs have come out to say is that it's not in the power of the modules, it's in the power of the system of how they build on each other to create an output. And so the way it's it's transitioned, it's made it to where anybody can compete if they know what they're doing, because garbage in, you still get garbage out. But if you have the right inputs, you can get the outputs of a million-dollar team for $30. It's really, really incredible. So it's been it's kind of leveled the playing field as far as how it's affecting, you know, the world in general. it is eliminating jobs, you know. And we've seen that through all the big tech companies are coming back, and we're gonna go in in cycles of they're going, oh my gosh, we're doing it all AI, we're gonna fire our whole staff, and they're gonna go, oh, we messed up. We need people, they're gonna hire back, and then they're gonna go through the same roller coaster, go, oh, well, we don't need this many people, and they're gonna fire it. And then so we're gonna go through that everlasting staff. But what AI has done is it has eliminated those junior positions, and so it's especially tough for kids coming out of college these days because when I came out of college, it's like you get a job at an agency, they teach you the grunt work, and then when you're good at the grunt work, they promote you and you start doing real work. Well, the grunt work doesn't exist anymore. That's what AI does, right? So it's gonna be really hard to stand out in a crowd for younger people, and I think we're gonna have to transition the way that we think in order for it to work. But because remember, the output is the commodity now, anybody can do anything. So, where I feel our world is transitioning to is no longer as worker bees, as doers, it's now transitioning to people, the ones that are gonna be successful or the ones who can analytically look at a situation and start solving problems, and then AI will help them to solve that problem. And I really feel that's where we're going. I can give you examples too if you need me to expand some more. I I actually would like that because you've brought up a great point. And why don't you share some examples with us? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. so I was talking to a cardiologist friend of ours about a couple of months ago, and this is an example of finding a problem and solving it. And so I was talking to this cardiologist friend of ours, and he goes, you know, we're running all these EKGs and we send them to our revenue cycle managing program, our partner, and they code them. And then half the time they're wrong when they submit them to the insurance agency who will reject them, and then they have to send them back. But because we do so much volume of these things, we don't have people who can go back and fix them all and resubmit them. And so this is costing our business 750,000, a million dollars a year, something along those lines. He goes, It's very frustrating. And that, you know, when you listen as an analytical person who goes, How can I solve a problem instead of just listening to problems? You go, this is exactly what AI was built for. It has the opt the OCRs that can go through and read the charts, exactly how the doctor put them, or transcribe them, whatever method they're using now. It can format the data specifically from the data points that are said as just a transcript, put them all into the appropriate format that you can then submit to the insurance client. And instead of you know losing a million dollars a year, maybe you're only losing a quarter million dollars a year. But you just made $750,000 for this one cardiologist. And how many cardiologists are there across the United States? Probably a lot going through this exact same problem. So if you can create a closed-in system, because you know, HIPAA laws and all that fun stuff, but a closed-in system that someone can download, put onto their computer, and then run all their charts through it and output it and make $750,000. Could you charge $75,000 a year for it? Because I'm pretty sure any smart business owner would pay, you know, $75,000, $100,000 a year to make $750,000. And so you create the system, you sell it to all the cardiologists, and now you're unbelievably rich. So it's an example like that, real-world applications. You just have to look for the problems, and then you can solve it. And there are problems in every single industry. So I want to ask you, why do so many businesses spend more on marketing? They don't actually grow. Yeah, because it's bad marketing. That's the that's the best that's the best. So there's there's so much noise out there, and especially with social media, right? You the this this is the perfect example of it. Do you know how people use social media? I know you do, but for your audience, in case they're they're wondering, this is how they use social media. So when people run ads on social media, if it's not something that's really, really going to cut through the noise, they just go like this. And then here's the the extra wrinkle. Half the people who are doing this are driving their car at the same time, right? So it's it's the scary world we live in. But that's why if people go, oh, well, I tried social media and it didn't work, well, you probably didn't catch them enough, right? And so this goes back to the ad agency when I was placing the the ad buys, right? how much do you have to reach somebody in order to make effective marketing? and this boils down to something called the marketing rule of seven, which was a maxim developed in the 1930s by the movie industry that saw that someone had to see a movie poster seven times before they'd go into the theater to watch the movie. And that was a hundred years ago. So, what is it now with the creation of TV and the internet and TikTok and YouTube and Netflix and everything that's vying for attention? Well, when I was a media buyer for those Fortune 500 companies, we saw that an average flight or a set of commercials was played out when it reached around 2,600 gross rating points, which means that the average person in the market saw it about 20 times. So if you only send an ad out once and you expect everybody to be knocking down your door afterwards, it's not going to happen because the data shows you're probably gonna have to reach them sometime between seven and twenty times to get them to take an action or to get them when they're not in their car or whatever it is, right? So there's layers to this, and that's why so much marketing fails, is people just don't understand the very basics of marketing in human psychology. And so, and again, a lot of people now are just using Chat GPT or Claude or whatever it is as a module. Create me a blog post, create me a social ad on roofing, and then they post it. But what it doesn't do is actually do copywriting. So it doesn't speak to the pain that they're going through, it doesn't speak to the ideal state that they're trying to get to, it doesn't create a gap within the context of the writing. It doesn't give people a reason to click. You're just spraying and praying and hoping that you reach the right person at the right time that they'll come in. And guess what? That's a really expensive way to do marketing. And that's why so many companies with you know hundred million dollar budgets fail because they still do that same principle and that same process. And so the way to start getting your marketing to work, right? The million-dollar question, quite literally, this is what we did with the automotive companies, right? So we had smaller companies, we didn't have the big groups at the agency that I was working at. So we had to be a little bit more tactical in the way that we would accomplish things. And so instead of doing what we call the spray and pray approach, the shotgun approach to marketing, where you just throw things at the wall and hope something sticks, we did what we called the sniper approach to marketing, where we see exactly who we're trying to hit and we aim our advertising at that person. Perfect example. So if a mother needs has three kids, you don't want to necessarily sell her a Corolla or even a small SUV. Sometimes you might have to sell her the minivan. So if you can target your copy and add to a mom who had three kids who are tearing up the backseat and driving her nuts and causing her stress and traffic that's already stressful. And then you have the afterstate of every kid watching their own TV in the minivan with their headphones on and mom going, ah, that's a way more effective ad. And then you can tune it to only mothers who Who are between the ages of 27 and 40 and who live in specific zip codes. And then you can target that way. And then instead of selling one minivan, you sell four minivans. And then that's how we start to level up the game. That's effective marketing. And so this is where we have the disconnect with so many people who can't make marketing work for them. Is they go, let's just throw a corolla to everybody and see who will come in. Yeah, it's not definitely not gonna work. Now, now we were we've been trained to in the marketing business and and when you're trying to help small business owners, medium-sized, larger corporations, SEO was everything, it was all about search engine optimization. Now, with a lot more people turning to platforms like chat GPT to do their search, how should businesses pivot as far as what how they design their website and how they can be found in this new world of searching through AI? Yeah, good question. So this is this is the the controversial take, right? So SEO has been such a good SEO is like 66% of our revenue at our company. We do a lot of SEO. And what we tell businesses is there's really two types. This is gonna be a long-winded explanation. Sorry in advance. No problem. This is a this is a very important topic. Right, right. So there's there's two ways to do marketing. The first one is what we call interruption marketing. It's the traditional media, it's radio, it's television, it's social media to a very large extent. It's people who are unaware that they have a problem and you're trying to introduce that problem to them and catch them to get them into a marketing funnel. And that one is called interruption marketing. The other, the other side of the coin is called intent-based marketing. So it's people who understand that they have a problem and they're just looking for the solution to that problem. And that's where SEO and pay-per-click come in. So if you have a local service-based business, roofers, plumbers, things of that nature, and someone goes, Oh my gosh, I have a leaking roof. I need someone to solve this problem. They're not going to Facebook, they're going to Google every single time. and now with the introduction of AI, people are starting to go to Chat GPT, they're starting to go to the LLMs. But the last data I saw, it only had a six percent market penetration compared to Google. And here's the psychology of it people still don't fully trust it yet, which we're getting there, right? Especially from where we were two years ago. But the last data I saw is that Google data is going up even since the the invention of the LLMs. Meaning, people are going to ChatGPT looking for an answer and going to Google to verify that answer. So all we've done is add an extra step in there. So SEO is still incredibly important, and you shouldn't necessarily change your strategy because the end point where people are making decisions is they still trust Google. And it's going to be really hard to overcome that. They've got 25 years of trusting Google. It's in the psychology, it's going to take a whole generation to get that part of it out. So it's it's still really, really important. However, LLMs have added that new wrinkle. it's like when they created the internet, and Google came up with the zero moment of truth in the automotive industry. going instead of people visiting all these dealerships and kicking tires and then making decisions, they go to the internet, figure out what car they want, go to one or two dealerships, and then buy the car. So now we have the zero moment of truth. And that's what the LLMs are for the real world, where we're at today. It's that zero moment of truth. They start their search there, they go to Google to finish that search. So it's important to get found on both LLMs and SEO Google, bing, whatever you want to use. Google's the lion's share of the market. so the question is, how do you get found on LLMs? We we kind of know how SEO works, right? There's four parts to it. technical, you make sure that your site can get read, and then your content. You have to have enough content about the topics to be the trusted answer for Google, and then backlinks. having other sites link to you and say these guys are authoritative, and then that passes your authority through. And then all those things working together is how SEO works in a very, very simple fashion. and then you have local SEO, which works on its own algorithm, but still similar proximity, distance, relevance, and prominence, right? So, how well do you rank, how far are you, and how well do you match the searcher query? So those two things are SEO. So, how do you get found in the LLMs? Well, it works a lot like SEO. And that you have to have your the ability to get found, technical SEO. You have to have enough content to where the LLMs trust that you're going to be the answer, and they don't see it from 800 different places. so you have that and it's backed up by experience, and then you have to have the prominence of enough people linking to you from enough places for the LLM to go, we trust this answer to show to our people. So that's a very rudimentary way of how it works. So, how do you get shown in LLMs? You do the same thing you've always done for SEO. You you build your SEO and it will transfer over to the LLMs. There's a lot more volatility with LLMs, especially right now, because they're still trying to figure out how to really hone in those those algorithms. But in five years, it's probably gonna be similar to the way that Google was 15 years ago. Yes, yeah, I agree. I agree. Now thank you so much for for giving you your your input there. It's it's fascinating times we're in, James. And it's just I'm I'm actually excited to see how things roll out in the next six months, year, two years down the road. It's we're we're at a very pivotal point, aren't we? We are. So here's the here's the real crazy part, right? we're in the wild west. We're basically unregulated with AI right now. So, do you know what's gonna happen? Governments are going to regulate it, just like they regulate everything else. So, this is what I've told my wife. I'm like, we've got like two years to make as much money as we possibly can with AI before they're gonna start shutting everything down. and it's funny, I was doing a podcast for professor at Stanford, and they were talking about how AI has impacted student jobs and the job market coming out. And I go, it's just a matter of time until they regulate it. And then literally that evening, Fable got shut down by the government because it was hacking into things. And so they they did it. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm no Stradomist now. but it's crazy how we we live in, right? And so that's what I told my wife. And now it's so easy to have the output. That's why we built our operating system, solo cmo.io. So basically, it took my 20 years of marketing workflows, of advertising workflows, and it put them into a program, an operating system that runs it literally every step of the way, like we run our million-dollar marketing programs. and so everything from defining who you're talking to to discovery how they speak and the words that they use to putting it into your SWOT, to putting it into your USPs, to putting it into a Grand Slam offer, to creating your website structure specifically to reach those people and rank on SEO, to generating your content for you using the workflows and the semantic variations that we use in our workflows, and to building out your social ads that will get people back to that content, that'll get people to your website with local SEO layered in. So it is like an all-in-one operating system. It's like having a chief marketing officer working for your company. It's literally replacing a million dollars in salary a year. I know I've managed big agency salaries, and it puts it all into a product that can get you 75% of the way there, 80% of the way there, and it's starting at $99 a month. That's incredible. So once again, that that website is solocmo.io. And James, we're almost out of time. if we want to wrap things up here and tell us where they can contact you if they want to talk more about your the services that you offer. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for for letting me talk about that. so again, if you need help with your marketing and you're kind of a do-it-yourselfer, or you don't have the tens of thousands of dollars to to hire a big marketing agency every month, you can go to solocmo.io. We're launching October 1st. We're in pre-launch right now, so you can sign up for the waiting list with founders pricing before the pricing goes up next year. and you can certainly explore it that way, solocmo.io. Or if you have more money than time, and you certainly want someone to help you grow aggressively going into 2027, you can reach out to us at MarketingIllumination.com and either fill in a form lead or text us, and we can set up a time for a consultation to see if we might possibly be a good fit to help you aggressively grow your business. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. Some amazing points that you've brought up. And as this technological train keeps going and keeps going, like we said, a year or two, who knows where we're gonna be. I'd like to invite you back on the podcast maybe in six months from now. And I'm sure we'll be talking about a lot of new innovations in this space. But we really appreciate you coming on. So once again, viewers and listeners, it's MarketingIllumination.com or SoloCMO.io. James, thanks again for being. Thank you for having me on. SPONSOR MESSAGE - TICKETPORTX SPONSOR MESSAGE You've worked hard to build your audience. So why send your customers somewhere else? Introducing white label digital storefronts from TicketportX. Now you can process tickets, registrations, donations, merchandise sales, and collect valuable customer data directly on your website or custom landing page. Increase brand visibility, create a stronger connection with your customers, deliver a seamless user experience, and monetize your brand with high-converting pages powered by TicketportX's secure hosting, payment processing, and event technology. Perfect for festivals, conventions, classes, retail storefronts, charity events, sporting events, and even free events. Manage entire event series from a single storefront and spend less money marketing multiple links and event pages. 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