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Episode 209
When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:
The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973.
Another example:
Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.
A last example:
In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.
These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”
I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions.
When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited.
Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest.
At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t.
All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van, carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset.
Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.
My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.
She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer
00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects
00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs
00:25:07 PSA
00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating
00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows
00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers as a foreign language?
00:43:12 AI's potential role
00:47:55 About Nilufer, book
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 208
People resist change.
They only stop resisting when they’re convinced the change is needed.
They’re only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth.
The best way to present them the truth is with data.
You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable glory.
Nope. Those avoiding change give themselves offramps by arguing about your data. History shows that to persuade people to take an action, it takes taking them through data in a way that grabs them emotionally. Some examples include:
Florence Nightingale, 1854
Al Gore, 2006
Princess Diana, 1997
Numbers prove, but a story compels.
This has so much to do with marketing. Here’s why. To do what we do, our bosses / clients must be convinced in how our work is yielding results. That is the core of every story that a marketing presentation tells. Our guest is a Data Storyteller. After graduating from Massey University in 2002, she moved into data analytics. She earned a digital design degree in 2015, combining her design and analytics skills, which led her to specialize in data storytelling. In 2016, she founded Rogue Penguin, a company focused on bridging analytics and business operations.
She now leads workshops for professionals in data science, marketing, and design. And she’s the author of “the data storytelling handbook”
Let’s go to New Zealand to speak with Kat Greenbrook
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:05:48 Welcome Kat
00:07:45 when data storytelling is needed
00:09:00 two ways of communicating data
00:13:55 Data stories improve communication between groups
00:26:38 PSA
00:27:18 Canvas for making time stories
00:30:05 making visuals relevant to the business
00:33:19 How to present when you only have part of story
00:39:06 Conserving data-ink
00:43:00 More you show - the less you contrast
00:48:20 Getting the book or contacting Kat
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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Episode 207
Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I’m doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true.
I’ve picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions.
However, it's hard to pass these insights along to others. They're often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire.
Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book.
As I leaf through its pages, I’m delighted to see many concepts I’ve known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form.
Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life.
He’s one of the nicest authors I’ve had on, and he’s back on this show for a third time. Let’s go to England to speak with Dan White.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:02:27 Welcome Dan
00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement
00:09:18 Uber's clever transit ad
00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads
00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset
00:23:49 PSA
00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story
00:33:19 How brain perceives messages
00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor
00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan
For links to the people, products or concepts mentioned in the show, head to episode 207’s shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot website.
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Episode 206
There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do amazing things.
Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do.
But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen.
The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked.
The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences. The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:
“During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.”
All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something, and they would have chained this together with reasoning by others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work.
This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen by building a model of something in the real world. That distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI.
My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.
He has written five books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:36 Welcome John
00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI
00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for
00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal
00:26:50 PSA
00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling
00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery
00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 205
Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.
Timestamps/Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
00:02:49 welcome Rich
00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly
00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content
00:22:47 expanding to image & video
00:27:11 PSA
00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI
00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT
00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 204
Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.
But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.
That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action
She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.” Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica
00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to
00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message
00:32:14 PSA
00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas
00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides
00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs
01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 203:
How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples:
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”
Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode”.
JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”
Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Hilary Clinton 2008 when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes.
Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable.
Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people
What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves. Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty.
Timestamps/Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole
00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision
00:18:04 Slide 1
00:29:20 PSA
00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6
00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars
00:46:06 Contacting Shea
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 202
One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures
People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.”
Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel - I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying.
Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT - when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity.
If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them - and this has given rise to a whole field - prompt engineering.
Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models - the brains behind Generative AI.
In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:28 Welcome Mike
00:11:27 Expressing all that's needed for a GPT to produce good response
00:20:24 Using AI context window
00:34:48 PSA
00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data
00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT
00:47:52 Training GPT for writing
For links to all people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 202’s shownotes page.
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Episode 201:
While our guest wasn't the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.
These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He's showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He's urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.
This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they've acquired and
The next criteria - content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time - be it in increments of hours or years.
Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.
This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.
So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea
00:11:21 Content mktg's more than a wrapper
00:20:27 Audience vs community
00:23:11 PSA
00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience
00:31:13 Having media calendars
00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3
00:45:34 About CEX & Joe's bookFor links to all things mentioned, go to the show 201's shownotes page at the funnelreboot.com website.
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Episode 200
Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating.
Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn't know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom.
Links to all episodes that featured the people mentioned are in the Show Notes.
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Episode 199
Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.
Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen.
With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job. He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this.
My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”
Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel
00:01:56 Barrier we face isn't technical know-how
00:06:05 Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread
00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML
00:27:41 building a custom algorithm
00:29:45 PSA
00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover
00:54:03 Contacting EricLinks to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.
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Episode 198
A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.
But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand.
Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?
We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack.
Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits.
His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.
Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a team that has performed over 100 shows together.
This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.
Timestamps / Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken
00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope
00:26:13 PSA
00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices
00:31:38 Pooling together data
00:55:06 Contacting Bob
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198
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Episode 197
Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.
Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.
Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.
As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.
There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.
Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.
Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:35 Welcome John Wright
00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking
00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods
00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables
00:23:14 PSA
00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars
00:42:13 Contacting John
For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site.
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Episode 196
There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that video must be part of the mix.
There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help.
Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from.
Let’s go to Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.
Chapter Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:12 - Welcome Nikki
00:09:05 - Video on platforms like TikTok
00:23:37 - PSA
00:24:26 - Reporting to stakeholders
00:29:59 - Ad campaign optimization
00:35:05 - Contacting Nikki
Links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned in show is available on the Funnel Reboot site’s show page.
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Episode 195
We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.
But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this.
But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven.
We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest.
Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire.
In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.
Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:14 - Welcome Luke
00:17:38 - PSA
00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data
00:49:29 - The MSP model
00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 194
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different.
- Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar
- Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC
- Programming can be done in various languages
- Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm
This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool, Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it.
She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use.
Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she.
As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR.
She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that.
Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn
00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs
00:20:55 - PSA
00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface
00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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Episode 193
Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don’t think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don’t run smoothly or aren’t available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site crashed or it croaked, give us a perception that sites are either alive and well or completely dead, when its health really resembles our own human health. Meaning, a website can give off warning signs that can be diagnosed and treated before anything really bad happens. It doesn’t take invasive tools to catch these; monitoring services that run without any special site access can detect issues. These tools that take a site’s pulse are also good to gauge the site’s fitness - its ability to handle business growth.
Our guest has always called Ottawa Canada his home. He has also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, supporting the local startup scene since the 2000s, which is where I first met him.
After earning his computer science degree, he began his career working at local web tech firms. A stint at a design agency stoked his enthusiasm for websites, and in 2010 he joined the parent company of Internet Service Provider and web host Rebel.com, and domain registrar Internic.ca.
He took on the role of CEO for both companies, where he saw first-hand how the internet fueled communication and value-creation. In 2013 he took on additional responsibility as a Director of the not-for-profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), where for the last decade more or less he has staunchly pushed for the internet to be used as a force for good in Canada.
Workwise, after stepping away from Rebel and Internic, he returned to his technical and startup roots. Based on his observation that while websites were getting easier for non-experts to build, they could make mistakes hurting their user’s experience of their site with equal ease. That led him to launch ONIK, a product that monitors website fitness.
Let’s go talk with Rob Villeneuve
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:06 - Welcome Rob
00:09:19 - Monitoring site health
00:29:09 - PSA
00:29:59 - How much access is needed to monitor a site
00:41:01 - Holding different patrs of site to different standards
00:42:12 - How alerts help
00:45:21 - Knowing when enough is being measured
00:49:50 - How large sites do monitoring
00:53:09 - About ONIK.IO, how to contact Rob
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
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We've all heard of 1970's Apollo 13 mission that was supposed to send a 3-man crew to the moon, but once NASA became aware of an on-board explosion, it became all about rescuing the crew.
Ron Howard's 1995 movie gives a glimpse of how mission control staff in Houston reacted to information about the explosion.
When an alarm on the command module flashed, signaling a power drop, Flight Director Gene Kranz (portrayed by Ed Harris) turned to the mission controller in charge of emergencies and said "is this an instrumentation problem, or are we looking at real power loss here?" That officer, named Sy Liebergot and played by the director’s brother Clive Howard said "It's, it's reading a quadruple failure - that can't happen! It's, it's got to be instrumentation."
But by following their procedures, NASA confirmed it wasn't an instrumentation problem, the ship had actually suffered a devastating explosion, and at that point they swung into rescue mode.
NASA aren't the only ones who, on seeing data put in front of them, are so quick to dismiss it.
Dashboards - and the work it takes to implement them - isn’t trivial. Yet many of them fail…meaning that once they’re built they never get looked at.
There are those who blame technical problems for this, but just like in Apollo 13, the main failures are due to people problems. The technology can be used to visualize exactly the operational data that people literally asked for…and present them with self-serve solutions, but they ignore the data, waving it away as some sort of instrumentation problem
Our guest is going to tell us the right way to pull off dashboard projects.
He’ll show how to engage the stakeholders to express what metrics they really need, ones that show how the organization is tracking towards reaching its vision.
Nicholas Kelly, currently the principal consultant and trainer at G&K Consulting, holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from University College Cork. Formerly a Deloitte Analytics Senior Manager, he specializes in designing and developing dashboards for major global companies, including banks and Formula 1 teams. Nick is a frequent speaker at international conferences, having trained thousands of professionals in data visualization and analytics adoption. As a management consultant, educator, and author, his focus is on teamwork, inventive methods, and bridging technical gaps to increase data literacy. He is also the creator of business board games and the author of the book "Delivering Data Analytics."
Let’s go to Seattle where I caught up with Nick Kelly.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:57 - Welcome Nick
00:08:18 - Why dashboard projects fail
00:34:46 - PSA
00:35:35 - Building the dashboard
00:57:12 - Where to get book; contact Nick
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 190.
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My sister-in-law Janice works at the forefront of Medical Sonography. You may know it by the name Ultrasound, where non-invasive sound waves are sent into the body, which bounce off tissue and get displayed on a monitor. It has the ability to evaluate anatomy in an increasingly wide range of structures such as abdominal organs, the heart, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound.
In the past 35 years, ultrasound has changed from a tool that was used solely by Radiology and has now expanded into being used by almost every medical disciple: cardiology, emergency medicine, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapy and more. Training these non-traditional users had a huge boom, and now ultrasound is being taught in the first year of medical school as it is known that no matter what type of medicine one chooses, ultrasound will play a part. Janice and others have shared their love and knowledge of ultrasound to help and aid the expansion of ultrasound into new realms in all areas of healthcare.
In a similar way, to be better marketers, developers, or website owners, there are aspects of web behaviour that we need surfaced: specific user conversions, page views, scrolls and many other interactions. These aren’t visible to Analytics tools out-of-the-box. Our equipment must be configured to highlight them, and that’s done with tags that fire and alert our analytics software of specific interactions, the same way that medical monitors show the echoes of specific sonar frequencies.
We’ve evolved from coding tags right on our sites to operating them with tag management systems, the most common one being Google Tag Manager. Without these tagging tools, our visibility into site performance would be limited the same way that doctors before ultrasound couldn’t see what was going on inside their patients.
Another similarity these tools share is that they both come with ethical and safety considerations, and laws covering user privacy and data protection. Gathering insights, whether by ultrasound or tag technology, must respect the digital autonomy and privacy of users.
We have a guest to take us through all facets of tag management and I hope that after hearing him, you won’t think of tagging as just some machine that should be relegated to technicians, but a tool you can use on the front-lines, as something you yourself should get hands-on with. So let's talk about tag management with Ricardo Cristofolini.With a background in Tourism and Hospitality Management and International Trade, Ricardo Cristofolini's Analytics professional journey began when he arrived in Canada in 2015 to study at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, where he earned an Ontario College Diploma in Computer Programming, Networked Environment, and Programming Languages from 2015 to 2017. There, he had the opportunity to put together previous professional knowledge with brand new one exploring multiple subjects, from Web and App Development to cloud computing, Database structure, and much more.
Transitioning to the workforce, Ricardo served as a Web Developer at FilmFX from December 2017 to December 2019, gaining two years of experience. In March 2018, Ricardo expanded his skills at Pondstone Digital Marketing, specializing in WordPress, Content Management, and other relevant areas until February 2019. At this point, he had already fallen in love with Analytics and Data Tracking. His expertise continued to evolve as he took on the role of Senior Data Analytics Implementation at Bounteous Canada from July 2021 to October 2022 He currently holds the position of Napkyn Senior Implementation Specialist Data Solutions, a role he has been dedicated to since 2022.
In his spare time, when not reading about Analytics and developing his knowledge (and earning a badge from Linkedin as Top Web Analytics Voice), Ricardo supports others' new adventures in this field on multiple social media platforms answering questions and providing guidance.
Originating from Brazil, Ricardo Cristofolini's professional trajectory reflects a dynamic and progressively challenging path within the realms of web development, digital marketing, and data analytics implementation.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:04:55 - Ricardo on GTM and Google Tag
00:27:40 - PSA
00:28:30 - All about Server-side Tagging
00:49:06 - Where to contact Ricardo
Links to all People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show #189 is available at the Funnel Reboot site.
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Episode 188
Dana DiTomaso embarked on her digital marketing journey over 20 years ago, initially working in tech support for a CRM before founding a web design company in 2002. In 2000, clients sought her expertise in increasing website traffic, propelling her into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By 2012, Dana became an active participant in the SEO community, sharing insights on technical and local SEO topics.
Dana, having typed her first line of code in 1982, consistently demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and started delivering talks and presentations since 1998. Recognizing the potential of digital-first marketing, she founded three businesses that educate entrepreneurs and organizations. As the founder and lead instructor of KP Playbook, Dana teaches the "Analytics for Agencies" course and manages a thriving learner community, emphasizing proven principles over quick tips. Notably, none of her clients have faced Google penalties to date.
Dana lives in an old growth forest near Victoria BC.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:01 - Welcome Dana
00:08:18 - The unvarnished view of data given by GA4
00:16:33 - Using custom reports and exploration tab
00:22:41 - Giving other users access to Reports
00:26:39 - PSA
00:27:25 - Reporting through Looker Studio
00:35:08 - Why knowing some UX helps
00:38:54 - Pulling other data sources together with GA data
00:44:01 - Looker studio tactics
00:53:18 - Where to contact Dana
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 188.
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