AI: The Future of Digital Marketing (Live Video)

Source: YouTube auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned (repeated caption lines removed, misheard brand names corrected).

0:08about this new world we're about to get into I'm about to get into anyway today's episode is going to be all things AI trust in the future so welcome to the digital marketing playground the host here John Williams the business upper leftand corner it all started with an idea to me AI is everything we've come such a long ways I remember when somebody was like the algorithm and this automation we didn't have any control over where the ads were at I remember hey the AI is out bitting my manual ecpc for Google back in like 2015 boy we come a long ways in 2025 where people are interchanging now forget P PC and paid search and CPC people are interchanging agents and tools and different platforms um it's wild it's real wild it's the Wild Wild West as they say um overall though this podcast and the many

episodes that are are going to come down the road we're going to talk about all things paid media so that includes search display video maybe even some of the audio stuff we can talk about life and we're going to talk about agency World we're going to talk about in-house we're going to talk about Amazon we're going to talk about meta we're going talk about IG and Facebook underneath meta we're going to talk about all the things digital advertising and for a while maybe it's just going to be me forever some days maybe I'll be lucky enough and I have some people here rapping with me about paid media and pay search and having a good time but let's just jump right in right so one of the most exciting things today and it's on everybody's nogin is the impact of AI are we all going to have jobs a year

from now two years from now most of us aren't that's the hard Cold Truth today we have a lot of doers so coordinators and Associate level strategist whatever you want to call them that all they do is go into the office every day and they upload ads and they can't have good conversations they can't talk about strategy and pmax is so scary um Advantage Plus is so scary but are they really um why because we don't have control and everything we do in our life we want to control it ex SE for it's not about us this world isn't about us this world is about everybody else that's the left to the right to the front and behind us and pmax helps us get there um a form of AI right when you open it up some accounts have Gemini functioning listening and learning we

can't control placements and performance performance Max we get to add themes we're just now getting the ability to add negatives at scale into the account um not changing a whole lot but think of it as what Facebook has been doing now for a couple years and Advantage Plus is rocking if your account in meta doesn't have Advantage Plus what are you doing whether e-commerce or Legion are you really building out a thousand campaigns with 100 individual assets are you really taking the Scag mentality to meta come on pmax same thing right it's all creative it's all audience based there's some text but it really is about reaching top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel with video and then there's in the middle this consideration stuff when people go to google.com and they they type in whatever that brand is it could be Nike it could be the Cincinnati

3:49Reds it could be Michigan go Blue absolutely better than Ohio State by the way and we can make that a conversation but it's placing your ads performance Max is placing your ads across search so google.com they're Partners so you got maps and the weather stuff that they got going on YouTube and the hundreds of channels that are there and then there's the Display Network which you have very little little control over that unless you just pick like three websites though what's interesting about all of this is the ability to optimize and ai's capability real time within performance Max within search within display it's always been around right with Dynamic ads we're just now seeing it as a tool some of us are using it more than others I'm 3 4 hours a day so about 10:00 at night my brain just goes and I'm coding

I'm using cursor I'm using Claude for sure I'm working on my python somebody said like this no code thing I don't know anything about that I'm just going in and doing my best to come up with the script or some sort of tool that's that's going to do a lot of the insight and work for me so I can focus on strategy right um and and then what's super important about all this though and with AI and where it's going and performance Max and Advantage Plus is like was it ever really about the automation being a problem or was it just about the data right and so when you think about each of these platforms and what goes into these platforms right um are there any good without data no what is the minimum threshold it's 50 conversions how do you get your minimum Budget on Facebook it's like 50 to 75

conversions times whatever your CPA is so whatever your cost to acquire a customer is that should be your budget I mean that's no different than Google ads in terms of best practice for some folks they can get there in a day because they just have really a really great brand and they're selling clothes and and dumb stopping stuff for social media and then Google ads take casley as an example this is a plug of your what do you call this thing iPhone and so they sell different cases everything from like six bucks all the way up to 30 40 bucks I mean they're selling hundreds of those things a day thousands it doesn't take them very long to get to the threshold where these tools performance Max and performance Max AI their automation is is taking over but now let's talk about AI differently right Beyond these

6:32thresholds beyond what it takes for the system to work for you let's talk about claw let's talk about open AI deep seek oh my g right these different tools are much different than what we've known and rightly so why because you don't have to go to google.com to find an answer you don't have to beat around the bush sure there's studies out there that says the information isn't always always accurate but what is I'm definitely not and I know you're not always correct right um it's trial and there but are you smart enough can you think through that process can you ask a better question to get more out of the platform that you're using do you know what to look for are you already asking all of the right questions why are my keywords not working are my bids not high enough do I

have the right ads what's the experience before um the consumer clicks on the ad is the message resonate what's your strategy how does it lead to your objective are we already asking these questions right where it's all about the audience it's not about us so then when you go into these tools and maybe they're pumping out incorrect information for the free version but if you pay for the right version and you put in the time four five hours day two hours a day an hour a day in these platforms you learn how they work and it starts to learn you so then it becomes your personality right these tools are powerful resources in order to make your work better make your strategy more efficient and answer a lot of questions that you used to have to go through a bunch of hurdles to get a response from

I remember working in the agency World way back in the day for this company by the name of cdk global and I got to tell you gosh I had to go through engineering and development and I had to go put in a jira ticket and then I had to sit down in a governance meeting and then it had to be waited for cost and what was the efficiency for it and then if I was lucky and an engineer or developer picked it up if I was lucky and it made Financial sense for the business because I had to think about scale was it just for me or was it for the rest of the business and what was the efficiency behind it then I had to hope that the person working on it knew enough about advertising to be able to even implemented oh was that painful and then

9:02you go internal man the bureaucracy internally and Matrix organization is a whole another level I mean at Farmers back in the day just to get a call only ad stood up for uh their local agents and mind you people aren't filling out forms for insurance they just want to pick up the phone or go online and complete the process it was like well I've never have my my teeth pulled and I still have my wisdoms gosh just to say hey I want to have somebody look at an ad click on it and call the agent so they can get pricing was like pulling tee I had to put in a process for that right and then I had to explain it then I had to go through Tech then I had to go through engineering because they need to tag the site they need to update Google tag

manager they need to make sure that there was no um conspiracy hack the website from a phone number that was like back in the day you didn't have a lot of control now today you don't need to go through that entire process in fact you yourself as a strategist or um an Advertiser you could instead of going to google.com and going through some gate and big book you could go to uh open AI type in your thought if you know what you're looking for if you're asking all the right questions and it can build it out for you it can help you do the process um it could even in some instances I'm not recommending this but you could use their tool to take over your screen and build it for you right it's just it's really really cool to be an engineer to be a developer is really hard right now

advertisers again are worried about their jobs and they should be Engineers should be worried about their jobs developers should be worried about their jobs why because you have this tool that millions of people are now using and dumping all their information into it all of their questions all their howtos in it's soaking it up and it's taking everything that was once Incorrect and it's taking the things that are correct and it's saying wow okay this does work and so for every time something becomes right or is correct I don't know if the if the word right even fits if it's something that's a correct process it can think through so many different iterations that you could plug it into a hundred different websites and say oh I know how to do this process and then extrap and put it into this process and it gets it done for you in 30 minutes

not days not weeks not governance not process none of that it can map it out for you as an Advertiser it can map it out for you as a marketer it can map it out for you as a developer even as an engineer it's a very thoughtful tool AI this world of AI now whether it's deep seek it's up to you is it CLA I do think CLA is a better coding tool than open AI today I was using open AI or ChatGPT as my primary coding Tool uh to build scripts for Google ads no longer I use cursor I don't go to Gemini it's a little funky even though it's a Google product don't recommend it co-pilot is really great for Creative but now there's a bunch of creative tools that are out there to me the go-tos really are Claude and open AI or ChatGPT I use

12:25ChatGPT like I use grammarly before I send emails or put something together processes or if I'm working on say some uh project to deliver to elt I'm I'm going to work do that and I'm going to have it be my partner and my peer to check my work to substantiate my numbers and then also I'm going to know if something's funky or odd because I'm going to ask all the right questions right or I'm going to attempt to ask all the right questions I'm not going to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to go into Excel anymore and create a bunch of if statements I'm gonna say hey AI here's this if statement that I need to create can you map this back to this data and then plug it in and say yeah here's this code pop it into the cell I then it takes care of

all the work for me why would you be scared of that as a marketer why would you be scared of that as a business person I don't get it right Ai and the power of it is ridiculous tying that now back to Google ads skip that world when you come into Google ads and you're thinking about the power of this Automation and what is performance Max I had the privilege of working with monum at jxt group and I remember there was this social style feeds and then you had shopping style and I think he is the inventor of that by the way sort of like Larry Kim is the unicorn person um and then there are a few other folks that you can tie things too but that process works and it works still very well today and in fact the default is to have a

shopping style at M pmax and if that doesn't work because you're not getting enough volume and that system still not working the way you need to is that you can go back to standard shopping but the whole idea is is that you just get a little bit more control but you let the audiences and the signals within pmax do its thing from the social style right so that means you just have creative in there with your headlines and your titles but you don't put your your shopping fee together that was a hack for a while now today I don't know that you need to do that right um and I think you can still have both together so I do think you can have a performance Max campaign where all your asset groups are nothing but uh creative and creative matters 100% you do need to have strong

creative for performance Max to work if you have bad creative you're going to have a bad performance Max campaign it's not going to be the best campaign because it is serving display ads and it is serving video so you should invest in that and then you have your shopping feed or another campaign that's performance Max that's all about shopping and then you can break it out you know just just say you're like some boutique store and you sell shirts and shoes and flip flops you want to have your shoes separate from your flipflops and you want to have your different shirts you know based on season in different in different asset groups no different this standard shopping right and it's magic Now with uh what is this a search Max coming here soon the idea that you're going to turn over what is an RSA standard text campaign search

15:38campaign over into what is very similar early similar to Performance Max for like shopping and display ads is wild but don't forget there's something that's hidden off to the right side that a lot of people ain't paying attention to is Gemini when you log into Google ads and you're you're in there and you're looking at that you're like oh I'm not going to use that tool so you just ignore it but in the background it's watching everything that you're doing it's watching how you're typing it's learning all of the different options that you're setting because my hypothesis is one day Gemini is going to run all of your Google ads campaigns and the only option you're going to have it's kind of like Advantage Plus and meta nobody's complaining about meta um and all of the automation from the resizing of ad to the text to the

suggestions of now they have their own version of site links and call outs how's complaining about that not at least in my feed right and my feed is pretty diverse from the CEOs mostly to a lot of In-House folks I try to Kill The Noise uh in terms of um people complaining about like this and telling me that this is the new best way I'm like as soon as I see that I'm like I never want to see that again but L A lot of people are complaining about that again going back to the very beginning of this conversation do we really deserve to control our media if we don't know what we're doing I mean do you know how many advertisers set it in forget it do you know how many advertizers on a daily basis actually update their manual bits kills accounts I mean I see the Red

Label of that minimum bid for the first page not eligible and they're Gathering all these impressions these clicks at like a dollar or some change I me I'm not saying you need to be $20 CPC are you really doing yourself a favor you're not updating your ad you don't have all of the possible headlines and the descriptions I'm not saying you should have that or that it's a must but we do know the more headlines you have the more Impressions you're likely to get because those headlines match to the 80% of how people are searching plus the 20% or 30% new searches that occur every every stinking single day and we're lucky if we get 30 to 40% of all of those unique search queries put into our account right so that we can actually see what's working so are we doing the best for our accounts or are we doing

18:13the best for ourselves you have to ask yourself that question right and when you think about the world of of digital marketing and and what this is think of it like Disneyland this is a plug right when you walk into Disney in the land there's not garbage and trash everywhere there's not bugs you're not getting eaten up by mosquitoes it's a very delightful very trustworthy very clean very humbling experience and you're engaged from the food to the rides to the PE the people watching is absolutely amazing the characters walking around are absolutely amazing it's a very engaging process that is automated almost it's almost mechanical when you walk in there from the lines to the food just the whole entire process so why can't our advertising be the same way why can't you just let the RS go I used to try and beat it I used to say oh man

with ecpc I can beat uh tcpa I could beat Taz why would I turn it over I remember that that was like 2015 though it's 2025 I don't have time to go in and to worry about whether a bit is doing its thing no if I have warnings or labels that means I'm doing too much I need to turn the re over so the system could focus on that and I dial in the strategy gone are the days where we need to control everything we need to start focusing on strategy y'all and AI can help us with the rest and I'm not talking about Claude and I'm not talking about ChatGPT or gemini or co-pilot or deep seek or the other whatevers that are out there I'm really talking about four Page search letting it go turning over the keys to Performance Max to

demand Jin so that we can focus on strategy and have better conversations with our clients the people that are asking us to help them put food on their plates and grow their business AI is funky nobody really understands it it's going to be a long time right now it's just guess word it and there are students out there I I'm a student again I'm 4 hours a day there's some weekend I'm like 8 to 10 I built an agent hybrid that analyzes thousands of accounts tells me what's working and what's not working and can even make changes it's not out in the public I'm still holding on to it right I'm still working on it I'm still refining it and I built now scripts that didn't exist I built I didn't have the skill set to do it now with open Ai and practice and lots of time and commitment

and error and invest I was able to do it it helps it can help with how you communicate it can help with math it can help with engineering I don't think it can solve love problems at this time but it can definitely challenge Theory it can give you the skills that you don't have if you just take the time to learn it like anything else in life right football basketball baseball cooking my four goldens taking care of them you first got to get one to learn how to take care of it and they're pretty cool I have four one too many I love them but it's like anything until you do it you don't know some people don't want to know and that's okay the world will move past you just like time and then there's a place if you don't want to be part of that there are other

21:38places for you to go that that will help you with that but you must invest in that you must invest in Ai and for the only reason is so that you can keep up as an Advertiser with where the industry is going 2 years from now if you're a coordinator you're not going to have a role if all you're doing is pull in levers an SEO somebody's telling you what to do and you just go into the platform and you do it you're not going to have a job not if you're an analyst today in a company really is like I don't know like why today you even still have a role doesn't make sense Your Role if you are an analyst should be checking the work that whatever tool you're using is there is there a reason why you're using sap anymore to like do a log for

account I think it's ridiculous you could just pump that spreadsheet into Excel of numbers and then say hey AI look at this tell me this and give me this forecast it use Basin and whatever other um model that you want to use and it does it he don't need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to crunch you know hundreds of numbers you don't have to do that anymore to build an ad for display it's been around for a long time for Automation and generation for ads Dynamic that's been around for a decade at minimum right Dynamic ads the concept for automated bids those plat platforms have been around for a long time forever long campaign manager and sa 360 has been around that's been there it's been Enterprise level right and I'm not talking about like the optimizers and the worst streams of the world th those

are simple products that stack on top of Google ads and Microsoft ad I'm talking about legitimate forecasting and development and AI tools I've been around in advertising for a while now you can take that concept and put it into the business and it automates it for you Embrace AI it's here to help you so that you can focus on strategy for the businesses that you serve right and it will one day be just as authentic as you your tool whichever one you choose to use your agent or body of work through that agent right that concept will look like you sound like you feel like you it will be a spitting image of your day-to-day for work don't hold out search is changing the world's evolving get on with it my first podcast I think it was a mix I don't know we're going to

24:11see how the output looks but this is my first one I'm going to do more and more and more but today was about Ai and my passion for it and kind of the noise that's out there like kill it get involved start practicing if you're not you're behind and you're not going to have a job two years and I don't wish that upon anybody go get it done go learn it peace and love y'all from JW it all started with an idea it's been a blessing to be able to to talk with you and chat with y'all today love