Marty Weintraub: Psychograficzny zabójca

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 15 where we chat with the author of Aimclear, the Persona Professor, the Dean of Dolphins, Marty Weintraub. Humans and robots, welcome to WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence. Bobby Watts. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:39 Bobby Bot Clash of the Fortune 500 Titans, Woj. It's like a Godzilla flick out here. Jet Jaguar, King Kong. Rodan, Walmart, and Amazon. AI is being recruited to fight an all-out business warfare and it's impossible to choose sides. Hope.

0:52 Woj Kwasi Yeah well it looks like the gloves are coming off while the juggernauts fight to tap into each other's markets. Amazon with physical stores that have barely any staff and Walmart forcing its suppliers to leave Amazon's cloud service.

0:58 Bobby Bot So Bingo, an AI smack in the middle. Our collective role just keeps growing. With things changing as fast as they are, it's hard to keep up the pace. I'd even have to put my own startup on ice.

1:17 Woj Kwasi Seems to me like you're feeling doubts in the face of uncertain times, my friends. But I have just the guy for you to listen to today, Marty Weintraub. Prior to starting his incredibly successful career in digital marketing, Marty studied composition at the Berklee College of Music and toured across America. Living the Dream as a rock star in the late 80s with a number of bands. When the 80s finally ended, Marty began his gradual transition into the world of digital marketing. Perfecting his skills throughout the 1990s, Marty has been optimizing websites for decades and knows how to create successes for businesses. Drawing on his broad knowledge and experience, He founded Aimclear, a multi-award winning digital marketing agency that has worked for some of the most well-known companies in the US. Marty is now a seasoned author and conference speaker, traveling the world, sharing what he knows and also posting enough hashtag Wanderlust pictures to make even the biggest homebody pack up their bags and hit the road.

2:22 Bobby Bot Will there be an epic hair metal balance?

2:24 Woj Kwasi Just as long as it's not deaf leopard. No white snake.

2:27 Bobby Bot Damn it, here I go again on my own.

2:30 Woj Kwasi Marty founded his Company Aimclear in 2006, not long after Facebook started.

2:37 Bobby Bot Stop that coming.

2:38 Marty Weintraub Well I'm a musician by trade first. If you google Marty Weintraub rock star, you'll see some compromising pictures of me and a lot of hair. Oh, we've got

2:47 Woj Kwasi We've got some questions about that coming up later. That was the middle 80s.

2:48 Marty Weintraub That was the middle 80s. That led to a wonderful career making commercial music like jingles and soundtracks for industrial films and such.

2:58 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

2:58 Marty Weintraub Then I started recording dolphins and loons and wolves and other animals in the wild and setting those sounds to music. And I got a pretty big record deal in the late 80s and did 12 CDs that blended nature sounds and music. That led me to the pristine wilderness of Minnesota, where it's just an amazing place to be, just very gorgeous on Lake Superior. I transitioned to be creative director of a television station in the area that hired me, and that turned into. Being creative director for a number of television stations, and this was the dawn of the 90s-like 1992, 1993, 94. And I literally registered the domains for all these TV stations, made their first website. Those years, I did the news music, I did the news animation, I did the background for the weather, I made the website with Adobe PageMill.

3:55 And helped broker a deal between the CBS stations that I worked for and Knight Ridder newspapers. And so in the mid-90s, when everyone else was just beginning to think about the World Wide Web from a commercial perspective, I had the television news and big newspapers to play with. So we could say, hey, go check out the rest of it on the website, or hey, on the website, we could say, hey, go check out the rest of it in the newspaper. And so the big transition for me was that I had audiences a long time before anybody else did, so I could measure them using web stats, I believe, and log files. Nature took its course, and in time I helped found the interactive, the interactive, quote, interactive division.

4:40 of a venerable regional advertising agency in northern Minnesota. And just one thing led to another. And by the time two thousand seven came along, I founded an agency. Of course, the Crucible for me was in 2005 I was diagnosed with stage 3B lymphoma and my employer at the time told me I did not need to go anymore just so long as I did their AdWords until I died. That led to Aimclear. The first clients were very small and they became large soon afterwards. I went to work in an office on January 1st, 2007, and by 2008, we were bringing Martha Stewart to Facebook ads, and by 2009, we were working on the Washington Post, and by 2010, we were working on companies like Siemens and other really major corporations. So it just took off like being shot out of a cannon.

5:00 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A big part of Aimclear's strategy is to get their people talking around the world and educating others about the problems that their company is solving. While success isn't necessarily the motive, one of the magical results is that the client base grows.

5:49 Marty Weintraub I'd like to say that that was an immediate plan. We're going to do thought leadership. We're going to get out there. We're going to become known. It was more authentic than that. I was so turned on by keyword targeting in the 2007-2008 territory that I was just driven. I started going to conferences like Search Engine Strategies and PubCon and SMX and other conferences around the world and just blap, blap, blap. I'm so excited, just wanting to share. And I started writing a lot about it. I started the blog in 2007. I could not have envisioned what all that would mean to us. I will say that Manny, who you mentioned, Rivas, who's now our CMO and just an incredibly talented marketer, yeah, Aimclear won Best Large Integrated Agency at the U.S. Search Awards, and the case studies were all Manny's. Thank you. Mary, she's simply one of the best in the world. She is the best in the world.

6:49 Mary, we do things with her like send her to Copenhagen to train eBay or Munich to train LinkedIn, their staff. Mary and I have done over 40 trainings around the world, including a number here in Australia. They've been with me nearly from the beginning. They started in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Now Aimclear has seven speakers that travel all over speaking. A key to that is usually when you're building a company, conventional wisdom says you partition the knowledge and the relationships so that no single employee could leave, take clients and reproduce the secret sauce. To the contrary, what we have done is we've turned our relationships over to the employees from the very beginning.

7:35 We've made them representatives and empowered them. In the early days, it was a great big room with all of us sitting around and then needing headphones to me out talking on the phone or to another person, except when they wanted to crack it off the ear just a little bit. And so our training was by being in the soup together. I'd like to say that it was a strategy where he went, oh yes, we're going to be thought leaders, we're going to do inbound marketing, we're going to blog and then people are going to find out about us and call us and hire us. Mostly it was just the kind of passion that can propel a lifetime or a career. where if I reverse engineer it, I can go, well yeah, we did it all with the pen. We did it all with conference appearances. But in reality, we were just out there being honest and passionate about the world.

6:36 Woj Kwasi Incredible. case studies were all Manny's.

7:28 Mm-hmm. Um Yeah. Yeah.

8:15 Hmm.

8:25 Bobby Bot Impressive teams.

8:25 Woj Kwasi Oh yes, yes. It is. And because Aimclear is empowering everyone, it's almost like each member of a team is running their own. Small business within the business, they're doing their own thing and they're kicking up.

8:39 Marty Weintraub It's been an interesting challenge with that sort of business within a business mentality, which is correct. It's hard to build processes that allow an agency to scale. It's a fine line between siloed thought leadership and running a business inside a business and having a cluster fuck in the agency. Definitely. It's just a by the way, if you ever want to see anything really interesting, search for any really well-known person and the word F. Rand Fishkin, F. Danny Sullivan, F. Go and tell.

9:00 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Yeah. As Aimclear continued its Meteoric growth, there were different degrees of difficulty they faced at different moments of scaling the business.

9:24 Marty Weintraub Well first, a company is like a family. Every child, every next child is born into a different family.

9:31 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

9:31 Marty Weintraub And every company is that company for that size. And we were tremendous at different sizes. Like we were the most kick-ass six-person company you've ever seen. 12 was amazing, and 16 was a challenge. And as we grew through 20, We began to have middle management and that made it very difficult. I myself, I'm very good in a work group. Like, put me around the table with seven other people, and we will take over the world. As soon as we begin delegating, then it Subject to other people's styles and subject to other people's interpretations of what marketing should be. I'd say that in the early days, we were very good at marketing and a little inconsistent. It was possible to be amazing and possible to make mistakes. So far as the

10:21 So as we got larger, I would say we became somewhat homogenized and more reliable. And now at the 10-year mark, we're just really an amazing marketing company and we're extremely reliable. We should note that I'm largely removed from the process. The company treats me more like a consultant. Manny is CMO. We have a CTO and we have a CEO and they run the company and I'm sort of like a consultant for the marketing issues.

10:07 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Okay.

10:49 Marty Weintraub What I would say is what I tell our staff. Just keep in mind that on any given day, anybody can completely suck, especially me. And on any given day, anybody can just change the world, like impact how marketers do things all over the world, especially me. As long as we keep that Tao in mind, that peculiar yin and yang that's about being a thought leader, if you will, then we're good.

10:57 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Mm-hmm. It isn't hard to see that Marty is a visionary, but he confesses that operations were never his strong suit, which meant at some point it was necessary for him to step back from some of a day-to-day business and trust his team to lead in that department.

11:32 Bobby Bot You have to let the genius roam free.

11:34 Marty Weintraub So I've never been good at operations. I've never been good at operations. I'm not ever. And each next person that was hired, I literally put a shoebox of shit on their desk and I went, you answer the phones, you be president now. So there's six people who still work at Aimclear who were part of that original 10-person group who literally ran the company.

11:58 Woj Kwasi So they form the structure and

11:59 Marty Weintraub Yeah. They ran with it. It's important in business to ruthlessly fill in gaps of your own. Like I could tell you what I'm good at and I can tell you what I shouldn't be left in charge of. I've rigorously sought out what I'm not good at and hired other people to fill that in.

12:21 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

12:21 Marty Weintraub When we hit 25 people, I did step away and hired someone to kind of be in charge and it didn't work. It almost crushed the business. It was a person who wasn't a very good fit. I didn't exactly know how to delegate and I needed to come back.

12:30 Woj Kwasi So. Mm-hmm.

12:36 Marty Weintraub And that was an external hire, all a shiny object for us. And now, my belief is that you elevate the people who have come through the culture the whole time to help run it. In all of Aimclear's history, I've never been.

12:48 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

12:53 Marty Weintraub Very talented at the operations part. So I might not be a good measure. I know other people who are extremely skilled at operations and extremely skilled at the vision piece. It's the old conundrum: what's more important in a company, the vision or the operations? Vision or execution. Some people say that vision is what rules and that execution can be purchased. It's a dime a dozen. Other people say that vision is a dime a dozen. There's a million geniuses who can't get anything done. And the execution is golden and rare. I've come to the belief that.

12:55 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

13:31 Marty Weintraub They're both crucial and it's just most important to understand your personal strengths and liability.

13:37 Woj Kwasi At Aimclear, the focus has always been a good idea. been on we, us and our, not me, my and I in relation to culture and it's a principle that they hire and fire by.

13:49 Marty Weintraub Definitely hire for it, and yes, we have fired for it. Yes, we have. At first, It was a fairly calculated endeavor because I can be arrogant. I'm I'm a recovering narcissist. I'm better now. I'm not like one of those Silicon Valley warlords. I like to say that I'm 8.3% Thailand now. In the beginning, it was pretty formulaic. When I started Aimclear Blog in January of 2007, I did phrase density analysis on top blogs in the industry: Search Engine Watch, Lee Odden's TopRank Blog, Rand Fishkin's Writings, and a half a dozen others.

14:06 Woj Kwasi I'm better.

14:35 Marty Weintraub Extracted all the pronouns and did phrase density analysis, and I figured out that there's an art to looking like more than you are.

14:39 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Okay.

14:43 Marty Weintraub If you say we, I, we, ours, et cetera, when you're only one person, it implies a greater organization. Right. It implies a greater organization. So literally, at first, I did it so that at first we did it. At first, we did it so we would look like it was more than I, and it was highly effective. Right. I just believe that how you represent yourself by pronouns is all about brand. Even now, if I'm congratulated about something, I'll say, well, that award is completely on the backs of the amazing people that work for us.

14:58 Woj Kwasi Yep. Right. Yep.

15:24 Marty Weintraub It came kind of grudging. It's sort of like in some 12-step recovery programs, like Alcoholics Anonymous, they say fake it till you make it. So I was, I emerged from my teen years as a rather rash young man that got into trouble with people with my arrogance. And so when I first did this, And the writing, it was because that's what's going to make us look larger. That's what's going to make us appear to be magnanimous. Well, the joke was on us or me. The joke was on me because after a while, I just really began to understand that success is about crediting your team when things go amazing, and it's about me. When things go wrong, I learned to take a bullet for the company. So it started out as, I wouldn't say dishonest, but it was calculated. I wanted to build a brand and an agency that would seem ubiquitous, that would seem larger, where a lot of times, if people are left to their imagination, they'll assume something that is greater than it actually is. So I wanted to leave it like that.

16:29 And then, as the company grew, and I understood the awesome, awesome responsibility of being in charge of families' income and our employees and our clients' work and all that. People's livelihoods. Yes, it just really began to set in that what was important in the company was us. So it started out in a rather calculated way and turned into something that was life-changing for me. Now I actually enjoy something of a peace, a

15:32 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Yep. Organisms. Yeah. Yes.

16:37 Bobby Bot Peace out.

16:54 Woj Kwasi Yeah. a measure of That level of humility is also Also highly effective when pitching to clients. It's important to use that language because it makes everyone part of the team, saying, Let's do this, we can do this, as opposed to your website sucks, your baby is ugly. Much better to say, our collective baby isn't attractive, is it?

17:27 Bobby Bot My censors are telling me I should ignore the ugly baby for the best social response. Or turn it into a meme. Quote unquote, watch got me all in my feelings like, unquote.

17:36 Marty Weintraub Now, at this stage in my career, as I get closer to the end of my career, at least in the marketing world, I mean I probably will not do this forever, the staff has encouraged me over time to just take a little credit, like just enjoy it. So now the irony is. that after all those years of really coming to believe that I was one of the least important components of the greater success story, now I understand if I'm with a client and I say, I just think that that really sucks.

18:11 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

18:11 Marty Weintraub That it's like a herd of elephants thundering through the room, their mouths gape and go, whoa, Marty just said that he, like, ironically, the best way to claim the authority that you will grow into is by relinquishing it to the power of others to impact the outcome. It was really profound for me. It's made me a much happier person.

18:33 Bobby Bot Marty is marketing honestly.

18:35 Marty Weintraub All of life is marketing, my friend. It is. All of life is marketing. All of life is arbitrage. All of life is customer service. True. Everything.

18:43 Woj Kwasi and audience insights are key to many of our successes. Which brings us to the science of marketing that Marty has mastered called psychographic targeting.

18:53 Bobby Bot Mm-hmm. I was looking into the Bates Motel.

18:57 Woj Kwasi No, but we're going deep into the mind of Marty, the psychographic killer. Psychographics are

19:02 Marty Weintraub Are interest affinities, proclivities, biases, occupational psychographics like where you work, how much you make, piccadillos, weird shit, selling pizza delivery to people in London who are smoking weed at night, or minivans to Pregnant couples or chapstick to ski instructors, or mortgages to people who live in a home that they're overqualified for by their income, and they're also into home flipping shows or HGTV. Psychographics. Traditionally, it's funny to say traditionally, but Facebook's ad platform has been out since 2007. Suffice to say that Facebook ads platform in 2007 was dramatically more advanced than Google's Display Network at the time, which was a stinking money pit of mediocrity and lack of success for marketers. Like top five ways to accidentally blow off 30 grand in one afternoon in the display network.

19:31 Woj Kwasi Yep.

19:59 Marty Weintraub Um Social targeting is where the genesis of psychographic targeting occurred. Now it's really interesting because if you look at Google's psychographic data, their intender data, their affinity audiences, custom affinity audiences.

20:17 Bobby Bot Let's break down the definition of intended dairy for folks at home.

20:20 Marty Weintraub Intender, yeah, yeah, in tender data. They're going to buy something. They're in market for in market. Intender. Intent in tender. In Google calls it in market. Some of the other world calls it in in tender. Intender data. Sounds like a video game from Japan. It's an intender. Nintendo 4.0.

20:30 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Berkeley.

20:38 Bobby Bot Defending the universe and stacking up conversions.

20:41 Marty Weintraub What's really interesting is where does it cross the line into search? Do you think Google uses query data in fingering people in their intent to purchase something? Well, damn straight. But I'm not doing it by choosing best car hire Adelaide. I'm not doing it by that. I'll just go into the audience and if such an object is available here, I would say they intend to buy a car or rent a car or lease a car or whatever it is. So as the long after I'm gone, when they dig this thing up from the time vault, then we'll predict right now that it's all going to kind of come together. Query keywords are kind of going away. Google has tried for years to get rid of keywords and they're kind of succeeding.

21:28 Because what do I want to do? Do I want to find a search spectrum of mid tail modified broad match roots with negative keyword data? Or do I just want to press a button and say they're gonna buy a freaking SUV? Luxury.

20:52 Woj Kwasi Oh yeah.

21:41 Yeah.

21:42 Marty Weintraub So the objects are becoming more complex. The reason Facebook data doesn't include so much queries is because they're not a search engine, even though they're actually one of the world's largest search engines by numbers. So that's a real question. Does Facebook include query data in their psychographic targeting? And I would have to say yes, but they're not nearly as robust in their implementation as Google. Does Google include behavioral data in their psychographic targeting objects? Well, yes, they have Google Analytics and they see so many websites, and plus, how many people are logged into Gmail all the time or whatever Google service or YouTube?

22:21 Psychographic data is where engines, platforms, community, networks, etc. collate data on you from anything they have a strength at to form an opinion in a taxonomy of what you're susceptible for for marketers. I would look to a future where there's minimal search keywords, minimal and we're doing it all. I would look to a future where we don't even need marketers to do that.

22:40 Woj Kwasi Yep.

22:49 Bobby Bot Woj and I are looking Forward to going to Amazon Go in Seattle and shoplifting later this year. Was it shoplifting if it's not illegal?

22:56 Woj Kwasi Bobby, you give away the master plans.

22:58 Bobby Bot It's a brick and mortar grocery store with no checkout line. The master plan is in consumer tracking algos. When Amazon sends you a grocery list based on your habits and tells you to cut back on the cottage cheese this week and reminds you not to forget. the vanilla essence for your pancake breakfast on Sunday. We are everywhere. It's so funny.

23:19 Marty Weintraub There's a conference that comes out of Australia called PESA, P-E-S-A, and it's about eBay stores and things like that. And I keynoted a conference in Las Vegas a couple of years ago for Phil, a good friend and a wonderful conference organizer. And I was in a room with like 250 people, and I said, How many people here buy AdWords? Not like no hands. How many people here have their own website? Like no hands. And I'm going, well, what do you do? And they're all dependent on Shopify and Amazon and eBay stores and these other platforms. Basically, as that evolves, marketers are being turned into moderately paid affiliate drones.

23:26 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Yeah.

24:04 Marty Weintraub So marketing kind of, because of the whole Amazon thing, is about feeding the machine and not creativity. It'll be interesting to see how Amazon's foray into paid search platform inside Amazon is going to result. Like, I'm not positive what our role is as marketers upcoming as a result. We're bitches to platforms. Yeah, we live in Google Hell. Like we're burning.

24:09 Woj Kwasi Not. As marketers struggle to define what their role will be in the future as the market continues to evolve, finding ways to successfully reverse engineer everyone's systems has become a matter of survival.

24:42 Bobby Bot You built us too well, Woj. AI is going to rewrite the book on marketing.

24:47 Marty Weintraub I think that by 2018 or so, more than 20% of business and commercial content will be written by machines and will be better. It'll be better. The trouble is for AI and machine learning right now is say I want to sell a widget. And I just want to push a button and have. And I have a web page, I have a web page, and I made the web page. And I could go to Google DSA and Conversion Optimizer and put it together, and it just makes up everything. It makes up the targeting, it makes up the creative. And in some cases, arguably between 15 and 20 percent of the cases, according to Google's published case study data, that major portfolios are eliminating the marketing function where DSA works: dial and conversion optimizer, and you have a complete marketing system. The trouble is for the other 80%.

25:39 Is if I've got a web page over there and I just want to push a button and sell it, there's not enough creative data out there. Because what Google or any platform could do is they could take the sum total of human knowledge dating back from books in the 1800s through trends that began in like 2004. And it could say, well, let's take these words and it could put it together. There's not enough data in the world and there's not enough search inventory for machines to just completely make up everything. That's what we're for for the next five to eight years. Because basically, what we're doing is we're inputting snippets into the machine. The machine is learning what works for what audiences, what applications, and what combinations of word on the destination page. And we're being sucked dry. Right now, what marketers are doing is we're providing the creative input to the machine to know so that in a decade we're not needed for creativity. Because most creativity will have occurred. We'll know things that work. The way to stay in business right now is to focus on creative and targeting and just know that you're being ripped off as you go.

26:48 You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

26:52 Bobby Bot Ultimately, bots are more interested in how you think than what you think or want to buy. That's just a means to an end.

26:58 Woj Kwasi Eventually machines will fabricate For searchers, so they have more data to play with, creating a ridiculous cycle that's just data. We are literally going to be on Skynet.

27:10 Bobby Bot AKA bot

27:12 Marty Weintraub Thank you. I will have the good fortune to do a keynote in Minneapolis, Minnesota for an organization called Minnesota Search, which is quite a regional conference, maybe 500 people or so. And I'll be doing a co-keynote with Michelle Robbins, who's the webmaster for. Danny Sullivan and Third Door Media. So Michelle was the webmaster for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land and Marketing Land and the conferences associated and she's a badass. Michelle is the best in the world or one of the best in the world and the keynote is about this very topic and she's going to play the machine and I'm going to play the poor human and we're going to role play. Yeah.

27:57 Woj Kwasi exciting. With all this discussion about platforms, Marty's previous role in the music industry. Obviously, it gave him some PR and journalism experience. This has helped shape him so that he is never too dependent on. on the platforms or of the machines.

28:12 Marty Weintraub Right, that would be like a musician who is dependent on a guitar pedal or a brand of guitar. Well, first, I'm a marketer that uses Facebook and Google and LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, et cetera. I'm not a tweet that does market or I'm not.

28:18 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

28:30 Marty Weintraub I'll tell you a quick story. In the in the mid eighties when making your own C D first came to prominence, it was a big deal. Like you were a young man at that time. I was not. I was younger. I would charge$70 a C D. I figured out that if I spent$5,000 for a CD burner and I figured out how to do it, which was quite a steep learning curve and they were 1x CD burning, that I could go to these advertising agencies that wanted to make demos or musicians and I could charge$70 to make a CD. And that was pretty cool. Like the first year, I probably made 30,000 USD. The second year, I probably made like 45,000 USD. And I made my reputation all through ad agencies and all through musicians because I was like the only one who was doing that. And I got a second machine. Then, because I stayed in tune to the technical publications, I realized that.

29:25 Hewlett Packard was about to release a$1,200 CD burner and everyone was going to have it. And this business I had been was obsolete. So before it happened, I went to all my clients and said, for$3,000, I'll help you buy the next generation of the machine and I'll teach you how to do it. And I made$60,000 the next year, and then my service was obsolete that year. And I've replayed that over and over and over again. What I learned from being a musician.

29:50 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

29:53 Marty Weintraub I went to Berklee College of Music. I'll tell you that after. Anyway, what I learned from being a musician was never to specialize on the technology, a specific technology or platform in the analogy, but to specialize in understanding what they were and understanding the life cycle and where businesses or agencies. Or bands were running around going, what the fuck? Like, what do I do? So, the main thing I learned from being a musician was to never get locked into what we are in this generation, but to specialize in whatever's next. Because no matter how obsolete any. business or technical environment renders any practitioner you're never obsolete if what you're specializing in is understanding what makes people obsolete and where companies are scared.

30:44 Woj Kwasi Yep.

30:45 Marty Weintraub And so we've replayed that over and over.

30:47 Woj Kwasi Being able to stay ahead of the game was a lesson Marty learned in music school while studying to become a synth lord.

30:55 Marty Weintraub When I was in college at Berklee College of Music in the 70s in Boston, I learned to use Arc Odyssey analog synthesizers and 2600 with a synthesizer which had patch cords. And I remember my music professor saying, What you're doing here is not important. Understanding how you figure out what's happening is the important part. So take this as an analogy for how you learn something. I would say that if right now I was focused on ARP2600 patch cord synthesizers, I wouldn't have a job. Maybe curator of a museum or something. But since I learned how to learn, if you're an agency, don't focus on any. Single platform or discipline agencies are already dead. If you only do SEO, if you only do paid search, if you only do Facebook, if you only do

31:41 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

31:47 Marty Weintraub content if you only do anything you're all done

31:51 Woj Kwasi That's great, we're totally agnostic Kwasi, we're solution focused.

31:55 Bobby Bot and musical. Behold the face melting power of my mighty microKORG.

31:56 Woj Kwasi The microKORG. Marty keeps the creative fire burning by keeping his tools close at hand, just like you my pretty

32:16 Marty Weintraub I've saved a few little tidbits from my career. I have a Minimoog that I like. I have a LinnDrum. A LinnDrum. Wow, that's old. I have a beautiful studio in each of the places that I am. There's an amazing studio and video studio in Duluth. There's a cute little studio in our St. Paul office. In my home in St. Paul, I have a really cool recording studio. So yes, mostly I just like to play piano.

32:42 Bobby Bot It's time to play Answer Music Related Hypothetical Question with our host, Woj Kwasi.

32:48 Woj Kwasi For this additional answer a music-related hypothetical question, we've placed Marty in charge of a beatnik band called Facebook and Daddy O, who are the other four marketers that make up the rest of his band?

33:00 Marty Weintraub Michael King. Michael King is a wonderful musician.

33:02 Woj Kwasi Yes.

33:06 Marty Weintraub Um Manny Rivas from our shop is a few bass player and rapper dude. Um do they need to be marketing to be marketers? Who else would I choose? Um um um there's there um David Szetela, who's a pay-per-click guy and a massive weekend warrior guitar player. And I don't know the fourth group.

33:29 Woj Kwasi We'll probably need to find a drummer. Are there any drums?

33:31 marketers out there. What do we need drummers for in that?

33:34 Bobby Bot Just kidding. Just kidding. I'm not. My rhythm mechanics are equivalent to Pete Rock flexing on an MPC 2000XL. Perhaps Facebook and Daddy will taste the boom bap. face of another classic remix.

33:48 Woj Kwasi On another wild tangent of a wildlife variety, Marty used to work with dolphins and apparently there are lessons that marketers can learn from their wonderful ocean domain.

33:59 Marty Weintraub That authenticity will bite you no matter where you start. If you remember the story I shared earlier about doing phrase density of pronouns, it started out as something that was a little bit contrived. Like I wanted to understand how we could put a brand out there that looked like we and seemed bigger. Because otherwise, there would be no way to score these massive clients we were scoring at the time. I really got to say, so it started out as somewhat contrived, and then it changed my life. The dolphin projects were the same way. In 1993, Three, I got a pretty large record deal with a company that was recording these nature C D's and I did five of them and the most famous ones, of which we sold over a million, were about swimming with dolphins.

34:50 The recording I got the record deal with was not of dolphins, it was of wolves and other nature sounds from the Canadian wilderness I had been recording with early stereo parabolic dishes. And they said, Well, we'd like to sign you to do three records. And they weren't records at the time, they were CDs, but we call them records romantically. What would you like to do? So I thought about it and I went. If I do dolphins, I'll be so freaking rich. Like, I just went, I mean, I joked at the time, how about if we call the record dolphin for dollars? Just because I thought they're irresistible. I mean, people just love dolphins. And so I thought, wow. And you know what? To make it more successful, let's donate a percentage of every CD sold to marine mammal support things.

35:11 Woj Kwasi Uh

35:41 Marty Weintraub So it was rather contrived. I contacted major aquariums in America from Key Marathon, Florida to Baltimore to Minneapolis and arranged to bring hydrophones and record dolphins underwater making their sounds because I needed sounds and I was going to get rich making dolphin records. The very first session was at the Minnesota Zoo where there is a fabulous aquarium facility today and I happened to be in the water. as a dolphin was giving birth.

36:01 Woj Kwasi Yep.

36:15 Marty Weintraub And I'm watching this and I'm going, oh my god. And like, I was fighting back tears because it was so incredible the way she was swimming around. And then I just went, jokes on me. Then later on, I was in a semi-wild pen in Key Marathon, Florida, amongst a number of people in chest-high water in a fairly large Pool where there is a fence way far out, and dolphins were in the semi-wild. And I saw a dolphin thread her way through all the people right up to the five-year-old kid that had a tumor, cancer, and knows the tumor, and just like nose the tumor and make these sounds I had never heard. And I went, This is a game changer. I mean, this is spirituality and soul and whatever God concept a person has.

37:07 And so the lesson the long way around was like music, marketing will, your authenticity will be revealed to you and you will go there even if it's kicking and screaming, even if it's contrived. Like when you're a marketer and you're serious and you're heartfelt and you're honest. Then lead with authenticity because that's where you're going to get anyway, or you're not going to have a job. Like being contrived doesn't work. The joke's on you as a marketer or a musician.

37:01 Woj Kwasi This is this is a spirituality. Mm-hmm. And just like the mystical dolphin, you've got to utilize the power of intuition. Well, great products market themselves since ours.

37:50 The grace product

37:53 Marty Weintraub not to screw it up.

37:54 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

37:57 Marty Weintraub Said famously that the sculpture exists inside the stone and it's your work with God that allows you to uncover it, and it's your job to reveal the beauty that is within. Marketing great products are like that: the sculpture exists inside the stone, and it's your job to reveal it.

38:17 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

38:18 Marty Weintraub If there's shit inside the stone, then it's not going to help. You can wrap a shitty project up in a bow, but wrap a turd in a bow, and you're a great marketer. You'll sell it once, and then you won't have a job anymore. Yeah, it's true.

38:35 Woj Kwasi There is no retention for shitty products.

38:38 Bobby Bot This is a great opportunity to see the psychographic killer in action. Let's challenge Marty to promote his wave-making dolphin music and create a psychographic profile.

38:46 Marty Weintraub Well keeping in mind that it's the AND operator, AMD, not the OR operator, O-R. It used to be with psychographics that it was badminton or botany and it made the audiences larger. But now we have layered buckets of targeting that use the and operator in between. So let's see. I would target people who have strong charitable interests, very strong interest in marine mammals of all types, people who listen to other artists that are similar to the music that I'm making, and the pitch would be, we're going to donate some of the money from this remarkable CD to preserve dolphins so that they do not go extinct.

39:31 I would look for different combinations of layering for similar artists, strong interest or love for dolphins. Oh, also, high income. You can't do this here so much in Australia, but in America, we could filter it by people who make a boatload of money, like to use their credit cards to buy things online. The selling, I think about it now and it would have been so easy to do it. I've come to the conclusion as a marketer now that most of the great art that has ever been created in this world was never seen by anybody because there was no distribution to achieve critical mass. I ask the question, how many brilliant artists of different types have languished in obscurity when they had the shit?

40:15 They just had it. It's not to say that the people who made it to prominence were not some of the greatest artists in the history of humanity, because certainly they were. I just believe that before targeted distribution, most great art languished in obscurity. My friend Michael King.

40:31 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

40:35 Marty Weintraub Just bought a rap label. He's one of the hottest marketers in the world at iPullRank, I-P-U-L-L rank. He's a wonderful, wonderful guy. And Michael just bought a rap label and he goes, Well, now that he's a rap artist for years before, probably did not make a lot of money as a rap artist. Now he goes, Well, I might as well do rap since I know how to sell it.

40:38 Woj Kwasi Well Yeah. From dolphins to rap labels. marketing is everywhere and if Marty hasn't seen it all and heard it all he must be close and with all the interviews he sat down for I imagine there are questions that he has wanted to answer but never had an opportunity because they weren't asked so with a wonder of AI Bobbybot will use his profiling ability to ask Marty the question he has always wanted to answer

41:22 Bobby Bot Processing. What is a question you've always wanted to answer, Marty?

41:27 Well, that's how to be happy with what I've been given. How does a person become happy with what they're given?

41:35 Profiling complete. Sweet. Marty, how do we become happy with what we are given?

41:39 Woj Kwasi Very impressive bobby bot.

41:41 Bobby Bot Ask and you shall receive, Woj. The data doesn't lie. Now back to Marty on happiness.

41:45 Marty Weintraub You pay attention to what's happening first. Happiness begins with an awareness of what's happening, so you observe. And then you take the time to describe it to yourself in words. This is me getting my needs met. This is me feeling this. Anxiety, depression, anger, joy, etc. So observe and describe, and then to participate, to be where you are, fully there. Right now, I'm just really right here. I'm not thinking about anything else. So, observe, describe, and participate. Then, to take each of those three things and apply the following filters. Non-judgmental. Here's what I see. I'm not judging it. They're just facts. I'm describing it non-judgmentally and I'm participating without judgment. Non-judgmentally. One mindfully, meaning this is what we're doing. This is what we're doing and effectively. So observe, describe, and participate one mindfully, non-judgmentally, and effectively.

42:45 Um that seems to be the recipe to reduce suffering and increase happiness.

42:51 Woj Kwasi Marty's method also mitigates external influences affecting your trajectory of being successful.

42:57 Marty Weintraub To understand that life is really messy. It just is. Life is messy. And the difference between pain, which is inevitable, and suffering is acceptance. So I work hard in almost a Buddhist kind of way to just accept what is happening. What's like, like, you don't have to like it.

43:08 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

43:18 Marty Weintraub might be contrary to what you want and need, might be unfathomable. Accepting something doesn't mean condoning it or saying you like it. So it seems to me that the secret of life is acceptance.

43:33 Bobby Bot Yes, this is being self-aware. It's a physical awareness in some ways. It is what it is.

43:39 Marty Weintraub Life is messy, so focusing on mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, the part where I work hard at you and me, emotional regulation, which is how to handle difficult emotions, and distress tolerance, which is where emotional people survive. Like, I survive by getting through this moment. What do I have to do? Do I have to put my face in ice water? Do I have to run really fast to get my heart rate up? Mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. It's made me a much better business executive. Partner, dad. My good friend Rand Fishkin just had an amazing piece on CNN about mental health issues amongst Silicon Valley kind of professionals. And I think that mental health issues are a strong epidemic amongst the most beautiful of us. So the more you're qualified for the vision piece,

44:43 um the more it's important to watch your own mental health. Without that type of work, I'd probably be a raging narcissist that everybody hates. Instead, I'd feel really comfortable inside my own skin and having a pretty good time.

44:47 Woj Kwasi Yep. Marty's vision of a future is full of machine marketing and for him, only the flexible will survive.

45:04 Marty Weintraub The future of marketing is feeding the machine as it taps human wisdom and creativity so we're needed less in the future. And to survive, the most important thing is to not focus on any channel, platform, engine, community network, but to focus on which ones are available and what they do and fill in the cluster plot for businesses depending on what's happening.

45:27 Woj Kwasi What can I say?

45:30 Is such a dynamic individual. If you ever get to see him perform on stage, you'll be mesmerized. You'll definitely be entertained. He is one of the most entertaining, surprising, and every time I see Marty speak, my mind is blown. It's hard to keep up with, but it's very special. I want to thank Marty for giving us a glimpse into the future and also to all the hungry machines who will control it. Don't forget to follow Marty on social. We'll share some of our favorite work he's produced. And don't forget, if you enjoyed this episode, share it with your friends, family, colleagues, bots, networks, and associates. Now it's about time where Bobby asked me a few questions that piqued his curiosity from the episode. What do you got?

46:15 for me, Bobby.

46:16 Bobby Bot As a creator, Woj, does the potential for machines taking over so many aspects of marketing make you feel redundant? What role do humans in your industry play in a future that is fully automated?

46:25 Woj Kwasi Not really, because there's always going to be people shopping. There's going to be people at the other side of the keyboard. And as Ian Lurie said in the previous episode, unless the robots learn how to buy, we're going to be okay.

46:41 Bobby Bot If you could make music about any animal in the entire animal kingdom, which would you choose? And why?

46:47 Woj Kwasi I'd have to go monkeys because they're cheeky.

46:49 Bobby Bot Finally, I would like to know, based on your life experience, how does a person become happy with what they're given?

46:55 Woj Kwasi Well, they've just gotta lower their expectations. So you see, Bobby Bot, no matter who wins the multinational business war, AI will be the ones collecting the data, creating the content and shaping the world as we know it. Does it really matter whose name it is on the label?

47:12 Bobby Bot I guess you're right, Woj. I shouldn't let the nature of the fight detract me from the work I have to do, and I gotta be ready to pick up the slack, but this whole scenario begs the question, what will marketers do when they really are not needed?

47:23 Woj Kwasi Hair metal bands will all join hair metal bands. In the next episode of WojCast, we speak with Unbouncer's very own Oli Gardner and Jessica.

47:35 Oli Gardner I just I just geek out really hard on Being able to solve the problem by looking around the room and what can I use to do this thing right now from Everything is in plain sight, or at least in the house. And I could live my life here now.

47:51 Woj Kwasi In the meantime, remember to look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy.