Marty Weintraub is the founder of Aimclear. Marty will tell us his novel approach to winning new business at conferences, what prompted him to embrace Facebook ads more than a decade ago, how and why he eschewed the big city to start his agency in Duluth, Minnesota, and how he transitioned from being a New Wave rock star in the 1980s to selling Dolphin sound CDs at Target in the 9os to eventually building a performance marketing agency.
Marty Weintraub is the founder of Aimclear. Marty will tell us his novel approach to winning new business at conferences, what prompted him to embrace Facebook ads more than a decade ago, how and why he eschewed the big city to start his agency in Duluth, Minnesota, and how he transitioned from being a New Wave rock star in the 1980s to selling Dolphin sound CDs at Target in the 9os to eventually building a performance marketing agency.
Links & References
Why We Buy, a book by Paco Underhill
Facebook Marketing to the (Lunatic) Political Fringe, a post by Merry Morud
Purple Cow, a book by Seth Godin
David Rodnitzky(David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Marty Weintraub, Founder of Aimclear. Marty will tell us his novel approach to winning new business at conferences, what prompted him to embrace Facebook ads more than a decade ago, how and why he eschewed the big city to start his agency in Duluth, Minnesota, and how he transitioned from being a new wave rockstar in the 1980s to selling dolphin sound CDs at Target in the 1990s to eventually building a performance marketing agency. Enjoy the show.
Marty, thank you for joining us today.
Marty Weintraub(Marty) (00:34): The pleasure is entirely mine. Thank you for inviting me.
David (00:38): I’m really excited to have you here. You are an industry legend, and you’ve probably been in the game almost as long as I have, which says something.
Marty (00:47): What year did you start, David?
David (00:48): Well, officially, I put 2000 as my start date. What’s yours?
Marty (00:53): I first started marketing television stations in 1995, and then registered their domains, made websites for them, designed their logo, did the music for the news, did the backgrounds for the weather, but I’d say I’ve been a digital marketer since 1995.
David (01:11): So you’re five years ahead of me. Actually, that’s a good segue to one of my first questions, which is tell me the founder story of Aimclear. How did Aimclear come to be?
Marty (01:19): Well, I’ve been a marketer since I was a kid. First, literally in my high school year, I was doing music for jingles and advertising and stuff, direct working with businesses that were local, and I fancied myself Barry Manilow, making jingles. And I thought, I’m going to make jingles for Coca-Cola. Later, that kind of came true. Then went to Berklee College of Music, played in bands, all that, and then as I got into the world, I became a touring musician, and I started doing, you guessed it, jingles.
And they were for agencies of various stripes, and it worked their way up to be actually for some fairly large companies, Pizza Hut, Dayton’s, Target, companies like that. And I was pretty into it, and I was the energetic young man. And I was invited from time to time to be at the larger agency creative table. And this was pre-internet days. By now, we’re in the mid-1980s. So we were digital but not internet, and we thought burning CDs, compact discs was the big deal.
But that was really cool for me because instead of just writing music and adapting lyrics and somebody who wrote for a jingle and producing recording sessions, I was helping to figure out copy for ads or fishing tournaments for companies that were marinas on that lake, and things like that, and it was quite the exposure to the advertising industry world.
Then I sort of combined them. I got a pretty big record deal with PolyGram International Publishing, and it was interesting because our ability to package up the little production company we had and market it to larger publishing companies was instrumental in getting the deal. And I realized that the early age that it wasn’t just the content or the depth that you brought. It was your ability to package it and articulate it and provide the value of it in an easy synopsis for somebody else to digest and then to gain their buy-in so they would believe in it.
David (03:29): All right, this was your band. Was it a new wave band?
Marty (03:32): It was a rural Mary Weintraub rockstar picture that made me scared of that shit all day.
David (03:40): I’ve seen those pictures. You were a keyboardist, is that right?
Marty (03:43): Yeah. There’s videos, too, but they are a little harder to find.
David (03:48): Did you tour with Duran or A Flock of Seagulls?
Marty (03:51): No, I was friends with Flock of Seagulls. What I can say that I’m allowed to say is that I hit Minneapolis-Saint Paul, from my native Boston in 1984, which is right when the Purple Rain thing was happening. And I engineered thousands of hours at Paisley Park in ‘80s. I have relationships at Paisley Park for sure.
It was interesting. I just recently got back to Paisley Park because they have a tour now run by a famous company that packages up tours of famous recording studios.And all I could think of was wow, I never got to spend this much time in Prince’s office before. It was cool. I got to go places at Paisley Park that I was not allowed to go to when I worked there.
So the whole Minneapolis experience was very interesting for me, lived there for years. When the PolyGram deal was done contractually, I went back to Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and it was like I went from working in LA and Hollywood and Burbank to teaching piano at a mall music store. But what’s really interesting about that, aside from a pica deal that I had at the time, that was somewhat limiting in terms of habits and personal health, if you know what I mean, I got a commission every time one of my students bought a piano. So that was a pretty big deal because you could make like $12 an hour teaching piano or something, but I got like $400 for every piano that I helped sell, and it kind of sharpened my sales chops a bit.
David (05:36): I just want to say, Marty, that I remember these mall piano stores from the ‘80s and ‘90s.I remember that they had standup electronic organs that had like trumpet and cello and then you could do a bossa nova beat in the background, and they were like $1,200. Is that the kind of store we’re talking about?
Marty (05:52): Yep. Exactly right. It was a mall music store, and the only reason that they really had piano teachers there was to sell pianos. But that was a very important part of my education, because now, I understood what it meant to have somebody write a check and for me to get part of that check. It was a big deal.
Now, I’m approaching like 30 years old, and I knew what it was to be around advertising agencies, I knew what it was to do creative with people who were far more advanced than myself. Like the creative director was the VP of Creative for Carmichael Lynch, and I’m like 26 years old with hair down to there, and sufficiently lubricated. I’m doing creating concepts with these heavy hitters who are working for like BMW or Northwest Airlines or Target or companies like that or the University of Minnesota Cancer Center.
By the time I was 30 years old, I had had an amalgamate of big time agency snapshots and music, which is vertical-specific media and then hardcore sales. Sell a piano, get $480, like that. And so tripping out of the ‘90s, I was sort of overloaded on it all. And so I live in Minnesota, and I got into early digital recording with carbon parabolic dishes and mint digital minidisc, and I went way up on the Canadian border in the boundary waters, and just because I was into it, started making recordings of loons and wolves.
And when you first saw kiosks how up in Target where you could press a button and listen to the nature-oriented music, I did the loon ones, the dolphin ones, the wolf ones, and I did all the recording of these sounds, and that company, North Sounds, sold 20 million CDs.
And so the first multivariate testing that I ever did, again, before the internet in 1990 or so was should the button that I press be red and should it be in the upper left or the motion detector that sets off the sound, how far away should the person be? How loud should it be? Which sound works. And so we were designing these testing patterns before the internet, and it was all optimized against [Gilroy? 0:08:20], which is cubic three dimensional airspace in Walmart by the inch.
David (08:32): Landing page optimization in the real world is what you just said, I think.
Marty (08:37): Yes. I’ll say that the skills that we needed to learn to do that are absolutely analogous to today’s CRO. It was conversion rate optimization against revenue per square, three dimensional foot in Target or Kmart or Walmart. And there was a list of variables that you could optimize and you just found the pattern. It was pretty amazing.
David (09:07): It reminds me of that book, Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. Have you read that?
Marty (09:09): A classic book.
David (09:11): Yeah. I love that book.
Marty (09:14): So then the ‘90s moved along and I sold a lot of CDs that blended dolphin song and music, like a lot, and had a little bit of money really for the first time in my life. And so I did the counterintuitive thing. I married the wrong person, had a couple of beautiful kids, and moved to Duluth, Minnesota. That was instead of going on the road with Yanni or something like that. But I was following my dreams to be closer to nature and to raise my kids. It was a really great thing to do. And then the founder story really gets rolling.
I took a job as Creative Director of the CBS affiliate up here and registered their first domain, brought the first digital editing to the community, video editing, and then made a deal with the Knight Ridder Newspaper in the city. So by 1995 when internet penetration was at 20%, we had thousands of visitors every night because we could tell them to go there and do it on the news. So I had a network affiliate news station to play with. And the key there was telling people to go to the newspaper for the next piece or bundling web buys with traditional television buy. So by 1996, I knew things that nobody knew. I knew what it was to have an audience. I knew what it was to drive those audiences and bang them around between different media. And that was integrated digital marketing in 1996.
And it worked so well that they sent me around to a dozen stations in the group around America to register their first domain and make their website with Adobe PageMill and make their logo and do all that. So by 1997, I had deep media integrated digital marketing, web-based experience. Then in ‘97, as the broadcast industry began to crash, I left that profession and took a job as the Director of Digital for a venerable B2B classic traditional advertising agency here, and then just made a hundred websites. And then I learned the agency thing, art directors and creative directors and production artists and account managers and CEOs and all that. And then I took a job. I wanted to bring all that together. And I had been teaching at a small music school called Institute of Production and Recording in the Twin Cities. So I took a job teaching career college trade school.
And I told them, I know a lot about digital marketing. I won’t go into the details of the case study at IPR, but it’s the case study that people like you and me do when they really start their career, spending a small amount of money on media in 2002 for early Google after coming from a background of knowing what it meant to do that and then crank the shit out of it. I think that we spent sub-six figures and they made over 5 million. And I went, Hey, I’m kind of good at this.
Then in 2005, I survived Stage 3 lymphoma while I worked there, and they became my first client. They said, “You don’t have to come anymore, but please would you do our AdWords until you die?” So I’m sitting there at Mayo clinic with a needle in my hand, and I’m doing Google Ads. It was called AdWords then, then Yahoo, and they became my first client.
The second client was, I’m still freelance-ish, was Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. And we did like 125 million of catastrophic health insurance by tweaking six organic pages and kicking all the illegal affiliates out. Then the third client was a hotel group that had 30 small hotels, like best westerns and holiday and expresses. And then the fateful experience. They sent me as a freelancer. They paid for me to go search engine strategies, Chicago 2006. And I saw [David Sullivan], and I heard the fateful word, WordPress . And at that time, I didn’t even know that we all existed as a community. Like many of us, I had been operating in a parallel career, and I didn’t know about Popcorn. Then in January 1, 2007, I just hang a shingle. I went to work, and by the fourth year we made I think 500.
David (13:50): So a couple things there you said the piqued my interest. One was you were talking about the early days of buying Google Ads and the ROI you could get at that time. And I do remember one of my first jobs was working for fine law, which was legal words. And I remember Google telling us, well, you may have to pay a dollar a click for the word lawyer. And I was like there’s no way I’m going to pay a dollar a click. I won’t pay more than 30 cents. Now these terms are $48 a click.
Marty (14:15): I had come from the earliest days. By 1998, I was buying AltaVista ads. AltaVista where you’re buying banner ads for search keywords. AltaVista really invented search marketing with that product. That was the first time we had heard of that
David (14:32): I never bought AltaVista, but I will say, of course, I bought on GoTo, which then became Overture, and then Yahoo search marketing. But I also remember in the early days of Google that you would sign a quarterly insertion order for the keywords you wanted to buy at a fixed price and a fixed position. Everyone today is used to the auction, but Google was originally like, you would sit there and go back and forth and negotiate. Well, I’ll pay 60 cents for this click. Well, no, we can’t sell it to you for less than 75 cents. Okay. 63 cents, 72 cents.
Marty (15:01): Those were the good old days. Plus there were so few people that were into it. I remember thinking in 2007 when I started Aimclear, I would like to be amongst the top 200 firms in the world at what we do. And there were about 200 firms in the world.
David (15:20): You set yourself up for success with that goal.
Marty (15:23): Yeah. When I first got into the internet in the mid-’90s, there were less than 1,000 websites. And there was news groups. There were news groups.
David (15:32): Groups. Yep. Eudora and Gopher and all good stuff. I just want to ask about the WordPress, when Danny mentioned WordPress, was that because you suddenly realized it could be that the web is becoming democratized and anyone can have a website or was it more like, Hey, I can build a blog and promote myself and my brand more easily?
Marty (15:51): It was because the media C&Es of publishing the integrated social response. Like that was 2006. By 2007, I came back with Aimclear blog, and it was in WordPress. And if you want to see something really funny, you look at the Wayback Machine. I made the first WordPress themes with my own hands. And I took pictures of all the amazing people I was meeting at SES New York in 2007. And I made a collage of them that had just about 40 people. There were people like Rand and Danny and [Todd Malicoat] and [Todd Freezer] and Chris Sherman and all these people that later became influential to me somehow. And I posted the picture, and Barry Schwartz put it in search engine roundtable in his who’s covering the conference coverage. Then just like I looked at my blog Blog, remember that where there media piles, and I was just going, holy crap because it was bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I looked and there were like 700 unique page views that night. I went bite me. Like, okay, so I get it. If you put pictures of a whole bunch of people, they come check that out. And WordPress was really cool for me because it was more of what I learned between the television station and the newspaper, but more immediately quantifiable and more personal feeling than stats or early analytics.
David (17:28): Let me ask you about today with Aimclear. So we know how you got here, which was a great story. And I definitely remember those big displays of nature sounds. I don’t know if that I ever bought one, but I remember them. What’s the elevator pitch today for the agency? Why choose Aimclear as a potential client?
Marty (17:44): Well, I’d say we’re a highly entrepreneurial company packed with creative people who would otherwise be on the island of misfit toys, in a good way. We’re entrepreneurs and we’re marketers and photographers and musicians and we’re driven. And it all funnels down to customer acquisition. We’ve won 22 US search awards, which are the most in US history and almost the most in the world, which is interesting considering that we don’t get to enter EU and UK and the companies that have the most do. We won the last six best small integrated agency awards in a row and the last two best small paper click firm in a row as well. So to have both of those is really neat.
We’re integrated, which means that we’re fixed on how things work together. So if we do a branding campaign in one market, and that’s the test market, and we have a control market that has a very good contribution to predicting what the test market will be, we can tell you how the branding affected the performance marketing in the test market. We have oodles of senior brand and PR and design build dev creative. And it’s not common to find the creative resume in the same shop as the performance marketing integrated resume that we have.
We’ve gotten to work with amazing brands, Topline PayPal, Semrush, Venmo, Uber, eBay, all over the world. We spent the first dollar of paid social for Airbnb, Dell enterprise software. We’ve worked for a lot of the platforms, LinkedIn, Etsy, Gumtree, lots of local like where you’re doing paid for a bazillion franchises for companies like Firestone and publishers, too, like Inc. Magazine or Martha Stewart Omni, and massive conglomerates like 3M or Siemens and catalog companies like Lands’ End.
One really neat thing about Aimclear is just the general level. This is the best Aimclear we’ve ever had in 15 years. We made Inc. 5000 six years in a row, which was pretty hard. I’m still involved. I’m lead marketer. It’s been a pleasure to see this next generation of marketers bubble up. I would say we’re a channel agnostic integrated media company and we’re gaining a lot of depth in connected television now.
Our concept is to nurture deeper multidimensional hybrid employees who can manage. It’s not unusual to have somebody in charge of a large media spend here and four channels do one of the channels and then run the SEO team and work with dev and design. We’re known for our ability to pace in sandboxes and then build out replicable and predictable models.
Since I talked to you last, we’ve got substantial in-house ad tech that’s really cool. We basically can pull in any parameter from anything, add things that happen in the real world to build mash shops that bid out asthma medication by predictive pollen counts or sell pizza products in London based on where the home team is and scoring at half-time. We’re very focused on work-life balance, almost as if it’s San Francisco and we have lots and lots and lots of wine tastings here.
David (21:17): You’re based in Duluth. You have a beautiful office that I’ve never seen, but I’ve seen pictures of. It looks beautiful. Is your entire team in Duluth or where are you finding people?
Marty (21:27): So we have a 3,000 square foot office in Saint Paul as well in lower town. And a number of people work between the two offices and go back and forth. We have some remote, fully remote employees with a cluster in the Detroit area. And so along with everyone else in the pandemic, we went from having almost no virtual employees to being a hybrid company. We can’t keep people out of the office because it’s such a wonderful experience. And to answer your question more directly, about two-thirds of the offices here, about a sixth is remote and about a sixth is in Saint Paul. And we’re very liberal in how we all get together. Like we don’t ask any budget questions. Just when they want to come, they come. From the three hour drive up from Minneapolis to here and vice versa. And I have a home in both the Twin Cities and here in Duluth.
David (22:24): So working in Duluth for some people, I’m sure, is a huge benefit, and for some people, they want to be within 10 blocks of Broadway in New York City. And so what’s your general pitch to people when you’re looking to hire them and convince them if they’re not already in Duluth to come to Duluth?
Marty (22:41): Well, we actually don’t pitch them. If they have the built-in desire to do it, then we nurture that, and if they don’t, that’s okay, too. People want to be in Duluth because they want to be together with this level of professional to gain the most. Laura Weintraub, our CEO, is an unbelievable business resource for any budding entrepreneur. And I’d like to think we have things to teach employees that are about the deal or about the craft or about the creative. And so if they don’t want to be here, that’s just fine. I haven’t always felt this way. We were rigorously a water cooler company for most of our existence, but COVID really softened that up. I still believe that being in the same room is better. And we’re flexible completely about how we do it. I would say you can’t convince somebody who doesn’t know why they want to be in Duluth to come to Duluth.
It’s 30 freaking degrees below 0 with a 20 mile an hour wind for a month in the winter time. But we’re farther north than Toronto, Canada by latitude. You’re a fisherman. So you know what it means to cast. I can drive an hour and 15 minutes here and be on 50-inch muskie on a river. I can drive 3 hours here and I can be on 30-inch walleye. I can drive 20 minutes and I’m in a dark zone to take pictures of the milky way, and I see the Northern lights over the city. If you’re someone like me and you love nighttime photography and you love canoeing and fishing and boating and all that, most of the people that live in Duluth that weren’t born here came here for some reason and then said send for my things. It either resonates with you or it doesn’t.
David (24:55): I want to steal one of your muskie photos and link to it on this post because you had a video this summer of you catching one of these muskies. And I watched it and I was like, I will never go swimming in the boundary waters ever after seeing this video.
Marty (25:08): So first of all, that was the Upper Saint Croix River. But the boundary waters have 41-inch northern in 3 feet of water. So that’s a good reason to not go living in the boundary waters. What’s interesting about that video is that that’s a drone. We were both busy catching the fish. The drone was just in one position. So every different perspective or angle is animated video. The video is cut, cut, cut, to all these different angles and zooms, but it’s just one shot. It’s all just an after-effects creation.
David (25:45): Well, I will just say that in a remote river in Alaska, there is a $1,300 drone that I bought and subsequently crashed into the water while I was trying to film something.
Marty (25:55): Well, I’m sorry to hear that. And I hope you got some good pictures before. Hey, and why don’t you come fishing with me this summer sometime?
David (26:03): I’m in. I would love to. You come up with me to go to Alaska.
Marty (26:07): I’ve never been fishing in Alaska, and I watch to so much. Please ask me next time you do that.
David (26:13): Invite is forthcoming once I figure out the dates.
Marty (26:16): We should say to our listeners that you did invite me last time and I was unable to do it. We should not make you feel uncalloused and uncaring about your Marty friend at fishing.
David (26:26): Well, I think you would love it. And the fish are not as big as the muskies, but obviously if you love the wilderness, hard to beat remote Alaska wilderness.
Marty (26:35): The bait for those 50-inch muskies are 18-inch sucker fish that are alive.
David (26:41): Wow. That’s crazy. So I want to ask you about how you’ve gotten clients. You mentioned all the awards that you’ve won. I’m assuming that’s part of it, but I think also you’ve been a very prolific blogger and speaker and influencer in the marketing world. What’s been the most impactful thing for you in terms of growing the business from that perspective?
Marty (27:05): In the early days, it was about attending conferences and having pure and unbridled enthusiasm. Like honestly, for most of my career, if you had asked me what’s my favorite thing in the whole world to do, it would be to hang out with you and talk to marketers that I love about marketing. So much of it was meeting somebody at the aquarium party at SMX Advanced in Seattle and going, Hey, what do you do? And not trying to sell anything. They go, well, I run blah, blah, blah, and have a department of nine and work for blah, blah. I go, well, that just means that you get zero of the credit when it’s working and they call you when it breaks. They underpay you. And half the time you’re exhilarated and half the time it sucks to be you, right? They go, well, you got that one figured out.
I take this really intensive fascination from how other people do their jobs. The conference is how you get there. The conversation is where you just listen to people. I’ve never been shy. Actually the classic thing was to go, oh, well, you’ve a blah, blah, blah company? Well, you must be making crap piles of money with the new targeting and what channel. And they’re going well, no, I’m not.
In the early days, certainly blogging made a very big deal. The big breakthrough was in 2011. I wrote Killer Facebook Ads, which was literally the first and best-selling business book about Facebook advertising. And then a quick book about after that also on Wiley about integrated social media marketing, and it was paid and organic and integration with search and blended tactics. And when Killer Facebook Ads came out, I had been speaking at a lot of conferences, but two months later, I was keynoting Search Engine Strategies, London.
David (29:13): I remember your keynotes. And what I remember about them was you would have these crazy amalgamations of audiences. You’d be like people who live in Duluth who are 57 to 65 who like muskie fishing, who eat chili in the morning are going to buy it’s Ford Fiesta or something.
Marty (29:27): Yeah. It was funny because in those early days, we never went, oh, I’m selling red widgets. So here’s all the targeting for that. We would go, here’s all this insane targeting and what you could sell with it. There’s some great posts out there still on the internet. Search for Aimclear Lunatic Political Fringe and you’ll find the crazy shit you could target early. It’s a Merry Morud’s post who works at Uber now. We were psycho. Search for Aimclear Psychographic Guide.
David (30:00): We’ll link to all of this, by the way.
Marty (30:06): Thanks. So it’s like, you could go, well, it was the blogging or it was all the dozens of conference appearances. Or you could say it was the podcast or it was the interviews or it was the books, or you could do any part of that, or it was the awards, but really it was just being driven. I was just driven to try and driven to share. Those are what came out of it. What went into it was just, I had just survived cancer. I had all my energy back and a normal life expectancy. And I was just on fire. I’d wake up at four in the morning on Sunday and write blog posts and shit.
David (30:54): Marty, what I would say as someone who observed you at that time, I am reminded of the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin, which the basic concept is don’t be like every other cow. You have to stand out and be different. And I think the two things that I always remember about you at conferences, number one is you were very open and transparent about what was working and what wasn’t working, and you weren’t sort of couching it in like vague notions of do more testing. It’s like, no, here is the test we did, and here’s the result. And I’ve always found that the speakers who are out there who were actually sharing real knowledge get more attention. The other thing that you did again, very purple cow, is that at a lot of these conferences you gave away what I would consider to be somewhat wacky items. So the one I remember I want to say was at SEMpdx, maybe at other conferences, you guys would have cakes delivered.
Marty (31:40): Yeah, we had the Aimclear Eat Me cake. It was
David (32:00): We all have so many pens and mugs. You want to be memorable. And you also gave away blankets, which actually was another thing. Depending on how cold it was at the conference, it was like, “Hey, I need this blanket right now.”
Marty (32:11): My favorite one was at an SMX Advanced. We got this giant tent, like a really nice six-person tent, and set it up on the exhibition hall floor, and got a whole bunch of wigs and glasses and crazy costume things. And we said, tweet a picture of you in the tent wearing stupid shit and someone will win the tent. And there were dozens and dozens and dozens of tweets. And Matt Siltala actually won the tent. He’s become quite a dear friend now over the years. He brought that tent home to his boys.
We just always took the position that the day that we have to go to a conference and have a tear-off contract pad and make our goal how much shit we book during the conference, the sales cycle for Aimclear is a lot longer than that. You have to believe that we’re the best company in the world for you. We have to believe that you’re going to be a good partner. We don’t take work just because it’s there. I’ve just always thought if those ways of getting business are the way you have to do it, then I just want to be in another business. So our conference promotions were always just fun.
David (33:26): I love it. I think just as a general rule of marketing, anytime you can stand out and be differentiated, you’re going to have more success. I don’t know what the statistic is, but the average person gets bombarded with like 3,000 advertising messages a day or something like that. And your chances of being rememberable are very limited to begin with. This is actually related to sort of a follow-up question I have, which maybe this is the answer, but how do you win these big clients against the big agencies? So you mentioned 3M and Uber and Dell, a bunch of huge clients. What’s been your success in making that happen.
Marty (34:01): It’s a lot relationships. Very inside relation, very inside referrals from relationships. Also about 30% of Aimclear clients are people that are hiring us at the second or third or fourth next place that they’re working. I’m fortunate. Honestly, I have friends, really well-connected, confident people who don’t make many referrals. And when they do, they’re insanely real. One that comes to mind is the SEO Oktoberfest Group. In thought leadership, that’s one of the who’s who in the marketing world. Also it’s on the strength of personal conviction and passion. I’m a musician. I know what it means to stand in the front of the stage and incinerate the first three rows of the audience with a guitar or a keyboard, just intense, creative, personal energy where when I get on a call with somebody, like I have a new business call after this podcast and they’ve never met me, and I haven’t spent very much time looking at their case study because it’s practically an RFP, and we don’t do those, but it’s a referral from a friend, the bulk of the time when I’m in the room with somebody speaking to them, they just go, wow, thanks. I learned a lot. Your passion is so intense.
Just like I’m in a conference room here, and David, you’ll see this from the video. You’ll see the end of this conference room table on that monitor. I was just on the phone doing a creative session with a new client. That’s like a 30 million a year spend or so. And I was sitting cross-legged on the edge of the table like a little Buddha just screaming at them in passion about their creative, “And the brand is all this authenticity and beauty and the creative, it’s all transactional like everybody else’s! And it’s expensive!”
The number one way anybody can sell anything to anyone in the world is to negotiate in their best interest and to bring all of your heart. The only freaking thing that matters to me in this moment is your shit. Like don’t know if we’ll work together, take it or leave. It’s just the way it is. A lot of times in pitches, David, I’ll go, “I don’t know whether we’ll work together, but this is the shit you need to do, whether you do it with us or not.”
David (36:44): I think that partly what you’re saying is you’re comfortable with who you are, and you’re mission driven to help people, but you’re also going to be yourself. And I would imagine, knowing you, there’s some clients, potential clients you get on the call with and they’re like, I don’t want to work with this guy. He’s got too much energy. He’s too eclectic, but that’s fine because they’re not the right fit. But the clients who get you are like, “Where have you been all my life?”
Marty (37:09): The he’s-got-too-much-energy part happened more when I was younger. Ironic that it’s the only time doing this interview that I actually stepped on you speaking to say this, but now I’ve learned to listen better. And so it tempers the intensity of it to hear them. I remember one meeting in the first year of Aimclear, and I was straight at the arrow, like completely sober, and I was on a call with somebody, and dude just went, “Are you on fuckin’ crack?”
David (37:47): You’re like if I say yes, do I win the contract?
Marty (37:52): Also, I have a philosophy of being to lose an opportunity to get it. One of the large brands you mentioned that we ended up making millions in fees from over years and then working for spinoff companies, and literally the people that worked on those teams are still hiring us at the next place they go to work. I was almost all the way through the interview process and we were going to have the big meeting just to explain to the Grand Poobah of it was the decision maker, what the deal was. And it was like the third interview or something. And the person got on the phone and went, “Well, I just really don’t think that Facebook works at all. And search marketing an inorganic, but I don’t think it ever really works to pay…” And I’m in a room that’s like six people on my team and there’s four people on their team and it was just all negative. And I felt the blood pulsing in my temple, and I’m trying to breathe because I had a lot of time invested in this thing. And I went, “Okay. Well, I just completely get that. All right, I see your point. Validate, validate, validate. So why don’t we do it like this? You pay the media spend, and I’ll do the marketing for free. And if we make your CPA and scale goals, you have to pay me $1 million in cash that afternoon.” And he goes, “You’re hired.”
David (39:23): And you got your million?
Marty (39:23): No, not for that. For the previous deal. No. The deal was like $8,000 a month or something as a starter deal. We were going to make a $100,000 the first year. So what I quoted him was 10x. I went, “Great. I’ll pay for it. You give me 10x if it works.” He said, “We’ll do the deal.”
David (39:45): In the early days of my world agency experience, I used to have all my contracts have 48 hour out clauses for no reason, for cause or not for cause. And the argument I always made was like, “Look, if we’re doing a good job for you, keep working with us. If we’re not doing a good job, just fire us.” Now, as you scale a business that doesn’t really work, it’s not really fair, frankly, to the agency, because if you were putting on 20 people on a client and the client just decides one day that they want to leave, that’s unfair. But for a small agency, it worked. And it goes back to the same thing you’re saying, which is like, “Look, I’m not here to convince you of anything, but I believe in what I’m doing, and I believe it’ll help you. And if you want to work with me, great. And if you don’t, then we’ll part as friends.”
Marty (40:24): What years were those, David?
David (40:28): Like 2008 to 2011, something like that.
Marty (40:31): I competed with that shit. Seriously, though, what you were doing was actually industry defining at the time. Like I can give you that feedback. We didn’t pitch for very many, same clients, and I won’t say it on here, but I do know about some San Francisco clients that we pitched for and you did, and you got the client, and I’m sure it’s worked in the other direction over the years. But my sense is that there’s so much work that we haven’t pitched opposite each other very often, but I could tell you how many times I heard that back from prospective clients that you were doing that and we needed to do similar. You set the tone for the industry with that confidence.
David (41:17): Yeah. Well, thank you. I’ve always said to people that when you’re in sales with an agency, you have to walk into the room with swagger, and the swagger needs to be the perspective that if the client doesn’t choose to work with you, it’s their loss more than it is your loss. Assuming it’s a good fit. Obviously, as the client if it’s something that you tangentially knows something about, but in my early days, when I do search engine marketing, that’s all I did. I felt pretty confident that if the client decided not to work with us, then there was a good chance they were going to work with someone who wasn’t as good as us.
The other thing I’ll say, just because I want to remember there’s something that you said which is sort of that you’ll talk to anyone and you’ll just share knowledge, and it’s not a sales pitch. It’s just a conversation. Something that I’ve always prided myself in along those lines is, if I get introduced to someone, and it’s pretty clear from the introduction that this is a person that is not going to be a good fit for working with me maybe because they’re not quite at scale, I always feel like it’s important to give them a half an hour of time and just say, “Listen. This is probably not a fit for us, but now we’re on the phone, ask me questions. I’ll do what I can to help you. I’ll refer you to someone like Marty who maybe is a fit.” I just think that paying it forward combined with swagger is sort of the right sales approach.
Marty (42:25): I always do that, especially within a radius of where we live, like a local businessperson that’s never going to hire an agency like Aimclear. I just schedule time with them. Also, one of the things that’s worked really well for us, if you google Aimclear Speed Marketing, we’ve gone to conferences like the Inc. 5000 Conference and Pubcon and other conferences. And we just made appointments with people that we met, and we put a marketer in the room with them for like a half hour like Pubcon Labs where Brad schedules people like us to work with clients. The thinking is anybody that comes to you or me on any case study as strategists, if we can’t talk to of them and ask them questions for a half hour and know the most important stuff that they need to do, then we’re not zoomed out enough to be a strategist.
So it was a really interesting data. I’ll cite it very generally, but if we were at a conference and we would spend a half hour with like 30 different people talking to them, the conversion rate of people that ended up reaching out to us to work with them was astronomical. It was like a half hour and 90% plus. It is sad that giving like that makes a job like a vocation and not a job, job. And like, if you want to start an agency or be an agency or be a consultant or provide any kind of services to anybody, that just has to be the shit that you’re driven to do. I think that about you, too. I’m sure that we spoke a number of times in those earlier years. You just love your shit. You’re just into it.
David (44:17): Absolutely. If you are doing an agency just because you want to make a lot of money, you’re going to burn out pretty quickly for many reasons.
Marty (44:26): The agency world is a lot different than it was before, isn’t it?
David (44:29): I feel like there’s cycles of change that repeat themselves, but certainly in the stuff that you and I have done, the search and social stuff, we were in the wild west days where we were inventing things every 30 seconds. And it’s much more of a level, predictable feel now than it used to be.
Marty (44:46): Yeah. There’s just timeless marketing tenets that will never, ever, ever, ever change. You want to know what’s really funny? I went to the conference, PROGRAMMATIC I/O in New York, the AdExchanger people to watch a double digit billions industry wallow in their own drool and excrement in fear.
David (45:10): When was this?
Marty (45:12): It was a few weeks ago because they’re going like talking about the demise of the tracking cookie. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking, hey, when I started marketing, we didn’t have the internet. We had television stations and newspapers and billboards and leaflets and direct mail. And you know what, somehow before we had persistent state to contact users time after time and know their interaction with it, you know, the tracking cookie, somehow we still sent people to car dealerships and they hired us back. We sold Chia Pet heads. We got insurance clients and sent people to restaurants and sold vacation property at hotel rooms in different cities. OMG. So funny, because the bottom line is that there is tech that will kind of do it. There’s Smart Contextual, there’s Walled Garden, persistent state, but really channel to channel persistent state, forget it. You’ll be lucky if you could study it in the future. And everybody’s all freaked out.
David (46:19): Yeah. I mean, to your point, it actually creates an opportunity. If you just sort of rest on your laurels and say, if I can’t have complete tracking from all of the channels, I’m just going to go home and cry, you’re going to be left behind. If you figure out ways to enhance that tracking with first-party data, with matched markets and holdouts and whatever else you can do, then maybe suddenly you’ll be winning business where other people are dying.
Marty (46:44): What’s going to work our timeless creative values is going to be the same that works that makes it so if you ride down the elevator with somebody, they want to hire your agency. Like if mostly what you have is top of funnel, best you get really good at top of funnel. And so the positioning statement that says, oh, just do it for a new brand. Or it’s the real thing for a new brand. Like some day it would be really fun to show it to you. We’ve really fleshed out our variable based creative construct and it’s making hundreds of millions for people. And what’s going to work in the future is being able to make every marketing communication. Every statement that you make in marketing to sell something has to have bolted down construct words that people can hold onto and learn every time, but variables in it that verticalize what you’re doing. Because the towel here, if you will, in our opinion, is constructs that people can grasp and learn quickly that have verticalized variables for flexible selling so that the joke is every failed acquisition campaign should have a notable brand halo.
So it’s figuring out how to do performance branding where you’re selling hard but you’re also branding because the ultimate sign of effective branding is direct traffic and new brand search as evidenced by Google search inventory or trends or similar. The way that you prove your shit is if you run ads to sell and then you look at the website and subtract the ads traffic and you just sold a lot more.
David (48:43): It makes sense. I mean actually many years ago, I think Google was thinking about doing view-through impressions for keywords. And I think it was ridiculed by people as a means for Google to give themselves more credit, which it may well have been. But there’s something to be said for the fact that when you run a text ad or you get show up in organic results or whatever, that is an opportunity to build a brand. I mean, if someone sees your text ad 70 times and they never click on it, but they start to internalize whatever the message is in the ad, they may do a direct type in and they may end up buying something from you. One of the ways that I think about this is as direct marketers, we sort of criticize brand marketers for not being data driven enough, which I think is true generally. But I think that where we need to be better as direct marketers is we need to be better at storytelling, which I think you’re very good at in what you’re doing. But you need to think about the brand consequences of ads that you create. You said it earlier, a brand company that has transactional ads, I think is the way you described it. That’s a problem.
Marty (49:41): Yeah. Well, if the brand is the same as everybody else and it’s an Amazon affiliate play and you’re running arbitrage ads, then all you can be is transactional unless you have some greater organization that recommends your service. But if you’re a brand that’s just losing heart and soul and spirit, and you’re trying to slug it out in transactional space, then you might as well be a Amazon affiliate. And there’s been an epidemic of truly heartfelt brands with mediocre agencies that are bleeding out in transactional space.
David (50:21): I guess a couple questions about the agency overall. First of all, what are your aspirations for the agency? You’re now not the CEO, but you’re still pretty actively involved. What’s your plan for the agency?
Marty (50:33): That’s such a good question. I’m the marketing lead. We’ve had a few generations of employees at Aimclear that even after 15 years, the average length of employment here is almost six years amongst active employees. And so our goal is to make deeper investments for the long term and have fewer employees that we take care of even more. I’ve been working to shed clients that aren’t profitable and focus on healthy two-way engagements that are profitable.
One really big thing is we’ve taken the same tools that we use for our integrated marketing analysis like Power BI or Tableau or tools like that, we’ve turned it on our human resources allocation so we could better predict about our staffing. We’re working hard to instill the concept of entrepreneurial savvy and to lean in and win battles for our clients with the best chops in the world, massive creative, and integrating that with targeting data, multi-attribution. So we’re not locked into one way of thinking about it, but we do side by side modeling.
There’s interesting use cases where different kinds of attribution next to each other work really well. And the number one differentiator that we have is we have fabulous creative that’s rooted in more classic marketing values. Aimclear’s philosophy is twofold. Right commerce, almost like the Buddhist concept of right, like right commerce. Like doing the right thing in business and right by people, even if it’s hard and joy. We’ve all worked at companies where there were cliques or layers or politics. And I’m sure that both you and I have experienced that even inside our own companies. And we have none of that. I can’t believe it. Literally I leave work here and three people hug me and one person other than Laura says, “I love you.”
Really what we want is we just want to be happy. I’m nearing the end of my career, and I’m sure I’ll always work, and I’m sure that I’ll always enjoy working. And I note that you’re doing this podcast for the next part of your career, which is beautiful. And so really, I just want our staff to be super happy and fulfilled. I just want it to be a really good experience. I care more about that than the extra 2%. I just want everybody to be happy and appreciate life because I know firsthand from my medical experiences that this is what we got, today. This time with you, this joy, this is what we got. And I want that to be apparent in our work and our day to day.
David (53:39): You can’t go wrong with that philosophy. I’m just curious, do you ever dream of like what would have happened if I had been a rockstar, if my contract had taken off and I was the next version of U2? Do you think you would have been happier or happier in a different way or is this just the way it was intended to be?
Marty (53:55): All of the above. They’re dialectics. You know what dialectics are? Like seemingly incongruent things that exist in the same space. I’ve always been a person that loved to do many things. I’m a really happy person right now, and I’ve been just getting happier and happier as I got older, and I really squared my mental health away in a good way. And so I understand to be me is to know that right next door in this office, I have a fully restored 1924 Baldwin Concert Grand Piano that’s 9 feet long, and it’s in a crazy amazing recording studio with a vintage German beatbox studio and a sample library and all the mics I need and percussion.
And I know that in my garage is a boat that I can take that’s automated to the Canadian border, that has everything on that lake in it. And I know that I love to go the Tulp Festival at Keukenhof. I love shooting the Northern Lights and Milky Way pictures. And what I’ve learned is that I know I can’t fit it all in. I know I can’t. I love way too much about living and there’s way too many things I love. I love my kids. Just love. It’s acceptance. And I do think about what it would mean to be a rockstar. And I like to think that I have all the same fun as a rockstar. I just make more money now.
David (55:32): You have a lot of adoring fans.
Marty (55:35): You do too. You invented this shit. When I was starting Aimclear, I was looking up to your company. You’re iconic in this space, David.
David (55:44): Well, thank you. I feel like everyone invents something differently depending on when they come into the workforce. Like you said, you invented domain names and building websites for companies back in the ‘90s because that was what was there when you started your career. And I talked to someone else recently for this podcast who was there in the early days of mobile marketing and that’s what he coed onto. So it’s exciting. I think when you go into this field, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see opportunities to invent things because there’s always an opportunity to invent.
Marty (56:11): Your podcast is going to be fabulously successful because you’re interviewing people that you have warm relationships with. Literally what our audience doesn’t know is that before we knew each other, I would just call you up and say, please, would you have coffee with me? I just want to talk to you.
David (56:29): Well, the beautiful thing about the advertising agency world is number one, there’s enough business to go around for everyone. So we don’t really have to fight with each other. There really is this concept of co-opetition. But the other thing that I’ll say having done a couple of these interviews and I’m starting to realize is the advertising agencies kind of get a bad rap from outside about how we’re all trying to screw over clients and just out there for ourselves. But every single founder that I’ve talked to is mission driven, and they’re mission driven to do great things for their clients and their team. And I think that’s the lesson that I’m getting out of this. It’s just refreshing to hear people and to realize that most people in our industry are in it for the right reasons.
Marty (57:06): Yeah. Because especially in the early days, if you’re doing it for your own peace of mind, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. You just have to really want to do it. I can’t even believe it. Like I look around the 6,000 beautiful square foot office, and I look at the level of professional I work with every day. I just can’t even believe it. I dropped out of college after seven semesters, got stoned, and went on the road with a band.
David (57:33): That’s awesome. My last thought on this is that I used to be a good Jewish boy, needed to grow up to be an accountant, lawyer, or doctor. And now I think it’s okay to grow up to be a marketer. But for all of us in the early days, our parents probably were still saying really, you really got to go into this online marketing. You could take the bar. You could be a lawyer.
Marty (57:53): I’ve heard that a few times. I think you should call this podcast, The Marketing Mensch.
David (57:58): Actually, the guy who founded Noah’s Bagels has a book called The Business Mensch. So it’s kind of been taken, but I appreciate that.
Marty. Thank you for joining us. It’s really great. Always entertaining to hear your thoughts and glad that you’re healthy. And I look forward to fishing with you soon.
Marty (58:13): Thanks.
David (58:16): A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.
Links & References
Why We Buy, a book by Paco Underhill
Facebook Marketing to the (Lunatic) Political Fringe, a post by Merry Morud
Purple Cow, a book by Seth Godin