[00:00:00] Speaker A: What happens when a Disney obsessed art student ends up leading multimillion dollar marketing budgets and sitting in boardrooms? Adam Gunn's career path is anything but typical. And that's exactly what makes it so relevant right now. In this episode we talk about bridging the creative and analytical worlds, what marketers get wrong about data, and how AI is transforming not just how we analyze behavior, but how we build digital experiences from the ground up. If you're feeling the tension between old school funnels and the chaos of today's user journeys, this one's for you. I'm Paxton Gray and this is.
Hello everyone. I'm Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor. We are a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations.
Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign. The Campaign is a marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and at 97Floor.com. Today we're talking with somebody who lives at the intersection of brand and performance, creativity and analytics, and who spent the last two decades navigating both agency and in house marketing leadership roles at some seriously high growth companies.
Adam Gunn is the VP of marketing at FullStory, a behavioral analytics platform that's changing the way teams understand and act on easy behavior. He brings a unique perspective around data storytelling and how marketing teams can evolve alongside AI. In this episode we talk about why the divide between creative and numbers person is hurting marketing teams and what to do about it, what behavioral data can tell you that traditional analytics can't, how to navigate the hype versus reality of AI tools in a marketing org, and why the future of marketing might be shaped less by human visitors and more by bots acting on their behalf. Adam has a sharp point of view grounded in real world leadership experience. This is a conversation about changing what's not and how marketers can make smarter decisions. In the middle of it all, let's get to it.
All right Adam, thank you so much for joining us today on the campaign. I'm really looking forward to talking with you and I think it might be good to have a start with you going over your background. Tell us how you ended up in marketing. Everyone's story is different and they're all usually pretty interesting, so I'd love to hear yours.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I hope my, my story's kind of unique and interesting.
I've been in the industry for a long time. I actually haven't counted the years, but it's probably, you know, pushing 20 if that dates me.
My background's kind of unique. I was that kid in high school that drew on everything and had aspirations to be a Disney animator. Worked for Pixar, got my degree in fine art and as I was putting myself through college, found my way into the graphic arts in a print shop working at the time almost everything was printed, web was just coming online so, you know, learning the art of, you know, preparing for color separations and getting artwork ready for print and kind of fell in love with typography and graphic design and identity work and branding.
That kind of shifted my major to have a visual communications emphasis. Did eight years of agency work, doing a lot of identity design work, building brands, building campaigns.
Kind of got sick of the agency side.
I like to, I like to say what kind of it frustrated me out of the agency world was just, it was very binary. Your clients either hired you again for another project or they fired you and replaced you. And you really didn't get a whole lot of opportunity to see data iterate and improve.
So I went in house in, in 2010 and worked in house for a company that had been a client as a in house graphic artist and had a really interesting moment in my career where the chief revenue officer was like, Adam, I want you to run marketing. And I'd never even had a direct report and suddenly I had a multimillion dollar budget and eight people reporting to me, most of which felt like I was not the right person to hire.
But it was baptism by fire and it was probably the transcendent moment in my career.
I think he saw some leadership capabilities in me that I probably didn't even see in myself. And it was a great time.
It was 2010 to 2015 when email marketing and nurture campaigns were coming on. We had to migrate the company off of a legacy homebrewed CRM onto Salesforce.
I had to report lead gen and ROI off of our campaigns.
I learned the language of the boardroom, which many creatives don't get the chance to do. And that kind of turned my career. But I've always been a brand guy. I've always loved storytelling.
Took the opportunity to join Pluralsight in 2015 and spent nine years owning the brand at Pluralsight. Got to see pre IPO going public in 2018, private equity phase. So really got the full gamut working for Aaron Skonnered at Pluralsight. And then the last two years I've been working at FullStory Behavioral Data and Analytics Company out of Atlanta.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Wow. That's. That is a really great, great background story.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: When you're old and you're old, the story. Sorry. When you're old, the story gets long.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
One thing I want to. I want to latch onto and talk a little bit more is this is something that's personally fascinated me for a while, which is this intersection between science and art, or some people would describe it as left brain and right brain.
And it's rare to see somebody with the skill set to sit right in the middle of those two things. And so you don't often see a creative who then is going to run a market team and sit in board meetings. And I'm interested in how that transition went.
And what do you feel like if somebody is sitting on either side, maybe they're on the more analytical side and they want to get more creative or. Or vice versa. What. What could they start doing to work to kind of develop that other set of muscles? Because they are very different.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah. I think a winning recipe for me has been just staying grounded in the reality that we're all humans, and humans are emotive beings, and they respond to emotive narratives. So, you know, even in a boardroom setting, you know, there's an opportunity to leverage emotion, humor, poignancy to your strategic advantage. And I think those are the skills I honed in my agency phase and working on brands like you're tying. You're pulling on those emotive heartstrings really intentionally.
But I found those same skills carry over into the scientific side, particularly on the. On the articulation of the narratives that come out of the data and being able to communicate those effectively.
A big part of eight years in the agency world was pitching, and a lot of times, you know, in the boardroom, you're, you know, you're fighting for resources or you're fighting for, you know, additional budget. And so that ability to pitch and sell a vision and imbue that trust is really what you're doing. And I don't know. I like to talk about the whiteboard. I found the whiteboard a very powerful place to kind of utilize some of those skills. Like, the whiteboard is a place where you can, you know, generate some of that emotive power through communicating an idea. And oftentimes, it's. Maybe it's a funny doodle or maybe it's a funny, you know, way that you're presenting a chart.
But I found those skills that I hewn on the creative side oftentimes translate to slideware or, you know, we don't, we don't get to use whiteboards quite as much in the virtual world, but same skills apply.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah, somebody does need to develop a whiteboard specifically for Zoom. That should, that needs to be a thing. If it's not, and maybe it is, and I don't know about it.
There often people on, and I don't want to harp on this too much, but often people on the creative side, I've seen firsthand, a lot of them say, I'm not a numbers person. And spreadsheets just really turn them off. Analytics really turns them off.
And you need to be deep into those things to lead marketing teams. So how did you.
Have you had that feeling of like, I'm not a numbers person? If so, how'd you overcome that? Or was that always just something you're interested in?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: I think my, my hot take on that would be. Oftentimes the place the creatives fail is they care too much about things that the analytics and business side of the business just don't care about, and they'll die on those hills. I remember in my early days at pluralsight, I literally sat in an hour and a half meeting about what shape of bullet best represented our brand. Was it a triangle? Was it a circle? Was it a square?
And we had the UX team in and the brand team, and we were battling. And I'd just been at this other company where I'd been head of marketing, and I just got real anxious. I'm like, guys, no one outside of the people in this room care. Like, they don't care what shape the bullet is. And we're wasting so many resources arguing and debating and going back to college and debating why it matters. And so, you know, my advice would be, you know, pick your battles. Like, I believe brands should be beautiful. I believe they should win. I believe they're an inordinately valuable strategic weapon. But there's a point where they just don't care as much as you care. And if, if you're spending time and energy trying to fight those battles, it's often, I think, why creatives get a bad rap and, and why sometimes, you know, those conversations don't. Don't imbue value like, pick. Pick your. Pick your battles. And the shape of bullets wasn't one for us.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, it probably isn't for anybody.
So tell me, tell me about FullStory. So that's, that's where you're going to tell us what FullStory does and how.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: They help marketers yeah, so FullStory is a behavioral analytics platform.
You could kind of think of it as like Google Analytics or Adobe analytics on on steroids. We have, you know, some proprietary code you can deploy on your website and basically you get a deeper level of auto captured behavioral sentiment rich signals from your users in terms of how they're navigating their site, your web experience or your mobile app, what they're experiencing.
The company's been around for about 10 years.
They first utilize that behavioral rich intelligence for recreating session replays. So a lot of people know fullstory because of their session replay capabilities.
Basically developers and engineers love it because if someone's having a bad experience on your website, you can go back and recreate that session and see exactly what's going on. We've been using it this week at FullStory. We've had a marketo form that's for some reason gotten buggy. And so to be able to go and watch the users interact with that form that's not loading is super powerful. And hopefully you're saving dev work and cycles, identifying that issue early, resolving it and then ultimately improving the customer experience.
Yeah, we're now moving.
Sorry about that. Oh, please go ahead.
I was just probably teeing up your next question, but we're now moving into the AI phase. So the next evolution of FullStory is how people are going to use AI to build, bring those insights to bear faster, better instrument the code without human deployment and ultimately get those sessions and experiences even more optimized with the use of AI.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: I'd love to know what kind of behavior data marketers could expect to see from this.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Yeah, the strongest signals from your users are often frustration signals. So we've kind of cut our teeth and are best known for frustration signals. We call them rage clicks. If someone gets frustrated because a button's not working, the natural human response is just to hit it 19 times.
And we believe about four successive hits is a signal of rage.
There's other things like mouse thrashing where you're moving your cursor.
We found evidence that copying and pasting is often a sign of frustration or at least, you know, leads to exit. So all of that what we believe sentiment rich signal is captured as a deeper level of analytic value than just what page were they on, how long were they on that page, what browser were they on?
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Right.
So how are you using AI to what is AI doing to help make that data more useful versus just a user looking at it and saying, oh, I can see somebody's Getting frustrated here. We need to fix that.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Our AI strategy for us has four pillars.
The first AI pillar for FullStory is Summation.
So we're using AI again. Our bread and butter was session summaries, but an engineer or a product manager would have to watch those sessions individually.
We're using AI to create semantic summaries of groups and cohorts of sessions with the hope in the future you'll never have to watch a session again. The AI will just tell you what the user was experiencing in those sessions that maybe led to a reaction or response that needs mitigation.
The middle two pillars of our strategy are surfacing opportunities and answers.
Again, as an analytic platform, a majority of our users are power users, deep analysts and experts in that field. But it's a huge burden for a small team or an individual to surface opportunities that can truly be mitigated and drive incremental value. So we believe AI can help us look at funnels, look at conversions, surface areas that might need mitigation faster than human intervention, and then answers is more for those data explorers who are democratizing data. Most of us don't feel comfortably comfortable saying that we're analysts, but we want to use conversational AI to ask it a question and be able to get a dashboard or an answer back in short order. That makes us feel more comfortable than if we were have to suss out that answer ourselves. And then the final pillar is predicting. I think that's the holy grail if AI is able to help us see problems around the corner and opportunities to, you know, improve an experience or run an a B test that maybe we didn't see. So the future is the models being sophisticated enough that it will be able to predict opportunities for us to improve conversion before we've even thought of them.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
Yeah. I mean, in a nutshell, it sounds like you guys are gathering so much data that it's almost impossible for a single person to go in there and get all of the insight. Some for sure, but not all. And AI is basically this needed layer that can surface all of that insight that, like, a single person couldn't. Is that accurate?
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The buzzword is agents, right? Like creating AI agents that are working on your behalf. And yeah, the. The idea to be able to scale that workforce with humans alone is a hard proposition with the volume of data that's available to you. So if these agents can help extend your team and get you those insights faster, we believe that's ROI for our customers.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
You have talked about. Well, really quick, something that has been said a lot in the industry is AI will continue to grow and develop.
And as that grows, people are constantly looking for like what is the constant, what is the way to win, what won't change even if OpenAI is no longer a thing and suddenly Meta llama rules the world, what doesn't change and what has been offered up is the person with the most data and the best data is the one who's going to win.
So I think that's true in many fields, but especially true in marketing.
So marketers need to get better at identifying sets of data, gathering and storing sets of data and then using that data. You have talked about. There's a lot of data that marketers have access to that they themselves don't realize is there. What would be some of those data sets that marketers should be looking at when it comes comes to like fueling future AI use?
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you know, my, my only addition to your narrative there would be, you know, it's not just any data set. I think first party data is where brands are going to win. So you have to be looking, you know, within your own data sets or owned tooling to find where you can drive that incremental differentiation. And obviously with full story on the mind we're going to hopefully demonstrate the value of this behavioral data.
And I think the future like to futurecast a little bit. It's awesome that it's in the fullstory platform and that you can see and utilize and build, you know, reports and alerts and monitor there. But the power of the future is going to be exporting that into a warehouse and pairing it with other data sets that you have, your transactional data, your CRM data and ensuring that between the two data sets there's an even powerful trigger to personalize an experience or mitigate frustration or circumvent loss or churn because of the combined power of those signals. So I'm going to say first party data and then the future is combining it, warehousing it and the ability to derive signals from that data.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Recent data shows that brands are seeing a 30 to 50% decrease in traffic because of Google's AI overviews. That's an enormous traffic loss. If this is something you're thinking about, either because you need to recover traffic or stay ahead of all the changes in AI search, I want to offer you a completely free AI overview audit. I'm Brittany Dillard, a senior SEO strategist at 97th Floor and our teams use this exact audit for our clients to discover where brands sit in AI Overview results compared to competitors.
This AIO audit informs our strategy for how to drive more conversions as AI continues to develop in search, and we've been able to help brands maintain conversions and therefore revenue even while search traffic drops. If you're interested in getting this comprehensive AI Overview audit done for your brand completely free, head on over to 97th floor.com AI audit and fill out the form on that page so our team can get started. A link to that page will also be in the show notes and trust me, you want to take advantage of.
[00:20:42] Speaker D: This one hey everyone, it's Emma here. I help to produce the campaign and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing and AI news. First up, let's talk about AI's rapid evolution in marketing content. Right now we're seeing giants like Uniletter really lean into this. They've just launched something called Sketch Pro and it's an internal AI driven design unit built in partnership with IPG Studios. Their goal is to create content content three times faster. So right now they're taking something from concept to consumer testing material in just two hours, which is insane. They're using a bunch of AI platforms including Adobe Firefly and Google VO3 to craft social first stories, moving away from a TV centric model. Their team in Jakarta, for example, boosted visibility on TikTok for brands like Rinso and Sunlight by over 22% during Ramadan just by jumping on to trending content with the help of AI. This isn't just about being efficient, it's about being lightning fast and super relevant. AI is letting brands react to real time trends and create highly personalized content for specific channels at an insane pace. Next, let's dive into some significant shifts happening in consumer behavior. A recent McKinsey study highlights that people are spending more time alone and online and they're all about immediate gratification and convenience. Digital connection and at home activities are really here to stay.
Over 90% of consumers in their survey shops at an online only retailer last month and grocery delivery is still super popular and trending upward. That bring it to me mindset is solidifying and people have way less patience for anything that's not super fast and reliable in terms of delivery and e commerce. Another report mentioned that 57 per shop percent of shoppers now hit up online marketplaces like Amazon for product delivery. So it's a 10% jump from last year and 39% bought something because an influencer recommended it in the past year. So what does this mean for us? The consumer journey is way more scattered and digitally focused. Our strategies have to prioritize really seamless online experiences, extreme convenience and getting in on that influencer and creator economy to become really discoverable for new audiences.
Finally, let's check out some innovative marketing campaigns. Burger King in France recently launched a campaign where they offered free Whoppers to customers who shared their phone number with a complete stranger. It was all about encouraging real life social connection in a very unexpected way. On a different note, Peroni just launched a beer sorbet and Stella Artois put out a limited edition white can for Wimbledon. These show how brands are using cool product extensions and event based activations to create buzz and connect. Innovation isn't just about using new tech. It's about thinking creatively and challenging the status quo. Now back to the episode.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: I'm sure you are using fullstory at fullstory I'm interested in outside of your use of fullstory, you know, as the leader, you know are is your team integrating AI into other elements of your marketing? And what have you found to be successful? What have you found to be a little bit more smoke and mirrors? Is there anything that's working right now from your team?
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean as, as, as clean as the vision for our platform sounds, you know, I'll be the first to admit and hopefully it resonates with most marketers like you know, every executive team, every board is asking us, you know, to have AI initiatives and dang, you know, the teams have heard it, they're responding to it, but I don't think we've seen the ROI or efficiency gains in the thrashing quite yet. So we're, you know, we're very much in the midst of objective herd and we're trying and experimenting but I can't say necessarily that at every aspect, you know, I'm feeling exponentially more efficient.
I think the, you know, the chat GPT and the Geminis I think are the, the low hanging fruit. I think most of us have adopted those, you know, into our workforce.
But you know, as a, as an executive leader, you know it's pretty easy to spot. I had today or it was yesterday, you know, a team member send over a strategy brief and you know, at the bottom where, where this list of tactics that we could do and it was just obvious that they'd asked ChatGPT and you know, it wasn't wrong, like it was all the right things but the, the human nuance that so far I haven't found AI helping us do is like at the end of day we have a certain amount of resources, budget, time and energy.
And that list of 30 things we could do aren't the reality of what we will actually do.
And so there's still a lot of time, energy and investment in taking the cadre of options and distilling it down to a true actionable strategy that fits time, energy and budget that AI hasn't solved for us.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: Yep, 100%. I just had lunch with somebody today and we were talking about this very thing of, you know, people are expecting. I want to see a 40% increase in efficiency and it's just not there. And what's interesting is it, it all works perfectly from a philosophical lens, but when you get boots on ground, it's.
It doesn't quite end up working out like that. Either the output is lower in quality or it's too basic. You know, in some cases it feels like a very hard working intern.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Or it's just not. Yeah, it's just not quite as efficient as. Or it requires a lot of human. So much human intervention that the efficiency gets kind of sapped up in that. Yeah.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Go ahead.
The current words I like to use for AI and again, I work remotely, so I spend a lot of time alone in a 20 by 20 office. But I do like having AI as a thought partner I very much enjoy.
Sometimes I'll get anxious questions in a meeting or sometimes I'll just want a different point of view. And so, you know, tapping into those tools as a thought partner I think is very powerful. But oftentimes, you know, just copying and pasting that and calling it a strategy I think is a dangerous game.
And I think often like it's, it's amazing how much ChatGPT is retaining of past conversations we've had and an understanding of my job and my role and bringing some of that back. But it's still a mirror reflection, it's still a lot of pantering and validating. And so, you know, I think you have to still, you know, be a little subject and funnel that back through either equal human thought partners or, or something. So, you know, yeah, it's definitely speeding up some of that front end, I think, which is really, you know, still critical. Like you can still take those narratives back to the board and say you've been heard. I'm not getting 40% out of this effort in terms of improvement, but we are seeing incremental gains and the tools will get better, the models will get better, and you do have to lean in right now. Like, I'm. I'm definitely someone who's bullish on the board needs to feel heard. The executives need to hear. Feel heard. But it doesn't mean you have to throw your arms up in abandonment. I think there's still a lot to be learned through the journey.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I agree.
In fact, in another conversation today, I was talking with somebody about the importance of being willing to adopt, even though you're not going to see a 50% improvement.
Being willing to adopt, even though it only means a 4% improvement, because over time, that percent will get higher. And what's more important is exercising that muscle that is being willing to adopt. Um, that's like, that ultimately is gonna provide the biggest return. But if you sit there and cross your arms and just say, like, this isn't providing 50 gains and I'm not going to do anything until it does, that's going to prevent you from eventually getting those 50% gains when they become more developed and possible.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I've tried to reflect a lot back on my career of, like, what moment does this remind me of? And the best anecdote I can have is, like, when the iPhone came out and it was like, should we have a mobile app or shouldn't we have a mobile app? Like, I think banks were the ones that were like, no one's ever going to bank on their phone. Like, they were slow to adopt, but, like, it was inevitable. Like, it was just. It was too good and it was. It was too future proof to not see that eventually every business would probably need to consider. Every consumer business would probably need to consider a mobile app. And I think this is similar. Like, you can be reluctant, but it feels inevitable that it's going to transform the way we work and the workflows that we have. And I'd rather be on. On the front foot. Like, it's. It's scary as a creative. I'll use Google vids, for example. I don't know if a lot of people know, but Google has a vids tool that will literally make videos for your brand off of. Off of prompts. And we've got sellers in our business trying to use them. The output is horrendous. Like, I do not want any of those seeing the light of day right now, but the, The. The future that looks like that is inevitable. So what I like by leaning in is I can help my team see what the future looks like and they can start building tools that scale. Like, obviously there's a. There's a brand template evolution that needs to happen, that's behind the technology coming online. And so all these things will work themselves out over time. But it is scary. Like you see that and you're like, I cannot have sellers making videos with this. But the reality is they're going to. So then how do you respond to it?
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
So back to, you know, those things that just will never change. Another that I've thought about is the concept which is marketing. One on one of you have to target the right people, talk to the right people and give them the right message. No matter what happens, whatever technology comes along, that principle will never change.
And so understanding information about this audience and who, like who we're talking to, how they think is super important.
You've talked about sometimes analytics can be too reactive instead of proactive. Tell me more, like, what do you mean by that? When, like, what are the signs that our audience, from our audience that would indicate like their analytics, our analytics setup is like too reactive as opposed to proactive?
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's.
If someone were to bring that question, I'd probably ask them for two inputs.
You know, if, if you saw a 20 drop in conversions, like how many people did it take to bring that insight to bear and then how many, how much time did it take for that to become to your attention? And you know, the current world of analytics is it's probably more people involved in getting that message surfaced and democratized to where action is actually taken and you lose too much time. And you know, when it comes to conversions based on your aov, like that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars over a given hour, week, day.
So, you know, those things are really present to me as the owner of fullstory.com but also to every fullstory customer. Like our job and our responsibility is to get them those insights faster.
And that's really what we take super personally and why we're on this AI endeavor. We believe AI is a means to getting those insights faster. Thus we're going to, you know, pursue it on behalf of our customer base.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Yeah, in the industry, marketers will hold up certain metrics. It's kind of like the holy grail.
Probably the undisputed is ultimately conversions, revenue generated.
But within that there are many like favorites of traffic and bounce rate and things like that.
What kind of data points do you say like you wish more marketers cared about? That is maybe like the unsung important KPI or metric that we should be thinking about and caring about.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I was you know, probably not the best thing to admit, but like, I wasn't a user of fullstory before I joined the company two years ago. I owned, you know, I was a core member of the pluralsight.com web team. And, you know, we were hyper focused on how much traffic were we getting in, how much of that traffic were we converting to either trial or a sales, you know, a sales led conversation.
But I don't think we were quite intentional enough of looking at behavior and sentiment as strong signal either, you know, creating friction in those funnels or potentially looking at how we could use that behavioral sentiment to improve, you know, improve conversions or improve flow through those funnels.
Funnel conversion is fascinating.
The charts in our app, like, you think, you know, people go from this page to this page to this page and convert, but when you actually see those cohorts of users and where the flow actually goes, there's so much value in just being honest and integral for yourself and realizing that, you know, they're probably skipping your platform page. As much energy and time as you've put into that, and they're going straight from home right into your pricing page. And if that's the reality, you've got work to do in terms of ensuring that whatever's on your pricing page also does some of the lifting of your platform page. So, you know, those insights, you know, true funnels and, you know, combined with sentiment are in, you know, incredibly important.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: That's interesting. True funnels. Tell me, what does that look like visually for people that haven't seen the platform?
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah, they, you know, they basically map out, you know, here's, here's their entry point. 30 of your traffic are going to this next page or taking this next action, 20 are taking this action.
X percentage are exiting.
And then being able to watch that, you know, that graphic grow to whatever conversion point you've sent is, you know, a view that I love within our platform because you can, again, you assume, you know, our solution. Engineers use the cow path analogy. I don't know if you've heard that, but there was an east coast college that before they laid any sidewalks, they just planted grass and they wanted to see where people were walking before they invested in the sidewalks. And inevitably you see that human behavior isn't as linear or isn't as, you know, routed exactly how you might assume that it's going to be routed. And the same thing applies to webflows and user behavior is it may not be as directional or as intended as you might think it is. But once, you know, what it actually is, then you can powerfully optimize and improve it.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Interesting. I haven't heard of that cow path analogy, but that's fascinating.
Um, one item on that would be that there's maybe this breaks down a little bit in that the, you know, there they could measure where is the, the grass been trodden and that's now where we're going to put the path. But that gives a little bit of a bias towards those that have walked before and there's some large percent that are just walking where others have walked.
Ashley Foss was on the show a few weeks ago and she describes, she has a book that she just wrote and released on this, but she talks about like we shouldn't be using the funnel at all. She, she thinks of it as like a playground where we say here's this and here's this and here's this and whatever you're interested in, it's here available for you.
Which I see is similar to, but slightly different from the cow path analogy in that the cow path analogy is then saying we're going to let them find these paths and then we're going to engineer them in. And the playground is still much more free.
I could see a lot of boards not loving a playground view of this because the end goal is we need to push them towards conversion and this kind of runs against that. I'm interested, like where do you sit and how do you view things? Knowing what you know, it's a, it's.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: It'S a great take. And the reality is it's probably a mix of both. Like as you're talking about the playground, I'm starting to think about how disruptive the AI sites, ChatGPT and others are to traditional traffic patterns and traffic flow. And in the world of how chat GPT is learning about your content surfacing and it is probably more of a playground. It's a directed playground. You're asking it a question, it's assuming what playground instrument you want to play on and it's going to surface that. But their intent is to give you enough information that it's, you know, it's zero click. You're probably going to stay and ask it another question.
And so you know, us training, feeding and coaching the algorithms and the LLMs is a massive undertaking that most marketing teams are now having to probably carve off some of their traditional SEO teams to really think about and dive into. And yeah, it's a very non linear conversation. I think social, both paid and organic, is probably a little bit More playground. But I still think when people are, you know, especially in software, when they're going to buy someone, whether it's your buyer, your buying, your buying committee or someone in procurement, they're usually going to end up on your website. And it probably needs to feel like a pretty traditional funnel at that point.
And then if you want to really blow the metaphor, you know, the future is customer based agents surfing our website. So, you know, historically we've built all of our experiences for humans, but agents are often going to be now going out and doing business on our behalf. And it's been easy. As marketers, we've just assumed all bot traffic is bad for as long as years as I've been in the industry. But there's a future coming where you're going to have to be able to differentiate good agents from bad agents, good bots from bad bots, and build web experiences, digital experiences that serve the good traffic. And those experiences they expect will be different than human experiences and we'll have to build them accordingly. So our work is getting harder.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: Yes. 100 and that is a whole new world. I mean there's no, that's a webless world in, in many ways, you know, it's going to be interesting.
Go ahead.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: I didn't expect my pop. My blood, I didn't expect my blood pressure to go up. But yeah, that, just talking through that I think raised my blood pressure. So we've got work to do.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: We do.
This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciated to hear your takes in perspective and I do encourage listeners to go check out fullstory.
Like my personal belief is as technology develops, the thing that needs to be true is marketers need to be connected to their audiences and you need to understand more about them, how they think so that you can deliver the correct message at the correct time to this person. So anything that gets you more of that information on who they are, how they behave and how they think is exactly what we need more of.
I want to end with just maybe prediction, maybe a bit of just like what, where your mindset is.
What do you believe marketers should be doubling down on and what should they be letting go of that we've just clung to?
[00:41:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, I think that last back and forth we just had was awesome. Like you, you, you need to have a point of view, a strong point of view. Mine was, you know, is funnel based, but you also need to be open to other points of view and, and go learn about them, go explore them. And I think we have two or three big pivots coming in the future that, you know, the companies and individuals who are able to adapt and assess and, and change their beliefs on the fly will probably be the ones that will incrementally win and differentiate themselves. So being nimble, being willing to adapt and, and not being close minded, I think is, is a critical recipe for success.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Awesome. I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much Adam for, for joining today.
Where, where should our audience go to connect with you and what would be the best place to go to to learn more about full story?
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean just hit me up on LinkedIn. I, I try to be as present as I can, as busy as I am, but love new connections there and then. Yeah, we love web traffic. So go check out fullstory.com and do some rage clicking for us. We'll, we'll find you.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: And if you're, if you're sending, if you're listening to this five years in the future, be sure to send your agent to FullStory.com's agent.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: Yeah, or send your agent to me and my agent.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Thanks Pat.
[00:43:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for, yeah, thanks for joining today.
That is all for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review and subscribing so that you don't miss future episodes.
Huge, huge. Thank you to Adam Gunn for joining us today. You can Find Adam on LinkedIn if you want to talk more about creativity and storytelling in a leadership position.
Some major takeaways for me from this episode were Number one, emotion still wins even in the boardroom. Creative storytelling skills are just as powerful when you're pitching strategy or presenting data. Number two, look past just the traffic you're getting and watch for behavior Signals like rage clicks and mouse thrashing often reveal more than page views ever could. And number three, AI is not a magic bullet, but it can be a powerful thought partner. So use it to surface insights faster but not to replace strategic thinking. You can find past episodes of the campaign and marketing tools and
[email protected]. Also, you can learn more about this agency and get in touch with a marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns. Please join us next week for a conversation with Chris Silvestri, conversion copywriter and founder of Conversion Alchemy. We're talking about how to increase conversions, retention, cltv and roas by matching your copy with the conversation already happening in your customers heads. Until then, see you later.
Sa.
