Becoming Stewards of Artificial Intelligence | Josh Eliseuson

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Our guest today is Josh Eliseuson, the founder and president of Jubilant Digital marketing. Josh has 17 years experience building and running digital campaigns for over a thousand different organizations, ranging from larger clients like McDonald's and USAA to small local businesses like roofers and doctors. Jubilant offers all the stuff, SEM, programmatic display, SEO, social media, website development, marketing optimization, and content marketing services. And Jubilant is a Google Premier Partner Member of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and five-time Web Excellence Award winner, and the recipient of multiple American advertising awards. Wow. Josh, thank you for joining us today. Josh Eliseuson: No, no. Thank you for having me. David McBee: Okay. Full disclosure to the audience, you and I have known each other for nearly all of those 17 years, right? Josh Eliseuson: Yeah, yeah. David McBee: I've had the pleasure of watching you build Jubilant from the ground up. And I know you're a humble guy, so Josh, I'm going to ask you, what are you the most proud of? Josh Eliseuson: Well, I think, David, when we first met, I was working for different agencies around Kansas City, as a W2 employee. And so kind of the coolest things about ... One of the coolest things about starting my own agency about seven years ago was just the families that we've come to employ. We have 15 full-time staffers now, a relatively small agency, but that's 15 people building their lives around Jubilant and the work we're doing. And so that is truly the thing I'm most proud of it. You might say that's something I could never have done as an employee of somebody else. We've created this organization that's able to put kids through college and people buy houses and people start their careers and do all that. When the dust settles in 20 years and I retire, that's what I'm going to be most proud of. David McBee: That's a great answer, a kind of an unexpected answer, but I really loved it. That's a good one. Okay. I mentioned a lot of awards there in your intro, so you're obviously doing things right. What would you say is your superpower? Josh Eliseuson: I think my personal superpower, and I think it's kind of in the culture of Jubilant, is we have this phrase that we throw around a lot is, "Humble hustle." And the humble comes in in that working in the ad agency space for 17 years and things like that, you can kind of become a cynic. You get asked the same questions over and over again, and sometimes people, we kind of forget that we have all this knowledge and maybe not everybody knows it, and maybe it's not a bad thing that we get asked these questions over and over again. So, we can't be cynical when we get asked a question from a client, or we have a new product that people have asked us to promote and things like that. We kind of have to approach it with some humbleness and be like, "Thank you for bringing us this business and thank you for willing to trust us with your product and brand," and being thankful first. And we kind of have that culture, and we try to avoid all that cynicism that can come in digital marketing, like, "Oh, that's a stupid question. I don't want to answer. I'm going to take two weeks to respond to that. That's a stupid question." We try, and we try to instill in our people, don't get frustrated, don't be cynical, and just be humble and be happy that we're being asked that. David McBee: Yeah. All right. Cool. With, let's see, 17 years experience, I know you've seen a lot of change over those years, so what do you think has changed the most? And second part of that question, what do you foresee changing in the coming years? Josh Eliseuson: Really, by trade, I'm a SEM and SEO guy. That's what I did for previous agencies before I started Jubilant. Now, Jubilant is a full-service digital marketing shop. We have a dev team, we have a social media team. So, when I look back on those 17 years, it's really through a lens of search engine marketing and SEO. And so when I look at what's changed in those industries, lots changed. And really the biggest thing, if I was to sum it up on what has changed, it's loss of control. 17 years ago when Yahoo was bigger than Google, and things like that, and you had three big search engines competing for ad dollars and competing for users and things like that, they were like, "Advertisers, you have complete control of your account." And so you could pick every keyword. If you didn't want to be on a keyword, you weren't forced to be. Your specific keyword list ... Back then, your keyword lists were 20,000 deep. Now, Google has basically kind of slowly but surely, first they expanded broad match to include a lot more terms, and they introduced broad match modified as an alternative to like, "Okay, hey, you have broad match keywords that are being expanded to include a lot of close variants. But we know advertisers are going to be upset about that, so we're going to add a fourth match type called broad match modified." Well, about a year or two ago, they got rid of broad match modified, so that tool to kind of stop the advertisers from freaking out, they got rid of. And then this year, they basically said, "Exact match isn't exact match anymore." Basically, Google has the right to appear on super, super close variants, even if it is exact match. And that could upset people, because we've always found that plurals are more transactional, so somebody's looking for roofers versus roofer, roofers is more action-oriented, more transaction-oriented than just roofer. Roofer's more of a researching keyword. So actually, the plurals make a big difference in how a keyword's going to convert, and so Google's like, "Well, you can't do that anymore." And then they have the artificial intelligence that's really coming out now, and the Google sales teams will push it and be like, "Trust us. Trust our AI. It'll manage your account." And honestly, the AI doesn't manage it as well as active manual management. Now, does it manage it better than not checking your account for six months? Yes, it does, but somebody still has to set up all the tracking for that AI to work and all the conversions and the keyword lists and the ad copy that's going to be compelling. So, you have that AI coming in, and sometimes it works better, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the account, so as paid search people, we're becoming kind of these AI curators where we are trying to curate the algorithm, because it is right. We can't see that this person in Tallahassee at 2:30 PM on a Wednesday is going to convert 5% better than somebody in downtown Seattle at 9:00 AM on a Monday. So, we let the AI find us those opportunities, because that's better for our clients. But can AI write better ad copy? Can the AI not realize that all phone calls aren't equal? So, working with a roofer, if somebody's just kicking the tires and asking some questions, is not as relevant as somebody that's like, "Yep, I'm ready for a new roof. I'm ready to spend $30,000 on a new roof, let's go." And so, what keywords and what ads drove the good lead versus the bad lead, the AI doesn't necessarily know that. And so that's kind of where we kind of massage it of, okay, you know what? This campaign targeting this city is doing a little bit better, and this keyword type is doing a little bit better, so let's separate that into a campaign and then apply the AI to that campaign. So, we become stewards of this artificial intelligence. And with ChatGPT coming out, they have the ability to kind of ... That's scary. "Oh, my gosh, they're going to write ad copy for us." Well, you know what? It's actually good tools to help us change out ad copy more often, so now we are able to dedicate that time to more quickly getting ad copy into the market that's changing, because we have AI helping us write some ads and things like that. So, we're use using them as tools. We're not necessarily scared of it, but it is interesting how rapidly it's changing now. We've always heard talk of AI, but really, in the last six months, it's changed quite dramatically, and we like to think that we're kind of on the cutting edge and we're using it before anybody else does. David McBee: So what I'm hearing is that my Google AdWords certification from 15 years ago, it's kind of worthless at this point, right? Josh Eliseuson: The questions are probably a lot different now. David McBee: Well, Josh, thank you very much for being our guest on Simpli.fi TV. I appreciate you, man. Josh Eliseuson: Yeah. No, no. Thank you for having me. Take care. David McBee: You bet. All right, everybody, thanks for being with us on Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.