229. “Irresponsibly Digital” with Abe Kasbo

Dawn talks with Abe Kasbo, CEO of Verasoni, about “irresponsibly digital” marketing and why businesses should think critically before increasing platform spend. Abe describes the shift from legacy media to digital since 2005 and argues marketing is behavioral science, but digital pushes businesses toward clicks, ROAS, and vanity metrics while neglecting brand, reputation, and the fact that many small businesses rely heavily on word of mouth. He warns of bots, fake traffic, ad fraud, low organic engagement, and platform “black boxes,” citing Facebook purging large numbers of accounts and concerns about fabricated “digital friends.” They discuss the real cost of “free” social (time), Google’s recurring prompts to raise budgets, and the need to audit audiences. Abe shares a case where webinars, email capture, and trade shows grew a company’s email list from 3,000 to 148,000 and boosted revenue, emphasizing human-focused, integrated strategies. 

In this Episode....

Who is Abe Kasbo, and whom does he serve? (00:44) 

Origins of Irresponsible Digital (01:09)

Marketing Beyond Clicks (02:46)

From Legacy to Trackable Ads (03:59)

Creative vs Metrics Trap (06:11)

Organic Reach Reality Check (07:06)

Free Social Costs Time (09:32)

Scheduling Tools and Algorithms (11:24)

Ad Fraud and Fake Accounts (14:35)

Auditing Vanity Metrics (18:29)

Email and Webinars Win (20:51)

AI Ads and Nutrition (23:33)

Organic Relationships Matter (25:28)

Black Box Ad Transparency (27:53)

AI Search Slippery Slope (32:55)

CTV and Direct Mail Return (35:56)

Book Plug and Big Takeaways (39:00)

Digital as Business Tax (40:34)

Human Loop Closing (42:57)

Abe Kasbo’s Information: 

Website: https://verasoni.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abe-kasbo-3828913/

Book: https://irresponsiblydigital.com/

Transcript

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Dawn Kennedy: 0:03

Welcome to Business Mastery with Dawn Kennedy your quick under forty five minute dose of expert insights and strategies to make a positive impact on your business and life. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about when we're being irresponsibly digital, which is a tremendous topic to talk about. I've got Abe here. We're going to be diving into some things and hopefully making you think before you increase your marketing budget. So Abe, thank you so much for joining me today.

Abe Kasbo: 0:40

I'm excited to be here. Dawn. Thanks for having me.

Dawn Kennedy: 0:42

All right. Can you tell me who you are and who you serve?

Abe Kasbo: 0:45

Sure. I'm the CEO of Sony. We're a an integrated marketing company. That's just some fancy words for a marketing So our clients, we serve fortune five hundred, the middle market and venture backed companies, and they could be as small as five million in revenue and as large as fifteen billion.

Dawn Kennedy: 1:06

Okay, amazing. So when we started designing this episode, and I know you work with enterprise size companies, there's a lot that you've learned working with enterprise that seriously affects the small business marketing and calling it irresponsible digital. Can you give a little background about what you've seen and how it affects and why it's irresponsible?

Abe Kasbo: 1:30

Yeah. Well, one, one of the reasons why I started the firm twenty one years ago was a lot of my doctor friends and doctors are small businesses, and lawyer friends were coming to me and saying, hey, look what's going on here. Something doesn't feel right. And we started the business at the intersection of sort of the legacy media and what was going on with digital, right?

Dawn Kennedy: 1:51

And so this would have been about.

Abe Kasbo: 1:54

twenty two thousand and five.

Dawn Kennedy: 1:56

two thousand and five. Okay. So just for the audience, because some of us don't believe that was twenty years ago.

Abe Kasbo: 2:01

Yeah, exactly. And that was a year before Facebook and YouTube were born. I think they were both born in two thousand and And, and I thought within that time frame, you literally feel the shift from the sort of offline legacy stuff to what's going on now. Now, I don't think I, I called it, but I don't think I understood the magnitude and how quickly all of this was going to change. But certainly watching it in real time and understanding that, wow, there is a major shift, how could we better position our clients regardless of the size? I thought there was an opportunity and we've been doing that ever since. Now, in terms of spend, I'll back it up. Marketing is about changing somebody's mind, right? Getting somebody to do something. It's a behavioral science. And what digital has forced us to do is think. Think about it in terms of clicks and think about it in terms of Roas and all of this stuff. And I think that small businesses have got to figure out, yeah, there is a return on investment for all of this stuff, but there's also a return on brand. There's also a return on reputation. Many small businesses, seventy percent of their customers really don't come from any kind of advertising. They come from word of mouth.

Dawn Kennedy: 3:36

Interesting.

Abe Kasbo: 3:37

Right? So if that's the case, then the question then what is if that is indeed true. Right. And those are sort of the numbers that are being thrown around. Then what's the appropriate Allocation for that thirty percent that I'm going to go after, right?

Dawn Kennedy: 3:58

Let me ask you this, because I want to be clear about what we're talking about when you say legacy media. So the traditional forms of advertising, the Yellow Pages, the newspaper, the radio, even, we were just kind of have a budget and send it out, never understanding. We knew there was a reach. We had a good idea of the subscribers, but we weren't actually necessarily, unless we asked the coming in where they found us able to tell if they were, if we were getting a decent return on what we were spending on the Yellow Pages. Yeah, but that's not true in digital. So you're saying in digital we've been forced to look at the investment side and that return on ad spend or that return on marketing investment. And when did it kind of stopped? Because some people think it's an expense, just it's like your phone bill, right? Yes. You just it's an expense. It's an overhead. And some people are like, no, it's an When you put ad dollars there, you need to get a return on that. Otherwise you're sort of letting your money on fire. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that.

Abe Kasbo: 5:01

Right. So so for sophisticated advertisers back right, there might have been a special phone number for ads. Okay. And so they're able to track that for most, for people like Coca Cola and some of the mattress companies that we all know, they probably had those systems in place, but they relied on brand advertising, right? So, and, and what happens is that if you, if there are four outlets for newspapers, for TV stations locally, right, there's only a certain amount of places where you can place your message. But now it's become democratized And I can go in and I can go into Google Analytics and say, oh, this is how many people visited my website. This is how many people clicked on my ad on meta Facebook or Twitter or whatever. This is how many form fills I got. Okay. And where businesses of all sizes, I think are challenged is that they tend to ask those questions sort of after or before or during, or maybe ignore the creative. Right. Because you hired agencies to come up with creative and that creative was good, bad or ugly, right? Remember the Wendy's commercials with where's the beef? Right here in new Jersey. In New York, we had Crazy Eddie where the guy was just throwing stuff and yelling at.

Dawn Kennedy: 6:48

You, guy.

Abe Kasbo: 6:49

Exactly on TV.

Dawn Kennedy: 6:51

I remember him, actually.

Abe Kasbo: 6:53

I'm from. Right. And then the Super Bowl commercials were memorable. And. But now everybody can point click at publish and then I want to see what's going on. Here's the problem. The problem is you didn't know what was going on then when it was legacy media. And you need to know what's going on now because we have bots, we have fake traffic, we have ad fraud, legitimate ad fraud. That happens. And we also have a statistical phenomenon on Facebook. For example, if you're a business and you're bringing one thousand people, and that's very hard to do to your business page. Well, Facebook, the stats that we get from rivals from rival IQ will tell you that the engagement rate on anything organic, meaning that you're not paying for it. You're posting is somewhere around zero point zero two five percent. And I'm horrible at math. But if we were to take one thousand people and do zero point zero two five, you're looking at less than a half a person looking at your stuff. So what are we doing? Right? We're basically slaves. We're serfs to, to these platforms because we're also subjected. We're human beings, right? We're on Facebook and we're like, oh, look, blah, blah, blah. Well, that has nothing to do with the way that consumers are behaving on the way that you think about it is, mean, maybe, but the way that people generally think their behavior on Facebook is not the way that Facebook is actually producing for businesses.

Dawn Kennedy: 8:40

Okay. Right. And is this just an algorithm change? Is this just decisions made over the last years you've been doing the digital, or is this something that's maybe more relatively new as more platforms have come up? Because now there's not just Twitter or now there's blue Sky and Substack that have a feature that you can restack things or whatever they call them in the platform. And then not only Instagram, but there are other platforms over time. I am the one that comes to mind is Snapchat. I think that did pictures, right? Yeah. Do you think this is just the evolution of the digital space, or is this companies realizing that we'll pony up the money because the ag fraud thing, I definitely want to make sure we talk about.

Abe Kasbo: 9:27

But I want to address something that you just said, which I think is very important. It's both ponying up the money and the time. Early on two thousand and seven, I was at a an entrepreneurship conference and I was on stage and the and I talk about this in my book and the presenter or the moderator was said, well, Abe is here to talk to us about how to promote our businesses for free on Facebook. And so what I said was, well, technically it's but what about my time? What about the business owner's time? What about the marketing departments time? Okay. And then and then what's the return on that? And that's on the organic side. Now, going back to the first part of your question about, well, like, like sort of the evolution of this. Well, Facebook is a business. And they figured out that, oh my gosh, if I'm giving people space, well, in order to promote their particular thing, we'll have them pay to, to boost. Right? And so at ten dollars a boost, if you do ten dollars a day, right, or ten dollars a boost, you could do the math. And then what do you getting out of it? So and behaviorally, if you're Dunkin Donuts. Well, and if you're giving away free doughnuts or coffee, or if you're near the New York Jets or the New York Behaviorally, your social is going to be a lot different than if you're a mom and pop shop, or if you're a lawyer or if you're a doctor on social media. And we have to understand that. But what we tend to do as humans, we tend to look at that and say, why can't we do this right? And it's a natural human response to want to participate in, in, in all of this. But we really need to be careful, especially if you are putting dollars against and time against all of stuff.

Dawn Kennedy: 11:23

Let's talk a little bit about that time being against it. So some of the things that I've become aware of over the last seven, eight years of being online, I wasn't online much before that. It's only since about twenty eighteen or so that I decided that maybe I needed to be online other than playing with my kids right on Facebook and posting prom photos. So there used to be apps and things where you could schedule posts ahead, almost like you would, again submit your newspaper ad or submit your thing. And it was posted. It was timed, I guess, to go out. And it was just, it was a sunk cost in getting it done, but you could batch it, put it all out, send it all out. And then apparently they started with the algorithm sort of affecting the reach of people who actually ahead. Can we talk a little bit about that change?

Abe Kasbo: 12:17

Well, to be honest, I'm not sure if anything changed there. Those still exist. We use them as tools for our clients. And it's not the algorithm isn't necessarily impacted by those or the they don't impact the algorithm. Okay. What platforms do is they'll say, okay, how do we keep their thing is when the attention economy. And how do I keep people Bull fear as. And I don't want them to go. I'm on Facebook. Facebook wants you to stay there because they're selling your data and your behavior for an ungodly amount money. I mean, so so those do exist. Things like social be are really great tools for businesses of all sizes. And they don't impact the algorithm. And, and internally, teams or business owners can look at and test say, okay, I'm going to for these posts, we're going to do these types of posts, video posts, one o'clock on Tuesday. Well, you could run a test and do that for three months, right. And say, and then next week we'll run them at four o'clock on a Thursday and compare. Right. But those tools are effective and they are a time saver for businesses.

Dawn Kennedy: 13:34

Right? Yeah. I know that inside I think it was the meta platform. Not that long ago, we got a business management request that it's like you need to schedule your post using meta, right? And that's where you should be scheduling your posts. I was very curious about that because the truth is that we've been hearing that things like Hootsuite and stuff does affect if it's coming from there, rather than you it on like Meta's business scheduler.

Abe Kasbo: 14:03

We're going to have to check that out because that's the first time I've heard that. I mean, I'm glad we're talking about it. Thank you for that.

Dawn Kennedy: 14:08

Yeah. This is and again, it's fairly recent. Yeah. And we've been doing just in our coffee anyway, more of the organic like you said, a timer and you post there. But we don't do a lot of digital. So I don't know, it's just anecdotal for us, but these types of things, like you're saying, the owner's time and the creative and all the things there is that cause that goes to this organically. So let's now talk about the advertising side of this. And to your point, things like ad fraud, and you're not just talking about like the scammers who post things that are AI generated and you click it. And it's a Temu thing because I've seen some business case studies on that recently that it's super easy to set up an ad with a nefarious purpose. And they're not screening those very well when they're done by AI. That's obviously a problem they have to deal with. But what things should we be cognizant of before we start giving our credit card number and our marketing budget to these platforms?

Abe Kasbo: 15:12

Well, true reach and true engagement. It's a problem. Facebook says they purge a billion accounts a quarter.

Dawn Kennedy: 15:22

Oh, wow.

Abe Kasbo: 15:23

Right. I mean, those are published numbers. You can find them on Statista and similar research based companies. So so my question Facebook then would be like, all right, so if you're purging a bit that we know of.

Dawn Kennedy: 15:36

Right, right, right, right.

Abe Kasbo: 15:39

And if we are saying the I have so many followers, like, how do I account for my followers on my business? Right? Like, how do I know they're not from if you're a local business in Kansas City or a local business in Pittsburgh, right? You want your followers to be local and you want your ad to be served there. And how do I know if these are fake accounts that could be set up in Pittsburgh or in Kansas City? How do I know that I'm not paying for those? And what was astonishing, and I actually book to put this in the book last June, Mark Zuckerberg came out and said, and this is after. This is during and after or whatever, where we already know they purge a billion accounts a quarter. He came out and said, we did a study where people have three friends And the market really calls for fifteen friends. So we're going to create digital friends for And all these sort of influencers online were clapping and cheering and which is I'm just going to come out and say it. It's insane because if that's the case, then what we're doing is we're creating more fake people to engage with my business.

Dawn Kennedy: 16:59

So let me, let me make sure I understand this. So the average Facebook account, personal account that people are using to share pictures has like three friends. That's the average.

Abe Kasbo: 17:10

No, the like offline.

Dawn Kennedy: 17:12

Oh. Offline.

Abe Kasbo: 17:13

Offline. Right. That that was his thing. You can Google. You could check my mouth. Yeah. Check my mouth. Right offline. People have three friends, but you're in the market for fifteen. And we're going to create them on Facebook for you. Well, if that's the case, you're literally creating more fake people.

Dawn Kennedy: 17:31

Yeah.

Abe Kasbo: 17:32

Right. Fake avatars. So we have we. And there's no accountability, by the way. You ever try calling somebody at Facebook? Okay.

Dawn Kennedy: 17:43

Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So the number of people that have had accounts disabled and they don't have a really good resolution track to get that resolved. And yeah. Uh, yeah, I'm a bit familiar. They do own the platform, but I guess my then is, do they have some sort of, I guess I'm going to it a defense. It's not really a defense, but do they have something where it's like, well, when you were paying for the newspaper, you didn't know how many people were going to get copy that day. Why would you pay us differently? Well, I'm curious as to because I know that they actually do give a range of the number of people that should see the ad. They're the ones that guarantee circulation at some point. Curious about your thoughts on that kind of statement that I'm not sure saying they made it, but just the perspective of, hey.

Abe Kasbo: 18:38

So, so I don't really trust anything. But here's the deal. Newspapers and, and magazines were at a certain girth, were audited. And I'm not sure who audits Facebook aside from the business owner and the marketing department. Okay. And I also and I say this with all due respect, because of the democratization, I can never say that word democratization, democratization of marketing. Everybody's a marketer now, but I'm a guard. I play basketball and I coach basketball, and so is Michael Jordan. Okay, I'd rather have Michael Jordan playing for me. So my point is that we most businesses do not have the time, the proclivity or the inclination to dig into all of this stuff and say, okay. And because what they really want is they want the shiny thing that says, I could track stuff and I could it to my boss and say, see, we track it. This is what's going on, right? And as long as you could track it, then that a shield. It becomes something that you can hide behind. But there's vanity data like likes it. We've audited businesses where they've had a likes, but the business is in Houston and in Los Angeles, and most of their likes are from Pakistan. What are we talking about here?

Dawn Kennedy: 20:12

How do we audit that though? I mean.

Abe Kasbo: 20:14

Well, you have to look at it.

Dawn Kennedy: 20:15

You have to yeah.

Abe Kasbo: 20:16

You have to you have to look at it. And then there's software that's helpful. You have to get that involved. And but you have to ask these critical questions. And that's just on that side. But I also want you to notice, you know, what's going on right now. Like in this conversation, we're talking marketing. We want to talk about marketing. And we and again, the name of the book is digitally irresponsibly digital.

Dawn Kennedy: 20:36

I know, I can't wait to read it.

Abe Kasbo: 20:38

And the and so digital just sucks so much it's the elephant in the room that we tend to neglect everything else. Yeah, right. I'll give you a story. We have a middle market company in Michigan. They. They're terrific. They came to us five years ago because they wanted to build their business on LinkedIn. And we looked at it and we said, that's great. That's not for us. Why? Well, you're not going to build your business on LinkedIn. It's going to just it's right. We're not going to do that. Well, what do you suggest we set? We took a look. We're going to build your your business on webinars. Webinars. It takes a lot of time. Yes. Well, at the time they have three thousand emails email, believe it or not, is the gold standard in digital. It is not social media because you're going to you're going to get a much higher return than numbers are in my book. I, I don't you're going to get a much higher on email. So we started doing webinars. We went from capturing three thousand customer emails to today, five years later, one hundred and forty eight thousand. The company's revenue went like this, like this. Whichever way, this way.

Dawn Kennedy: 21:53

It went up.

Abe Kasbo: 21:53

It went up exponentially once we started that, because they had what we recognized, they had really a good product, an excellent CEO who who comes across very well. And then we partnered with much larger organizations who brought these folks to the table. And then so by it's basically trading expertise for email and it works for everybody. And that's just one example of how the sort the online offline game could be played. We mix that with continuing to go to trade shows, and the reason why you want to go to trade shows for that particular company is so you can acquire more email lists that are more credible. Because if we were to go out and buy email lists, the attrition rate is terrible. So if I'm spending ten thousand dollars on on an email list or ten thousand dollars all in on a, on a, on a trade show, I'm going to the trade show. I know it's going to require a lot more time, but that's more reliable. I get to meet people. And marketing is about marketing to humans with humans, because I know AI is all the rage, but it's not buying my stuff right now.

Dawn Kennedy: 23:13

Right.

Abe Kasbo: 23:14

And I do want that to come across to folks that they shouldn't forget the humanity of the business because of all this, and that's why it's important. The creative part that we were talking about, creative part is very important.

Dawn Kennedy: 23:30

Very much so. Yeah. So as a small business, let's say that you've been doing things kind of the same way it's been working for you. The Google ads thing, I guess has been a thing recently because now they're doing, I don't know what call it. It's like AI recommendations. The cost per click thing, I think is waning or changing the way they do it. Because as of right now, as far as I know, you cannot pay to be recommended by AI. I think it all has to do with a e t or.

Abe Kasbo: 24:02

You can, you can. So if you're on chat, uh, GPT, you can buy ads on chat. GPT you can also feed your local blog a certain way to quote unquote, teach the I don't know who came up with this, but it's brilliant and nefarious at the same time.

Dawn Kennedy: 24:24

I was going to say that sounds that sounds a little.

Abe Kasbo: 24:26

Yeah, AI nutrition, they're calling it right?

Dawn Kennedy: 24:29

AI nutrition.

Abe Kasbo: 24:31

They're calling it AI. Yeah, to go along with AI hallucinations, but we that's a completely different rabbit hole that that I'm going to go down. And I've been going down that rabbit hole and it's tough. It really is tough these days because there's so stuff coming at you from our perspective that you really want to make sense for your clients. And my gosh, the volume of BS is unbelievable.

Dawn Kennedy: 24:57

I saw a study, and I'm going to have to go back and dig into it a little bit more that as human beings, we're only designed for a certain number of connections. Yes. We're not designed as human beings to have sixty thousand people. Yeah. In our quote unquote circle. Yeah. So I Here is a little bit about are we getting some. Again, these are early articles, I think. Yes.

Abe Kasbo: 25:23

No.

Dawn Kennedy: 25:24

And I've done a few case study reviews because that guy. But what are your thoughts on how we're sort of swinging the other way and maybe leaning more into organic is perhaps, at least for the time being, maybe a little bit of a better move for.

Abe Kasbo: 25:41

I was at an awards dinner recently, and there was this former CEO of a very large company, and he started talking to me. And out of nowhere, he points to me and he says, well, I see you don't have that many LinkedIn followers. I have this how however many LinkedIn followers, right? And he might have had like twenty eight thousand LinkedIn followers or whatever. Right. And his assistant or whatever was right there. And I said, well, yeah, that's great. How many conversations have you had with your thirty eight thousand followers?

Dawn Kennedy: 26:13

Right.

Abe Kasbo: 26:14

Like real conversations. Okay. And then how many of those real. How many of those actually are not fan boys and girls, right? Like just fanning. Right. And what is the substance of that relationship? Because on my LinkedIn, I might have two thousand eight hundred or whatever, admittedly, and it's true, I probably have seventy five substantial relationships there. Now, I might know some of these people, but of the two thousand eight hundred, there's no way I could know any thousand eight hundred people. My brain, I'm not that smart. It doesn't right now. If that number goes up, is it going to make me feel better about myself? Right. Is it going to? I mean, that's the entire thing. Like your neurons fire when there's a light, your neurons fire when people follow you. And that's the addiction that I also talk about in the book a little bit. One of the Nordic countries as recently as three weeks ago came out and said, we're not we're not doing computers in schools anymore. It's not going to happen because they're seeing grades drop, performance drop, just like here in the US. Okay.

Dawn Kennedy: 27:29

Attention spans too. Right.

Abe Kasbo: 27:31

One hundred percent. So I think our relationship with all of this needs to be reexamined. But we are all, including myself, addicted to And for kids, this is this is a weapon of mass destruction.

Dawn Kennedy: 27:45

It is.

Abe Kasbo: 27:46

And it is for businesses in in which is which we're talking about right now. It really is for businesses. They need to know where that spend goes. And there's a black box on Facebook. There is a black box on PPC with Google because for for a large extent, I may or may not know, and it may or may not tell me who these people are coming on, who the who these people are. If that's what we want to measure and where they're coming from. No, actually, it will tell you where they're coming from. It'll. You could write on. You could see the map. So if your ad is being clicked on at two o'clock the morning and you're in New York on the East Coast, and it's being clicked on at two o'clock in the morning and you at eight a m or whenever the service. You've got to reconcile those behaviors and understand what the traffic pattern is and what the meanings are for each business.

Dawn Kennedy: 28:45

Now, why do you think that? I know there's a lot of competition in the online space during certain times of the year. So we also know certain industries are cyclical based on seasons or whatever. But from your experience doing this over the years, do you think ad spend has gone up proportionately to like the actual conversion, or do you think that there's any responsibility on their side when it goes from sixty cents a click to sixty dollars a click. Do they have any sort of responsibility to what happened to that money? Right. We sort of demand transparency if our electric bill doubles, or we want to know what happens if all of a sudden we're receiving bank fees we didn't have before, or let's say some other thing that we've invested in has doubled, tripled, quadrupled in price. We might even go and look for a different provider. What are your thoughts around that? Because this black box thing just made me have a little knot in my stomach. I think if they're taking our money, we should have some transparency as to why the pricing is the way that it is now.

Abe Kasbo: 29:53

Agreed. And look in, in certain, in certain instances, Google is pretty good about if there's a phishing incident incident related to your ad, they'll give you your money

Dawn Kennedy: 30:05

Okay.

Abe Kasbo: 30:06

But and I, and I really do believe they're good that because we've seen that with our own clients and own experience over the years. That's great. But but in terms of the the pricing of the ad based on time or whatever it is, a dog eat dog world, and again, you're not really going to talk to anybody at Google. And in fact, I copied and pasted the monthly email that our firm gets from Google for our clients. And it's literally the same email. If we have however many clients, they send these emails out and the email goes like this, something like this, I, we noticed that your traffic is down. We'd like to talk to you about if you adjust your spending. This happens once a month. So adjusting your spending isn't this way. Adjusting your spending is this way every time. It literally every single time these emails come. Right. And the other thing that Google does, and I discussed that as well is that they'll call them business consultants, but these business consultants do a three month rotation. They have no time to really understand your business. Right. What could happen in three months? I don't even know. Like, you know, in my own business, things can change in six weeks.

Dawn Kennedy: 31:28

Yeah.

Abe Kasbo: 31:28

Right. So so they have these people rotating and they call them business consultants and the conversations. And we do get on with them every once in a while, but the conversations inevitably are about increasing budgets. And if people continue to pay, then what is you're feeding the beast. And I don't have a I don't have and I say this in the book, I don't have all the answers. What I'm trying to do is get us to think about better questions.

Dawn Kennedy: 31:56

Right?

Abe Kasbo: 31:57

If we can get to better questions. And I think I've gotten to a point where I could better questions, but then what could I, as a small business, do About my spend with Google. Do I continue to be there? Well, yes, you you have to. Because if your competition is there, what. Right. And that becomes a regulatory question because there's really one. Google is eighty nine percent of search.

Dawn Kennedy: 32:26

Yeah.

Abe Kasbo: 32:26

Right. And now everybody's talking about the move to AI. And there's all kinds of study that suggest that AI search is somewhere around, excuse me, as low as one point percent to as high as it could be as high as twelve percent search. I'm going to wait because we have to. We still don't know enough about that. Yeah. But people are asking us about AI advertising. It's a real thing now.

Dawn Kennedy: 32:54

See, and my quote unquote issue with this honestly, is if I were to open an AI search and ask a question like, is the top ten plumbers in this zip code or something like that. I'm looking for a recommendation right before when you went into Google and you said, can you give me the ten plumbers in this area? You'd have your ads up front. You knew they were ads. Okay. That's cool. But then the search underneath would just be the search underneath. And it could be by distance of the zip code or whatever. Now, without prompting AI to make a recommendation, without saying to AI, tell me who to choose. Google opens up and gives you an AI answer almost without your consent. Is the issue. But AI advertising.

Abe Kasbo: 33:46

Is based on what? Well, where does AI get its information?

Dawn Kennedy: 33:50

Right. That's it. So now we have the a, e, t, and everybody has to go and put FAQs on their websites. But now everybody's doing the same thing be recommended by AI. And now we're going to start paying AI to us. Yes. It just feels like a really slippery slope, especially with, to your point, the fraud that's already going on, the platforms that are organically, creatively designed by people and pushed out by people and a B testing and all the things that marketers do. I'm not a marketer, but isn't that a concerning? Or at least to me, it's a little concerning.

Abe Kasbo: 34:23

Well, AI is being fed right now by if you think about what AI does and it's going to at least right now, and I it's going to get better and I don't know what that means, but we're going to monitor that change and, and see if it's meaningful or not and how to use it. But AI right now is going to revert to the mean meaning that it goes out. It has all of this publicly available information, which it is borrowing, right? Because they're not paying for it. It's just also amazing. And depending on how you prompt it or you ask it these questions. It's coming back to you now. Businesses and universities, they're already figuring out how to manipulate this to their benefit. Okay. So so so then the answer is it is manipulatable now. We could do that, which is AI nutrition, all these FAQs. And I do more FAQs than you, than you if we're in the same business and I'm a better I'm the recommendation. I don't know how that works, but it is manipulated. And if that is the case and they. And AI moves volume meaning moves my attention from Google right to, let's say anthropic, then that's a market that anthropic will sell into and capture dollars because it's an advertising thing, right? Right. The other thing, one, one more thing that I think is worthy to talk about Is, and I think it's a good thing. And there's fraud there too. But there are people that are much smarter than me, like Doctor Augustine Fu, who people, if you're interested, follow him on LinkedIn. But vibe, the rise of vibe on TV is terrific because now if I want to advertise on television, I could advertise on the apps and I could do it by zip code. Whereas in the past you either had to buy the on air package or the sort of clunky geographic locations that are broken up strategically. So you could buy two or three from the cable company.

Dawn Kennedy: 36:39

Yeah. Instead of buying one. Right.

Abe Kasbo: 36:40

Instead of buying one. So YouTube vibe, those kinds and people are TV, they're just watching TV differently.

Dawn Kennedy: 36:49

Right.

Abe Kasbo: 36:50

Right. The NBA finals were last night I went out there were a bunch of people watching TV. Right. So there are some things that we can also look at that where they say, oh, people are cutting the cord. Well, people are cutting the cord, but that mean it's the death of television.

Dawn Kennedy: 37:10

Right? Right, right. Yeah. We're just doing things differently. So again, instead of using the yellow pages, we're sort of using the Google machine and what may revert a little bit. I actually saw a little teeny yellow pages actually not that long ago in a local county. It was tiny. It was maybe fifty pages, but it was there.

Speaker 3: 37:30

So direct mail works. Maybe that's going to.

Dawn Kennedy: 37:34

Come.

Speaker 3: 37:34

Back.

Abe Kasbo: 37:34

Right? Home depot you get mailers from Home Depot.

Speaker 3: 37:38

Oh yeah. Do they do that? It works right.

Abe Kasbo: 37:41

Bed Bath and Beyond. Everybody gets that really ugly. It's probably the most famous campaign in the history of direct mail. And I'm the guy that goes to to that store. And I and I always think, and I'm in the business, but I always think it's twenty percent off the entire bill, but it's a twenty percent off one item because it's twenty percent shows up in my mailbox every single month. And that speaks to strategy and the consistency portion of marketing and advertising and messaging. If we're consistent, even if it's bad creative, we will achieve results.

Dawn Kennedy: 38:20

Yes.

Speaker 3: 38:20

So I'm yeah.

Abe Kasbo: 38:22

I'm agnostic about creative. I think creative is great. But if you think about all the really quote terrible used car commercials, you remember them, right?

Speaker 3: 38:33

Like you remember.

Abe Kasbo: 38:33

The guy screaming at.

Speaker 3: 38:34

You.

Dawn Kennedy: 38:35

Right? Yeah. What a great point. Yeah. Crazy crazy Eddie. Definitely. That was my childhood in New York. I do, I do remember Crazy Eddie and his electronics. So that is so funny to think about because one hundred percent right about those. Again, traditional legacy things that went on. But yes, they were very impactful to people who who absorbed them and watched them over time. So can you tell me one about your book, about how to reach out to you, how to find you and where to work you, I'm assuming, on LinkedIn.

Abe Kasbo: 39:08

Yes, I'm I'm a little salty on LinkedIn. I share all of this data. Some people may like it, some people don't. But you can follow me on LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn. I and, and then hopefully we can develop a relationship there, right? But varicella dot com is the is our website and the book is called Irresponsibly digital. And if you go to irresponsibly digital dot com, take you to all your favorite platforms. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever, wherever you like, you could purchase it there. Please do purchase it. I get about three bucks a book and I have kids in college.

Speaker 3: 39:44

But I, I wrote the book because I.

Abe Kasbo: 39:48

All of these ideas needed to sit in a place. I have these conversations one way or different points of time about different things with every client. Their ad fraud is real. Digital advertising is real and it works. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. I'm not saying we shouldn't do Facebook. I'm not saying that any of that. What I am saying is that if we're going to do all of that stuff, it has to be with a one. We have to go in with our eyes open, ask the right questions, because there is a money suck that's happening And each business experience it experiences differently. This has been great for the the agency business. It's also if you I've always said this digital is a tax on business. It's an additional tax, right? Why. Well, now I have to pay a social media consultant. And they may not like this, but it's true. I have to pay a social media consultant to do something or I have to spend time on this. Or if I'm a big company, I have to have a department for all of this. Okay. Great. And and I'm glad that we've created jobs. What are we getting out of it?

Dawn Kennedy: 41:04

Yeah. I don't think social media manager was a thing in two thousand, two thousand and one, two thousand two. Just kind of watched the documentary that not that long ago that talked about the jobs that were created in the auto industry in the last one hundred and twenty five years in the airplane industry and one hundred and Right. There were no flight attendants in the tens that at least I'm aware of on commercial flights to take you from New York to LA. So of course, it's going to change and evolve. And I agree with you, it is something, though, that I think we think will be easy. Well, we'll just post it on Facebook. It'll be fine, right? We're just going to throw money at Facebook. It'll be great. Wait, wait until you see what we're doing this month on on Instagram. The photos are beautiful.

Abe Kasbo: 41:47

Universe up until just look at what happened with shift. A very quick shift within the last two years. Universities were were training their students on social media management. That's like having a degree for telephone sales, which there isn't one. Okay. There is no specific degree in television advertising that I think I know of. Maybe maybe at UCLA or USC and there might be a program at University of Florida, but there isn't. But these universities have been selling in social media and which. Okay, fantastic. Now, we may not need all of that. Well, what is what's their response? Right. What's their response? And, and then what do those people, what do those kids do? Who graduated with those degrees? What do they do with that? Right. Right. Because teaching somebody how to post and teaching somebody the Ecology and how the platform works are not the same thing, right?

Dawn Kennedy: 42:54

Yeah, absolutely. We are, as you say, in a human business where we're connecting and working with humans. And I think that wrapping all this up, the human being in the loop is the most important, where you decide to reach out to them and where your people live and what your budget is and all the things. So we're going to put everything down inside the show notes. So the book will be there, the LinkedIn will be there. And if you find us on the day that this drops recording, or if you find it two or three years later, you should still be able to find everything you need. Go read Irresponsibly digital. I'm going to get myself a copy because I think it's important to understand what is going on in the digital marketing space at a level that is not just all of the danger or the algorithm is changing, or the hype of the algorithms changing, because that's really what you hear a lot about. There's the that is the big change has always been feels like anyway, it's the algorithm and that's that's something we don't control. But you don't hear a lot of these other things we talked about today. And I really appreciate this conversation. So thank you so much for all of your time.

Abe Kasbo: 44:03

Oh, thank you for having me on. I really enjoyed the discussion.

Dawn Kennedy: 44:06

I did too. Thank you. All right. We'll talk to you all next time on the next episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. If you want to learn more about me, you can go Don k Kennedy dot com and you can now check us out on YouTube well as, of course, any of your favorite platforms that podcasts. Take care.