Where SEO Products Are Going

In this episode, Neil and Eric break down where SEO products are headed as AI automation accelerates, from on-page fixes and content creation to promotion, links, and social distribution. They explain why humans still matter, why the SaaS apocalypse narrative is overblown, and how platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Adobe fit into the future of AI-driven software. The conversation also covers commoditization, managed services, platform moats, and why AI amplifies skill rather than replacing it. Key Takeaways AI automates SEO tasks, not strategy Platforms win, plug-in tools struggle Human judgment remains the moat Chapters (00:00) Future of SEO automation (02:01) Commoditization and services (03:00) AI bots and feedback loops (05:00) SaaS apocalypse explained (12:00) Platform vs feature software (17:00) Podcast monetization insights (21:00) Agency differentiation debate

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Where do you think SEO products are going in the near future?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Automation. And I'll be very specific. Automate fixing your on-page code, automating the creation of your content, automating the promotion of your content, automating generating links and brand mentions, right? Automating posting it on social media and driving brand awareness. And that's what I mean. I think it's gonna automate more of the tasks that people do. You still need a human in the loop, from what I can tell. You know, technology may change over the next five years. But I don't, I see a lot more efficiencies be created by these tools. But the market disagrees with me, and the reason the market disagrees, you've seen it. Look how much SaaS companies are getting hit.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, my company is HubSpot. I'm giving a hypothetical here, but let's say my company's HubSpot. Our growth rate has increased. Oh, my stock is now down 60% over the last year. Maybe HubSpot was overvalued before, but 60% hit. It's like, come on.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  60% hit on 20% growth.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what? HubSpot is getting hit hard, Intuit's getting hit hard, ServiceNow, I believe, is getting hit hard.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually have-

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Adobe's getting hit hard. It's, it's-

• 1:47Speaker 00

  I went to X for this, and here, let me give you some numbers, because we like numbers, right? So-

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  So check this out. So ServiceNow- According to Grok, um, down 28% this week, Salesforce down 26%. Intuit down 11% in a single day. Um, and then you see Snowflake down 26%, Adobe negative 35%, Salesforce down 35%. And, sorry, this week, ServiceNow dropped 28%, but overall, it's down 44%. So it's, it's happening across the board. And this is, we'll talk about the SaaS apocalypse, but let's focus on the, the SEO products first. So I, I actually think, um, the, where this is going, cause here's the deal, like these content, you have a content creator. I have a content creator as well. There's a bunch of content creators in the space and they all kind of, they're all a little different, but, um,

• 2:34Speaker 00

  a lot of this stuff is becoming commoditized. And so I, I do think, I continue to believe that the way to, to succeed here is to upsell them into services, into managed services. And I do think the way we're going to do service in the future, Neil, you might or might not agree with me right now, it's fine, but I do think it's going to be like the Palantir model. And what I mean by that is Palantir has a base level of scaffolding for their main product, but then they have four deployed engineers that customize them for each customer, right? So right now, when I, when I'll text some of our, our clients, they're like, hey, we need, um, can you make one of these bots that can do this for us? Like, these things are relatively simple to build, not easy. But if we can build a scaffolding for all that for single grain, which is what I'm doing right now in my little open claw, like I have a superhero. So I have Alfred, I have Flash, I have Oracle, I have Green Arrow, I have all the DC heroes, right?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  And I'm testing them to see if they'll constantly be proactive, iterate. And the crazy thing is Oracle, which is my SEO bot, it actually uses Clickflow. And it, as it uses Clickflow, it gives feedback, product feedback on Clickflow as well. So it's a self-iterating loop, right? And so that's where I think, not just SEO products, I think all products are going this direction. Now, do I think SaaS is going to zero? No. I think what's happening right now is layoffs, by the way, was up, I think 250% or 100% um, since compared to last month. Crypto is getting wiped out right now, like 67,000 for Bitcoin, right? And then you have this happening. So maybe there's a, there's a market pullback happening right now too. But I think what happened with SaaS specifically, going into the SaaS apocalypse, was everyone's like, oh,

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Anthropic came out with these skills and like you can just pay 20 bucks a month for whatever. But what we talked about for weeks and weeks here was that for HubSpot, for Salesforce, you know that if you're a multi-billion dollar company running all those transactions through it, you need reliable, you need reliable CRM, you need a reliable ERP. You can't just swap it out like that. There's a lot that goes into it. So I think a lot of these things are going to come back and maybe my sense of you and I are waiting for the market to pull back a little more.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I can buy more.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  And I got how much more will go back.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Uh, that's not financial investing advice, but Eric, the way, the way Eric looked at me is he knows me quite well.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, dude, you've been using AI to code way more than I have. And let me ask you a question. I already know the answer, but just for everyone listening. How often are the products you're creating have bugs and errors and issues?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Oh, all the time.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  And you think you fix it and it comes up broken the next day. Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  So how is anyone going to be like, yeah, I'm going to use AI to replace my HubSpot? And it's okay if emails don't go out and my leads get lost and we don't close as much revenue.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  And I'd rather do that instead of paying or no, not even paying. Instead of using the free plan HubSpot has or paying 50 bucks or whatever it is a month. People aren't going to make that decision. They're just going to pay the 50 or a hundred dollars a month or use a free plan. Then they are going to build that in-house because you're going to have too many bugs.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  What do we say? We said AI amplifies your nature, which is also your intelligence too. And so when you hear people saying that, it's like, oh, you clearly haven't thought about this.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, but here, be, be, be, so I don't think a SaaS pocket, like sure, we're seeing everything drop right now. I think we're going to see a broader pullback. People are like, oh, Bitcoin might drop to 40 grand or something like that. Maybe, maybe, right? Not financial advice, but um, you want to see here, let me just show you this before we move on here. I have um, You know Opus, right? The little clipping bot for social?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Uh, Opus.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Opus Clip?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  So. You're talking about the one that helps you find short clips from your long form videos and so.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Has it improved? Cause the last time I used it, it was eh.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  I used it maybe a month or two ago. It's kind of the same. And so in my mind, right? Like even the stuff we're talking about today, like even Noah, Noah's unbiased, right? It's like, we spent 80 minutes talking here. I know we have a bunch of good clips in here for your side and my side. And I know Neil has some longer form clips too, cause Neil tends to talk like slower and like calmly and like it's, it's longer. But I just know we have good stuff. So here's the thing. I use my little um, Flash. Flash is my social bot, right? I was like, hey, just, just see if you can replace Opus here. And it actually, I, I, I inserted a 80 minute podcast with you and me in here, right? And it found some good moments. Here's the headline over here from these moments. Claude Code will replace your marketing team, which we actually did use. 150 times faster than engineers. Okay, 1443 to 1535. Here's a hook over here. High agency people will never be replaced, right?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  So now, am I saying these are amazing? Not necessarily, but I am saying these are better than Opus in my mind, right? And then our team can do something with this. Now, the other thing I was testing out, cause we had um, a prospect come out, come out to us. And I'm sure this is happening to you too. They're like, we want, you know, thousands of AI ads per month, right? And I was like, okay, well typically if you're gonna do that, you need to do the research on their ad library, their competitors' ad library, what the strategy is. Research the company, understand how their marketing is, right? So my little bot over here basically came out with a bunch of concepts and um, did all the initial research. And I was just like, without much prompting, it, it used VO3 to just make like a simple ad here. Now, am I saying this ad's amazing?

• 7:31Speaker 00

  No, but it's a boxer that's like punching and then like picks up the, the um, the powder, right? And my point of showing you this is like, I didn't even prompt this that hard. But if I spent an hour, two, three hours with this, if someone on my team did, right? It would be amazing. And I got the concept, I just wanted to see how it look. And so I can do this now on my whim. And when I have Neuralink connected to me, it's game over. I can just imagine things to life. Maybe that's going a little too far, but you get my point.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dude, the possibilities are endless.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. For those that have imagination, which is all of you listening.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I think there, there's certain people that are big believers that uh, I know a little bit biased for this because I have kids and they're in a gifted school right now. I'm a big believer that education is still really important. And I talked to a lot of people like, oh, with AI, you don't need to know these math formulas. Your kids don't need to know any of this. And I'm like, eh, if they actually know all this stuff and they have a strong foundation. Actually, some people we know, one of both are mutual friends in Orange County.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Are they really smart people?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Are you talking about book smart or business smart?

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Just like street smart.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  They're street smart.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And I'm a big believer that no, if you give your kids amazing education and then you give them AI, they'll do much better than if you didn't give them.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  But if they don't believe that, I don't think they're street smart. I know who you're talking about, but that like it's obvious. If you don't have a good foundation, how can you build on it?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  So how can you just say like, that is a stupid comment?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  This is very stupid comment.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so by the way, Jensen Huang, so even the Nvidia CEO is like, the market is just wrong about software stocks. The same thing. I mean, he's probably.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Oh, he said it.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  He said that, yeah. So he said, the notion that AI somehow is going to replace software companies is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself. And he said that on February 3rd, so just a couple of days ago.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Look, I hope these stocks tank a lot more so I can buy it.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And then they go back up to where they were.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Which ones are you gonna buy? Not financial advice.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  As of today?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  I would buy more into it. HubSpot, Klaviyo, those three I would buy.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  You would buy HubSpot because it's not, it's smaller than Salesforce, so more room to grow.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And HubSpot has gotten hit really hard.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I think too hard.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Dude, the funny thing is I saw a tweet the other day. So Figma, right? Imagine you wait 10 years for an IPO and then there's a 180 day lockup period. And the stock's down 83%.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  It's less than what Adobe offered the last time I checked. What is it now? Uh, yeah, 10 billion. Didn't Adobe offer 20 billion or something like that to Adobe?

• 10:10Speaker 00

  You'd have to grok that.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Adobe offers billion Figma. I just use Google, it's easier. 20 billion, yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  So, okay, I think this one's related that's worth talking about.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Dude, wait, half the price. And do you remember that something Khan? I forgot her name, but she is the head of like the. Is it FTC or something like that?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Lina Khan.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Uh, Lina Khan.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, she's like, this is a good deal. Like, you know, this is why it was good for me to get involved, right? Basically saying me, us stopping that deal was good.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Former FTC chair Lina Khan hailed Figma's August 2025 IPO as a major victory for antitrust enforcement, highlighting the blocking of Adobe's $20 billion acquisition allowed the firm to grow into $68 billion independent company. Boy, was she wrong.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's funny how time proves itself out. Okay, so.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's not even that. We all knew that there was lockups. The moment lockups go up, a lot of times, things go down. And when Figma first came out with their stock price, most people were like, this is overvalued. Even when Adobe offered 20 billion, most people were like, this is overvalued. This is why Figma said yes to the Adobe deal because they didn't believe they were worth 20 billion.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, we'll see what happens with them. Um, but okay, because we're talking about Figma and because we're talking about the SaaS apocalypse here, let's talk about good versus bad software in the AI world. So I saw this, this tweet over here. Um, this is from Boring Business. So he says, look, the real turmoil, go ahead.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Once before we get into that.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Do you know what Figma's quarterly revenue is?

• 11:38Speaker 00

  No, what is it?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  274. That was the last numbers that I can see. So roughly a billion a year.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Because they're growing, right?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Wow, 68 on revenue.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, companies aren't worth 68 times revenue, especially if they're not profitable.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  It's just like, where do people get these math from?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, it's, it's never been, e- even when you think about your kids, right? They just need to, you just need to be, to beat the, the, the average, like, it's not that hard, right? You just need to make sure they're above average. That's it.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, okay. So, Boring Business says, "The real turmoil in software is not so much the loss of existing customers. A massive Fortune 500 that already has their existing data on a Salesforce or Workday is not going to magically rip it out and replace with some vibe-coded internal tool. The real damage will be in the upsell of additional features that adds analytics, insights, or ease of use on top. So, for example, if a CRM software upcharges your subscription to be able to analyze your data and provide customer insights, that feature becomes less and less valuable in a data, in an AI-driven organization. As long as you can download the data, it's very easy for someone to use AI to draw out those insights themselves." Let me just scroll to the bottom here. The, the, the key point. The real test.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Of a good versus bad software will come down to whether you are selling a feature or a platform. Okay, we should explain that. SaaS companies that are just selling plug-in features with a monthly subscription on top will get easily replaced by AI. The companies that provide end-to-end platform-level solutions will continue to do well. In fact, the good software businesses might even see unit economics and margins improve because they will be cutting down their own costs using AI. So a platform would be like a Salesforce, for example, where there's actually a bunch of people building on it, right? And then, and then a lot of the vibe-coded stuff that you're seeing pop up right now, it's just like kind of one-off features. And so those are the ones that I think there's not much of a moat.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that. I don't, I don't think there's much of a moat there.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that, which is like, when I think about software now, and maybe you're thinking about it this way too. When I think about whether it's Carrot or Clickflow or whatever, I think everything we build has to log into just, I bought the domain singlebrain.com, where you have everything just kind of working together. Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  You're gonna change your company name?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Maybe eventually, but I do think everything, I do think the way we're doing marketing for people is just gonna be there. You have really smart, high-agency people managing these, like these four deployed marketers managing these solutions, and I think your headcount's gonna be a lot less. I can say that. You don't need to say anything. So, my guess.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  You should, yeah, I like Single Brain.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  You should end up rolling it out. And we ended up getting offered or pitched by np.com. And I said-

• 14:11Speaker 00

  To buy the domain?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  To buy the domain. I said, sure. I said, how much? You want a hundred grand, two hundred grand?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  What'd he say, five million?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  No, I think they were at 1.5 last, and I was like, eh, I don't care to spend 1.5. But, you know, I would buy, I told the broker, I would buy npd.com. And they're like, oh, okay, yeah, we're gonna talk to him. We know him. And then they talked to him, but funny enough, I'm an actually-

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Well, don't give the numbers out in public here.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Follow up. But like, even then, I don't really care to own it that much.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  You already have the main one, Neil Patel.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And have NP Digital, and it's like, I don't really care. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend 1.5 million on np.com.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dude, I wanna, hey, you wanna know how to make $500,000 per podcast episode that we do?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Uh, how?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so, um, you know, TPBN, uh,

• 14:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  It was supposedly called Tech Bros Podcast Network, but it's actually called something else. It's like tech bro, something, something, uh, programming, right? But they, they actually revealed the numbers on their podcast, okay? So they do a live every day for three hours. Um, and they interview like tech people and also talk about what's happening. Um, and they basically do 5,000 host read ads a year, okay? And I think they do about, give or take about 10 million dollars a year. Now, remember I was talking about the Operators Podcast?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  So, the Operators Podcast, um, they charge $500,000 per year for a sponsor. Okay? So, this is, this should be interesting. There's money tied to this.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  So, okay, so to sponsor the Operators Podcast, the minimum buy-in is 500 grand a year. For a show that reaches less than 100,000 people per episode. It's because, just like TPBN or Colin and Samir, the audience is incredibly valuable, niche, and hard to reach. Rich has spent millions on podcast ads. The largest CPM we have ever paid is 40 bucks. Because we don't need niche, we need reach. But if Phil started sponsoring Joe Rogan, the ads wouldn't work. Joe has 10 to 100x as a big audience, but he doesn't have people looking for a new e-comm forward ERP. So you either need a lot of reach to charge 500,000, or you need a very valuable audience. And so, when you think about Tech Bros Podcast Network, they might only have, you know, 1,000 people or 5,000 people at any given time. But, a normal consumer, maybe their average, um, you know,

• 16:22Speaker 00

  dispensable spend a year is maybe 3 to 5 grand a year, if that, okay? Now, when you look at, um, if we have VPs of marketing listening to this or founders listening to this, what is there? Maybe they're spending 100 grand, 500 grand, a million a year, right? So, the reality is, I mean, we, we do have a deal with HubSpot right now, okay? Um, but the reality is, when we're working with people, yeah, chances are, we probably can charge, you know, and, and we have, we have charged at least 360 grand a year, remember?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  So-

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I just charged more than 360 grand. What are you talking about? We charged 720.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. So it was 720.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Good at math.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Thank you. I only thought about my share. I was being selfish. So, so we charge 720 grand a year and, you know, I think we need someone who's specifically on, and by the way, I'm just, if you're focused on B2B podcasting, we are happy to hand it to you. We can probably offer two or three more slots. And if you have those relationships, we'll happily offer it to you to find them for us. Yeah, because, I mean, look.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  I, I, someone started messaging me.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  You didn't send me an email.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  No, I know, because they started messaging me on pricing and I told them more. So once they agree, I'll forward it to you.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Good, good. But I, I think we should, like you and I, like especially when we think about influencer deals. By default now, I have an auto responder when anybody reaches out to the leveling up sponsorship email. It just says like if they want to post, it's like 25 grand, 25 grand. It just says 25 grand, right? And then at least 25 grand, right? And then most time I still don't want to do it, right?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  But my point is with this podcast, there's a lot of people that offer to do it. I think it's just got to be like at least 250, 300, 500. Because operators, they do 5 million a year and they have a podcast network and they have 10 sponsors doing the 500 grand a year.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  This is a lot.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  We just haven't had focus on it, that's all.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  They don't, so they don't charge based on views or anything like that?

• 18:17Speaker 00

  No, it's just like we know our audience is really valuable and we know we can charge that. And just like Tech Bros Podcast Network, who's listening to that? It's tech bros, or not tech bros, but tech founders. And we know this is a valuable audience.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It's a very valuable audience. Expensive purchase. I look at it as like a mini Super Bowl ad.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Yeah. Mini Super Bowl ad, guys. It's just a pain in the butt to manage and we just, we have, we don't have someone dedicated, neither of us do, so.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  I, I look at a lot of this stuff as you just figure out what works for you and then you go from there. But like, I think like the ROSE CEO or founder who said how a Super Bowl ad is really a great value and was comparing it to companies spending a minimum of 200 million. Million dollars a year on ads. I was like, uh, I don't know what reality you live in.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  I listened to a podcast with the CMO of Wix. So he's been there for like eighteen, nineteen years or so. Okay. So I, I think Wix, their marketing budget is a hundred million a year. And he, he was saying, um, uh, he was just saying that the Super Bowl is one of their best spends of the year. And, um, he's like, you know, I've been marketing for a very long time. It's a different perspective, right? I'm not saying anybody's right or wrong here. But, um, he's, he's like on a hundred million a year. He's like, that's one of our best things, um, because everyone just remembers us, blah, blah, blah. So your mileage may vary. Um, and Neil's just sharing data, client side data that he has on his side. Um, and then the Roxy is saying that that's his first time. And but then you have the Wix side. So it's, it's always interesting to me to hear different perspectives.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I agree with you. It's always different, uh, interesting to hear different perspectives.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Um, but for majority of companies, cause I see a lot of data related to Super Bowl. And I see companies of all sizes running Super Bowl ads. Majority of them are medium to big.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Uh, medium being at least hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions in revenue. Big being in the billions. And we typically don't see companies generating a ROI from Super Bowl ads. And this is whether it's us or Publicis or WPP or Densu or Omnicom. You pick the agency. Most people don't generate a ROI because you gotta buy the Super Bowl ad. You gotta buy like Olympic time slots, which tomorrow's opening ceremony. I can't wait for that. Um, you gotta spend millions on the creative and then the talent. And then you gotta do campaigns around it and raw your people. And maybe you wanna do stuff on YouTube at the same time.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Like it just all adds up.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Let me ask you a question real quick. Um, side note, cause I was kinda talking about this with my team this week. So you just mentioned a couple of these holding companies. WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, whatever. And some of them are merged together. I, I lose track of this, right?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Omnicom IPG is going through the merger.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  So when you think about these big holding companies, agency holding companies, what do you think their differentiator is with each of them?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Publicis is more integrated approach.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Uh, they've been doubling down more harder on influencer marketing than most of other players.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And they're probably the cream of the crop when it looks to quote unquote, reputation. But from a tech perspective, my personal opinion and influencer perspective, I still think a lot of the small, medium shops do a better job. That's just my own perspective. Everyone can have their own opinion. Um, and I'm also biased because I own an ad agency. So just putting that out there as well. But. I don't think there's a differentiator outside of publicists. Publicists, when they pitch how it's all integrated, that story works well. The other big difference between publicists and a lot of the other big holding companies, publicist is very picky on what they buy and they seem to be much more strategic. A lot of the other ones are just spray and pray.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's exactly my point. So I was arguing with my team earlier this week and granted, there are some agencies that have differentiators, right? My whole thing was like, there isn't a lot of differentiation with a lot of these agencies. And you can actually, because the thing is like, you basically have process power with people, right? And that was the old way of doing it. And so again, earlier in this episode, I talked about how the physics, the laws of physics as it ties in with business is changing rapidly. And I think it will force differentiators into businesses. But I do think like a lot of, whether it's small business, small agencies or large agencies, I think a lot of them, it's just like, you know, they're helping people and like it's, they're easily interchangeable, right? For the most part. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to review, rate, review and subscribe and we will see you tomorrow.