Is Your Ad Budget Too Small For Your Agency? (Here’s How You Know)

CPO Ep 66 Todd & Kelly

Kelly [00:00:00] the nice thing about having those big budgets is you can save the time by sort of papering over those cracks and, and overcoming it with data and overcoming it with scale and overcoming it with that, without that money, it means the people working for you to uncover the, those diamonds of opportunity.

Kelly Is everything is all about creativity and problem solving and, and big picture thinking and all of those components.

Intro Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bo Jee Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

Kelly Hey everyone. Kelly McGuire with Bougie Day Digital. Excited to get into today's topic.

Todd Hey, everybody. Happy Monday. Um, this is Todd Kelly's partner, JE Day Digital. We are here on Monday. We had our all staff [00:01:00] company retreat last week. Was it fun? Kelly, did you have a good time?

Kelly I did. It was fun. It was good to see everyone.

Kelly Good to realize that everyone's real people and not just faces on a screen.

Todd We have real humans in our company, believe it or not. They flew in from. All over the US and all over the world. and we convened in a beachside resort for three days and did very little work, for that time. It was nice to, nice to see everybody and I don't know for any, any executives out there listening if you're in a remote company environment or have remote employees.

Todd I gotta tell you the value of getting face time with those people and what you hear from them sort of before, during, and afters. It's pretty worth it. so anyway, that's my, that's my stance on even spending a ton of money to do a all staff retreat. It's, it's really worthwhile. and so during that retreat, you and I had a breakfast chat and, the best topic I can come up with and, and maybe this will be the name of the podcast [00:02:00] is.

Todd How enough money can paper over the cracks and what does that mean? other than the obvious. And so for the listeners, what we got into this conversation about might very well just be resurfacing what our company positioning in 2026 and beyond really needs to get narrow and tight on, as our own marketing efforts.

Todd and really. Getting tighter around who our ideal customer profile is as a company. And we're thinking about this. 'cause, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. We have lots of friends and, all the agency worlds, big agencies and the agencies, the HoldCo agencies. And we just had a myriad of conversations and have, some really great partnerships.

Todd What it leads us to know through validation is that there is a gap. There's an underserved marketplace, which was our original hypothesis when we [00:03:00] reformed this company, and that underserved marketplace is for brands and clients largely buying media, or having media budgets, arguably somewhere between one and $25 million.

Todd The reason why we use those numbers is because we've got enough friends in the industry that work for the bigger agencies that have all told us we could care less and don't really want to touch a media budget below $25 million because we work on $200 million media accounts, or $75 million media accounts, or $500 million media accounts, $25 million isn't worth our time.

Todd It's not even worth responding to the RFP, but. Those agencies get five, 10 RFPs a week sent to them for that budget range because there are brand managers or CMOs or marketing directors out there who think that their $3 million ad budget or their $7 [00:04:00] million ad budget, or their $20 million ad budget is big enough and that they need to go to one of the big shops because they've got proven.

Todd Capability and demonstration and maybe vertical specialty, maybe your automotive or your CPG or your, you know, whatever you are, consumer electronics or health and wellness and, and you look around and you go, wow, this one agency. But they do a lot of great work in that category and look at the brands they work for.

Todd Well, if they can do work for those brands, boy they should be able to crush it for me. And you had a whole lot to say about why that type of thinking is, potentially a catastrophic failure. in the mind of the marketer, and there's really, really clear and obvious ways to detect that to us because we get in behind the scenes, they're not so clear to the marketer.

Todd To the marketer. The optics of the big, shiny agency [00:05:00] with massive case studies, with really cool brands is the allure. What they don't realize is. There's a big difference between a $15 million ad budget and $150 million ad budget. I'm gonna pause there as sort of the opening intro and I want you to sort of talk about, and I'll, try to weigh in and, and prompt more questions about it.

Todd But you really went off on a tangent about papering over the cracks with enough money and how the smaller. Advertisers can't do that, and there's nowhere to hide, and this is why it is so much more difficult to find a team that will actually do the hands-on work at that size and why you need to look for a partner who specializes in that size versus thinking you belong maybe with a bigger shop that has much fancier logos on their website and that you want to believe you can [00:06:00] sit next to those companies.

Kelly Yeah, it's, it's a really interesting sort of space that I do think gets orphaned a little bit in terms of opportunity because the perspective that I have on it is at the smaller levels of budget, you have this interesting benefit where. You haven't fully saturated much of the market, almost everything, you know, has some level of incremental benefit to it, right?

Kelly Because you haven't, you've either not run ads before, or you haven't tapped into, you know, existing demand all that much, and so everything kind of looks like it works a little bit. Your biggest challenge is kind of finding points of diminishing return or maximizing efficiency in those types of things.

Kelly Everything is, something's better than nothing. Elements of, you know, things look good and I'm yielding things out of it. On the other side of that spectrum, when you have these larger budgets, this, this tends to exist because you are a more mature brand, and so you have a foothold.

Kelly You have a brand. Establish, you have an audience that knows about you. You have enough money [00:07:00] to create some of your own momentum, whether it's buying a Super Bowl commercial or whether it's, you know, doing a big activation. And so you have these moments, these catalysts that. You can piggyback off of and generate success by amplifying these bigger opportunities in these bigger things, these celebrity endorsements, these big commercials, these retail engagements, things that already have a natural momentum to them.

Kelly And so it's a lot easier to say, Hey, we have this great exciting thing, let's put some money behind it. And most likely, unless we totally mess it up, people are going to respond and there's gonna be positive momentum. Now of course, there like anything else, there's a spectrum. There's still, you know, good to, bad to, great.

Kelly But for the most part, you're not, the media investment itself isn't having to do all of the heavy lifting of both creating the opportunity, perfecting it, and maximizing it. and again, where on the other end of that spectrum, the media, again, it's tapping into so much newness typically, that it's gonna look good in there.

Kelly But when you're in that middle [00:08:00] zone, right, you have. You have enough momentum going to where you know, you should be hoping for these outcomes, but you're not so established that you're dominant in the, field. You have all of your, your audience really defined. You don't have your, all these journeys perfect.

Kelly And you run into this thing where if you do kind of reach a ceiling or maybe something that you thought would work, doesn't work as much as you want. There's not an obvious and clear pivot or solution to it, and you don't have something where you can just throw money at it and say, okay, well now I don't have enough brand awareness, so let me just run some awareness and then that'll kinda reignite my pool.

Kelly You have to do it incrementally and you have to do it with a lot of responsibility on the ROI and the returns. 'cause generally you're pretty cash flow tight, right? You have enough money to do cool things, but not so much that you can afford to sort of. Be too speculative or burn through stuff. And so that creates this extreme level of responsibility and strategy that has to go in where you have to think about how do I run my core?[00:09:00]

Kelly Elements as much as I can and make sure I'm maximizing that. How do I identify points diminishing return? How do I formulate enough experiments and tests to be identifying net new and incremental opportunity? How do I lean into the levers that aren't just spending dollars on meta and Google or programmatic or whatever?

Kelly It's that will dictate whether or not something is successful or works right? How do I get the right creative messaging? How do I get the right website journeys? How do I get the right partnerships or data? All of these things take a lot of work. And again, at the bigger side of things, it doesn't feel it's this weird thing where it almost feels like it's easier the more money you have because again, money solves a lot of, lot of problems in the field that we're at, right?

Kelly You can buy more data, you can create more awareness, you can have prettier creative, and all of those things make it easier. To make every paid media dollar work better and perform better. In the absence of that, you have to be a lot smarter and you have to be more competitive on the bids, and you have to work on the fringes and identify audiences that [00:10:00] can engage.

Kelly You have to look at lifetime value, you have to extract more out of it, and all of that is the expertise and the knowledge and the creativity that is more than just. Logging into meta and buying and, and setting up some ads or choosing some keywords on Google and just simply showing up where it's at.

Kelly You have to look at the bigger picture. And so it's, it's just this really interesting thing where if you're in that middle ground again, I, the number I would use would more be that like maybe five to $20 million range. Again, you're big enough and growing enough to where your dollars should create momentum.

Kelly And you feel like you've, you know, you're past that sort of really startup or early growth stage, but you're not at that mature level yet. And so the other thing that we talked about that brought a lot of this to light is there's so much tools in technology and AI is at the, so much at the forefront of this right now, that there's all this promise about, Hey, we did this thing and it saved all this time and money, or we applied this thing and it identified all these things.

Kelly But a lot of those case studies are built around these ideal scenarios or these mismatched scenarios of a client [00:11:00] type, where that is set up for success and possible. And very few clients actually operate and live in that same analog experience where they're not gonna have the existing momentum with very clear user journey signals.

Kelly They're not gonna have the the carried momentum or the clear. Path from discovery to purchase or, or things that make it very easy for AI to say, if I do X, I will see Y and I can maximize in journey. There's so many variables and nuance to the pricing strategies and user journeys and retail prioritization and competitive markets that, again, AI can very much help teams really think through and identify and take their knowledge further.

Kelly But it's not just a flip a switch and the ai, AI figures it all out, right? That works when it's just replicating something that's already working really well. It's not problem solving. And almost every five to $20 million client is gonna run into a lot of problems. You're gonna run into AUR journeys, you're [00:12:00] gonna run into unclear data streams, or lack of history or pattern recognition, or market conditions or market competition.

Kelly All the things that require. The inputs that leverage the power of the AI to help you kind of go into that. And so it, it runs into this weird thing where you'll see an executive that'll see an article or read something. You'll be like, well, you know, that saved them a bunch of money, or they unlocked all this value out of that and, and the ai, why can't I do that?

Kelly And you kind of go into that and it's like, they're not you. It's just a very different experience in

Todd terms of, well give, give an example what you're talking about. So in that scenario, like, Are you framing this up as purely budget based? Like when you say they're not you, you're saying, 'cause you and I talked about, if you're to interrupt and try to get some context to this, if you're a startup Energy drink, I'll just use this as a category.

Todd Let's say you're doing, you're not startup, you're, maturing. You've been around, you've got a $15 million ad budget, but [00:13:00] you're going up against Red Bull and Monster Energy and Rockstar. Who have hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that sort of the context you're talking about?

Kelly Yes.

Kelly But it's not only the existence of the money, it's what the existence of the money represents and unlocks. Right. So again, in that scenario, if you take your Red Bull or your monster. There is brand recognition there. There is built-in audiences, there is advocacy, there is interest, there is tuned in audiences, right?

Kelly And so all an AI system has to really do is understand who the audiences historically are. There's a huge pattern of who likes these brands, who buys them what's already well known and well-established journeys that work, purchase patterns at work. And again. You already have an audience that is ready to buy and is not fully exhausted and all of that.

Kelly So it's pretty easy to see clear patterns of, if I do this and I refine this and I do these channels, I'm gonna see these results. And it's pretty predictable. And again, there's so much [00:14:00] money at play that even the things that don't work or don't work as well, well sort of get buried. It's not as. Obvious, it's not as clear like, hey, there's a problem here, and it's dragging my overall results down.

Kelly It's sort of an anomaly in what is probably, you know, the balance between what's working the 80 20, you know, it's 80 percent's gonna work great and maybe 20% doesn't, and it's not as glaring and obvious at that kind of scale,

Todd if you're spending $15 million in media.

Todd You might have a hundred million dollars in sales, so that's not an immature brand. If you've got a, energy drink brand doing a hundred, $150 million in sales. They've got an audience, they've got buyers, they've got retail, grocery distribution. They're doing pretty well.

Kelly Yes. No, they're doing great.

Kelly But what I'm saying is, is that 80 20, right? If 80 percent's working and 20 percent's not at a hundred million dollars, right? that 20% quote unquote not working as well, sort of gets overshadowed and washed out and it's, you know, it's a dilution effect. Right? Exactly. The dragging down that dilution effect at scale isn't as bad.

Kelly 20% of your 15 million at the scale that [00:15:00] you. That dilution isn't as big and it's, and it's more impactful. And it's more problematic. And again, and it's, you just don't have these preset operating pools as much as a big brand does because maybe you find a pocket of success. Maybe you find an audience that hasn't really discovered you yet and is interest, but you don't know what the, point of diminishing return is on that.

Kelly And how much money can you spend chasing it? And what's the opportunity cost of going after that versus maximizing, so many times we run into these brands where. they want to do something shiny and new and exciting, and I get that right. You want to do TikTok, you want to do Reddit, you want to do CTED, or you want to do this thing that.

Kelly It is cool and it sounds better and, and it's really a lot more exciting. But then we run into it and like, but you haven't maximized your search opportunity yet and that's your lowest hanging fruit. So why would we pivot dollars over here before you've really tapped into what is ripe and ready to kind of benefit your business?

Kelly And so that's this balance of how do you create these experiments and these tests and how [00:16:00] do you, what's your room to fail and how creative can you be? 'cause again, if I have a hundred million dollars. I can afford a $5 million test, that doesn't go very well, and I can learn from it because again, that 95 million is just gonna overshadow it.

Kelly If I have a $15 million budget, I can't afford to burn $5 million testing out some cool thing and go through it. I really can't even afford $1 million without it really working and giving it its full chance. And. And again, and it's not just that, right? it's not just the media spend, it's those big budgets also mean you have the production elements and you have the audience ability, and you have all this other things that go into whether or not something's successful or not.

Kelly There are situations where we can run a perfect media targeted campaign. It still doesn't work as good because the creative wasn't good enough or the website wasn't good enough, or the app didn't work as well or something that said, we got all the right people. All the people that are in there, but there were other elements.

Kelly The call center didn't work as well. The email nurture system wasn't as good as it could have been. [00:17:00] A competitor underpriced us. Amazon didn't feature us. We lost position in Costco on an end cap to another thing, like things that have nothing to do with media that again, those things just aren't. As uncontrollable or as impactful at scale as they are when you're running these other things.

Kelly And it just, it double and triples down how creative and how mindful and how attentive the teams have to be in making that $15 million work. Whereas the a hundred million dollars would just have a lot more room for error or room for grace and what can and can't work and what you can do to control it.

Todd So I think that's where I want to sort of focus. The rest of this conversation on, because the idea of papering over the cracks is, is tied to the hypothesis that again, a hundred million dollars media budget, you have much more room for error that likely would not have any significant impact versus that $10 million, ad spend.

Todd You don't, even though that's a lot of money, you don't have a lot of room for error. Any errors in that level. We [00:18:00] know because we run accounts this size. Are pretty glaringly obvious, and immediate and need to be addressed immediately. We maybe, again, at a hundred million dollars, I'm sure anybody running a hundred million dollar media account, let say they put just as much time, energy, and effort into it as we would for a $10 million account.

Todd But to your point, the difference is the mistakes are magnified.

Kelly not to interrupt you, but it's not just mistakes. It is. Just more things won't work. Right. Again, I'm gonna use your other example, the Red Bull campaign. there's almost no world where you're gonna run a Red Bull campaign and it's gonna completely and totally fail.

Kelly Maybe it doesn't work as good as you want, but people are gonna buy Red Bull. Red Bull has momentum. Like it's gonna work. It may not work as good as you want. You can run a startup brand and you can run something that just for a smaller drink brand that genuinely doesn't work very well. Like it just doesn't come through and now you're scrambling and problem solving and trying to put all these things.

Kelly you're inherently going to fail more at that level [00:19:00] because you're, you have to take more chances and be more speculative. There's just not this higher baseline of. Just not a world where Red Bull's gonna totally fail because it's already surpassed that. It's too mature for that for the most part, unless you're getting like wild speculation on things like that.

Kelly But within your core, what's driving the business forward, you're just not gonna run into as many failures or as many really impactful problems. And that's the problem that I have with all of this is. All these case studies and all these miracle silver bullets, and this fixes everything. It assumes the best.

Kelly It assumes everything works well. It assumes things perform well, and it very rarely looks at when something goes wrong, when you don't have all these things, how do you problem solve? And these problems come up so much more often than these beautiful case studies want to acknowledge it's this.

Kelly this exists in life, right? Everyone wanna, wants to look at the person who dropped outta school and went and started a business and, you know, became a billionaire. No one wants to talk about the 10,000 other people [00:20:00] who did the same thing and went bankrupt and failed miserably.

Todd Well, so that's why I wanna, this back to, you know, we talked a lot at the, in that conversation about how. there's this gap, there's this middle market sort of need and gap. And we have the world of indie agencies, which we're a part of, and you, and, and some of those could be very small.

Todd Two, three people, you know, doing small projects, local SMB type projects. And then you have maybe the mid-market, zone. And then you have the bigger HoldCo or large indie agencies that are again, servicing, you know, call it 50 million on up. And then you have brands who have the 5 million or the 10, or the 15 or the 20 million, and they, RFP, these big agencies because they have some belief for whatever reason it is, whatever's informing their beliefs.

Todd Maybe it's a referral from a friend who's, you know, CMO in a similar company or, maybe they worked at a big agency before. Whatever their, their belief system is, they believe that [00:21:00] that's where they should go. I think what we were debating is if we know from talking to those people and our, and our friends in the, in the industries, that the staffing and labor models and the interests of margin performance of the bigger agencies really isn't in support of the smaller accounts.

Todd Why, as a marketer would you? Try to get the attention of the bigger agencies with some belief that they're, again, when you have all the wonderful data and, and signals and money to buy anything and everything you need. If you're, you know, 150, 200 million, whatever, red Bull on up, but you're not that, you're, you're the a hundred million dollars in sales and $15 million ad budget beverage brand, why are they not looking at.

Todd the mid-size market indie agencies that can really do amazing work in that area, because [00:22:00] that's a big deal to that size agency. They're gonna put the A team on that work and you're gonna get, and most indie agencies are staffed by x big agency employees. So you're getting. Sort of the pedigree that you want in the big agency, but

Todd well, okay. Debatable, you can debate that. in many cases, I think you're getting the pedigree. 'cause lots of people leave big agencies and start their own indie and so they're good people. They've worked and done great projects. anyway, I just think it's interesting and it's a, point of, of validation where we need to continue to lean into that.

Todd if you've got 25 million or less. I can tell you, matter of fact, you're not getting the B team at the big agency. You're getting a C team at best. You get the A team to start or the B team to start. The execution team is not that. whereas you could go with an indie agency and get the a team front to back, start to finish, and your outcome is probably going to be better.

Todd The clients that have hired [00:23:00] us, who came from big agencies have told us that.

Kelly I have perspectives on, a few things that you said there. first of all, I, I, don't envy people having, if you're at one of those brands having to make this decision, it is such a noisy, fragmented, difficult Oh yeah.

Kelly World to try and get through and sort through and figure out what's being said versus what's the reality and all these things. It, it, it's very, very difficult. I, I can understand that. A couple of points you made, if you're at that level, really, the only reason I think that you would gravitate towards, let's call it the bigger agency or the bigger name, maybe a couple of things.

Kelly One would be, we've always kind of made this joke. No one ever got fired for hiring the big name, right? Like no one's like if, if you hire that and it doesn't work like. No one's gonna be like, you took a big chance. It's like, no, I hired like the big name. It's if it didn't work, like what was I supposed to do like that's in there.

Kelly So it's a safe, it's a safer thing to do if, you're known, you just kind of have that insulation. I guess. You're hoping that there is a model [00:24:00] of whatever they did for those bigger clients or for those bigger agencies. There's learning and there's something that you can sort of draft off of or, or can be applied to and you're gonna get into.

Kelly That's a whole debate between where is the real value of marketing live? Is it in the processes or what exists? Or like the people that are actually spending the time to implement it and do it. Obviously my argument tends to gravitate towards, it's the people implementing is far more important than what they're implementing too.

Kelly But you could make a case against that. I could see that. it's not one I would buy into, but I could see it being done. The other thing that you said is the more independent agency and trusting with that. Well, I agree that a lot of those are typically gonna be taken down from people leaving the big agencies and, and maybe the top heavy talent of those agencies, is more of the, the better talent.

Kelly I would argue there's not that many a teams that exist. And so I think what you end up there is, especially in those startup that that come [00:25:00] out, you'll be very top heavy in those agencies, but the rest of the talent that's spending the hours and the time as you're building up, I don't know that you're always getting the very best of the best and there across every independent agencies.

Kelly Of course, there's really good ones. I would be careful to assume that just because they have a pretty story and a pretty website and that experience coming to the baby agencies that. It's not just a few of the senior executives that are talented and then everyone else who actually has to do all of the work and put it all in is structured and set up to kind of fulfill on all those promises.

Kelly That's really hard to sort through. and you'd run into that. You also have a problem at that size of agency where. Especially if you're starting out, not all of them are set up with the legacy of access to the same reps that you have at Facebook, or the reps that you have at Google, or the relationship and the history that you have with the DSPs and all of this moving technology and everything that empowers us to do what we do.

Kelly That is not something that if you haven't done and built for a decade plus, you can't just jump in and be like, I'm on the same playing field as everyone else is in there. Like there are seats you can't [00:26:00] get access to, and if you do, they're very expensive and all these things that structurally and fundamentally have to exist.

Kelly And so that's why it's a really, really hard middle ground to live in, right? It's not that hard to work in the startup world where you don't have to have too much of that sophisticated infrastructure to be able to work with them. It's hard to operate at the really high levels of big budgets where you do have access to all the infrastructure and the, and the seats on all, all of the exchanges and the data partner relationships and all the things that you can not miss out on.

Kelly Opportunity to live in the middle where you're small enough to give that experience, but big enough to have access to all of the really powerful things that drive results. It's a very, very small thing, and I think you find most people ending in the spectrum that middle ground is hard to find. I think it is.

Kelly Corporate structure. I think it's motivation. I think it's legacy access. I think it's the way it's approached, that allows for that to exist. And I think that's the rarest thing there is. And at the end of the day, what you're ultimately looking at when you talk about budgets and scale. It's access [00:27:00] a resource when it comes to the fees and what is available to the people doing the work to implement it, right?

Kelly The reality is, is that 20% of $10 million is $2 million to run 5% of a hundred million dollars is $5 million of resources, right? So just the laws of the way that fee structures work. The way that you're creating a balance between working dollars and what go goes towards the people doing the work.

Kelly It's really, really hard to make the math work. And that's why a big agency is like, I can go win a hundred million dollar client, even if I have to do it at 5, 6, 7, 8%, or whatever it is, that's still four or five times the resource allocation than if I went and got a 10 or $20 million client. Even if they're willing to pay double their fee rates on it.

Kelly And now you run into. the people spending 10 or $20 million, they don't want to hear that they're spending double their percentage rate of the a hundred million dollar client. So now they expect to spend 7, 8, 9, [00:28:00] 10%, whatever it is, not realizing to do the math of what's left over. And guess what? You still want the same outcomes.

Kelly You still want these same capabilities. You still want the same access to the tools, yet you're gonna do it on a fifth of what the overall number is over here. Guess what happens? You're either not going to get it or people are going to cut a lot, a lot of corners to try and make that promise cause again, if you go to that big agency, they're not pitching the 10 or $20 million client being like, you're gonna get half of the value that I'm gonna give. The hundred million. Gonna pitch it like it's a hundred million dollars. Make all the promises in the world. And then you realize the math simply does not make that possible.

Kelly So what am I really going to get? And at the end of the day, if it comes down to you at let, let's go higher end, $20 million client versus a hundred million dollars client. Every single time that a hundred million dollar client has a need or a someone super, a superstar breaks out. Everything siphons to that.

Kelly And, and this is why I always say [00:29:00] you need to be right size of the agency. I personally would always want to be my agency's priority and not sort of there if all else fails, they're last in line because this pays the bills 3, 4, 5 times as much as they do over there. It just doesn't make sense to think you're gonna get that at those numbers and be the priority, but that's the way that I look at it.

Todd You know, what's interesting about that, and we can, we can wrap on this, is that, in the past when we've had to, go through procurement, uh, officers in the procurement process for onboarding, either prospects or, or looking at prospects or onboarding clients, or an RFPs, we have had to respond to if said client hired us, what percentage of our business would they be?

Todd And anytime that that showed up as well, you would be our largest client by billings or revenue or whatever. If you were to come on board, it was perceived as a turnoff [00:30:00] because they didn't want to be the largest client and be a big concentration risk in your company. And I always thought that was interesting 'cause I thought, well, why wouldn't you wanna be by numbers the most important client on the roster?

Todd I would think that that would be. An attractive thing based on how you just said it, you would, you know, you're gonna get a lot of attention or at least be in the top three maybe, you know, like, know that you're your top three. But anyway, I thought it was interesting. I loved your comment about, when brands have enough money to paper over the cracks versus the ones that don't.

Todd And, and why do the ones that don't have the perception that they can go. Play with those, those same brands that do have the money to paper over the cracks and expect the same things, the same outcomes, maybe the same fee structures, maybe the same types of talent and resources working on their business.

Todd And don't stop and think that the economic calculations don't support that. They never will, they never have. [00:31:00] AI is not going to equalize the field. every smart, intelligent. Person that's now sort of had enough time around ai, including the Stanford professor that we've enjoyed his, content from, has all, said these are not tools to expedite and cut corners.

Todd all they are going to do is give you a teammate to do better work with and, and that's going to take. Time, energy, and effort. It's not an easy button to cut a corner and soles anyone out there think that it is, I think we could probably prove them wrong, and would welcome the challenge.

Kelly I keep saying it over and over again. Again, I think we are in an era where a lot of people are gonna go through multiple getting burned experiences thinking, Hey, this is this grandiose promise. Is right sized for me and it's gonna work. And I would say 90% plus of them are gonna find out it's not that easy that we're not set up for that.

Kelly And then eventually it'll come back around and [00:32:00] say, okay, this thing can be an accelerant to greatness. It can take good to great. It can take great to incredible. It can't take bad to good like that. You still have to. Figure out how to get something that has the right inputs and has the right guidance.

Kelly I mean, and the papering over is just, it's so much around everything. I, I feel like I say this all the time, it's everything is a combination of time and money, right. If you have more money, you can save more time. If you don't have more money, you have to, you know, you have to put in the time to offset it.

Kelly The, you know, it's a balloon and it's always the same thing, and it's almost always those two inputs that are going back and forth. And the nice thing about having those big budgets is you can save the time by sort of papering over those cracks and, and overcoming it with data and overcoming it with scale and overcoming it with that, without that money, it means the people working for you to uncover the, those diamonds of opportunity.

Kelly Is everything is all about creativity and problem solving and, and big picture thinking and all of those [00:33:00] components. it's almost never going to be at that, at that middle spend level. Just buy more keywords or just, throw up a couple more Facebook campaigns and then it's, we're gonna nail it.

Todd I think we're gonna see a lot of ai, contribute to, bad decisions. Coming out. So

Kelly think it'll be weird too. 'cause I think some of them, you'll see this little pop of improvement because you'll start from a bad baseline and then it'll sort of fizzle out and not go anywhere and it'll kind of run down these cul-de-sacs.

Kelly But everything's gonna be like, oh, it feels so good and it looks so good right out of the gate, because you're probably starting from a less than ideal starting point. But I, think it's gonna reach a ceiling really, really fast.

Todd Well, we've got some interesting tech that we're gonna be trying and testing, so we'll talk about more of that later.

Todd and. I think that was a good discussion. If you're happen to be a marketer, you happen to listen to this podcast and you happen to have a budget between five and $25 million, you should be thinking about who's servicing that and whether or not you're with the right sized partner or not. you might be, and they might be crushing it or maybe you're getting [00:34:00] overlooked.

Todd 'cause you're 29th on the client roster of a very large agency and you're just not that important. so good luck and, Talking to you. I will talk to you on the next one.

Kelly Thanks everyone.

Outro Thanks for listening to contrary to Popular Opinion where we challenge you to think independently, push the limits, and take uncommon action so you can achieve game changing results in your business and your life.

Outro Just stay up to date with our latest episodes. Be sure to click the follow or subscribe button now. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.