Samir Balwani 0:00

Hi, I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and founder of QRY. Join me as I talk to industry leaders about their strategies, challenges and successes in managing their advertising and marketing. Hi, I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and founder of QRY. This episode is brought to you by QRY. QRY is a paid media agency that helps brands balance brand awareness and performance marketing to drive predictable and profitable growth, to learn more about how we can help you visit weareqry.com, on this episode today, I'm really excited. I've known Stephen forever. He's the head of growth at Geologie. Super smart guy. I learned so much from him, and I can't wait to share more. Thank you so much for coming on today, Stephen. Thanks for having me smear. So let's get started with the easy stuff. So talk about, what is Geologie? How did you get there?

Stephen Racano 0:56

Sure, so I'm currently a head of growth of Geologie. We've been around for almost right around six years now. I really didn't have a complete linear path. You know, working brand side on D to C, right? In fact, we knew each other on the agency side. But, you know, going way back to after I graduated college, I did some web development. I got that's how I got into SEO and analytics. And I've all I've always been about providing, you know, agency level retainers for good portion of my career. From there, that's where I met you, over at Morpheus media, which became create the group where we did some SEO, and I started an analytics and measurement team there. And from there, I moved on to group M, where I led a paid search and paid social analytics team. And then my wife's job actually took us over to Italy, so I had to leave my job at group M, and, you know, find my own way freelancing. And luckily, a few months after I moved there, I was connected, actually, by an ex colleague of ours, Toby, who connected me with Nick and Dave, who are the co founders of Geologie. They were really looking for a marketing mix model and some measurement and somebody to help, you know, understand how they could, you know, take their product to market. So I did small audit. I thought there was a huge opportunity on the table, and everything is history from there.

Samir Balwani 2:26

Yeah, it's funny. I am a Geologie consumer, and I do love the brand, so I love that you landed there for sure. And it is, no, I'm not surprised at all that you had such great success, it's you are a very smart person with the ability to try and figure a lot of things out, and be able to see things from all different angles, which I think is key for a marketer these days.

Stephen Racano 2:52

And I'm not surprised that you're a customer, but I stumbled upon your customer profile years ago, and I didn't know you were a customer, but I'm not surprised, because look at your skin. I mean, I age back live here.

Samir Balwani 3:13

So listen, Steve, let's talk advertising, because Geologie is a skin care brand. You are a men's skin care brand that is swimming up river for sure, as well as a subscription business. You have so much nuance to it, and there's so much to work out. What are the challenges you're seeing? You know? What do you what are the things that are, you know, frustrating you Where are you seeing? Opportunity?

Stephen Racano 3:38

Sure. I mean, we recently made a pivot into, you know, wider omni channel marketplaces, and we also started our retail operations in half the doors at target this year. So that has brought, you know, a ton of new challenges, you know, to the brand, you know, d to c space in general. You know, from 2022 through 2024 has has had its own set of challenges, right? We've seen CPMs rise. We've seen, you know, channels shift pretty significantly within the space. We've really seen just a major shift in consumer behavior back to retail. So, you know, with that, we're seeing a lot of shifts in terms of how we want to spend our advertising dollars, how much we want to focus in on brand overall, and allow that, that brand awareness to trickle into the omni channel presence, and that's been, you know, some of our biggest challenges, as we've also tried to stay profitable every single month while we grow, which is, you know, obviously a huge challenge for For any brand in this day and age?

Samir Balwani 4:41

Yeah, it's I love when we talk. You touched on it perfectly, because I know you and I talked about this before too. But the shift from a performance mindset into this one a brand. And how do you make that shift, especially when you are trying to maintain profitability and cash flow positive, because brand. It is an investment with a long return window that isn't always easily seen. So managing those investments is really difficult. How are you having that conversation internally? And how are you even just thinking about that?

Stephen Racano 5:09

Yeah, I think, you know, we're, I'm lucky internally, because we've always kind of believed in a brand foundation, you know, coming from an SEO background, you know, we've always looked at, you know, organic as a huge evergreen piece of our business. You know, this really started, actually, from a very performance driven approach, where we were working with a lot of men's lifestyle creators on YouTube. They would create videos like, how to get rid of dark under eyes, or, you know, how to approach skincare in your 30s, Beginner's Guide to skincare for men. And what that did was it created a foundational element, you know, that was a mix of brand and performance, right? And I think that that has allowed us to see the impact that that could have to the business long term, and bringing in, you know, quality customers, building awareness and mixing that with performance over time. I think you know now that we've reached kind of a pivotal moment in terms of now we need to really go more focused on the awareness and reach side of things. It's not necessarily just about that mix, right? It's how do we actually leverage things like humor and just interesting content to, you know, carry our brand voice in a way that is going to lead towards people searching for us or being there when they are in market in the future? And you know, that has been a big challenge, because also a lot of those customers, they're not coming to us, d to c, right, where we have first party data, where we have our diagnostic quiz, where they're answering, they're going to target, right? They're going to Amazon. And hopefully that will be continuing to expand, and in those kinds of places, it presents tons of challenges around measuring lifetime value and repeat purchase and understanding who that demographic of that wider reach actually is becoming,

Samir Balwani 7:07

right? Yeah, that's interesting, because you guys are so used to having all the data at your fingerprint, at your fingertips, of saying, okay, you know, I spent X amount of dollars. I know exactly who my customer is, and I know exactly how long they stayed with us. The retail edition does muddy that conversation and and it's something that we work with a lot of our clients on, of just understanding you go from a laser pointer of measurement to these like very broad strokes of, is it working or is it not working? I may not know exactly what's working and what's not working, but overall, how are we doing? And that can be really uncomfortable for people,

Stephen Racano 7:44

sure? I mean, I think there are aspects of marketplaces and retail that are very performance driven, and particularly within the skin, hair and body care space, right? It's a very concern driven market. You know, people are looking for solutions to skin care problems, whether that's clear skin or aging or sun protection, right? And retail media, as I'm sure you're aware, is, yeah, has a huge, you know, data driven component to it, and you know it's it's still out of your control a little bit, because you need to rely on services like roundel or Amazon ads, and, you know, AI to help run some of those things. Where it's not as straightforward as like a Google search or a meta campaign, but you do have the data there, and it can be a good mix of performance and brand, particularly within the skin care space where, you know, our main goal is to get people results right, and finding out what they're looking for, results for, and getting them into the right product is brand marketing and product marketing for us. And that's, that's really where some of the mix comes in. The challenge right is, where does the humor and, you know, the additional right we, we have a couple of really great creators. One, his name is Jaden Williams, and he's a YouTube creator. He speaks very well to Gen Z, millennial audience. He's fairly young himself. His video that he did makes fun of TikTok marketing trends for us, that's amazing, and it has nearly 20 million views, right? It's amazing. I mean, just incredible. And you go through the comments, right? And every one of every one of the comments is like, this is the greatest ad I've ever seen, you know? But like, if you measure the performance of the code that's tied to that, it doesn't do now, sorry, I do anything, yeah. So, so that's where the challenge really comes in, is like, how, what, what level of engagement are we looking for? What from, from what audiences? And you know, is that leading towards lift in from an omni channel standpoint, yeah.

Samir Balwani 9:54

And so the interesting thing about that is, from a brand standpoint, is, how do you continue to. Replicate that and build this momentum around it and stay focused to that, right? Because if you said humor a few times now, and so like, if, if the brand is going to have this humor element to it, how do you maintain that humor? And how do you continually show up with humorous perspective? Like, Old Spice is a perfect example of it, right? Like they double down on how they're going to show up, and now that sits with you in that is how the brand appears. And the goal of all of these brand ads and brand moments is to have brand recall. So when somebody is ready to say, You know what, I am ready to go buy my next skincare product I am, you know, Black Friday is coming up, I'm going to try something new. Let me go test out. What am I going to try out? You just want to be in that consideration set, right? So if we think about, you know, top of funnel is brand awareness consideration and conversion consideration being I'm ready to make a purchase, and I've got four or five brands in there, the hardest part is just getting into that set. And so that's the beauty of brand awareness. And when people start to measure it as, okay, what's my click through rate? What's my conversion rate on variant awareness like those are not the metrics that tell you if you are in the consideration set or not. Like that. You will not be able to measure that piece of it. So I do love that you guys have that perspective and are looking at things like that. But how do you rep you replicate these kind of viral wins? Or what's your strategy around that benefit,

Stephen Racano 11:22

you know, creative ideas, they come at the random, right? And, you know, sometimes you're going to market with a new, new, you know, product collection or product line, and you need to come up with creative ideas that support, you know, the overall, you know, message, right? And a lot of times that's very, very challenging, right? So some of our most creative ideas, many of which come from the creators themselves, right? I mean, you know, authenticity is just key for any type of brand. And you know, one thing that we always do is we always get our creators product weeks in advance of any kind of filming or or, you know, content creation, and we allow them to come to us with ideas, right? I mean, we oftentimes know what product lines we want to promote. Sometimes we have ideas that we just set up calls and brainstorm, you know, with them. You know, when we came out with our hair co wash, right? You know, guys like you probably use it in your hair. Guys like me, I use it in my beard. Oh, that's awesome. And one thing that I was recognizing was that my beard Dan trough was gone, I guess because it's, you know, it's, it's scalp hair, it's good for your face. My skin wasn't, you know, healing on my face, and it was really solving for that. And it was something that we actually, when we just, you know, define the product benefits. We didn't define it for beard use ever. We didn't define it, you know, we knew it worked well for Dan, drift on your head. And, you know, out of that, I talked to one of our creators. His name is semi stupid, and he does some really amazing humorous content. And I told him, I said, you know, we, we really want to promote this product for beard dandruff. You know, it would be really funny if, like, he does these skits between him and his roommate have really bad, bad beard Dan drop. It might be one of the funniest videos. I mean, like the engagement on this video, you cannot help but laugh throughout the video and be like, This is the greatest ad ever. He basically is like, scratching his beard, and he's like, Is it snowing? He serves him toast in the morning, and he's like, Oh, why'd you put Parmesan cheese

Samir Balwani 13:39

on the toes. Oh no, oh no.

Stephen Racano 13:43

But, you know, it, it's ideas like that. They just kind of like come at a whim and you need to be able to execute. You need to understand that they they're good for your audience, and then find the right partner to execute them on with, right? Because, you know, doing brand marketing, a lot of people think brand awareness, right? Yeah, I make the most beautiful, prestigious brand video and put it on connected TV, but like, that's not what people remember, right? Yes, people will have name recognition from that, no doubt. And there are some brands that do that really well, right? I mean, but in the in today's day and age, it's going to be the podcasts and the creators on YouTube and the creators on Instagram and TikTok that create memorable content, right? And, yeah, that's really where, you know, we're trying to focus our our brand efforts when it comes to the brand voice and the humor and just the reach that it, that will have recall to it.

Samir Balwani 14:40

I laugh, because you talk about the beautiful brand, CTV ad, and you and I come from luxury marketing, which is all that all day long. And it's interesting, because something that we really focus in on is we'll do brain health tracking for our clients, and we help them with understand. What people think from a brand attribute standpoint. So worth it for the value is for a person like me, you know, does has high quality. So really, the the interesting thing for us is always when we look at a brand ad or a brand placement or even a brand campaign idea, and asking our clients, like, what is the attribute you are trying to move here? What are you trying to get people to consider? Because brand recall is one thing, remembering a brand, knowing the brand, knowing what it does, is one thing, but making sure that you make it into that consideration set again, requires that you fulfill on some of these brand attributes and luxury does it by saying, you know, we are we create this lifestyle, and so that's why they do these ads. And you know, you can kind of like fit in there fragrance ads are fascinating for that whole element as well, but for the male audience who is so tactically driven, and it is definitely a different way to market and a different attribute set that you have to focus in on it and prioritize Absolutely.

Stephen Racano 16:05

And you know, a lot of our awareness heads are very focused on validation, right? I mean, we find we have our diagnostic and that tells us that, I mean, over 70% of our customers are coming to us. They've never had a skin care routine before. You know, they're coming to us because we make finding a skin care routine simple, and they know that we're, you know, quality and making sure that our brand awareness is providing that validation. So they know when they're coming to us, it is worth the price. You know that that we we charge, right? Many of our competitors have a bunch of products in the market that you should be skeptical of they're kind of hocus pocus in a lot of ways, right? You know, they use a lot of fads. And you know, the male consumer in particular, you know, is very skeptical to skin care working right? Where we didn't grow up in a generation, where our parents used it in a lot of ways. Yeah, right. And, you know, like we, we see it at Sephora and at CVS and at Target, and it's overwhelming. I mean, how many products there are in the space. So, you know, we, we leverage, you know, one of the things we are leveraging outside of just awareness and engagement, which is where humorous ads come in our connection, you know, from from that standpoint, is really leveraging our ads for from a validation standpoint, right to let people know when they are ready to come into market, whether that is another creator that brings them in, or maybe their, you know, significant other ran out of their product in the bathroom, and they're just looking for their own. Maybe their skin breaks out and, you know, they actually have a problem that they need to solve, but at that's at that point they are going to recognize us as the brand that works, right? We're better grade skin care, we provide simple and effective solutions, and that's really one of the biggest differentiators of us in a marketplace where so many brands make that claim, right? So yeah, challenge to do that when everyone's trying to make that same claim.

Samir Balwani 18:02

Yeah, it's the it is interesting because, I think, because you have so much performance marketing history and SEO history, you have this natural ability to connect kind of brand and performance and show kind of that pathway through when you guys are running brand awareness campaigns, or just even thinking about brand awareness, and then going into the consideration set, you know, thinking about validation, validating that somebody even needs it. How do you then differentiate against your competitive set? Because I'm assuming that they're all doing relatively the same thing. Because, again, this, this is a very untapped market. It's also an educational market, right? Like, there is a category education that just needs to happen, yeah?

Stephen Racano 18:45

And it's an education that is is difficult, right? I mean, it's very scientific. You know, most, most guys and just people in general, really don't understand the foundations of what makes, you know, a good skin care routine, you know, versus a bad skincare routine, right? What is the difference between a drugstore, you know, a middle line or premium quality product and a luxury product? And a lot of times that difference is packaging, yeah. And, you know, packaging can come from a brand standpoint, but packaging could also come from a product standpoint. So, like, one of the things we really try to, you know, focus on is how, like, packaging can differentiate a product's efficacy. And we use, I'll show it, I don't know if it'll show but we have these, you know, beautiful, airless pump bottles, right? And you would say, oh, what? What is, what? Why? You know, yeah, but that makes the product shelf life a lot longer. It keeps the product, you know, fresh and working where a lot of you know, our competitors in the space, they put their product in jars. And you know, frankly, because they're not using a lot of really core science backed ingredients, it probably doesn't make all. That much of a difference. But when you're using, you know, high grade retinols and things of that nature in your product as a leg acid, you know, kotric acid, it is important to have these products stored in a way. Vitamin C, you know, is another one, having them stored in that way. So it's educating the the consumer on like, what really matters, what validates the product, to make it better in a space that, frankly, it's hard to tell, right? Yeah, but you know, who is in the pudding. It's all about results, right? So, yeah, we really leverage our reviews, our awards, you know, our industry honors and recognitions, you know, to help kind of build that trust and validation as well. Because until you try the product, a lot of times, you you don't know. And one of the biggest things we find is that our consumers are often very surprised, and I think that's a good thing, right? You know, if, if they believe and have tried other products in the market that haven't worked for them, and they come to us, we know that that's going to be a long lasting customer, right? They're surprised that they got results from our product, and at the end of the day, that's going to keep somebody on, you know, a healthy skin care routine.

Samir Balwani 21:10

Yeah, that's awesome. I you know, we've been talking a lot of like, brand awareness consideration, but how do you guys actually, then look at measuring that success? Like, how do you look at finally, at the conversion level. Is this working? Is this not working? How am I actually growing the business? How do you kind of take a look at that?

Stephen Racano 21:28

Yeah, you know, I think, like brand marketing. When what a lot of marketers think about brand marketing, they're thinking about prospecting and awareness. But the reality is, brand marketing is a life cycle purpose, right? And I think, like, when you think about any initiative that is truly life cycle focused, like performance, marketing is going to be middle to lower funnel, and it's very easy to define, you know, what is your capital lifetime value? Is your audience qualified? Are you getting the click through rates and three second video views that that you expect. But when you take a brand initiative that can cover anything you have to really like, dive into what the specific goals of each piece of content and media and platform, you know, really is right? Is it a balance of performance and brand? Is it, you know, building awareness around specific concerns, is it just to get engagement and, you know, I think, like, it's also about the price and value and the perception post purchase, right? So, like, we can talk all day about search, lift and follow accounts and cost per follower and engagement metrics and positive sentiment, right? Like these are, like the ones I think most marketers are thinking about when it comes to brand performance. But like, the true measure of brand performance comes in retention. It comes in AOV, comes in life, you know, LTV, it comes in number of products per purchase, how frequently somebody's purchasing, right, you know, and I think, like, these are the things you know, coming from a subscription business. These were things are, like, heavily on our radar already, right? But these are the things that we really want to truly understand, you know, as we do more brand marketing, is, Are people cross selling between deodorant and body wash? Are people moving from skin care, you know, a three piece set to a four or five piece set? Which products you know, are really resonating in driving that, that perception and that quality to our consumer? And I think like that's really where people should be focusing their brand, you know, measuring on is because you said it's a long term game. It's a

Samir Balwani 23:42

long term game, right? I mean, the beauty for you guys, too, at skincare and just your products in general, is if you build a brand, they buy your product and they trust you, it's so much easier to get them to purchase the next different set or your new products, right? Like I always tell our clients, when you launch a new product, the number of your existing client customers that buy that product is an indicator of your brand. If you can't get people to come back and get excited about the products you're excited about bringing it to market, assuming they have the need that is a missed opportunity and something that we need to be really thinking about,

Stephen Racano 24:15

yeah, and you know, like, review count, review sentiment and like, these are the things that move organic, right? I mean, coming from an SEO background, like you're not going to rank, you know, in the top 20 products on Amazon, if you don't have a 4.5 you know, quality review, and you don't get that, you get that from having the right product, but you get that from setting the right brand perception, right, especially when your product is in, you know, a more mestiz space. And I know you work, you, you know, we both have worked with lots of luxury brands, and you know, it's, it's about, how do you maintain the value of that product, so people understand it is worth the price, right? And that they're coming and leaving good reviews, even though it might be. Be 20% more expensive than other Amazon products, which tend to a lot of times, be highly discounted, and from who knows where,

Samir Balwani 25:09

yeah, you have no background on and it just becomes so normal to say, Oh yeah, that's just a knock off. And you're like, okay, but that they don't want to buy that, right? Like it's just so yeah, it is interesting. The there is one thing that we try and get a lot of our clients to do too, is the how did you hear about us? So post purchase surveys, adding in word of mouth as an opportunity, because that is a great indicator of not only do I have a good brand, but is it a brand that people are excited to talk about? And going back to your humor, if you have a great brand with good products, and you use your brand campaigns to give somebody something to talk about that goes beyond your product that can still spur word of mouth and give people something to talk about so

Stephen Racano 25:54

that could it spurs a lot more conversation than talking about your Bathroom routine. Check

Samir Balwani 26:00

out my rental. Yeah, that's never gonna have a conversation. It's

Stephen Racano 26:04

very rare. It's not that it never happens. I think, you know, like again. I think problem solution people recognize, oh, hey, you know you had a really bad acne problem, and you cleared up your skin. How did you do it? Right? That becomes a conversation with your friends on Reddit and in many other places, potentially. But just like a normal, healthy skin care routine and habit is not something most guys are talking about, for

Samir Balwani 26:33

sure, for sure. I do want to shift conversations here and kind of look ahead. So as we all know, AI is changing everything. Marketing is shifting pretty rapidly. Advertising is shifting as well. What trends, technologies are you looking forward to? What are you most excited

Stephen Racano 26:52

about? I am really excited about TikTok. Okay, and I'll tell you why. You know, for over a decade, right? We say this is the year of social commerce, right? Yeah, every year like, oh, social commerce is going to pick up, yeah. And it really wasn't until last year that I think we could truly say the day has come where social commerce is a reality, right, yeah, how many? How many times? And you know, you work agency side, you've probably been telling your clients is the year of social commerce. You've probably been lying for the last decade. You could go into a meeting Samaria, and you could say social commerce is a reality, and TikTok has made it so yeah, and I think I'm very excited about that, because it's been so it's been such a long time coming. Yeah, right. I mean, meta promised, you know, Facebook really, right? They were better when they started promising social commerce was going to become a thing. YouTube has really tried to make it happen. And, oh,

Samir Balwani 27:56

I remember in purchase and purchase TV ads too, like trying to make it a thing of, like, your friends are watching these shows with you, and they're purchasing these products. And I'm like, No, this is never gonna take off. Like, it's just

Stephen Racano 28:07

yeah, but like, TikTok puts you right in the funnel, right where you know where you should be. You learn and are educated about products. And you know TikTok, I think, did a really great job of stemming discounts, which has created other problems within, you know, the social commerce space that we can talk about. But at the end of the day, it was enough to really feed the industry in a way that I think many brands are are seeing a lot of success now with TikTok Shops, right? And even being a more male focused brand, you know, we certainly consider ourselves gender neutral and unisex. We have one, you know, a few female beauty awards, and we do have a mixed client base. But, you know, we approach TikTok knowing that a big core part of our customer base is now. And we said, Yeah, are we going to be able to find success? You know, there, and we're, like, in one of the top, like top five, percentage of TikTok Shops. That's awesome. We leverage creative challenge through the TikTok creative platform and studio. We work with their affiliate network, and we boost the content that works, and we're finding success there. And what we're starting to see is that we're we're seeing repeat purchases now, right? So I think that the biggest challenge on TikTok Shops is going to be, how does TikTok Shops pivot out of a discount focused mindset, right? I saw a LinkedIn post you can laugh at with me, and it was somebody bragging about how they sold the first Birkin on TikTok. Oh, I

Samir Balwani 29:54

just saw that too. I literally saw that and and it wasn't their first. First they sold three, right? I think it was like

Stephen Racano 30:01

three, okay, their brag is okay. TikTok Shops is no longer for cheap products, okay? And granted, yes, a Birkin, but they sold it for 6700 euro, which is like 70% off of a Birkin on a flash sale. Okay? And anybody knows about luxury Birkins. They're like, 15 to $20,000 brand new. The person, the three people who bought it probably cashed in on like, five to $10,000 reselling it on eBay.

Samir Balwani 30:30

100% it's so funny. I love that you brought that up, because that has been so we have said social commerce is coming. Luckily, we have not been one of the agencies that said it is here, because my problem with social commerce and my problem with TikTok Shop, still, there are two key pieces that I have. One is brand safety. There is so much trash on TikTok Shops that you get put next to and for a luxury brand, for even a growing brand, every brand moment matters. And so it because you have to be really careful. I do think beauty and skin care is a needs to be on TikTok Shop. So if you're a beauty brand listening to this, and you're not on TikTok Shop, you are missing a whole host of opportunity. So that is one. That's my first one. The second one is TikTok Shop is really good for low consideration purchases. That is why discount does really well, because it cuts out the entire consideration risk. That's why you buy a Birkin at 70 you're like, 70% off, sure, I'll buy that. What's the worst that happens? I resell like it's there's something wrong with it, and I resell it at, you know, 50% off, right? Like, so, so it is really good for impulse, low consideration, or for reaching early adopters. And the hard part about that is early adopters tend to be brand switchers, and you have to be really careful about using TikTok Shop as the only avenue from which you do acquisition and and making sure it's not your primary it is a great place to launch new products build buzz, but you got to draft that purchase power in other channels. So I am not fully set on social commerce being here all the way. There are still some major challenges TikTok Shop will have to get over as well as meta shop as well. But I agree. I think, given your category, specifically, if you are like that, that is a huge growth opportunity for you into the next year. Yeah, and you know,

Stephen Racano 32:21

it is about, it's about it's about product selection, right? I don't think every product. I'm not trying to sell Birkins on TikTok, right? And I certainly would not devalue a $20,000 Birkin to $7,000 and brag about it, because, you know what? Like anybody could do that that doesn't really take a

Samir Balwani 32:38

lot. Happily, I can take a loss on a lot of things and sell a ton of things. But

Stephen Racano 32:42

you're right, it's really all about the product fit. And we, you know, we launched a product called blemish Buster kit, which is a pimple patches and acne spot treatment. I mean, this literally gets you results visibly in like, six hours. And I have proof of this. You could actually watch me on another podcast that I did called subscription prescription. I woke up that morning with a huge pimple on my nose, and I recorded the entire time. The whole day, I put on the spot treatment. I used the pivot patches. And by the afternoon, and then six hours, it was gone. Watch me on the podcast. I need that. And it's products like that, though, that really worked. You know, what the number brought up on TikTok Shops is, what's that colon cancer screening kit? Yeah, it's

Samir Balwani 33:28

these. It's like, super random, like, impulse purchase products, right? Yeah, relative low cost, big results,

Stephen Racano 33:37

right? Yeah. The other thing, obviously, everyone is excited about is AI, right, you know, like, there's, I love being, you know, we Morpheus media before, before you had your own amazing agency, we had the SEO team, and we refer to it as SEO and emerging technologies. That's right, yeah, if you recall. And you know, I think what is key about emerging technologies is just like, you just gotta trial and error. Everything right? And one thing about emerging technologies is like, sometimes you try something, like months ago, and it wasn't a great fit, it wasn't prime or maybe the right vendor or tool wasn't out there, but, like, three months later, the best thing ever could be out there, right? You

Samir Balwani 34:30

can't write anything off in perpetuity. I'm, like, always revisiting old technology constantly for that reason.

Stephen Racano 34:36

I mean, AI like we, we leveraged very early on for ideation and helping with process. And, you know, it has come so far in a year, right like now, we could do prompts and fill in data that allow for our AI tools to, like, literally have our brand voice. Um, yeah, which is incredible. Um. We're leveraging AI to, you know, watch our ads, read our ad concepts, and, you know, compare them across different kinds of demographics, how they're going to react to them, how it differentiates the product in the market. We're leveraging AI within our creative space. You know, you could do incredible amount of fun things, and you could see a lot of trends, you know, popping up that are AI based creative, you know, but you got to also be careful, there's a lot of AI tools that don't create authenticity, you know. You could take this conversation and you could upload either of us into an AI tool and try to do a nice product read, but I guarantee you that product read is going to be really boring and fall flat and not have a good hook, right? And you might be able to hit the talking points that you want, but it's not going to have authenticity. It's not going to have emotion, right? And, you know, maybe in a year from now, we'll be on this and AI will have emotion. We're certainly moving in that direction, but right now, I would say it's still, it's still a little lacking on that side,

Samir Balwani 36:07

yeah, I think on the creative side. And I can I use it for some of my content writing, but I don't use it to write the content to get me past the writer's block at the beginning, exactly right? So I actually have trained a chat GPT to be a journalist. And I say, hey, I want to, I want you to interview me about this topic. And then it creates all the questions as if it were a journalist asking me all the questions. And then I record a video answering those questions, and then that becomes our content. So I think really understanding where the human interaction needs to be as well as where AI can help you move faster, I think, is the key piece of it, right

Stephen Racano 36:46

for sure. I mean, I could give you one one use case, but we have 10,000 reviews, right, plus probably closer to 11,000 now, but like you could load those up to AI tool and summarize the benefits across this product. What are my customers like about this product? And then, boom, you have a summary. You know, how long it would take me to read 10,000 

Samir Balwani 37:08

Yeah, I'm never gonna be able to do that.

Stephen Racano 37:11

And then you could take that and write really good product descriptions and really good bullets that really call out, you know, the differentiation of your products. So, like, those are some of the ways we're currently leveraging it, but we also love to just play in the space. I mean, it's fun to play in. We've always been about trying new emerging technology. Sometimes you're on the right side of it. Sometimes, you know, it's a fad, but at the end of the day, it's it's fun. And if that's part of your brand then, like, make it part of your brand too, right? The audience come along for the ride.

Samir Balwani 37:45

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Well, awesome. So we're coming up on time. So thank you so much for joining us. If someone wants to find you online, where can people learn more about you?

Stephen Racano 37:54

Yeah, you could go to my LinkedIn, I think, is probably the best way to connect with me. I post on there frequently, and you could, you know, follow some of my stories around how Geologie is focused in on growth, and, you know, some of the things that we're doing within the space there.

Samir Balwani 38:09

Yeah, thank you so much again, Stephen for this is so much fun. Thanks.

Stephen Racano 38:13

Yeah, let's do it again sometime.

Outro 38:19

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Chief Advertiser. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe at chiefadvertiser.com share the episode with others who might find it valuable and consider leaving us a review. Your support helps us bring more insights with each episode. See you next time.

‍