David Pollet is the CEO of Incremental and a repeat entrepreneur with over 20 years of startup experience.
He has extensive history across startup environments and the lessons he has learned come from what he calls “a mix of big wins and big fails.”
David is a “Go to Market Growth Leader” with experience scaling Saas startups and public company divisions ranging from $5M-$100M+ in ARR. 25-years of experience in Sales, Marketing and Strategy leadership roles.
He is a team-builder with experience translating long-term strategic growth initiatives into operating plans that can be executed, measured, and improved continuously.
He has a proven track record of accelerating growth during times of transition. Deep knowledge and experience transitioning transactional businesses such as media arbitrage and data sales into Saas businesses with complex, multi-year committed engagements.
He is well-versed in Identity Management, Measurement & Attribution, Machine Learning, Data Sales, and all Media types (incl. Linear TV, CTV, Digital and Social Video).
Known for partnering closely with product, engineering and finance, he easily identifies opportunities for innovation and profitable growth.
What you will learn
- Learn how to leverage data for maximizing e-commerce revenue.
- Understand the role of AI in automating the collection and interpretation of e-commerce sales data.
- Discover the process of using machine learning to predict daily sales and align disparate data sources.
- Understand the impact of retail media networks on advertising performance.
- Discover the journey from traditional online advertising to advanced machine learning techniques.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:00:30
Hi, everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show! Today I have with me David Pollet. Now David has a mission to help retail media networks basically make sense of data and we’re gonna find out what that really means. Really. It’s about how to make more money out of an e-commerce site and make sense of the information that the old media networks really uh have struggled with.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:31 – 00:01:16
David Pollet, is the CEO of Incremental, a repeat entrepreneur with over 20 years of startup experience:
David Pollet is the CEO of Incremental and a repeat entrepreneur with over 20 years of startup experience.
He has extensive history across startup environments and the lessons he has learned come from what he calls “a mix of big wins and big fails.”
David is a “Go to Market Growth Leader” with experience scaling Saas startups and public company divisions ranging from $5M-$100M+ in ARR. 25-years of experience in Sales, Marketing and Strategy leadership roles.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:18 – 00:01:36
He’s known for partnering closely with private engineering and finance to identify opportunities for innovation and profitable growth. So, David’s Incremental website and business is all about helping e-commerce identify opportunities and grow. David. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
David Pollet
00:01:37 – 00:01:40
Uh It’s great to be here too. Thank you for having me, Jeff.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:40 – 00:02:31
So hopefully I described you accurately. Uh So which uh I have a favorite saying which I’ve mentioned to you before is that if you see an acronym, shoot it. So we’re gonna try and, and as we know, the digital landscape is full of acronyms which most of the people outside the industry have no idea about. So we’re gonna try and make sense of the noise and also the industry. But you’re about helping retail, online businesses grow effectively, and identify opportunities. So, David, how did you get to start what is quite a niche business? Really? So tell us a little bit, you know, thumbnail sketch of, you know, what you, what you’ve been doing the last 25 years since you were born because you’re only 26 I think. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:32 – 00:02:53
So tell us about your journey to where you are today a little bit. I’m, I’m intrigued by, you know, because we all got mixed backgrounds and uh but sometimes when you look back on the journey, you realize that um it all makes sense in looking in the rear vision mirror whereas you had no idea when you were starting where you were going. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today.
David Pollet
00:02:54 – 00:03:45
Yeah. Um, I mean, gosh, I really think back to it, it’s, uh, my cousin Harley who I owe a lot to, um, I was not making good use of my college education. I had hair down below my, uh, my shoulders and I was having a lot of fun and he gave me a job for the summer in Boston. And uh he had a venture capital company. I showed up. The first thing he did was march me to the barber. The second thing he did was give me a gym membership and tell me I was fired if I didn’t show up in the morning. And the third thing he did was put me in with his portfolio companies and, and, and really let me go to work and start ups that just needed hands and legs.
David Pollet
00:03:45 – 00:04:14
And uh from all of that, I caught the bug. And so my first good gig at a college was working at a company that was eight people, was a start up. And what we then called uh online advertising, right? We sold online ads. This was before there were even standard sizes. So I had a creative guy that would make the ads if I was able to, to make the sale. It was 97.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:14 – 00:04:21
Yep. So the web is what the browser is. What three or four years old by that stage, that’s, that’s very early
David Pollet
00:04:22 – 00:04:56
Netscape ruled the world. Um You know, so, uh um and you know, from there, I, I uh I journeyed a little bit. I did a little bit on the marketing side doing what we call digital marketing. I did that for Lendingtree and joined them at about 18, did a five year stint at Bank of America, which I consider to have been serving time. Um you know, and then hop back in. But this time I hopped in, in on, you know, you call the vendor side.
David Pollet
00:04:56 – 00:05:32
Um and just lucked into a job at a company that back then we didn’t even call it machine learning. We came up with an acronym. I know you hate those. But uh we called it a predictive optimization engine. Um That was just trying to use machines to make your advertising perform better. And uh and it was great. It was great. It had an incredible leader and I learned a ton and, and I caught the bug for trying to use machine learning to make things perform better for marketers. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. And I can give you the rest of the companies, but that’s it.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:33 – 00:05:41
That’s great. It’s a great thumbnail sketch. And it sounds like you’re actually uh you had an apprenticeship for what you’re doing today.
David Pollet
00:05:42 – 00:05:48
Yes. Yeah. No doubt. And still rely on the leader of that company for advice on a regular basis.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:48 – 00:06:06
Wow. Very cool. So what was, you know, the call, the inspiration to do to start incremental? What was it? Was it a AAA creeping realization? It was an aha moment,
David Pollet
00:06:07 – 00:06:48
you know, I wasn’t hired to run incremental. I was hired to run their sales. Um and at the time they built a really, really good. So there, their name was Trades Well, and they built an incredible automation layer, right? And what I mean is they were able to suck for a brand. So, you know, I’m gonna use a brand that’s not a client of ours. So say Gatorade, right? Because I’m never allowed to talk about it. Um They, they were able to suck in, here’s all the sales that happened on amazon.com, walmart.com, target.com, wherever they, they’re, they’re placing their products and, or advertising those products on those sites, right?
David Pollet
00:06:49 – 00:07:24
Um And they solved a really big key problem, which was when you do that, there’s a different identifier for every single bottle. The same bottle of Gatorade has three or four identifiers just on Amazon. They call them AINS. That’s Amazon’s version of a skew. Then you have it on Walmart, then you have it on Target, then you have it everywhere. And this company without arms and legs was able to suck all that and create what we call the super skew. And let you just look at the sales of that singular product across all the different marketplaces.
David Pollet
00:07:25 – 00:07:53
Um where I came in is II, I was quickly promoted to CEO um which was great um by our now executive chairman and uh and what we saw was I came from the media side, retail media was huge and it came out of nowhere. You know, you’re talking about getting the $50 billion twice as fast as search or social. I mean, just unbelievable
David Pollet
00:07:54 – 00:08:46
and all the measurement was provided by the recipient of the ad dollars, right? Meaning that the people who got the money told the people who spent the money. Oh yeah, this stuff’s really working. It’s doing great and that alone was the inspiration to go. Wait, we have all the data. We do a lot of cool stuff. Let’s stop doing most of it. Let’s do this one thing better than anything else. It was a big risk. We shut down 70% of our revenue. We just drifted away because that revenue would not have allowed us to be neutral. And if you look back through every media type, they always self measure and then someone always comes in and goes uh uh there’s going to be a neutral measurement brands always vote for a third party to tell you whether or not it’s performing. And
Jeff Bullas
00:08:47 – 00:09:07
That’s the big problem, isn’t it? With saying, go to an agency, they’re going, I’m going to spend money on Facebook and they’re going to tell you that you should increase your Facebook advertising. Why? Because they make more money, that in fact, it might be the reverse. In fact, Facebook advertising is not working, for example. Is that correct?
David Pollet
00:09:07 – 00:09:43
It’s, I mean, it, it could be the agency, you know, I mean, look, I want to say there’s, there’s great intent, there’s more good intentions than bad intentions throughout the industry. So I don’t quite want to demonize, but it could be the agency. if it’s only your search agency, they’re obviously gonna be keen on Google. If it’s only your social agency, they’re gonna be keen on Facebook, right? That’s just those biases that exist. But more importantly, if you’re trying to make sense of media, only having a view of Google or Facebook is like trying to predict the weather knowing only today’s temperature, you just don’t have the information
Jeff Bullas
00:09:44 – 00:09:47
to the weather in New York when it’s actually trying to measure London.
David Pollet
00:09:47 – 00:10:34
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Well, anyone can get to London, it’s rainy and cold. But um every time I visit, but uh um I do love the city. It’s beautiful. Um But uh and so we set out to build that and we realized none of the current present day measurement methodologies were going to be of any use to anybody trying to transact on retail media. So this became a really big build out, right? And that product graph I talked about became the underlying core of our entire strategy. If you didn’t have that you couldn’t do what we do and nobody in the measurement field has that we’d already run for four years of hard yards building that. Right.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:35 – 00:11:28
So you’ve actually taken the time to actually get the insights and the data to make sense of the advertising dollars spent or the channels, the multi channels that you are actually in. Because quite often retail, online retail is very much about having multichannel apps to market. In other words, you’re on Amazon, you’re actually got your own website, you’re actually then offering affiliate deals as well and the list goes on. So you guys have done a lot of hard work to actually collect data off the big platforms and beyond. So, Amazon and so on. So how did you collect that data or was that, you know, a secret, secret men’s business or? So how did you collect that? Is that because you had API S into every platform?
David Pollet
00:11:29 – 00:12:10
No, I mean, so that’s the first part. You start with the API IS only the mature ones have those, then you have to go scrape the portals, right? And you have to make sense of that and then a lot of them just to get to the problem, you have to do both. If you want a promotion on Amazon, they have a different sku from a different nation and you can only get that insight from the portal. The rest of your sales are coming through the API. So we combine those two capabilities. And then lastly, you have, you know, RMNS retail media network, sorry kill that um retail media networks. Um
David Pollet
00:12:11 – 00:12:42
They’re in their infancy. So a lot of them literally just email you stuff once a week. So then we had to build code to open emails and suck the data down and they give you weekly. So then we had to use machine learning to predict daily sales to line up the data. So it’s a lot of work, right? But, it was fun work because when you got it right, you can unlock a bunch of really cool insights for brands and you could do it quickly and, and that’s the fun part.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:43 – 00:13:09
Yeah. So what you’re doing is you’re, you’re by and this is what’s great about digital. A lot of people maybe don’t get it, but digital is really good. I was gonna use the F word but I didn’t um bother me wouldn’t bother me either anyway. Um What’s good about digital is it’s got, you can get data and they just got to work out how to get it. But the fact is that
Jeff Bullas
00:13:09 – 00:13:49
in, in, in the past like TV, they said, well, the ad work, well, the only way to do that was like put in a code and that code then goes through to the actual seller and the seller goes, yeah, the adverts working because I’ve got the data out of the code that you put in now, we’ve got, you know, things like, you know, QR codes, we’ve got, you know, basically different platforms you’re selling on. So, and I’m gonna go back to the API uh application programming interface is what that means. Um So the API is really just a funnel and a connection into places like Amazon or big software platforms so that you can collect data and pass it backwards and forwards. Is that correct?
David Pollet
00:13:50 – 00:14:01
Yes, you can even give instructions. I’m looking for this, right? So um which is kind of neat. It’s a way for two different technologies to communicate with each other.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:01 – 00:14:11
Yeah. So, data is good in the fact that you can collect, I mean, digital is good because you can collect a lot of data. The next challenge is making sense of the data, isn’t it?
David Pollet
00:14:12 – 00:14:29
Yeah, I mean, the biggest problem that exists is the fact that everyone went look, there’s so much data, grab it all. It’s not how you go about getting data, right? Um And so yeah, you know, we built this and, and we really focused on, on automating it.
David Pollet
00:14:29 – 00:14:58
So, you know, of course, we started at the beginning the machines would try to automate it and then people would look at it and they’d go, you got it wrong, you got it right, you got it wrong, you got it right. It was tedious. And in uh the, honestly the team did this before I got here and they did kill her. I mean, the most attractive thing about this company to me was you had this engineering team that’s worked together for 15 years. Even on a company that they IPO ed, they’re the smartest, most, like,
David Pollet
00:14:58 – 00:15:16
they’re just the best team ever. They’re likable. They’re open to business inputs and hearing what the market has and they’re just such good engineers that they don’t have to talk, they know what each other’s thinking. So they had built that. Yeah. Um And made sense in the data. You’re right. It’s a big problem.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:16 – 00:15:47
Yeah. Ok. So if you are going to offer your service to a client, obviously, and I’d, from what we’ve been talking about, it appears that you are talking to big, bigger e-commerce players. So one question I have is what is your typical e-commerce um customer profile? Do they have a certain level of revenue? Like 10 million plus 1 million plus? Where do you generally play? Where’s your ideal customer?
David Pollet
00:15:48 – 00:16:16
Yeah, I mean, um so we, we pretty much exist within the enterprise right now. Yes. Um And only because the last, the, the, the first iteration of this business had a lot of health and beauty clients were very strong there. I think about 70% of what’s on the shelves at a pharmacy. Uh right now today represent clients of some form or fashion of ours. Um But we moved into CPG
David Pollet
00:16:16 – 00:17:12
and we’d really like to get into pets and technology next and hard goods. But you have to do new marketplace integrations with everyone. You can’t call somebody who’s selling pet food and say, oh, we haven’t got Chewy yet. Like you wanna, you wanna help me sell pet food online, you already have to have the integration, the partnership with Chewy. So we’re, we’re moving across vertical by vertical uh in terms of size, they’re, they’re really big companies and then there are some really small companies. Um those more often found us, those are really fun because you can really, really, really validate on the client side, whether what we’re telling you, we drove these in criminal sales, they can see it. Yeah. And so it’s great. It’s just, it’s a sharp knife, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:12 – 00:17:16
And you must, talking to the decision makers rather than just the middle management.
David Pollet
00:17:17 – 00:17:51
You know what I mean? We’ll talk to anybody who has the same religion we have, which is, there is a way to figure out what’s truly incremental. There’s a way to optimize it and the metrics today that are used are not accurate. Um But to make the investment in us, there needs to be some executive sponsorship because they, they have to approve, granting us access to the data and that usually takes a certain level of act of uh of authority in a corporation. Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:51 – 00:18:15
So, um can you give me a thumbnail sketch of the process of how you engage a client and then work with a client right through from start to not finish but the ongoing recommendations. What you find can you tell us what’s involved in, um, someone on board your solution to, so you get the truth about what is really working, what isn’t in their marketing and sales and bottom line.
David Pollet
00:18:17 – 00:18:56
Yeah. Um, a lot of it comes before we, you know, the configuration of the software to solve their problems. A lot of the work gets done before they say yes. So the first thing that people always notice about us is we’re doing pretty well. We’re scaling. I have one salesperson, no one in marketing. Our whole hypothesis is to put really smart data scientists and analytic and technology professionals out into the field. Um And uh you will get back a better result and that’s been panning out for us, right? So we don’t have a bunch of sales people really hunting. We have people that go in and have they, they kind of
David Pollet
00:18:57 – 00:19:33
The sales part of it is their least favorite. They are diagnosticians, right? So they try to understand, um, what are the goals? And, and I’ll give you an example, there’s a large laundry detergent that has a lot of market share. And if you walk into them and you talk, we’re gonna help you drive more sales, we’re gonna help you drive your market share up, they’re gonna look at you and say we don’t care about that. We already have 70 plus market share, right? The value of increasing at 1% is not worth the cost that it would take to compel those last few people to use us.
David Pollet
00:19:33 – 00:20:02
We want to get to profitability. And so that’s an example of configuring the solution to the objectives of the client, right? Um Then uh we, we uh to get the data, we, we always start with the API available data and the scrape available data because we can do all that work. So they have to grant us access, they can do our platform, they click the Amazon logo, they select the API they
David Pollet
00:20:03 – 00:20:59
enter in the key and boom, I’m sucking all the data out. So they don’t have to run around grabbing data from everywhere and emailing it to us. Um And then there’s a learning period where I’m just observing and our uh system uh every, every hour it runs through about 25,000 iterations of the model trying to arrive at a, at a best fit. Um because there’s a lot of correlation in the methodology. Um There’s always a risk of correlation. It’s great because it can be ubiquitous and it’s terrible because if your business is doing well and the rooster crows every morning, the one thing you’ll try most to do is save the rooster’s life every morning. So you don’t let that rooster die like the correlation between rooster crows business grows, right? So, so uh we do these things called synthetic testing
David Pollet
00:21:00 – 00:21:35
and that’s how we get to causality. And we introduce that to pick the models that are best representing the truth, right? Then we push it live and then every day or every week, we go through every single campaign, they have assigned an incremental score and we make a prediction. If you make these changes, you’ll get this many more sales. And what’s really cool. I think about my product team, the decision they made, we make everything transparent. So rather than trying to defend it, we invite the clients into the process.
David Pollet
00:21:35 – 00:22:05
We let them know that machine learning is not perfect. Sometimes we’re going to get some things wrong and we work together to get this thing set up perfectly for their business in functioning at the most optimal rate. So our system actually sends you an alert. If the model loses confidence, it goes, hey, whoa, something changed. We, we, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t think we’re making good decisions this hour, right? Um And that’s, that’s been the process. I don’t know if it fully answered your question.
Jeff Bullas
00:22:05 – 00:22:31
Oh, no, that’s good. Um So basically you start collecting data and then you try to make sense of it and then you’re going, oh this doesn’t make sense. So actually you’re trying to get to the best point of truth that you possibly can get by looking for outliers. Does this make sense until you get to a point going, I’m confident in the data is that where you try to get to,
David Pollet
00:22:31 – 00:23:03
I’m confident in the data and I’m confident in the methodology that has been selected to determine the outcome, right? Because there’s a lot of algorithms running, you gotta, you gotta make sure that those are tuned properly and that they’re rendering really good recommendations. At the end of the day, our system is saying, move this money here to there, right? So you got to know that that technology is making good recommendations. Um And it’s based on good sound math.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:04 – 00:23:32
Cool. So basically you’re trying to go from very cloudy blurry eyes, like waking up in the morning to very clear eyes like in the afternoon or lunchtime, you get sharp and you’re going, this is true as best. It can be true because there is no absolute truth, of course, in terms of data. But uh maybe you’re aiming for 98% 99. I don’t know. But um so you’re basically going, OK, I know what’s going on and I trust it.
David Pollet
00:23:32 – 00:23:40
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea is we set out to make measurements that the CFO believes in.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:41 – 00:24:16
OK? And that’s the accountant who is an attention to detail guy and he will call bullshit if he detects there’s any bullshit or lack of transparency. But you guys don’t do that, of course. But I’m saying that my brother’s an accountant, so he and I have fun conversation because I’m a big pitcher. He’s small pitcher and, and we eventually get to the truth together, but there’s a lot of fun in the, in the meantime, but you guys are both big and small, I suppose, in terms of what you’re trying to achieve, you’re trying to give a big picture of all the detail.
David Pollet
00:24:18 – 00:24:21
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:21 – 00:24:23
So, in terms of that,
Jeff Bullas
00:24:26 – 00:24:39
do you provide a dashboard that gives that sort of look into the ecosystem and what’s working, what isn’t, do you provide them with a dashboard or not?
David Pollet
00:24:39 – 00:25:27
Yeah, absolutely. We actually do it at the campaign level. Again, retail media, big spend teeny campaigns, there’s often, there’s thousands for a large brand. Um And so we, we have ways of grouping them like uh oftentimes large brands will say, hey, we love your granularity, but we don’t want to go through 2000 campaigns. So group them as conquest and branded and you know, they’ve got their own sort of taxonomy. We group it into those taxonomies that align with how they operationalize their media organization. Um And then we, and then we give them, we give them their insights um and what we’ve been doing lately, which is super cool is um
David Pollet
00:25:28 – 00:26:02
We’ve been trying to get them out of our dashboard and get our insights into the platforms that they use to buy and transact on their media, right? So the whole thing is like, hey, don’t even bother swiveling over to us now that you, you use the dashboard, your analytics team goes in and goes. Yeah, I think it’s still real. I think it’s real. It’s good, right? The dashboard has become the validation point, but let’s just put the insights where you need them at the moment, you need them. And now we’re getting this huge uptick in utilization of the insights because we made them really easy to use.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:02 – 00:26:05
You make it easy to take action.
David Pollet
00:26:06 – 00:26:21
Yes. Yeah, they’re, we, they’re portable to the place where you’re buying the media and that’s been huge. And I, I don’t know that I’ve seen an incremental measurement solution do that before. Maybe one has, but I haven’t seen it. It’s been a great unlock for us.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:21 – 00:27:08
It’s very cool. Now, let’s stand back a little bit. And you are, you’re working with a whole bunch of, you know, big players, a lot of players, a lot of data in the e-commerce space, online retail. OK. So you must be getting some real insights into, you know, not, not what happens on Monday but what’s happening as a trend? What are some of the big trends you are seeing here? For example, are you seeing social media becoming so noisy that it doesn’t make much difference anymore? Is, is the rise of A I and the mix of A I and search mudding the waters in terms of the effectiveness of seo search engines in terms of producing.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:08 – 00:27:53
Because what every retailer has tried to do in the past, online retailers try to get their product to appear on page one, right? Because if you’re off page one, you’re nowhere. So you’ve got social, you’ve got search, you’ve got paid. Let’s talk there and then you’re not owned and earned. But let’s talk about those three. What are you seeing any distinctive trends in, in basically what works and what doesn’t in terms of ad spend and also earned as in Search, in other words, because you gotta earn search, you don’t. OK. So can give us a little bit of insight on what you guys are seeing in the big picture on this,
David Pollet
00:27:54 – 00:28:45
you know, uh it’s a little bit of a back to the future, right? Uh We, we’re seeing things that there’s great parallels in like say search versus retail media, which is also 50% of search based product um in the sense that uh if you think about when Google was really getting rocket, right? Talking post go to and in sort of the precursors to that Google is getting rocking and all of a sudden most consumers are going through Google on a regular basis, it becomes the center, the funnel disappears because everyone as they go through the consideration set and everything they come back through Google to get the information. So Google manages to put itself in the midst of all of this demand and the reporting
David Pollet
00:28:45 – 00:29:31
makes it look like search is driving everything because they’re just taking credit when you click it. It’s like, wow, that we drove the sale and you know what people figured out over time was, well, you know, actually if you can see your TV campaign, they tend to search your products less. There’s an interconnectivity with the other investment that’s occurring. The big trend we’re seeing is the marketers. Again, retail media is the new shiny toy, right? And the way that retail media is measured by most, it gives it credit if that’s the last place you went to to research. And so retail media is getting an extremely large amount of credit.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:31 – 00:29:46
But can you tell us what retail media is like a suitcase? It’s a suitcase word. Ok, we need to open a suitcase. What does retail media mean? Because there’s many meanings for retail media.
David Pollet
00:29:46 – 00:30:25
It could be. Yeah, it’s a complex question but the easiest thing is retail means a lot of things right now. But if you actually look at the spend, most of the spend is people paying to have their products featured, put into prominent places on retailers, websites right now. Retail media is saying, oh, we’re, you know, we’re interjecting uh this data into C TV. So that’s retail media and we’re putting it everywhere. But forget about that. If you actually look at the spend a lot of it’s happening by paying to be in the right spot on amazon.com on walmart.com.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:25 – 00:30:55
Well, that’s really, that is really interesting because you said the old is now new or it’s actually old, sorry? Ok, because basically let’s think about what’s been going on on the shelves of a bricks and mortar store. Ok. It’s placement you pay for placement. So you’re talking about instead of paying for placement in a bricks and mortar store, there’s another layer to this placement on a digital store. Is that correct?
David Pollet
00:30:56 – 00:31:30
0, 100 percent. And that’s why it’s merchandising half the time. It’s not even the media. That was what I wanted to say the F word. That’s why our methodology is key too because we take into consideration the competitors wrapped around you. What’s their price? Did someone start running a special? Right? And they’re trying to measure it like reruns over, leaving it to the beaver in the 19 seventies. You know what I mean? It’s like that methodology doesn’t work. This is like right there at the cash register and, and it’s getting over credited quite frankly, it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable,
David Pollet
00:31:31 – 00:32:06
but it means that there’s an interconnectivity and you have to understand the impact of TV and see TV. And you know, you’re in store, shopper marketing and your search and your social and all of that and how that all comes together and you need to play the symphony. You can’t let all these people go out with their instruments into different rooms and strum away their favorite tune, put it together and expect to have a good sounding symphony. Right. You’ve got, you need, you need a conductor in and that’s what I mean by a return to the, that’s what I mean by back to the future, we went through this with Google.
David Pollet
00:32:07 – 00:32:23
Google was God’s gift to advertising. If I could put more dollars in Google, I would. And then people learned, hey, you know what, when you turn off the rest of the marketing, my Google performance drops, right? And, and that’s where we are today
Jeff Bullas
00:32:23 – 00:32:29
because the big challenge has always been attribution. Where was the first click?
David Pollet
00:32:29 – 00:32:32
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:33 – 00:33:00
And that’s quite often hard to know because someone’s searched for a product, they’ve read a review on youtube or watched youtube, they’ve done a Google search and the product brand names popped up. They’ve then, uh you know, got an email because, or a cookie that’s sent email which has turned up. In other words, it’s the symphony that matters. Not the one thing that matters is that correct?
David Pollet
00:33:00 – 00:33:42
It is in, in, in accepting that and then pursuing the truth is what’s going on, those are the brands that are going to win. Yes. Those are the ones that are at the end of the day, you can buy as much advertising as you want. But if you’re not selling your product, whether through the, the, the key of your business model or the fact that the, the retailers might be getting re dollars for your media, but they’re not getting the back end cut that they get on the sales one way or the other, you’re not going to perform as well. So you have to understand that to continue to protect your positioning on their sites, to continue to perform. I mean, it’s all a virtuous cycle. Um
David Pollet
00:33:42 – 00:34:13
And, we’re seeing people wake up to that. I just talked to this really, really smart woman. I can’t say her name because it was kind of a partnership but super smart, she’s been in the industry. Um you know, she’s been in this industry, the media industry for a long time and she’s actually the one that goes, of course, your company is starting to get a lot of attention. We’re seven years into this retail media thing that’s around when people start getting serious about measurement as new media comes up, you know, and it’s just a pattern.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:14 – 00:34:28
So incremental really is the conductor that brings the best out from the symphony by identifying where the best tunes are coming from and then uh fine tuning the orchestra after much practicing and optimization.
David Pollet
00:34:29 – 00:34:39
Yeah, we try, we try, we try to bring a lot of humility. It’s not an easy problem to solve. We think we’ve got a pretty darn good solution. But you know,
Jeff Bullas
00:34:40 – 00:35:21
yeah, it’s very interesting because um you know, I’ve been involved in digital for quite a long time. Now, I actually put together what were seminars back in the nineties about how to use the internet. Back then when I knew very little about it, I just thought it’d be good to run a, you know, a, a conference. Um, and I was dealing with it on with actually a bricks and mortar retailer that was very, very used fax machines for advertising. So there you go, fax machines are now collecting dust in the bottom of uh cupboards uh or else they have been sent to the tip. But in fact, most Children don’t even know, teenagers don’t even know what a fax machine is. So, um
Jeff Bullas
00:35:21 – 00:36:04
but so for me, the whole area is fascinating and we, we’re seeing and now we’re watching the impact of A I machine learning is the precursor and, and part of the Symphony of A I really. So, and on top of that, you add neuroscience and a lot of other things but, and large language models. But the interesting thing I’ve seen in search, for example, is that uh Google recently updated has removed the search. Well, the traffic results are a lot of information sites, the fact they’re driving traffic more to because information sites quite often had a, you know, a button by this product because that was placement 98 information site.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:04 – 00:36:26
Google’s going, that doesn’t matter too much what we want. Now we want to take you straight to the buy site. So they rank the buy site up and rank the media information site down, which has had a lot of bloggers and media companies, you know, tearing their hairs out and poking their eyes out because it’s just so painful, you know, traffic’s dropped 50 60% in some and even more
David Pollet
00:36:26 – 00:36:28
terrible. It’s terrible.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:29 – 00:36:47
Yeah. Have you seen that sort of trend as well in terms of, you know, basically people going straight to the buy page. In other words, if you’re an ecommerce site with a buy button, they rank that up and then the site that was an affiliate site, for example, has actually had it ranked, they basically, some of them have disappeared almost.
David Pollet
00:36:48 – 00:37:32
Yeah, we’re seeing a systematic attempt at collapsing the consideration period for a purchase, right? And that’s happening at the expense quite frankly, of the business model that funds the best content and, and, and that’s not something we’re saying. I mean, that’s not anything novel, I’m acknowledging it. You just said it. Um I, I, so I don’t want to present that as something we discovered, but I will say that it’s, it’s there in our data too, right? And it’s a shame. Um And, and I don’t quite know what, how this all pans out to answer your question though, on, on LL MS because I kinda, I, I diverted from your two questions ago and gave you a different answer. Um, we haven’t seen a large,
David Pollet
00:37:33 – 00:38:05
You know, sort of, we don’t see this big decline in the effectiveness of paid search for advertisers, shipping their, you know, the, the traffic into the amazons of the world that just, we haven’t seen that collapse yet as a result of chat GP. T, um, you know, um, I, I can’t say we’ve tried to run specific analysis on it but nobody’s come into my office and said, hey, wow, you know what search isn’t working anymore? The volumes are lower. We just haven’t seen that yet, you know. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:38:05 – 00:38:54
it’s, it’s really fascinating to watch and uh you know, part of what, you know, we’re looking at doing and we are doing now is actually making ourselves more on the e-commerce side actually. But selling services and information in small snippets. Um So, but um you know, Google’s told everyone to provide great content and then they’ve actually then decimated the people that provided great content and we’re talking Forbes, we’re talking a lot of, you know, big sites. Um Then we’re seeing some what is quite, quite dangerous area and this is where it comes down to maybe the, the, the breaking up of these huge multinational global platforms such as Google and Microsoft and others and Apple in that uh you know, go Google just bought reddit.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:54 – 00:39:14
So Reddit’s getting a, oh no, no, they’re totally independent. We’re not giving them any priority. Well, just a few tweaks of an algorithm and Reddit gets 50 million views a day instead of, you know, 10 million. So, you know, Google’s old premise was do no evil and it’s like, make as much money as possible and decimate the rest.
David Pollet
00:39:14 – 00:39:38
Right. Don’t they all start that way? You know? He’s wonderful now, you know, like, um, II, I couldn’t agree with you more. Um And yet I’m an avid consumer of most of these products and the products themselves. Give me joy, the business model implications give me heartburn, right? So,
Jeff Bullas
00:39:38 – 00:40:36
yeah, and it’s, it’s, and yeah, is, is it uh are we leaning more into uh the big boys and girls winning and the smaller player that’s contributed to the content and the depth and breadth of the web that provided great insights. Are they gonna be, you know, decimated by this evolution um that the bigger players are bringing in uh the big get bigger and the smaller gets smaller and there’s no middle ground like losing the middle class in America or around the world. OK. So, uh anyway, and I started to see the rise of algorithms in social back in 2013 when Facebook went public because they then need to make money because they were basically, you know, it was a freemium model, write for free build your network and then the network then becomes supercharged because it’s now a global network.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:36 – 00:41:01
So we are seeing more and more the rise of algorithms everywhere. From buying plane tickets to train tickets. Right? And, and beyond. And I quite often go to uh incognito mode on my search because I know the algorithm is gonna be messing with me. And you can only, you can see the price go up every time you do a new search, you’re going shit. You’re a bugger.
David Pollet
00:41:01 – 00:41:31
Yeah. No, I hear you. I hear you 100%. I mean, it’s, it’s an interesting world we’re in and, you know, um, everything you said could happen, the only thing that I take solace in is when you look at every single new technology, there’s some version of doom and gloom and I’m not saying there aren’t bad consequences to new technology. There usually are some good things. But the one thing that has been consistent throughout time
David Pollet
00:41:31 – 00:41:55
Everyone’s prediction about it was never correct. Right. Like the one thing that we can count on not happening is what everyone’s saying is gonna happen, you know? Um, but it’ll be an interesting world and sometimes, yeah, tell you the truth. I’m a little nervous for my kids. I figure I’ve only got a few good years left before this thing doesn’t know what’s going on. So, you know, I’ll be blissfully ignorant.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:56 – 00:42:30
Yeah. Well, it’s fascinating for me. I’m a little bit, I’m along lines more of a utopian future but, and dystopian is also part of the conversation, but the truth is going to lie. Somewhere in the middle to predict exactly what’s going to happen is a fool’s errand. And you only have to look at the likes of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger who sadly died last year after nearly reaching 100. Gee, those guys are so wise. They said, don’t ask us to predict the future. We’ll just see what works today
Jeff Bullas
00:42:31 – 00:43:40
and what has worked for a century or more including psychology, economics, math. And I, I’ve just finished reading Charlie Munger’s uh book called Poor Charlie’s Almanac. And it is fascinating. Um I felt like I’d opened a holy grail of wisdom because he uses 90 to 100 or did 90 to 100 mental models to actually in their decision making and that include economic psychology, um you know, uh mass uh science, this goes on. Um and you know, fascinating and uh if you look at people trying to predict and this is where we’ve seen the fall of things like active investing, them, active investors are trying to predict the future. Um And we know how well that normally goes. So passive investing is about investing what works and basically is playing to the market. But anyway, that’s another thing. But for me, um
Jeff Bullas
00:43:41 – 00:43:48
I’ve certainly taken a much more holistic approach to it and leaning into the future, not running away from it. Um
David Pollet
00:43:48 – 00:44:33
It’s your only choice, right? Life is better. If you, if you develop some optimism, I will tell you though there is a, there is a good Charlie Munger quote about predicting things and, and I think about it a lot, um which is, he said, if you want to predict, if you want to predict people’s behaviors, look at their incentives, they follow them every time, right? And we’ve been sort of circling around that thematically here in, in talking about either the seller of media or where Google’s business model has gone or Facebook’s algorithms. I mean, at the end of the day, they all, they all align to Charlie’s rule. Um And, and just so, you know, uh if you ever make it over here,
David Pollet
00:44:33 – 00:44:46
you’re definitely having beers with my head of sales and I or my one sales guy because he has turned me on to reading everything Charlie Munger ever wrote. I mean, he just, he just adores um
Jeff Bullas
00:44:46 – 00:45:27
Well, for me, um there’s a lot of information but there’s very little wisdom and um I’m actually in the middle of studying what is wisdom because that’s a fascinating topic on its own, right? And uh again, one of my favorite terms at the moment is a suitcase word because we use things like happiness and success and we all think we know what they are, but everyone has a different interpretation of that. And that’s why you call a suitcase word, you open up the suitcase and you discover many meanings. And that’s why I asked you that before about um So for me, poor Charlie’s almanac was like opening the Holy Grail
Jeff Bullas
00:45:28 – 00:46:05
of Wisdom for the last century that he’s seen. And in fact, his reading was Benjamin Franklin’s Almanac as well. Um So, and they were both generous. So for me, you just talked about incentives. So why do companies win? Well, it’s not just data and conversion funnels, it’s actually things like psychology. So what do you incentivize people for? Well, you incentivize that and that’s what you get. Um So it is absolutely fascinating. So poor Charlie’s almanac recommendation. Anyone listening? And um I think I’m sure you’d enjoy it. So,
David Pollet
00:46:05 – 00:46:08
yeah. No, I’m on it. That’s a guarantee.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:10 – 00:46:11
So
Jeff Bullas
00:46:13 – 00:46:49
I can see why you are where you are today. In other words, what the call was, it sounds like it was a creeping realization of something better needed to be done in your industry regarding data and insights into what works and what doesn’t with advertising for retail and online stores? What have you learned along the way? Can you sum it up in two or three Piff um uh insights. Uh What’s, what’s some of the biggest learnings you’ve had? And there’s a second question after that is who’s helped you the most in this journey um at incremental. And before,
David Pollet
00:46:50 – 00:46:51
yeah, um
David Pollet
00:46:54 – 00:47:30
uh you know, I mean, probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned. I think you even said it in your, your introduction is um failing at something you care terribly much about is really hard. And when you give a little retrospective to it later, it’s always that moment of a big leap of big growth, right? And so I’ve learned not to be scared of failure. Whereas I think when I was young, even when I was failing, I spent most of my time trying to convince everyone I was, you know, um and
Jeff Bullas
00:47:30 – 00:47:32
ego, ego got in the way.
David Pollet
00:47:33 – 00:48:22
Yeah. Um That, that’s number one. number two is, and I actually like to think that I’ve got a bunch of students here. I’ve been blessed with just an incredible team, but number two is, I would vastly prefer a bunch of B minus students that work really well together than a bunch of alpha A’s that are incongruous when it comes to setting up processes and, and, and getting things done, right? It’s all about the culture and the people and, and I think how people treat each other is really important to build a successful company. Um And I think, sorry, I’m going to go a little further, but just real quickly, I think that was glossed over by the.com bubble, right? Because that wasn’t real business. And so
David Pollet
00:48:23 – 00:48:59
that culture of super genius was so celebrated back then. Uh I don’t think that I don’t think that’s real. Um uh And then the last thing which leads into your next question is um it doesn’t matter where you are in your career, the best words you can ever say are, hey, could you give me a hand with this? Could you help me think through this? Right. Um Going and asking for help and insight and feedback is more critical now that I have more authority than I’ve had in the past. Um And uh
David Pollet
00:49:00 – 00:49:35
you know, I think you have to, you have to have some failures to, to, to, to circle around and arrive at that conclusion. Right? Um And then as to who’s helped me the most, uh the CEO of a company called X plus one, which was uh you know, that first machine learning company that I worked at a guy named John Nardone. Um He doesn’t just take my calls. He makes a lot of time, he enthusiastically takes time to sit down and walk through stuff and he gives me very real feedback. Like,
David Pollet
00:49:36 – 00:50:21
What are you thinking? You know, he has told me before that you’re not doing this part of your job properly based on what you described, right? He gives me real feedback and that confidence in me to spend the time because there’s got to be something behind that people don’t like to waste time and the investment that has been um really, really special to me. And I’ve modeled a lot of my attempts at leadership after him. You know, he was very loyal to his employees. He put them first. He, you know, a lot of the things that I learned from him. I’ve tried to get into this company. Um, but if I had to pick one, there’s more, but if I had to pick one, he, he, he stands taller than the rest of the mentors.
Jeff Bullas
00:50:22 – 00:50:46
Yeah, it’s good to have someone that can, um, give you insight and bring wisdom, because doing it on your own can be a lonely place. Um, the other thing I wanted to ask you is are there any books or resources that have helped you as well in terms of, you know, what books you’ve read? Are there anything else, uh, resources, blogs, anything that has helped you as well that there is a bit of a go to or has been?
David Pollet
00:50:47 – 00:51:17
Yeah, I mean, sadly, and because I’m a little mad at myself, I don’t read as much. I listen to more podcasts. I mean, I just, I consume podcasts like crazy these last two years because I’m always on the go or in the hotel rooms or in airports and they’re very, very, um useful and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve found some great ones there. I tend to listen to people talk about topics that I’m not qualified to, to, to not necessarily listen to and try to pick up as much as I can.
David Pollet
00:51:18 – 00:51:43
Um And then on the book side, quite honestly, the reading that I do too is either dedicated to fly fishing or it’s true fiction. Right. And I could tell you a ton of things I’ve learned from, from novels but I don’t know that they’re reference material. It’s an experience of envisioning yourself in that character’s shoes. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:43 – 00:52:14
Um, for me, reading’s been a joy since I was five. In fact, I became the librarian’s best friend. I think when I was about six at primary school, as we call it in Australia. And, um, and I’ve, because I enjoy it so much. I feel guilty when I spend the time reading. But I’ve after reading Charlie Munger, how long he and Warren Buffett read and how much Bill Gates reads and go work for them. It works for me. So, uh, and Charlie Munger’s joke amongst his family was that he was a book with two legs sticking out. So
David Pollet
00:52:15 – 00:52:16
It’s actually pretty good.
Jeff Bullas
00:52:17 – 00:53:06
But, um, yeah, so I’ve, the thing is reading books is a creeping growth. It, it, you don’t notice a difference tomorrow, but it’ll turn up in a conversation next week. It’ll maybe show up and being a little wiser next year. Um, it’ll give you insight. So I, I read quite a lot. I read up to 6070 books a year. And, um, there might be one or two fiction in there. Um, but I, for me too, along with Joseph Campbell being a fanboy are, uh, things I’ve asked have been like, you know, what’s your purpose in life? And, and Joseph Campbell said, well, as humans, we really don’t have purpose. But what we do have is we should follow our bliss. And
Jeff Bullas
00:53:07 – 00:53:53
In other words, that’s your curiosity. What brings you joy? And I think out of that comes the journey you should be on and then that becomes your call and you go from curiosity to being compelled and that becomes your bliss because we’re all different. I think that’s for me and has been maybe a big discovery because I’ve been feeling guilty for following my curiosity. But for me that’s fed a lot of what I’ve done since I was 50 because I wanted to make money. I was following the wrong path, I suppose if you like. But um, the other thing you mentioned too, which I think is a big learning, is not to be afraid of failure. And I, I think that is a very wise, you know, insight
Jeff Bullas
00:53:54 – 00:54:21
and my biggest learning and biggest growth and opportunities have happened because I was, I had huge failures, you know, marriage broke down, business failed and I really wanted them all to work. But looking in the rear vision mirror, I’m glad they didn’t work because now I’ve had the most fantastic journey since I was 50. Um And you know, you don’t learn out of comfort without
David Pollet
00:54:21 – 00:54:32
a pain. That’s a pit, that’s a pit. The answer I wish for. That’s perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Learning is forged in the fires of pain like that.
Jeff Bullas
00:54:34 – 00:54:52
It’s a paradox. So, and that’s, and we all want certainty as humans and that’s really what, um but there is no certainty. Um And uh yeah, so I’m gonna ask you one more question to wrap this up and I ask all my guests
Jeff Bullas
00:54:54 – 00:55:09
and I think I know what your answer is going to be because you’ve already told me and it’s a guess. But anyway, so if you had all the money in the world, what would you do every day? That would bring you deep joy and happiness.
David Pollet
00:55:12 – 00:55:14
More time with my kids.
Jeff Bullas
00:55:14 – 00:55:15
Ok.
David Pollet
00:55:15 – 00:55:19
I’m sorry, like it’s, it’s not a money based answer but it, it is,
Jeff Bullas
00:55:20 – 00:55:24
it does not need to be a money based answer. That is not, it’s not a trick question.
David Pollet
00:55:25 – 00:55:46
It, uh it would be more time with my kids, you know, it’s a blink of an eye. So, you know, when you have these young kids, it’s so hard, you know, they’re keeping you up all night and everyone goes, yeah, the days are long but the years are short and you’re like, yeah, yeah, whatever with your little one liner and then your kids are 14 and 16 and you go,
David Pollet
00:55:47 – 00:56:15
How the hell did that happen? Do you know what I mean? And so now it’s kind of uh every business trip, every everything you’re like, oh, I wanna be home. I wanna see how things are going. I wanna hear my kid launch a camp with his buddy and he got a bunch of 7 to 11 year olds there this morning and I wish I could have seen that man, you know, like, you know, I wanna hear how camp went, you know. So that would be it. That’s what money would buy me.
Jeff Bullas
00:56:15 – 00:56:43
Ok. In other words, it comes down to relationships and that’s really what matters. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, um, basically confirms, uh, Harvard research of 87 years that showed that um happiness comes out of relationships. That is the one that brings us the most joy. And um you’ve just basically uh revealed the wisdom of nearly 90 years of Harvard research. So very, very well done.
Jeff Bullas
00:56:47 – 00:57:42
David. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I have enjoyed our bouncing conversation and the insights you provided and um I look forward to maybe that beer during fly fishing. I have done fly fishing. I did it for the first time in Montana about five years ago. And uh yeah, I’ve been, I think it’s all downhill from there because I caught six in 30 minutes. Yeah. So yeah, and I did it with a tech guy and me and we had a fly fishing coach cos it was at an influencer camp uh on a dude ranch in Montana. So I was very spoiled, very grateful. Uh the tech guy, obviously, he remained nameless. He caught everything including logs, trees and branches but
Jeff Bullas
00:57:43 – 00:58:03
and yeah, so um he was, he had a, you know, it’s very unkind but he was un co as we say in Australia, which means uncoordinated. And as we know, fly fishing requires a certain amount of coordination. Um, but I love my first and only fly fishing expedition. So it’s, you must enjoy the peace and quiet of it.
David Pollet
00:58:04 – 00:58:15
I do, I do. I love it. You can clear your mind because you have to pay attention to everything. Well, this has been a real pleasure. It really has. Like I, I enjoy talking to you. So I hope we talk again.
Jeff Bullas
00:58:15 – 00:58:45
I look forward to it. So, uh I’m sure you’re going to have some sites in 12 months. So let’s keep in touch. And I’m David, it’s been an absolute joy. Um One on one conversations for me like this from around the world with wise smart people. Um Mate, I’m grateful every day to be able to do this and this is something I would do without getting paid. So, there you go. Awesome. Well, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks a lot. Thanks. I’ll just pause here. Thank you, David. It’s been absolute joy. You that.