Is Anything Real?

[00:06.2]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real?", the podcast where we torch illusions and call BS on the dashboards. Here's today's hot take: Attribution is a magician. Great at misdirection, terrible at telling the truth. Brand versus performance. That's the wrong fight.

[00:22.2]
If your funnel can't connect end to end, you're just shuffling money between line items when nothing compounds. Joining me today are Jesse Resnick and Walter Schock of Ei Digital, an agency that's been building unified brand and performance systems for 15 years.

[00:38.2]
And they're here to tell us why the old split is killing your ROI. Welcome to the show. Hi Adam. Thanks for having us. What's up, Adam? Good to be here. Awesome. 15 years in, fully remote, 35 people. What's the origin story here, and why are you still boutique by design?

[00:58.2]
Sure. We became fully remote intentionally just at the top of this year. Before that, we've had a beautiful office in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Post-Covid that just did not make much sense, and we kind of let people go a little further afield, and we also hired some amazing people in California, and Texas, and way upstate New York, and really just leaned into that remote as more of an opportunity than a hindrance.

[01:35.4]
And, yeah, really happy we did. I think we kind of look at talent now in a much wider pool. We're not limited to just the New York City area. Probably 60% of our people are still in the metro area. But we've got incredible people. Like I said, Texas, California, Connecticut, as far as Hawaii.

[01:55.6]
So. And, Walter, I know that's where you are. But I know most agencies that I've seen and worked in, and people listening probably see agencies tend to split, rather, into two tribes.

[02:11.1]
You've got the brand builders and the performance hawks. You've both said your answer is "yes". What does that actually look like in practice? I mean, I think we really come more from a brand mindset and world, both Walter and I.

[02:30.1]
And we're also, I think, by nature, fairly pragmatic marketers and people in general. And what I mean by that is, we've always said We're here to make an impact on the businesses that we work with.

[02:46.5]
Right. And we love to work with really sexy brands and cool brands. And thankfully, we've had the opportunity to do a lot of really fun things with a lot of awesome brands that a lot of people would want to work with. But we've also done amazing things with B2B companies, or technical businesses, or startups that isn't as outwardly brand sexy.

[03:12.1]
But we like to make an impact on those businesses, and you know, really understand that. And I think what happened over the years is that we started incorporating more traditionally performance-driven channels into our mix.

[03:30.5]
Probably email or CRM being one of those first ones that we really adopted and leaned into. And I think mentality-wise, what we said, I don't know if you remember, a number of years ago, Airbnb came out, I think they had a New York Times article, and they're like, we're not doing any more performance marketing.

[03:51.2]
We don't need to do it. It's all brand. And I think that was actually a great article. I agreed with their position on that. Because Airbnb is a brand name, right? It's the Kleenex of renting your house, etc., so they don't have that need.

[04:11.7]
In fact, what was amazing about some of those stats coming out of Airbnb is that like their direct traffic is just incredibly high. So Google doesn't own this arbitrage on getting traffic to them. People aren't Googling Airbnb, they just open an app.

[04:28.0]
They have real estate on people's phones that they own. They say, oh, I want to go on vacation, go to Airbnb. Right? And so, that's just one example of where that kind of discussion comes into play. And I think for Walter and I, we've often, you know, things become too siloed.

[04:47.0]
We're in a non-linear world where consumers don't know if you're driving performance, you're driving this, like you're trying to bring people in. You need brand awareness. We believe in brand, but we see pure play brand often is leaving so much opportunity on the table to take people all the way through and get a much greater insight into the impact of the work that they're doing.

[05:18.7]
So, a classic example you see all the time a brand makes an awesome commercial or some sort of ad spot, which we love, we build those, and they run it. And you see that pre-roll on YouTube, or on Instagram, or wherever you'll see that ad and you go, oh, that's really funny.

[05:41.4]
That's really great. Oh, I want that thing. Whatever the hook is, you click on it, you get to a landing page, what's on the landing page? The same ad with the same messaging. No deeper point of engagement? And you just see bounce rates off the charts, right?

[06:00.1]
Right. 98, 99% bounce rate. To us, that's obvious that could be a success from a pure awareness standpoint. But you've left so much opportunity on the table there to capture new audience for your CRM, to take them into a deeper engagement, to drive a conversion off of that moment of interaction, as just one example.

[06:25.0]
And so I think we're always looking from day one, we've always looked at reverse engineering solutions from the consumer's point of view. What would that consumer experience be, and how do we make that?

[06:40.7]
Because brands who succeed just have unbelievable, amazing consumer experience. Whether that's in experiential, in digital, in their ads, everywhere they show up, they go, oh, I'm so glad I'm spending time with this brand.

[06:56.7]
That brand's adding value to my day through humor, through value exchange, through information, whatever the case may be. Go ahead, Walter. Yeah, I was just going to say, kind of, I agree with everything Jesse said, obviously, and just from my perspective, said simply, like, we just kept finding that it was starting to get a little bit frustrating when you would run this amazing brand-based campaign or work more broadly and only get so far, and see these huge opportunities to kind of.

[07:27.9]
You know, nobody was picking up the torch and kind of bringing that customer through the next mile of the experience, have you? Right. So we were just like, there's such a clear opportunity, and it's not that complicated to say, okay, once this experience ends, it picks up here, and we could also do that.

[07:47.4]
And now we're able to see it all the way through the line and say we could really deliver on those results in a way and really deliver on basically moving that business forward, truly, because we saw it ourselves and we see it kind of with other partners in the mix at times, that there's all this time and effort and money spent on amazing things, but they're not delivering fully.

[08:13.2]
Right. It's almost like you're building half a house or something like that. And then you're like, you want to check it out? You're like, it's kind of cold. There's no walls. Like, what's going on here? I mean, the title of your podcast is funny, right? Is Anything Real? really lines up with that mission. If you look at paid as a channel, you know, so often we see brands who are just running very outdated models of their paid advertising.

[08:38.1]
Totally. And they're not running what we would consider true full funnel where you're intentionally targeting awareness, you're bringing people into a consideration, into a conversion. And those are all different pieces of creative. And what is going to drive performance is the creative.

[08:56.3]
Right. And so, often a lot of marketers look at performance as purely a numbers game and that is a fool's errand because it is not. Because the art and science need to be working hand in hand.

[09:12.2]
And so, a great paid campaign, the insights you're deriving from the numbers only take effect meaningfully if you're affecting change in the actual ad creative. And that's how these modern AI-driven algorithms work.

[09:30.4]
You feed them content, they do an amazing job of finding the right audience for that content. But you need a high volume of content, you need to look at that data, you need to feed that back to a creative team who can then take those insights, derive more creative, be insight-driven, from a consumer perspective, use the numbers, feed in more creative.

[09:51.0]
And that's where you get that flywheel effect in a modern paid advertising campaign. I mean, I love what you're both saying here because so much of the industry still acts like you're supposed to pick a single lane or lanes that sit next to each other.

[10:06.1]
And I love how we're killing that myth. But let's take a moment to talk about attribution. Right? Last click: I would call it the zombie that won't die. Why do you still see that as steering budgets the wrong way? I think the answer there is somewhat simple in that people like to have numbers, and answers, and certainty.

[10:29.2]
And unfortunately, it's true in last click attribution. It's kind of true in life. Like things are a little squishier in reality than is comfortable for most people. And so, you want to know, hey, how many people click through?

[10:47.4]
I should know that exactly. And again, Google's the classic, you know, they've built a business on this. Google collects a lot of last click attribution that really isn't theirs. Right. You saw the campaign, you saw the billboard, you went to the experiential event, you heard word of mouth, and the way Google is structured, you just happen to, instead of typing in www.brand.com, you just went to Google and said brand.

[11:17.7]
And then Google is getting, you know, they're clicking on the AdWords, not on the organic SEO version of that link. Jesse, I know that gets into you've argued, just like I have in my agency days against buying branded search every once in a while.

[11:34.0]
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's something I tested with a client like Bank of America, through the 2008 financial crisis, turned off brand keywords. We saw a dip, but it wasn't the bottom-line impact. So I think the key here is performance metrics matter, but only if you know what story they're telling.

[11:51.7]
How do you two coach your clients through that? That's always a challenge because ultimately, we're in a client service-driven business, and we have to blend a combination of what we think is important and the client's priorities.

[12:11.1]
And we always view our role as bringing perspective and insight to everything we do, but ultimately are here to service the client's objectives at the same time. Right. So, we don't take a hard stance.

[12:28.6]
So I think it's very case by case. We've got clients who are at brands, but come from performance backgrounds and are sometimes challenging. But also some of the best clients we have in many ways, because they can really have a dialogue, you know, let's say with our media team or with somebody on the SEO team to really have a real deep dialogue.

[12:52.9]
Right? Or if you're doing some mixed media modeling or something like that, and you're really building out a model that's taking in some of the more nuanced complexities that's happening, etc. So I don't know, I don't have a clear answer to how, because I think it's very case by case.

[13:10.5]
Right. Sometimes we talk to clients, and they're amazing clients, but the real in the weeds brand, like this level of conversation just is not. They're too busy for it. Right. They're trusting us.

[13:25.5]
They're entrusting some of that thinking to just happen inside of our walls. And they don't want to get that into the weeds of blending the art and science of it. Sorry, go ahead, Walter.

[13:41.4]
No, I was just going to say there's certainly, I just had a conversation about this the other day, and there's just, there's a ton of productive psychology involved on the client management side of things. Right. Really needing to know, what are their goals, where is their education level at? And our approach, typically, is to somewhat adapt to that.

[13:59.6]
And we're not trying to force them into any particular vertical or way of thinking. We'll certainly share some ideas productively and lightly and feel like, like Jesse said, we have a responsibility to a certain extent to say, this is how you should be looking at things, or how this certain idea works.

[14:17.6]
But ultimately, however they respond, we will adapt to and understand their kind of level of education and desire to really get in the mix on what we're doing or just trust us, or anything in between. I mean, I think it's probably just even more broadly, defining for your clients a funnel shouldn't be thought of as just top versus bottom.

[14:39.6]
It's more of a continuum. Right. Brand primes demand, performance captures it, and attribution, I'll joke and say, it just guesses at the middle. But you know, to layer it back here a little bit even more, you've run Ei Digital through multiple cycles, from pre-iPhone to AI today.

[14:58.1]
What's truly, from your perspectives, different about building a brand going into 2026? I mean, from my perspective, channels continue to get more fragmented.

[15:14.2]
Right. Look at the current TV landscape and the controversies happening with late-night TV, for example. Right. Ultimately, those controversies are sitting on a bed of a dying medium, essentially. Right.

[15:29.5]
And TV's the new print. TV's the new print, exactly right. And so, that fragmentation is going to be picked up in podcasts and other areas of the Internet and you've got the twitches of the world and live streaming and different modalities of content and engagement and where people are.

[15:49.8]
And you know, I think that fragmentation makes what we're talking about all the more important. Right. You need to be consistent with your message across different channels. You need to be in a lot of different channels, but you also need to pick your channels thoughtfully, because you can't spread yourself too thin.

[16:11.3]
And I think that's one of the big differences, right? I mean, and you've seen that trend, right? Used to be, TV was the pinnacle of brand advertising. You make a commercial, and then somebody buys the thing that you're selling. Yeah. And I think consumers, from our point of view, there is a time and a place for an amazing, somewhat traditional campaign brand video, or spot.

[16:36.1]
Right. But I think consumers just aren't moved in the same way. That's just one piece of content in an endless stream of content. What you need is a platform, and that platform needs to be putting out tens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content consistently.

[16:57.6]
Look at the Red Bulls of the world, right? I was just on YouTube earlier today, and Red Bull Media was doing the biggest skateboard drop-in of all time. Whatever, breaking a record. And that's a live stream of this amazing event, and they're going to create thousands of pieces of content that will ricochet around the Internet based on that.

[17:20.6]
How many people actually watch that live stream? Virtually nobody. Nobody. It's boring to sit through a 2, 3 hour live stream of all of the build-up to what is ultimately two minutes of content.

[17:36.8]
But it has a real value to create that long form, chop it up, create all the anticipation, etc. So I think volume of content and building a platform, versus a single video. I also want to just add to that really quick and just say that something that I see that's shifting tremendously and I think is causing a lot of challenge for some marketers is that because of this fragmented landscape and the volume of content needed.

[18:07.1]
And AI in the mix. There's just such a need to be a lot less precious about what you're creating. And I'm not saying throw it out the window, and don't care about it, but there's a need to move faster, more volume, be a little bit less precious and kind of let the market decide on what's working, and what's not working as it relates to what your brand is impacting on for a consumer, versus we still see a lot of classic situations where it's like painful amounts of time in the boardroom in a vacuum, developing this big idea, running it through executives up and down, over and over, and then it gets to market, they've spent millions of dollars on it, and it just falls flat because nobody cares about the idea that you thought sounded good in the boardroom.

[18:55.3]
Right. So there's a need to kind of throw that model out to a certain extent, more and more exponentially every day as we're moving faster in this landscape and really start adapting, creating more content faster, being slightly less precious about it, and being okay to be like, oh, that didn't work, turn it off.

[19:12.2]
But that opens up the opportunity for like, oh wow, this really did work. And I didn't expect it. Right. Like if you just look at Meta in a silo, what we see constantly is ads working really well against certain audiences that we never expected.

[19:28.0]
Interesting. Just like, wow, I didn't know that that ad with that audience was going to create those results. Obviously, we knew that what we were doing to a certain extent, but usually the performance, and taking that approach, unlocks these opportunities. And we say, well, why did that happen?

[19:44.4]
And then we start to learn and optimize from there. And not just in Meta, but everywhere I feel pretty strongly that that thinking needs to start to be adapted more and more and more. That's why you see a lot of these startup brands doing so well. It's why Graza Olive Oil is the #5 olive oil in the world.

[20:01.4]
And the big players go to the bathroom in their pants a little bit, and say, what is happening? Right. And Graza is sitting in my kitchen right now, so I can speak to that working. It's also interesting, Walter, what you wove in there about the impact of AI, especially when you talk about taking one.

[20:20.0]
You know, Jesse, that Red Bull example that opens up the doors to take one piece of content and really work as a signal amplifier in a lot less than sitting 20, 30 years ago in the creative room and like splicing tape apart.

[20:37.3]
Right. So, it's not really just noise. It's actually a signal amplifier if it's used not unthoughtfully, but somewhere in the realm of not being thoughtful and thoughtful. Right. There's a boundary there. I think most of this is interesting, right?

[20:52.6]
AI is permeating everything that we're doing, we're seeing it in creative work, in the workflow, in the targeting. Like everything is shifting based on that. The other thing we see a lot, to what Walter was saying, is like that boardroom idea and that discussion.

[21:09.8]
That's not to say that ideas don't matter. Ideas and story is always at the center. But we see it's much more effective to have a great idea. And you can almost use Meta as a testing ground to say, great, let's put out a little bit of this content here and there, see what's resonating, versus a focus group.

[21:31.8]
And it's like, well, the focus group is a very sort of stilted way, old school, kind of fragmented way. You can just put it into the market at essentially MVP, what we call MVC, like model and put it out there, Minimum Viable Campaign, and say, oh, is this resonating?

[21:51.2]
Which message is? And like Walter said, sometimes our prediction on what's going to work is spot on. And sometimes we're like, whoa, this is taking off. And we didn't expect that. But we got to listen to what consumers are reacting to and why and extrapolate a learning from that, and lean into that.

[22:12.5]
Because we're all smart guys in the boardroom, right? Guys and girls in the boardroom. But who matters more than us is the end consumer and what resonates with them ultimately. I love it. Jesse, Walter, this was completely powerful.

[22:29.5]
From debunking brand versus performance myths, to the messy truth about attribution, you've given everyone here a playbook for building smarter funnels. Where can people find you and Ei Digital online?

[22:46.2]
Best place to find us is on our website. So eidigital.com You can find me and Jesse on LinkedIn. So just look up my name. Walter Shock. Jesse's name, Jesse Resnick. That's probably where you'll, where you'll find the latest and greatest in terms of our ideas, our work, our thinking.

[23:03.0]
You know, we tend to have a little bit of a cobbler has no shoes kind of situation because we focus on our clients so heavily. So definitely LinkedIn is the place to check us out and see what's going on. And thank you so much, Adam. Appreciate you having us here. Let me ask one, one final question.

[23:19.4]
Okay, go ahead, sorry. For any of the marketers listening who are stuck between their CMO screaming brand and their CFO demanding performance, what's one move they should make this week?

[23:37.6]
Drum roll. One move they should make would be, listen to the CMO, because that's whose team they're on?

[23:53.1]
I don't know what that one move would be, to be honest. If you're looking to drive that. Maybe it'd be the importance of lower funnel metrics invalidating upper funnel metrics. So that's maybe what it would be.

[24:10.9]
So if you see, I've gotten a bajillion clicks, but my bounce rate is 99%. Don't think that the bajillion clicks is a good thing. Right? Just very simple. Go to second-order metrics to validate your first-order metrics.

[24:30.6]
That's what I think it would be. And I think if you do that, you get a lot greater insight into what's actually happening. Couldn't agree with that more. Fantastic point. All right, well, thanks for tuning into Is Anything Real? the show where we sift the signal from the noise and torch the sacred cows of the this industry.

[24:48.1]
I'm Adam W. Barney, and just a quick final thought: If you're still debating brand versus performance, you've already lost. The winners are building systems that stitch it all together. Walter, Jesse, thanks for joining today, and I'll see you all next time. Thank you, Adam.

[25:03.7]
Thank you so much, Adam.