Introduction and Brandon Rhoten’s marketing career

Alex Gluz: We have a great guest for you today. Super excited. Brandon, nice to have you here.

Brandon Rhoten: Thanks for having me.

Alex Gluz: Can you do a brief intro of who you are and what you do?

Brandon Rhoten: I’m the CMO of a company called GroundTruth, which is an advertising platform that connects foot traffic to media. It allows B2C companies, typically, to understand the effect of their media.

What we say is, use real-world behavior, things like where people are in the world and what they buy, to drive real business results. Get to people showing up to your retail or restaurant location.

Alex Gluz: Very cool. How did you get started? What did you go to school for?

Brandon Rhoten: I went to school originally for biology and learned pretty quickly that I hated chemistry. That ended up making me switch over to marketing.

Really, the reason I switched to marketing is it’s not fundamentally that different than biology, I’d argue. It’s cause and effect. It’s understanding the way the world operates and how people make decisions.

I ended up in marketing. That led me to a digital marketing agency. That agency got a lot of attention, which attracted Wendy’s to grab me up. Wendy’s, the fast-food company, asked me to build their digital social marketing program.

Did that. Ended up running consumer-facing marketing for them for about six years and saw significant growth in that organization while we were there.

That led me to be the Chief Marketing Officer of Papa John’s and Potbelly. Then I semi-retired for a bit. Those companies had done really well. The teams did awesome work that led to stock growth and all that good stuff.

Lasted about three months of retirement. My wife’s like, “Hey, you ain’t done yet. You’re driving me crazy. You need to go find something to do.”

I joined a bunch of boards. That led to the relationship with GroundTruth. Really, what attracted me to the advisor role and ultimately the CMO role at GroundTruth is understanding the effect of marketing on the business.

As a CMO at a large company, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on media a year, you’re accountable for driving results.

In the seven, eight billion dollars in media that I put into the world, I can probably account for 20, 30% of it, if I’m lucky, exactly what it did. We saw growth, but that direct attribution to impact.

That’s what GroundTruth does. I love that I’m helping marketers every day figure out how their media actually results in an effect on the business, so marketing’s seen as an investment and not an expense.

Attribution and the changing buyer journey

Alex Gluz: It’s a great topic, and I talk about this many times a day, many times a week. It’s an ongoing conversation, and that’s why I was so excited to chat with you.

Let’s dive in. You’ve been in marketing through its entire digital transformation, so to say. When you started at Wendy’s building the digital presence, did you imagine we would still be struggling with attribution in 2025?

Brandon Rhoten: It is a little surprising. Having said that, I joined Wendy’s in 2011, so it’s been a while.

In 2011, social was pretty well established at that point. Mobile was certainly well established. Programmatic was established. A lot of the tools we use were in place in 2011.

Yet the organization, and almost every organization that looked like it, these massive companies with billions of dollars in revenue, really used traditional media as the primary driver without any attribution and just made assumptions on what was working.

Even in 2011, when we’re probably eight or 10 years past when most of this stuff began to emerge in some capacity, it was a challenge to convince the organization to move to more attributable, more discrete and addressable mediums.

The fact that it took 10-ish years to get companies that were well established and had great resources to understand the effect of their media, but just didn’t, doesn’t shock me that we’re sitting here in 2025 and we still have a bit of a mentality of, “This is still a black box. This is still art and not art and science.”

It doesn’t surprise me that it’s still like that because the industry is set in its ways. But the accountability, especially from the boards and CEO and CFO level, has shifted dramatically.

What’s really accelerated the move towards attribution and understanding the effect of your mediums is more the demand of the organization to say, “We need to have these dollars accountable. It’s not just an assumed effect on our business anymore.”

I actually credit the rest of the organization, not marketing, as the driver. Especially media companies and things like that made their money off massive upfront deals and things of that nature.

It doesn’t shock me, unfortunately. But it’s awesome that now we’re capable of measuring pretty much the entire funnel.

If you have blind spots in your funnel now, it’s your own fault. It’s not because the mediums won’t allow you to at least understand the rough effect on your business.

Alex Gluz: The problem is not exactly about the inability to track things. It’s also about drowning in data and being able to decipher it.

The issue is that companies are tracking activities instead of journeys, like you mentioned, the funnels. When somebody lands on your website, bounces off, comes back two weeks later through a different channel, then downloads something or gets engaged with a video, then goes quiet for a month before suddenly requesting a demo or going to the store, that’s a real buyer journey.

But most attribution systems would just credit the last click or last interaction. Understanding the full sequence matters more than the perfect tracking.

Brandon Rhoten: I agree with you. The traditional funnel that is very linear is gone. People jump all over the place. They make decisions in different ways and in ways that sometimes are a bit invisible to you.

Understanding the touchpoints that lead to the most likely outcomes is critical, and the effect of each of those touchpoints on the outcome, so you can make your bets in the places that truly create impact. I think you’re totally right.

Connecting digital and physical customer experiences

Alex Gluz: Something came to mind. The idea of really blending the digital and physical places is just very actual right now.

Last weekend I took the kids to the auto show, which was pretty cool. A lot of activities were, “Here’s the ticket,” or something, a raffle ticket, but punch it into the iPad. A lot of activities are basically trying to gather your data and blend everything together.

You have so much experience in the food industry. Now it’s the apps, and the apps are trying to capture information. You can order through the app. You get perks through the app.

How do you think it’s going, and if it’s going in the right direction? Maybe you still see big gaps.

Brandon Rhoten: I think there are still gaps, and primarily they lie in assumptions about what physical interactions are necessary and what actually adds value.

I’ll use a very specific example from the restaurant industry because that’s obviously where I spent the majority of my time.

A lot of places put up kiosks where you walk into the store and you order through a kiosk. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s ridiculously annoying and disruptive.

It doesn’t actually improve the experience by any stretch, especially if you’re going into a place where you’re going to spend a decent amount for the food. All of a sudden, you feel like you’re doing a lot of work to get through a transaction that is supposed to be easy and fast and pleasurable.

We oftentimes put technology in spaces that aren’t necessarily ideal for the net experience you’re trying to get.

Even those tablets, the kiosks in stores, oftentimes they aren’t even trackable. It’s not even adding the layers of value for the business that people are assuming.

It might reduce labor in some capacity, but even that, you’re decreasing the experience sometimes by such a stretch that it’s not worth it. There’s a balance to be struck. We have to find the ways that make it feel like magic, make it feel easy.

There are technologies that allow for that. Aware that your mobile device is in the building, that’s meaningful.

A lot of fast-food places now, for example, you place an online order, and when the device gets near the restaurant, that’s when the order drops to the back of the kitchen so they can actually make it.

I was working on that with Apple in 2012. That is such old technology, but it’s just not implemented everywhere and should be.

We should make it easy where you can use things like Apple Wallet. You can use things like tap to pay. It shouldn’t feel clunky. You shouldn’t feel like you’re going to drop your phone out of your window in a drive-through because you have to reach over and somebody’s handing this terminal to you, and it’s all weird.

Obviously, it applies way outside the restaurant world too. Even in the B2B world, sometimes the forms we create and the hoops we make people jump through. You need that data, but there are ways to gather that data over time.

When someone reaches out, you can connect back. You can do some homework, use AI tools in the back end to figure out the details that you don’t have them fill in.

We have to try harder, especially as marketers, to make the experience feel good and not cumbersome because we’re trying to create these layers of later remarketing and later measurement.

It is still really clunky in a lot of cases. There are brands that have figured it out, but the majority of brands haven’t.

Then what happens is somebody does something, it looks interesting, so everyone copies it. Oftentimes it has all that baggage attached to it where it’s not that good, but everyone’s just copying that experience.

Sometimes you can fake it, and it still feels good. Like the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. That’s not real. That uses a timer, basically, to figure it out.

I don’t know for a fact, but I think that’s how it works. The guy, it says, “Jim’s making your pizza.” Odds are it isn’t Jim. Odds are Jim just works there, and the face came up because it’s on the cycle and he’s on the shift at that time. But he probably didn’t touch your pizza.

That’s okay. Make it easy. Make it interesting. Make it useful rather than create these barriers for the experience that you’re trying to create. Across the board, we have to do better at that.

Alex Gluz: That’s great. It’s part of user experience, and we obviously, as marketers and being digital, like to talk about it. But this is a new frontier.

Now I register my phone number. What happens next? Do I get a text? Sometimes you submit your phone number, and then a month later the random text comes in. That is just so random. I’m not going to respond to that. It’s just a random thing because it’s broken.

People understand, I guess, that it’s important and they need to embrace it. But like you said, they don’t look at the value it provides.

Every touchpoint needs to provide value versus just, “We’ve got to do this because everybody else is doing that.”

Brandon Rhoten: Giving the contact information is a great example. If you’re a B2B company or a B2C company, it doesn’t matter. If I give you my information for a purpose, I’m asking you to reach out to me and talk to me about what you sell because I’m interested in what you sell.

It takes you two weeks to respond, or you start spamming me. The default approach in a lot of marketing departments is send more emails, send more texts. It’s quantity.

It’s true, in the aggregate numbers, you end up with more responses if you do that, but you’re ticking off the people that really want to work with you.

Understanding the appropriate level of communication that someone is asking for and the thing they’re trying to accomplish is critical. That’s really hard.

It’s on marketers to really understand: somebody filled out my form. They want to hear from me today. They don’t want to hear from me in two weeks. They don’t want me to spam them continuously unless they ask for the newsletter or something.

Don’t just assume that you can all of a sudden mass-market to anyone who raised their hand. It just makes people hesitant to raise their hand, and that’s not what you want in the end. That actually hurts you. It doesn’t help you.

Explaining marketing results to finance and leadership

Alex Gluz: You mentioned that almost every medium is digitized now. If everything is digital and trackable, why do you think CMOs and marketing leaders are still having awkward and difficult conversations with finance about ROI?

Brandon Rhoten: I think there are two primary reasons. One is a legacy issue. People love running Super Bowl ads. They love old-school big techniques. Those feel cool.

If you take over Times Square, that feels awesome, and it’s impressive. There’s value in that, potentially, for your constituents, for your investors, for maybe your organization and your business.

There’s this art side of it and this emotion side of it that just feels good. That’s one barrier. You have to find a balance there of what feels good and what creates internal rah-rah around marketing because we’re doing something cool.

The other main reason, and this is probably 70% of the problem or more, is marketers don’t speak in the language of everyone else in their organization.

We try to talk about things like reach and impressions and conversion rates. You name the CTR, you name the internal media metric or marketing metric that we use. That means nothing to someone who’s running a P&L.

At the end of the day, people who run the P&L, the CFO, the CEO, board members, speaking as a board member, I care about the business. I care about revenue. I care about foot traffic. I care about check growth. I care about all the fundamental things in my business that lift. Those are the KPIs I care about.

I don’t care about click-through rate. I don’t care about video completion rate. None of that stuff matters.

We should use those in marketing to understand the effect of what we’re doing as a leading indicator. Something that gives us a sense of, is the creative working? Is the medium appropriate? Is even the reach appropriate to get to the outcomes we want?

That’s internal speak for marketers. The second you get past somebody with a marketing title, you need to strike all that from your vocabulary.

You need to speak to your CFO, your CEO, your board, everyone, in terms of: this is the impact to the P&L. This is the impact on the metrics that we care about.

There are metrics that are non-P&L-related that sometimes companies care a lot about: customer service metrics, NPS scores, all that stuff. That’s fine. But it’s got to be in their language.

Marketers are supposed to be good communicators, and we fail dramatically when we show a slide that says, “This is how many likes a post got.” Who cares?

Again, leading indicator for us that there’s interest. Great. Awesome. Celebrate in your marketing department. Don’t celebrate that as the primary reason that your marketing is affecting your business past marketing.

You’ve got to use the language everyone else uses, and you have to show the connection between that work you’re doing in marketing and the effect on the business. That’s the critical missing step for most.

The consequences of cutting marketing budgets

Alex Gluz: That’s one of the layers, and I think that’s part of it. But also there is a fundamental disconnect because CFOs and some CEOs too.

I think CEOs in B2B and SaaS understand digital better than regular CEOs because that’s just the nature of the business, and they know how it works. But they think of marketing like a vending machine.

You insert the budgets. You receive the leads, which lead to pipeline. The pipeline will close, and the more you put, the more you get.

B2B marketing is more like farming. You prepare the soil, plant the seeds, nurture growth and harvest when ready. Obviously aligned with sales and customer success and product as well. Some crops fail. Some exceed expectations.

The successful relationships I’ve seen accept this reality and set up realistic expectations. Like you mentioned, they speak the same language, and the expectations are clear. They have the plan together and understand the timelines together.

When companies are under financial pressure, maybe funding is tougher or economics, marketing usually goes first. They start to chop down the marketing. How do you feel about this, Brandon?

Brandon Rhoten: As a CMO for a long time, I do believe that has serious long-term consequences and short-term consequences often, but very much long-term consequences, especially in a long-sales-cycle B2B business.

If it takes six months to close a deal and another six months to get the revenue actually flowing from that deal, shutting down marketing today hurts next year. It doesn’t hurt this year necessarily.

When you close down the budget, which is understandable when things are tight, that’s the one budget that you have the most control over. It feels, anyway, to someone who doesn’t understand the impact, like there’s a short-term benefit and less long-term risk.

That goes back to the farming analogy you just gave. Having everyone understand what the cycle looks like. How long does it take to get to revenue from an effort? The difference between a leading indicator and something that actually appears in the P&L.

Making sure the organization understands that, and then constantly illustrating that thing happens in real time. You can look back a year, and you can see what happened in your marketing that led to outcomes that are occurring right now.

I think that’s a short-term view. I would also argue that is, again, a bit of marketing’s fault. We don’t show the path to revenue oftentimes, and we don’t speak the same language oftentimes. We’re not talking about the real business results that occur based on marketing activity.

People are like, “I don’t care if we have less reach. I don’t care if we have less impressions. I don’t care if we have less likes.” All of these marketing metrics that are somewhat meaningless.

Understanding the language to speak and illustrating the impact with a realistic view of how the business actually operates, and how a lead becomes revenue in a B2B case, or in the B2C case, how foot traffic becomes a lifetime value for a customer over time, is really important. It’s hard to do.

It’s not super clean and not super easy, and it’s a little different in every business. There’s not a formula you can necessarily pull off the shelf that’s perfect for every single business.

I think it is detrimental. When it happens, when you see the effect of it, you need to share that effect, and everyone has to be on the same page about the consequences of cutting.

I tell my team often, and this is a little internal and maybe a little harsh, but I say, “We have to let people feel the pain once in a while, but we have to tell them that they’re feeling the pain and why they’re feeling the pain.”

If someone says we need to cut this thing, this marketing project that we know is going to generate X number of leads or amount of foot traffic or whatever it is, we have to be upfront to say, “We think this is going to be the effect based on history, based on what we projected from this project.”

Then when it happens, we need to point to it and not rub it in people’s faces. Just make it clear that this is the outcome of the decision we made to cut this budget.

You’re not dwelling on it, but you’re being transparent in that my job is to drive this foot traffic, these leads, whatever it is, and this is hampering the ability to actually accomplish that.

We had a bad Q1, but it’s because we cut budget in Q1 and Q2 of the previous year. When we’re going into budget talks for the following year and we’re talking about cutting Q1 again because we’re worried about a soft start to the year, we have to be transparent on what is the effect of that in Q1 next year.

Are we willing to eat that effect? Are we willing to suffer those consequences and feel that pain? You should be transparent and speak the same language.

Balancing creative work and measurable business outcomes

Alex Gluz: You touched on so many things. What’s really interesting is, in your current role, you’re not only selling technology, but you’re also trying to change how people think about media itself. How do you tackle both practical and philosophical shifts?

Brandon Rhoten: The biggest philosophical shift that we run into is the art-versus-science discussion. There are chief marketing officers, there are marketing departments, that just love art.

Art is great, but we are art in the service of commerce. I would argue that’s the purpose of marketing.

Getting people over the shiny objects, getting people over the “be cool and be seen as cool.” Cool’s important, so don’t get me wrong. What we did at Wendy’s and at a bunch of brands that I worked for is we got to be cool, and that helped us.

You can still be cool and effective. There’s a way to connect those two things together. I’ve got all these things behind me. I constantly have examples, I hope, of great marketing.

Liquid Death is cool and effective. You can do both. The art can be in service of the commerce. There’s no reason those things don’t align.

On the philosophy side, it’s understanding that you can apply science and not hurt the art. That’s a critical component.

On the more practical side, what we run into is people just have a belief that this is too complicated to measure. It’s too complicated to understand. Everybody takes credit for everything, which is true in some cases.

If you pull up your Meta dashboard, your Google dashboard and two other dashboards, everyone’s taking credit for the same thing.

You do have to have the discernment and the ability to measure against your own P&L what’s actually happening, so you can define what’s right there.

People get overwhelmed in marketing. You said it upfront: there’s a ton of data coming at you, and you get blind to it. You end up just going with your gut rather than doing the homework, trying to build the right models and then constantly testing those models to make sure they’re still accurate.

You can learn what tactics drive outcomes and what combinations of tactics, in what order, drive outcomes.

We’ve got to get over the art-science thing, where a lot of people are stuck on art and don’t realize the science. You’ve got to do both in marketing today. That’s just what it is. It’s art and science.

On the practical side, we have to simplify the process as much as we can and do our best to tie it to our own business rather than just rely on the dashboards that we’re handed and go all in with Meta because they told us it’s working, even though the business is suffering.

We have to be able to build our own models, and reliably build our own models, that internally people accept and understand.

Alex Gluz: You said marketing is art at the service of commerce. I’ve never heard this before.

Brandon Rhoten: I believe it. That’s its purpose. We build cool stuff that’s supposed to get attention and drive interest and create an emotional connection.

At the end of the day, if it doesn’t result in transactions, and maybe not immediately, it might take some time to get people flowing through that funnel appropriately. But that’s its purpose.

Otherwise, people wouldn’t spend money on it.

I don’t care who it is, what brand that does flashy things that are awesome. I love it when my team gets to go to France and pick up a Lion. That’s great. Cannes is amazing.

But if all you’re doing is picking up a Lion and not delivering to the bottom line, who cares? The company’s going to stop investing in it.

Why would you invest in it if, in the end, it becomes a vanity project for art? That’s not its purpose.

Moving from television reach to outcome-driven media

Alex Gluz: A little different subject: TV advertising. Is it still the biggest spend?

Brandon Rhoten: It’s still big, but it’s not the biggest as a percentage of spend anymore.

When I started at Wendy’s, we had 80-plus percent of our budget tied to TV. If you look at the numbers, digital marketing is larger than television spend as a percentage of budgets at almost all companies at this point.

Digital marketing includes things like CTV and OTT, which are essentially television through digital channels. It’s a bit of a break there that it’s still using the same format.

I would argue for a 16-year-old, YouTube feels like TV. It’s consumed in the exact same way. It’s a lean-back experience that happens to you versus you’re directly interacting with it like you will mobile advertising or social advertising in some cases.

TV has shrunk as a percentage of spend. It’s still, from a dollar standpoint, massive, though.

I would argue a sophisticated marketer today is not spending significant money in linear, non-measurable media. They’re spending the bulk of their dollars, and this is what the stats bear out, in addressable media that is digital in some nature.

Even if it’s streaming audio or digital out of home or streaming television through CTV or OTT, either direction, you’re still getting the same benefit of that television experience or radio experience or whatever.

But in a way that’s much more trackable, much more connected to the funnel, much more connected to your CRM, much more integrated into a plan that you can measure.

Alex Gluz: It’s something I was also thinking about because I don’t watch TV. The only way I watch TV is to watch a game. If I have time and the kids are not going crazy, I would sit down and watch a game and enjoy it.

Brandon Rhoten: Probably watching it through a streaming service. If you’re watching it, I imagine you’re using Hulu or YouTube TV.

Alex Gluz: I still have cable. I don’t know why I do.

The interesting thing is the commercials. I would watch the commercials, obviously, as a professional. I’m like, 95% of these commercials don’t apply to me and my family.

I don’t drink this brand of beer. I don’t drive this car. I don’t go to these places. It’s all irrelevant to me. It’s just spraying it wide, and hopefully it’s going to land.

Versus digital, where you can be very precise nowadays. If you log in through YouTube and then you’re using YouTube TV, YouTube is Google. They know so much stuff about you, and they exchange data with Meta and LinkedIn and all of them.

It’s an interesting situation to see different stages of it. You’re in the middle of it, I guess, trying to put this all together and also supporting the marketers, which I love, helping them to show the value.

How do you approach this holistically to educate the newer customers for GroundTruth? How do you educate them and show everything? You probably work with some of the more traditional companies still, which rely on old mediums.

Brandon Rhoten: Typically, when someone comes to us, they are already frustrated with traditional media. They are experiencing the pain of pure tonnage of media not resulting in the outcomes they want.

Usually, we’re music to their ears when we say, “You don’t have to do it that way. You could choose to use addressable media that understands who your target is and connects them to the rest of your mediums that you’re going to be delivering.”

Usually, it’s actually not a very hard sell for us because they’re already frustrated with traditional mediums. Oftentimes, frankly, they’re frustrated with the walled-garden mediums.

They’re frustrated with the Metas of the world and some other players that just don’t allow you to see through different mediums on the open web and in open channels.

If you’re running Meta stuff, you can’t connect that to your CTV cleanly. There are some ways you can jimmy-rig it, but at the end of the day, you’re not building a real funnel. You’re not understanding the effect of your mediums on the outcomes.

Again, I’m not knocking Meta. They’re awesome, and they’re growing like a weed. They’re huge. They’re massive.

At the end of the day, they just don’t have the ability to give you full transparency, or at least as much transparency as possible, into how your spend is resulting in an outcome.

Usually, it’s not a very hard sell. People want to know how the technology works, how you can integrate everything. They want to understand the cost impacts of all that.

We typically don’t have to explain much more than, “Do you want to know what your media is doing for foot traffic or check growth?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, let’s run a test.”

Then they can see it, and they can experience it. Oftentimes, they’ll test us in a geo-lift test or a similar controlled test.

We’ll do something as a separate unit just to validate against their own P&L. But 99% of the time, they come back like, “Yeah, it’s working, and it’s working much better than the stuff we were running.”

Where we run into issues is people are used to buying on tonnage, so they’re used to buying pure reach. They’re used to having low CPMs, essentially. Take that as TRPs or GRPs on television.

Especially big agencies are used to negotiating high reach, low cost per thousand reached. That’s not the model of an outcome-driven marketer, though. They don’t care about that. CPMs are irrelevant.

What matters is cost to acquired user or lifetime value of acquired user. The outcome is what matters. I want revenue. I want people showing up to my business.

Where we do run into a little static is when folks are like, “Well, your CPMs are higher than what I bought here.”

Well, yeah, because we’re doing it very differently. It’s not a tonnage play. We’re not just dropping bombs everywhere and hoping we hit something. This is much more accurate. Its intention is to get to an outcome.

People generally who are coming to us already are frustrated with, “I just did my upfront. I got a great CPM, but my business hasn’t grown in five years.”

That’s exactly what I experienced at Wendy’s. When I joined Wendy’s in 2011, it had 10 years of traffic decline. The CPMs looked great. Efficiency was awesome in the upfront.

The agency would celebrate, “Hey, we saved you another four or five percent this year on your media upfront.” But the business is shrinking.

I don’t care if I get more reach and it’s more efficient to get that reach. I care if I have an effect from my marketing.

There’s a bit of a mindset shift that has to happen. Usually, people come to us, they’re already to that point where they’re frustrated.

How GroundTruth measures outcomes and why transparency matters

Alex Gluz: I’m so curious. How does GroundTruth work exactly?

Brandon Rhoten: Basically, we tie media to mobile devices and to point-of-sale systems, in some cases the purchase data.

The connection points essentially allow us to understand: Alex is sitting at home watching a CTV ad. Then we target you with another ad in another format. Maybe it’s digital out of home. Maybe it’s streaming audio. Maybe it’s mobile. Maybe it’s desktop.

Then we watch to see: do you show up to the retail location that you were exposed to?

If the answer is yes, we find more people like Alex, and then we optimize based on the touchpoints that led to that outcome.

If it turns out CTV is driving the majority and mobile is an important part that actually gets you to the conversion, CTV and mobile. If it turns out you need digital out of home, fine.

We’re media-agnostic. We do not care what mediums work. We care that they work.

Essentially, what we’re doing is exposing you to advertising through a bunch of different digital formats, even though some don’t feel digital, things like CTV and digital out of home and streaming audio. Then we’re measuring if you show up and doubling down on what works.

Alex Gluz: For our listeners, check this out. It sounds like a great technology which is really taking off.

One of the questions I really want to know, Brandon, is you’re selling radical transparency. How many marketers are secretly terrified of what that transparency might reveal?

Brandon Rhoten: I will say, if you’re in a situation where your budget has a lot of historical baggage and you value that baggage, there are marketers that love getting tickets to football games for free. There are marketers that love the gift baskets that come from vendors.

It’s true, and it’s sad, but it’s true. I know marketers like that. “I don’t want to give up this deal because I love this college basketball team. We need this deal so I can go to all the games and get in the suite.”

The folks that are scared of it are the ones that the baggage is valuable to them in some capacity. They’re valuing the baggage or the perks more than they’re valuing the outcome that they’re trying to drive.

To me, the long-term game for a CMO is create the outcomes, and you can buy your own damn suite at a college football game if you’re making a lot of money for your company.

The folks with a longer-term view are much more concerned with the outcomes and much less concerned with the perks. Perks is part of it.

Part of it is also, we talked about this earlier, this art sense of, “I want the cool thing to happen. I want to go to the award show and pick up the trophy. That’s what drives me,” versus, again, the outcome. Maybe you call that a perk too.

At the end of the day, if you’re a marketer that just lives to go to Cannes every year or lives to get an Effie or an ADDY, you name the award. Again, my teams have won hundreds of those, so I’m very proud of them for that.

But you can still win those awards and get outcomes. You just prioritize the outcome over the trophy or over the tickets or over the gift basket.

Usually, that’s what we run into. People are stuck in the old ways and the old perks versus the outcomes.

Alex Gluz: As I see it, this kind of fear could be rational. Perfect attribution would reveal that conferences or events or parties they love attending generate no pipeline. That the in-house team produces perfect creative for landing pages that don’t convert, and that certain campaigns which they hype up so much are also not productive.

Some boring tactics, in the long term, might actually drive revenue. I get it.

There’s an issue with timelines at times. The company sets up specific goals, and they say this year we’re supposed to hit this amount of sales, which translates to this pipeline. The pipeline translates to this many SQLs, MQLs, and so on.

For marketing, unfortunately, especially in a very competitive space and slower buying cycles, which we talk about all the time, it might take longer.

It’s scary to say that. Some things are so visual, and that at least gives some visibility on the activities. But once you start looking under the hood, it’s scary. I think you hit a lot of good points home.

Using AI to optimize media and creative

Alex Gluz: What do you think are the next big steps? We always talk about AI. How’s AI coming into your world and making changes?

Brandon Rhoten: AI is incredibly powerful for things that happen behind the scenes that used to take a lot of manual work in our world.

Think about optimizing media plans in real time. Think about understanding what lookalikes you should be targeting. Think about understanding the effect of mediums against each other, how they actually fuel one another.

We’re building a lot of AI into the back office of our world to automate and see things that you can’t see as a human.

There are just way too many variables that you can’t do the math on your own. A spreadsheet won’t make it work. I don’t care how good you are at pivot tables. You can’t put in a thousand variables and understand what the likeliest outcomes are without tons of work.

By then, the campaign’s long over. Doing the really hard work of understanding a lot of variables in real time to get to an outcome is a big part of what we’re building in our back end for AI.

Another component that we’re building is iteration on creative. Right now, we have a lot of people who bring a piece of creative to us, and they want to run it in CTV. They also want to run it in out of home. They want to run it in mobile, an omnichannel approach, which in most cases works best.

They don’t want to format it in 50 different formats for mobile. AI can do a lot of that work now. You’ve got to have a human check it.

I think we’ll get to the point where that’s not necessary. But today, you’ve got to make sure that sixth finger doesn’t creep in on the right hand, because it does happen.

Iteration, resizing, recutting, optimizing for cuts in videos with a moment in the first three seconds that grabs your attention and then creates the conversion at the end. AI can be a hugely powerful tool there.

For us, it’s more about doing what we already do better and throwing more brains and AI brains at the problems we know we need to solve to optimize to outcomes.

I can see it starting to come to the front. We’re self-serve and managed. We’re rebuilding our self-serve platform right now, where people are going to tell us what the outcome they desire is.

Right now, it doesn’t look at more than a handful of variables to make a decision on the recommendations that are given. It’s going to be able to look at hundreds or thousands of variables.

Your industry. What’s happening in your industry. What campaigns are working right now. What style of creative is working right now. What offers are working right now.

The number of variables we’re going to be able to apply to a campaign, where it used to just be discernment from an individual, becomes, “This is based on real data. This is based on what’s working right now.”

In three months, it’s going to change because people’s tastes for creative conversion are going to change. People’s tastes for the offer are going to change. The economy is different. The competitive set has shifted their messaging.

For us, it’s about making your ads as effective as they can be and doing it in ways that you don’t even see. It just works better because, in the background, instead of 10 people looking at your media plan, you have AI brains that are all looking at a million other variables.

Alex Gluz: I love it. It’s a very practical approach, and I can totally see this work.

It’s also the next level of what we discussed, because a human cannot discern all of it. It can help you craft that story and explain how the whole journey works and the implications of different channels and the budgets too.

It’s very important to understand the budgets, and not only budget as a broad project, maybe across different seasons or budget across different regions and things like that. It’s a lot of variables.

Mentors, marketing inspiration and closing remarks

Alex Gluz: Great conversation, Brandon. I have one last question for you. Who were your mentors, and the best advice they gave you?

Brandon Rhoten: I learned a ton from the CEO who brought me in at Wendy’s, Emil Brolick. He’s one of these guys who just gets we’re trying to get to a healthy business, and that, in the end, is the best thing for everyone.

My outcome-driven mentality really grew from him because he wasn’t worried about the shiny objects. He wasn’t worried about all the perks. He cared about making the business grow.

I would argue it was his leadership and a lot of work from a lot of people that he brought in, like my team, that led to 40 quarters of growth for that brand, which is crazy. He’s a huge mentor.

But I look up to a ton of marketers. That’s why I have the shelf back here.

I don’t know who does Buc-ee’s stuff, but Buc-ee’s is awesome right now. I know Mike is the primary driver in Liquid Death, and he’s doing great work, but I’ve never met the guy. I just really admire the work.

I look up to people who discover a way to do things differently and in an interesting way that ultimately drives that outcome.

Savannah Bananas, are you following those guys? Minor league baseball team that’s just murdering social right now. Last two, three years, taking an industry that was commoditized and dying and making it cool again.

There is no shortage in the marketing world of awesome work out there that we should all be aspiring to find our own version of.

Alex Gluz: I love that. We’ve been talking to Brandon Rhoten, Chief Marketing Officer at GroundTruth. Brandon, where can people learn more about you?

Brandon Rhoten: You can Google my name. My last name is really weird. Rhoten, R-H-O-T-E-N. If you search my name, you’ll probably find stuff on me and the work that my teams do.

Go to groundtruth.com. That’s where we’re building out this world where you can have measurable results associated with your marketing tied primarily to foot traffic. But there are other variables too.

Find me on LinkedIn, and happy to connect. Or go to groundtruth.com and dig on what we have to offer because you should get some real business results from your marketing, and your organization should just expect it.

Be the driver of that for your organization.

Alex Gluz: Check this out. For our listeners, if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you build marketing revenue engines that empower growth, visit tamonroe.com. Contact me on LinkedIn as well.

Brandon, thanks so much.

Brandon Rhoten: No problem. Thanks, Alex. This was fun.