PPC Origins - Tim Reed

In episode 44 of “Getting Granular,” Chris Cesar sits down with Tim Reed, a Paid Media Specialist at Granular, to dive into Tim’s journey in digital marketing and his experiences with PPC.

In this episode of “Getting Granular,” Chris Cesar sits down with Tim Reed, a Paid Media Specialist at Granular, to dive into Tim’s journey in digital marketing and his experiences with PPC. Tim opens up about how he found his way from an undecided major in college to a career focused on e-commerce and Amazon advertising. He shares what drew him to Granular, fueled by a passion for digital strategy and the psychology behind marketing. Tim also digs into the evolution of paid search, from the early days of simpler platforms to today’s world of AI and automation, which he believes bring both opportunities and challenges. With a mix of humor and insight, he highlights the value of data-driven decisions, building strong client relationships, and staying adaptable in a constantly shifting industry.

Show Notes

Introduction to Getting Granular (00:01): Overview of the podcast and introduction of the host, Chris Cesar, Senior Manager of Paid Media at Granular.
Meet Tim Reed (00:25): Chris introduces Tim, who provides background on his 5-6 years in the industry, emphasizing e-commerce and Amazon advertising.
Tim’s Path to Digital Marketing (01:16): Tim describes his journey from undecided college student to digital marketer, sharing his interest in the psychology behind PPC and client relationships.
PPC Landscape: Then and Now (03:41): Discussion on the early days of Tim’s career, with fewer platforms and simpler strategies, compared to today’s automation and expanded platforms like TikTok and Amazon.
Favorite Aspects of PPC (05:19): Tim highlights his enjoyment of data-driven strategies, learning from diverse client industries, and the dynamic nature of PPC.
Specializations and Role at Granular (10:00): Tim elaborates on his expertise in Amazon and Google Ads, his transition to Granular, and the growth opportunities the agency has provided.
Personal Approach to Client Management (20:39): Emphasis on understanding clients’ individual needs, setting clear goals, and adapting communication styles to different personalities.
Future of PPC (36:39): Tim shares his outlook on AI and automation in PPC, considering both the opportunities and challenges they present for the industry.
Words of Wisdom (41:11): Tim’s closing advice to always keep learning, adapt to new technologies, and improve communication skills as a cornerstone of professional growth.

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Episode Transcript

Narrator: Welcome to Getting Granular, the podcast where digital marketing experts from the agency granular talk about the latest trends, tried and true best practices, and share their unfiltered thoughts about the industry. Whether you are here to learn how to grow your business, improve your digital skills, or just want to hear some Midwest PPC experts rant about digital media, you’ve come to the right place.

Chris: Welcome and thank you all for tuning into the Getting Granular podcast. I’m your host, Chris Caesar, senior manager of Paid Media here at Granular, and today we’re introducing not so new of an employee, Tim Reed. Tim, welcome to have you.

Tim: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s definitely been a while. I’ve been integrator for two and a half years, so it’s been a long time coming for this podcast.

Chris: Yeah, usually we within the first, I dunno, six months of someone starting, I’d like to get ’em introduced here and roll out the introductions, let you tell everybody who you are. And what was it about a year and a half in, you’re like, when are we going to record my podcast? And I said, oops, here we are.

Tim: I didn’t even know they existed until maybe a year or two ago.

Chris: Well, now Tim, much overdue. Great to have you. I guess let’s just dive right into it. So you want to start off with just tell us about yourself?

Tim: Yeah, so I’ve been at Granular for about two and a half years, and then I’ve been in the industry off and on for about five to six years, just getting various jobs and internships and trying to get some digital marketing experience. But Granular is my first full-time digital marketing position.

Chris:

And what is it you do here at Granular?

Tim: So I’m a paid media specialist here at Granular, so I lead on a few accounts and then I support other accounts with any paid media strategies. So I’ve gained a lot of experience at Granular already with multiple different platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google Ads, Microsoft ads. So I have a good understanding of a lot of the platforms, especially having some experience with a lot of the bigger clients.

Chris: Which one’s your favorite?

Tim: My favorite platform for advertising, then yes, probably meta just in there constantly from one of our bigger clients.

Chris: Good answer. Good answer. Always keep the big ones happy, right?

Tim: Yeah, you have to. Well, I have to keep all of ’em happy, but the big ones especially,

Chris: But you’re a little bit more than just a paid meeting manager, right?

Tim: Yeah, so I also help out with the reporting side. So Mark Lee is our reporting and tracking expert here at Granular. I help him out with whatever he needs when it comes to new monthly reports that we send to each of our clients. So that’s another one of the big parts of my responsibilities here at Granular.

Chris: Shout out to Mark, right?

Tim: Yep, shout out to Mark.

Chris: Shout out to Tim

Tim: And me.

Chris: Maybe don’t shout yourself out. That might sound weird, but I’ll shout. Shout Tim. Thanks. Shout out Mark and Tim for anytime you have a reporting issue or a tracking issue is, oh, this tracking is broken, or my reporting is messed up, or I need this Mark. Mark and Tim here are the two go-to guys. So yeah, Tim doing a great job with that, saving my rear end on multiple occasions.

Tim: Yeah, appreciate that. Especially recently with some of your reports, but

Chris: That is not my fault. I’m going to call that out right now. I’m going to push the blame off on someone else, even though that’s definitely my fault. Cool. So thanks for the intro. I guess, do you want to start to, let’s take a step back, go back and go back in time. Go back in the way back machine, and how did you get here? Where’d you get your start in paid media, paid search, and what brought you here?

Tim: Yeah, so I think I first started in college with not a whole lot of direction, I would say. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I first started to learn about different careers. So I started college, kind of undecided in my major and then eventually decided to go into the business field. I know that that’s where a lot of people gain experience and then obviously working in the business field has a high potential for growth too. So I tried to look at it from that perspective. So eventually decided to go into the business fields, and then we had some classes where I was able to experience different aspects of marketing, so finance, accounting, marketing. Then business management I think was another one, but eventually settled our marketing because it seemed the most interesting to me, specifically the psychology of marketing and how people are convinced to buy certain products and how you can use your ads to influence others, not in a weird or creepy way obviously, but user ads to really show the value in your products too.

Because before I thought marketing was just manipulating customers, but especially digital marketing is a lot more targeted towards people that actually are looking for your products and people that actually want to buy those specific products. So that’s when I eventually decided to do marketing and then eventually then I had to choose between sales or digital marketing. And I knew I didn’t really want go into the sales field. I’ve done interviews for sales jobs before and seen a little bit of the industry and I was just not a fan of how they operated and how especially the pay was commission based, so it wasn’t consistent. And I wanted to just switch to the digital marketing aspect of it because there you’re still working with a team, you’re working with a bunch of different clients, so you get to have experiences from other industries and then you don’t have to go out and constantly sell. I mean, we’re still selling ourselves when we’re working with our clients, but it’s a lot in a lot different aspect. It’s more of a relationship type approach.

Chris: A hundred percent agree. The whole sales thing, I’m right there with you where it takes a special type of person to be able to go out and just sell yourself constantly doing this that meet all these different people thinking about all the rejection you have to deal with. It’s tough. Yeah,

Tim: I remember one interview, it was in downtown Chicago, and he was just talking to a bunch of random people on the street that were super busy and with no fear, he just kept trying to sell people. I forgot what the product was, but I don’t know how you could go in downtown Chicago and just talk to a bunch of random people.

Chris: Yeah, that’s cutthroat. That’s again, not for me and not for a lot of people, but again, if you have the skills where you can go out there and sell sand on a beach, good for you. Yeah, it’s interesting what you say about marketing, the whole psychology behind it, because you always like to think marketing doesn’t work on me. Like you said, it’s sort of trying to trick people into it, but then as you take those classes in school and you learn this is how the cycle and the psychology behind it and oh, this color means this and this color and your product means that, and you always think that this doesn’t apply to me, but then you see it and you’re like, oh, this has been, and as you continue to live your life, you’re like, oh, this is an ad that I’m intentionally buying something off of. Because like you said in something with search where if I’m looking for a very specific product, those search ads are there to provide me with that very specific product if they think that it would fit my needs. And yeah, I think that’s all very valid points. That makes a ton of sense where marketing has existed for all these years for a reason.

Tim: And then growing up, I always had a negative view of ads. I remember just seeing a bazillion commercials when I was a kid and wanted to, I wish I could have been able to skip a lot of them. Obviously before there was just regular TV or there was just constant commercials. There was, I think a 30 minute program was 20 minutes of the actual program in 10 minutes of ads, 22 minutes, 22 minutes, and then almost, so it’s eight minutes of ads then technically. So just seeing that just turned me off completely from any ads. And eventually it became none to it too, especially when the DVR was invented. That’s probably too retro right now. But

Chris: Tim, are you telling me you don’t still subscribe to cable?

Tim: Well, obviously I don’t think I’ve ever subscribed to cable in my entire adult life.

Chris: I subscribed to cable. I will be the last millennial to subscribe to a cable service, and I’ll put that out there right now.

Tim: Streaming was in its infancy when I was in college, but I think I never paid for cable myself. It was always mostly my parents.

Chris: I think the reason I have it, and Tim here is not a big sports guy, but anyone who knows me knows that that’s basically five ACEs of my free time is spent on attending or watching one sporting event to the other. So yeah, that’s why I keep cable. I won’t tell you how much I pay because I have told people and they freaked out because the number is quite high, but between those paying and the ads, and like you said, I think people can get cynical with all the ads, which no disagreement here. They are annoying, but again, they can sometimes sell a good product, except I think we can all agree since we’re in the season, political ads, those are the worst.

Tim: Those are constant. Every time I’m on YouTube it’s just constant. I should just get YouTube, what’s it called? YouTube premium.

Chris: And you know how they say they like sway voters, but have any of those ads ever actually changed anyone’s mind? No, I still know I’m voting for regardless,

Tim: So it doesn’t even matter.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we can all agree ads are good, political ads bad. Well, some ads are good, but not ad overload, but that’s

Tim: Why that’s another topic for another day. They’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these things. I don’t think they’re doing anything, but that’s a whole nother topic.

Chris: That could be, again, months, two hour long conversation with political ads, but no one wants to be bored with that today. But yeah, that’s why it’s all about the digital advertising standing out in a crowd. And again, the banner blindness isn’t really exactly what you said, but that’s something that we fight with all the time is make sure we stay relevant, interesting, and in front of the people that are the ones who are going to want to potentially purchase whatever product we’re offering at the

Tim: Time. Yeah, exactly. Have that high purchase intent, and the way you do that is build your audience and build your customer base so that people that are actually seeing your ad want to buy that product.

Chris: We already sort of touched on this a little bit, but what did the paid media landscape look like when you started in the industry?

Tim: I mean, it was pretty basic. When I first started, obviously Google ads and Microsoft ads were still a thing. They’ve been a thing for over 20 years now, but a lot of the newer platforms that you didn’t really see back in the day didn’t exist. So Amazon, Snapchat, TikTok, programmatic, a lot of those are still very new. Programmatic mostly grew as streaming grew. And then obviously Snapchat and TikTok are maybe a little bit old at this point, but there’s still a lot newer than Facebook. So mostly it was just Google ads and Facebook back in the day in terms of where you can run digitally, but now there’s a plethora of platforms. There’s probably almost too many platforms that ads can run online nowadays. So just seeing where it was at compared to where it is now is mind blowing.

Chris: And to sort of take this a step further in terms of the changes we’ve seen, the targeting that we can see get with programmatic now is almost the targeting we could get on Facebook, meadow, whatever you want to call it, as it transitioned 10 years ago or so where you could get almost creepy levels of data. And that was the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal. And that’s sort of where programmatic is now, where all these other platforms are starting to change, where some of those targeting capabilities more limited with people being more aware of their privacy, and I guess there’ve just been a lot more changes as well. Aside from that as you’ve taken this journey through your digital marketing career,

Tim: I don’t think that’s specific targeting and programmatic going to stay. It’s probably going to be there for a little bit longer, but I think that’s going to eventually be taken away too. And as you see in the industry, more and more options for us are being taken away and there’s a lot more automation and ai, which I’m sure we’re going to get into later but’s a lot of things that are being stripped away that we were able to do five, 10 years ago,

Chris: I would say continue to start using or continue to use programmatic as long as you can. Well, oh yeah, like you said, those very specific targeting options are still available because I think you’re on the right track too of in five, 10 years, people are going to realize, oh, my data is being sold this way, and then there’ll be a whole crack down there and then there’ll be a new channel that evolves and that’ll be the wild west of targeting. And then it’s just sort of a cyclical, non-ending process

Tim: Eventually they can’t keep up too. I mean the laws are just now keeping up with the internet, but now the laws need to figure out how to keep up with AI and stuff too.

Chris: I totally trust Congress

Tim: To get everything right. Well, there has to be regulations, otherwise it’s just going to be out of control and then people are going to, they’re going to try to take over jobs and it’s a whole nother thing

Chris: And no one’s talked about that yet either, right? In the last, I don’t know, year, two years, five years. Yeah, of course. No one. Yeah, original content, that’s what we’re here for. Yeah, I guess what else have you noticed that have been sort of the major changes in the industry since you’ve started?

Tim: Just trying to think. I guess new, I would say there’s been a lot of new growth in the industry in terms of the people you can target and where you can target them. Streaming in its infancy, didn’t really have any ads before, and now we got all these programmatic ads that we can do and there’s all these different options. There’s streaming with ads, streaming without ads, streaming with limited ads. There’s just so many different options in terms of where you can target people compared to what there was in the past. And I think that’s just a huge, huge shift from where it was because before it used to be just mostly Google and display ads that were all over the internet and obviously nobody likes how constant display ads are when you’re clicking on an article and you have to close a bazillion different ads on there.

Chris: Not to push people back to the cable bundle again, but if you recall when streaming services started, it was, oh, you pay us this subscription fee and then we give you this content with no ads,

Tim: Right? That’s how it started

Chris: And now it’s basically buy the subscription, we’ll give you a discounted price, but you’re still see ads.

Tim: Right? Yeah. Streaming is worse than cable now, in my opinion now because there’s all the streaming and then there’s ads constantly for that streaming. And so basically if you don’t want ads, you’re going to have to pay a lot more for streaming, but then you’re basically paying the same amount as cable.

Chris: So I think we all just decided that cable is the way to go and I’m right and everyone, I just waited long enough for the cycle to start back over and everyone’s going to start coming back to cable. Right. But cable’s like hundreds of dollars. Yeah. Cable companies are also not doing so great right now, so we will see,

Tim: I’ll see once all the people that are still using it like you and then all the older people that won’t refuse to give up their cable.

Chris: What are you saying about me,

Tim: Tim? I dunno. I’m sure a lot of people use cable for mostly, you probably just use it for mostly sports I assume, but it’s mostly sports. Yeah.

Chris: Although you can’t get past a classic Seinfeld episode of Comedy Central or you’re flipping around. That’s true. You could stream the

Tim: Entire series. I could,

Chris: But yeah, and to that point too, one thing that I’ve noticed with my cable subscription is a lot of different streamers are they are coming together but making these deals where you can get ESPN plus included in your subscription, you can get peacock included in your subscription. Obviously they’re all with ads, but I think we’re starting to approach that point where everything’s starting to centralize back together of it’s still just going to be one subscription that you’re paying, but rather than having it all in one little channel flipping cable box, you’re going to have to connect to all the different apps. And that probably comes back to how these ads are being purchased to bring it full circle programmatically.

Tim: Yeah, that’s true. And then it’s just the competitiveness of streaming has just made it significantly worse. You don’t know how long your favorite show is going to even be on there before they just rip it off and then send it to a platform you don’t have or are not paying for, and then you have to pay for another platform. You sound upset about

Chris: This. Has this personally affected you recently?

Tim: It’s just annoying. That’s why I’ve been a huge advocate for still physical media. You have that forever and then they can’t just rip it from your streaming service.

Chris: Have you lost a show you loved to a different streaming service?

Tim: Well, I’m trying to think. Obviously the office in Parks and Rec, I refuse to get Peacock for the longest time, and then I eventually got Peacock just because of a couple comedies.

Chris: But did you watch anything original on Peacock or you literally just bought Peacock so you can watch the office in Parks and

Tim: Rec. I mean I just have the ad version and I split it with my in-laws, so it’s not that bad, but

Chris: All right. See, this is, they also showed the office on Comedy Central all the time and it was with ads, so you could just go back to cable and just throw out there. That’s true. Anyway, off the topic of cable, a little

Tim: Off of,

Chris: I could talk about cable all day and we’ll never come to solution solving the world of problems, but I mean, yeah. So obviously you sort of mentioned this already, but what are your favorite parts about working in paid media?

Tim: Yeah, so I think my favorite part about it is, like I said, we’re working with different clients of different industries and be able to learn how different companies operate and learn the process for each one and how different clients will respond differently to different people or respond differently to how you say something. So you kind of have to read the room, read the client, and I think it’s really interesting because every client’s different in how approach them and how you talk to them. And so that’s kind of what I like about it’s the relationship aspect of building between the clients can be wildly different between each client even though you’re doing the same type of work.

Chris: So you mentioned you have, again, you’re doing more or less generally the same thing for it could be any number of different people. How do you approach that on a day-to-day basis where again, it’s more or less the same two tasks, but it could be approached completely different. The messaging to the person you’re working on it with could be completely different. How do you manage that on a day-to-day basis,

Tim: That’s kind of hard. You have to absolutely take into account what the client wants and sometimes what the client wants is not always the best strategy. So trying to give your recommendations as quickly as possible or as efficiently as possible I think is key. And then the way to do that is to obviously get feedback from the client but also from your expertise feed into your recommendations because obviously each client is going to be different and it’s going to have different goals and you just have to be clear what those goals are. You can get that from the client and then you need to show them how what you’re doing is meeting their goals.

Chris: Yeah, I think that’s really insightful because again, you’re, you may sit behind a computer screen for most of your day, but at the end of the day you’re still dealing with people, your ads are trying to sell to people, the people you’re working with to get all these different campaigns set up are people, and having different people, you’re going to have different personalities. So you’re always going to have to find different ways to manage those personalities where some people might want to sit there and talk about their dog for the first 15 minutes of a call and other people might log on and say, alright, what’s the plan? What are our metrics looking like? What’s happening?

Tim: You just kind of have to read the room and that’s going to be hard, especially at the beginning when you’re first launching client because you don’t know how the client is at the beginning. So the initial probably first month or two is going to be probably the most challenging. You don’t know how the client is and then if they add someone new to the team or if they change up who your contact is to then you have to kind of readjust and figure out what their needs are and what their goals are. So it could change even when you have the same client

Chris: For sure. It’s always a fun challenge to work with different people and different personalities.

Tim: It could also change the dynamic drastically though too. It could, which I’ve had some clients that have changed dynamics drastically from when they add a new person on the team and then they have all these ideas.

Chris: And that’s the other thing, everyone’s always going to have different ideas no matter if they’re brand new or they’ve been there at a company for 30 years. And again, like you said, it’s all about managing expectations of figuring out what’s going to work best for everybody involved.

Tim: Yeah, that’s why it’s good to always constantly reaffirm what the client’s goals are. Maybe not every single medium, but at least every quarter you should know what their goals are.

Chris: Absolutely. So changing topics here a little bit, how did you come to Granular? How did you get here from where you started?

Tim: What brought me to Granular is that, well, I think I talked about a little bit about this at the beginning, but I’ve been going through a bunch of different types of jobs. So before I started at a nonprofit organization for, I did that for about a year and a half and that was a really rewarding job and gave me some good initial Google ads marketing experience, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for and so I decided to change to some other jobs. So I had some various internships. I had one internship that was out of someone’s house, so it was a really small agency.

I think that internship was actually unpaid. So I actually was working at Walmart while doing the internship and doing a crazy amount of hours. Well, the internship was only part-time, but I was working at Walmart obviously, so support myself since that internship wasn’t paid. So I had to work at Walmart and then work on that internship and back to back. And then luckily I was living with my friend who didn’t charge me a crazy amount of rent, so I was able to still afford to live working on a minimum wage Walmart salary. So that was good in terms of that. And then after that I worked for a third party Amazon seller that sold health and nutrition products on Amazon. And so that’s where I got some Amazon ads experience, but I didn’t end up doing a whole lot of Amazon ads experience. I ended up doing a bunch of random tasks that they wanted me to do. It was a bunch of warehouse work and packing up boxes and stuff. And this is obviously not what I signed up for.

Chris: So what was your title there? What was I Tech? Was it like a marketing role or was it just like, were you a warehouse

Tim: Person? I mean, my title technically wasn’t a warehouse role, it was more of an office assistant or something. Okay.

Chris: I think this might come out, I think this podcast episode might air before Sarah’s who we recorded last week, but if you listen to Sarah’s podcast, which I highly recommend, we get off on so many different things, way worse than here, but Sarah’s role at a previous company was something like marketing coordinator, something like that. And somehow that turned into, she was working remote at this company and 800 miles away and her boss asked her to rent a dumpster, but it wasn’t fill out a form. It was like make a phone call and make sure this dumpster is delivered to this address that she was not at. And it got pretty crazy. So all this to say, it sounds like your experience was sort of similar to hers of you were in a quote marketing role, but you were being asked to do things that were not marketing related

Tim: Whatsoever. Bunch of random things. I was even checking inventory too and verifying products. I had to go out there and count the inventory of stuff we were bringing in and it ended up getting really messy too, and they didn’t want to spend enough money for their to even be worthwhile on the ads too, so they thought a thousand dollars was too much ad spend and I was like, you’re not going to get anything for a thousand dollars.

Chris: So it sounds to me like you were more of an warehouse inventory guy than you were an Amazon ad guy.

Tim: Yeah, basically.

Chris: I don’t know, we may or may not have mentioned this at the top, but Tim here you are our go-to guy for Amazon ads.

Tim: Well, yeah, I am now, and I did learn a lot on Amazon ads from that company. A lot of the stuff I had to learn on my own, there was no training or no one really knew how to do marketing besides really basic things about it. So they didn’t know that they couldn’t get a crazy ROAS for a thousand dollars ad spend and I think could have inflated it and made it all brand search, but obviously I’m not going to do that.

Chris: And see that’s why you’re here. We’d love to have you here. You are a go-to Guy for Amazon just based this, based on the experience you’ve had previously

Tim: Alone. Yeah, it’s not my full story though. That was my last job before Granular. So I was at that job for about two years or so and it was my girlfriend, now wife that encouraged me to just try to find other jobs and just try to find something I would, that I actually enjoy, so that I think it was like this spring of, it was 2022 where I started just applying to as many digital marketing jobs as I could possibly find and kept interviewing around, and I just ended up being really motivated to get out of that job. And so I eventually just applied to a bunch of jobs. I had a ton of interviews. I was probably having four or five interviews every week and then eventually interviewed at Granular and was able to get that job too, which I think is just really awesome that I was able to do that. And then right after I got the job at Granular, I obviously put my two weeks notice for that job and got out of there as quickly as possible. And then a month later, a month later, I ended up getting engaged to who’s now my wife, obviously her name’s Brittany. And then after that I got married six months later while I was a granular, so within six months of when I started granular, I got a new job and then I got married, I got engaged, and then I got married.

Chris: So it’s a granular love story,

Tim: It’s a Granular love story, and I moved up to Wisconsin in Illinois before.

Chris: That is the most important part. We’ve moved from the worst state into the best state in my humble opinion. Again, that could be a whole nother podcast of everything I have against that state in the city of Chicago, but I digress. But yeah, so you could probably say that granular major life so much better.

Tim: Yeah, granular did definitely make my life so much better too. Also, I think I was a test too, because Granular mostly has hired senior level people and people that are more experts in the field, but I came into granular not knowing a crazy amount about digital marketing. I knew a little bit about Google and I knew a decent amount about Amazon, but I came in with not a whole lot of experience, but the team was able to train me up really quickly and then we were able to hire a lot more mid-level people after they saw me succeed and grow in my role. So I think it’s really cool that I was the first person that was a mid-level person at the company.

Chris: Tim, you’re selling yourself short.

Tim: You’re the Amazon guy. I dunno about that. I mean, Jeremy knew a lot before I started on, all right.

Chris: Most people know I don’t like to give Jeremy a lot of credit for basically anything ever. So you’re the Amazon guy?

Tim: Oh yeah. I didn’t know any other platforms though really, really, that’s the thing before I started Granular.

Chris: But that’s one of the big things about working here is I personally don’t, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to Amazon today if you have that one specialty. And that’s part of what makes grantly a great is we have different people who have different specialties where again, I know you’re very well versed in Meta, but so am I of, if somebody needs a meta campaign, you want to show on Facebook and Instagram, we have any people who can do that. But then again, if there are these different companies.

Tim: Niche.

Chris: I have this very specific need to sell on Amazon, boom, we have Tim here, or we want to grow our follower base on TikTok for one reason or another, we have people who are specializing in TikTok. We have that wide breadth of not everyone’s going to be experts at everything, but everyone’s an expert at something where we always have that ability to dive in and say, no matter what it is you need, someone here has probably worked on it at some point and will be able to point you in the right direction.

Tim: I agree with that. Like I said, we have a lot of specializations. We have people that specialize in programmatic and we have people that specialize in meta. Then we have people that specialize in Amazon like myself and then Jeremy I mentioned earlier,

Chris: And it’s not even necessarily a channel thing too where if we want to promote a business on Google, if they’re an e-commerce business, again, that’s something you have a lot of expertise in where if it’s more lead gen, I’d be someone who’d be more likely to be able to help. So it’s not even necessarily just the different channel mixes, it’s also the verticals and specializations of each different company that does come to work with us.

Tim: Yeah, I agree. And that collective knowledge just helps us just learn and be a better company.

Chris: So then aside from changing your life and having met me, of course, what else is it that you do like about Granular and working here?

Tim: I really like the environment too. Just being able to ask people questions that have the knowledge that I might not have on a specific subject and being able to really talk to them and be open about any questions I have or any concerns I have. People are always willing to talk to me about it and just really be open to it and people are always willing to make time to help invest in you if you want to continue to grow in your career. So that’s one thing I like about Granular and then just the environment of the office. Having our office is obviously in third Ward, so we have a pretty open, open space here. Just being able to just interact with the people. I think having the open desk desks definitely help instead of cubicles so we can talk to people or have an office chat or do whatever we need to do, I think is really important too. And then obviously I like the working environment of being a hybrid. I usually go into the office about a couple of days a week, but being able to have the flexibility of being hybrid I think is very beneficial to just having a more balanced life.

Chris: I would agree with that too, because yesterday you were here yesterday too, right? Yeah, yesterday the office was pretty, every desk was pretty full. I think there was maybe one or two empty desks where today you and I are the only ones in the office today, so I would agree that that’s super nice to really love that flexibility of not, you don’t have to be in the office four days a week, four or five days a week because you’re not productive unless your butt is in your seat.

Tim: I mean, I wasn’t here before Covid when you guys had to go in five days a week, so I’m sure it was quite a bit different of an environment, but

Chris: That was also, everyone was always in every day, five days a week at every business. That’s true. Remote work wasn’t a thing until 2020, but yeah, now that that’s opened up, 10 out of 10,

Tim: Recommend shouldn’t go back. I would recommend everyone, at least if they have an office, to go in at least a couple of days a week to be able to interact with other people and not be a hermit.

Chris: Oh, for sure. But again, it goes back to the flexibility of if you want to have that option, it’s there, but again, it’s not you have to be in here and you have to be in your desk of thing.

Tim: Well, yeah, it’s not super rigid or anything too. Center thing, the flexibility, it’s just nice too if we have an appointment or if we have to go somewhere or if we have to end early or if we start early or we can end early. Just the flexibility of being able to as long as we get our work done, just being able to live our lives.

Chris: Tim, did you just say you work four hour days and start late and end early every day? Is that what…

Tim: Heard? No, I usually start at eight or eight 30 and end at four.

Chris: Okay. If you say so, I’ll take your, I believe you. I trust you, Tim, but you’re doing a great I do full days. No, you’re doing great. Yeah. So I guess as we sort of start to wrap up here, taking a look towards the future, the future of paid media, obviously like you said, it’s changed a lot since you started and to where you are today, and obviously it’s going to continue to change a lot. Where do you see that going?

Tim: Of the future? Brand media?

Chris: Yes,

Tim: It’d be interesting to see. Like I said, I think programmatic will end up staying for a while, but I think it’s not just in streaming services obviously, but it’s not billboards and a bunch of different other things. So see programmatic staying for a while, but if streaming changes, I think programmatic will definitely change. So I guess that’s one aspect too. And then I think e-commerce is definitely going to continue to grow Amazon ads, you’ve seen explosive growth, especially in the past five years. So I think e-commerce especially is really going to grow specifically on Amazon. I think it’s really going to take off, and then obviously everyone’s talking about AI taking off and making our lives easier, but also more difficult at the same time. I think that’s just something that everyone has to adapt to is a little different AI capabilities, and if we can learn those now instead of later, then we’ll be a lot more ahead of the curve and be able to show that we can adapt to different situations,

Chris: Be less worried about is AI going to take my job, be more worried about how can I use AI to improve my work?

Tim: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are worried about AI taking over their job, but I think it’s just going to help people just work more efficiently.

Chris: I would agree. I mean, I know that we use it all the time where again, it’s not running the campaigns, but I have to do this one very specific task. It’s not a creative task, it’s 10,000 emails. Can you help me find the ones that are Gmails or something like that where you use it for organization and productivity things where again, if that was something that I was doing manually, going through 10,000 emails that could take me six hours where now Che GPT can do it in 15 seconds.

Tim: Yeah, that’s true. Then just going back also to the purchasing power that I was talking about a little bit earlier, I think, I know people have been complaining about the economy and stuff, but spending is at all time high right now, and I think purchasing people’s purchasing power I think is even higher than it was in the middle of Covid now. So I think that’s another way people can really grow is, or that the ads are really going to grow, is just how e-commerce has just exploded.

Chris: When you say purchasing is at an all time high, do you mean purchasing ad buys or purchasing the people who are buying our products?

Tim: More people are buying products than ever before.

Chris: Okay. That’s interesting because

Tim: I think we’re at, not to rant down our society, but I think our society is very consumed with consumerism and wanting more and more stuff In terms of that aspect, I know it’s kind of a bad thing to say, but how do you really feel Tim? People are more materialistic. That’s the word. People want more and more stuff.

Chris: As someone who has tried to stop the impulse purchases in the last year or so, it still happens a

Tim: Lot. Yes, it still happens, and marketing actually helps people be more consumeristic, but it’s part of our industry.

Chris: So it’s your

Tim: Fault. I mean, it’s not entirely my fault. You’re just a small cog in the operation. No, I’m helping people with purchase intent.

Chris: You’re okay. You’re helping them improve their

Tim: Lives. Yes.

Chris: Okay. You don’t believe me. That’s okay. I believe you, Tim. I believe everything you say I about that. That’s probably safe. That’s a good call. Yeah,

Tim: But that’s rant too much on that, just saying I think people are buying a lot more than they used to. Oh yeah,

Chris: Definitely. Cool. So as we wrap up here and get to the end, I just usually like to ask everyone if they have any words of wisdom, be it professionally, personally, any sort of closing thoughts you’d like to leave people with.

Tim: Yeah, so I’d say that the biggest device you can use for pay media and also for everyday life is just to constantly keep learning on what’s going on with your job, learn what’s going on within the industry, within the platforms we’re working on, and learn what’s going on outside of marketing too. Just constantly be able to learn new things and grow in your skills so that you can become a better marketer and a better person. So for example, one of the things I’m trying to get better at is that everyone I think can improve on to some degree is communicating and communication towards clients and towards your peers, and I think that’s huge in every aspect of life, not just in business or marketing, but in terms of anything you do. Like the communication and listening are some of the most important skills, skills you can learn, and that’s something you can constantly grow and learn and that’ll just make you an overall more well-rounded person if you can have a good conversation with someone.

Chris: Very insightful. All right, Tim, thanks for joining us today. Hope to have you back real soon.

Tim: Alright, sounds good. Thanks for being here,

Chris: And thank you all for listening to the Getting Granular podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any PC tips, tricks or news in the digital marketing world. Also, be sure to visit our website for more content at granularmarketing.com. Got a great blog up there. I’ve been your host, Chris Cesar. Thanks for getting granular with us today.