Pax (02:15)
All right, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today on the campaign. I'm really looking forward to talking with you and ⁓ I think it might be good to have ⁓ a start with you going over your background. Tell us how you ended up in marketing. Everyone's story is different and they're all usually pretty interesting. So I'd love to hear yours.

Adam Gunn (02:35)
Yeah, I hope my story's kind of unique and interesting. ⁓ I've been in the industry for a long time. I actually haven't counted the years, but it's probably pushing 20, if that dates me. ⁓ My background's kind of unique. I was that kid in high school that drew on everything and had aspirations to be a Disney animator, work for Pixar, ⁓ got my degree in fine art.

And as I was putting myself through college, found my way into the graphic arts in a print shop, working ⁓ at the time, almost everything was printed, web was just coming online. So, learning the art of preparing for color separations and getting artwork ready for print and kind of fell in love with typography and graphic design and identity work and branding. ⁓

That kind of shifted my major to have a visual communications emphasis, did eight years of agency work, doing a lot of identity design work, building brands, building campaigns, kind of got sick of the agency side. I like to say what kind of frustrated me out of the agency world was just, it was very binary. Your clients either hired you again for another project or they fired you and replaced you you really didn't get a whole lot of opportunity to see data.

you know, iterate and improve. ⁓ so I went in house in, in 2010 and worked in house for a company that had been a client as a in-house graphic artist and had a really interesting moment in my career where the chief revenue officer was like, Adam, I want you to run marketing. And I'd never even had a direct report. And suddenly I had a multimillion dollar budget and

eight people reporting to me, most of which felt like I was not the right person to hire. ⁓ But it was baptism by fire and it was probably the transcendent moment in my career. I think he saw some leadership capabilities in me that I probably didn't even see in myself. ⁓ it was a great time. It was 2010 to 2015 when email marketing and nurture campaigns were coming on. We had to migrate.

Pax (04:31)
Wow.

Adam Gunn (04:56)
the company off of a legacy home brewed CRM onto Salesforce. I had to report lead gen and ROI off of our campaigns. Like I learned the language of the boardroom, which many creatives don't get the chance to do. And that kind of turned my career, but I did, I've always been a brand guy. I've always loved storytelling. Took the opportunity to join Pluralsight in 2015 and spent nine years.

owning the brand at Pluralsight, got to see pre-IPO going public in 2018, private equity phase. So really got the full gamut working for Aaron Schonert at Pluralsight. And then the last two years I've been working at Full Story, ⁓ behavioral data and analytics company out of Atlanta.

Pax (05:42)
Yeah.

Wow. That's, that is a really great, great background, great story. And yeah. ⁓ one thing I want to, I want to latch onto and talk a little bit more is this is something that's personally fascinated me for a while, which is these, this intersection between science and art, or some people would describe it as left brain and right brain and.

Adam Gunn (05:48)
Sorry, you're old, story gets long.

Pax (06:15)
It's rare to see somebody, ⁓ with the skillset to sit right in the middle of those two things. And so you don't often see a creative who then is going to run a marketing team and sit in, in board meetings. And I'm interested in how that transition went and what do you feel like if somebody is sitting on either side, maybe they're on the more analytical side and they want to get more creative or, vice versa. What.

what could they start doing to work to kind of develop that other set of muscles? Cause they are very different.

Adam Gunn (06:51)
Yeah, I think a winning recipe for me has been just staying grounded in the reality that we're all humans and humans are emotive beings and they respond to emotive narratives. So, you know, even in a boardroom setting, you know, there's an opportunity to leverage emotion, humor, ⁓ poignancy.

to your strategic advantage. And I think those are the skills I honed in my agency phase and working on brands. Like you're tight, you're pulling on those emotive heartstrings really intentionally, but I've found those same skills carry over into the scientific side, particularly on the articulation of the narratives that come out of the data and being able to communicate those effectively.

big part of eight years in the agency world was pitching. And a lot of times, you know, in the boardroom, you're, you know, you're fighting for resources or you're fighting for, you know, additional budget. And so that ability to pitch and, and sell a vision and, and imbue that trust is, is really what you're doing. And I don't know. I like to, I like to talk about the whiteboard. found the whiteboard a very powerful place to kind of.

utilize some of those skills. Like the whiteboard is a place where you can, you know, generate some of that emotive, ⁓ power through communicating an idea. And oftentimes it's maybe it's a funny doodle or maybe it's a funny, you know, way that you're presenting a chart. ⁓ but I found those skills that I hewn on the creative side, oftentimes translate to slide where, or, you know, we don't.

Pax (08:24)
Thanks.

Adam Gunn (08:41)
We don't get to use whiteboards quite as much in the virtual world, but ⁓ same skills apply.

Pax (08:47)
Yeah, somebody does need to develop a whiteboard specifically for Zoom. That needs to be a thing if it's not, and maybe it is, and I don't know about it. ⁓ Often people on, and I don't want to harp on this too much, but often people on the creative side, I've seen firsthand a lot of them say, I'm not a numbers person, and spreadsheets just really turn them off. Analytics really turns them off.

Uh, and you need, you need to be deep into those things to lead marketing teams. So how did you, have you, have you had that feeling of like, I'm not a numbers person. If so, how'd you overcome that? Or is that always just something you're interested in?

Adam Gunn (09:25)
I think my hot take on that, it'd be oftentimes the place the creatives fail is they care too much about things that the analytics and business side of the business just don't care about and they'll die on those hills. I remember in my early days at Pluralsight, I literally sat in an hour and a half meeting about what shape of bullet best represented our brand. Was it a triangle? Was it a circle? Was it a square?

And we had the UX team in and the brand team and we were battling and I'd just been at this other company where I'd been head of marketing and I just got real anxious. I'm like, guys, no one outside of their people in this room care. Like they don't care what shape the bullet is. And we're wasting so many resources arguing and debating and going back to college and debating why it matters. And so, you know, my advice would be

you know, pick your battles. Like I believe brands should be beautiful. I believe they should win. believe they're an inordinately valuable strategic weapon, but there's a point where they just don't care as much as you care. And if, if you're spending time and energy trying to fight those battles, it's often, I think why creatives get a bad rap and, and why sometimes, you know, those conversations don't, don't imbue value.

Pick your battles and the shape of bullets wasn't one for us.

Pax (10:52)
Yeah. Yeah. It probably isn't for anybody. ⁓ so tell me, tell me about, ⁓ full story. that's, that's where you're going to tell us what full story does and how they help help marketers.

Adam Gunn (10:55)
Ha ha.

Yeah, so Full Story is a behavioral analytics platform. You could kind of think of it as like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics on steroids. have some proprietary code you can deploy on your website. And basically, you get a deeper level of auto-captured behavioral sentiment-rich signals from your users in terms of how they're navigating their site, your web experience, or your mobile app.

what they're experiencing. ⁓ The company's been around for about 10 years. They first utilize that behavioral rich intelligence for ⁓ recreating session replays. So a lot of people know full story because of their session replay capabilities. ⁓ developers and engineers love it because if someone's having a bad experience on your website, you can go back and recreate that session and see exactly ⁓ what's going on.

We've been using it this week at Full Story. We've had a Marketo form that's for some reason gotten buggy. And so to be able to go and watch the users interact with that form that's not loading is super powerful. And hopefully you're saving dev work and cycles, identifying that issue early, resolving it, then improving, ultimately be improving the customer experience. We're now moving into, sorry about that.

Pax (12:29)
Yeah. So tell me

please

go ahead.

Adam Gunn (12:34)
I was just probably teeing up your next question, but we're now moving into the AI phase. So the next evolution of full story is how people are going to use AI to bring those insights to bear faster, instrument the code without human deployment, and ultimately get those sessions and experiences even more optimized with the use of AI.

Pax (13:01)
I'd love to know what kind of behavior data marketers could expect to see from this.

Adam Gunn (13:08)
Yeah, the strongest signals from your users are often frustration signals. So we've kind of cut our teeth and are best known for frustration signals. We call them rage clicks. If someone gets frustrated because a button's not working, the natural human response is just to hit it 19 times. And we believe about four successive hits is a signal of rage. ⁓ There's other things like mouse thrashing, where you're moving your cursor.

⁓ we found evidence that copying and pasting is often a sign of frustration, ⁓ or at least, you know, leads to exit. So all of that, what we believe sentiment rich signal is captured as a deeper level of analytic value than just what page were they on? How long were they on that page? What browser were they on?

Pax (14:01)
Right. So how are you using AI to you? Like what is AI doing to help make that data more useful versus just a user looking at it and saying, I can see somebody's getting frustrated here. need to fix that.

Adam Gunn (14:14)
Yeah, our AI strategy for us has four pillars. The first AI pillar for full story is summation. So we're using AI, again, our bread and butter was session summaries, but an engineer or a product manager would have to watch those sessions individually. We're using AI to create semantic summaries of groups and cohorts of sessions.

With the hope in the future, you'll never have to watch a session again. The AI will just tell you what the user was experiencing in those sessions that may be led to a reaction or response that needs mitigation. The middle two pillars of our strategy are ⁓ surfacing opportunities and answers. ⁓ Again, as an analytic platform, a majority of our users are power users, deep analysts, and experts in that field.

but it's a huge burden for a small team or an individual to surface opportunities that can truly be ⁓ mitigated and drive incremental value. So we believe AI can help us look at funnels, look at conversions, surface areas that might need mitigation faster than human intervention. And then Answers is more for those data explorers who are democratizing data. Most of us don't feel comfortably comfortable saying that we're analysts, but we want to use conversational AI

Pax (15:29)
Mm.

Adam Gunn (15:39)
to ask it a question and be able to get a dashboard or an answer back ⁓ in short order that makes us feel more comfortable than if we were have to, you know, suss out that answer ourselves. And then the final pillar is predicting. I think that's the Holy grail. If, if AI is able to help us see problems around the corner and opportunities to, you know, improve an experience or run an AB test that maybe we didn't see. So the future is the model's being sophisticated enough that it will be able to.

predict opportunities for us to improve conversion before we've even thought of them.

Pax (16:14)
Yeah, I love that. yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, sounds like you guys are gathering so much data that it's almost impossible for a single person to go in there and get all of the insight. Some for sure, but not all. And AI is basically this needed layer that can surface all of that insight, that like a single person couldn't, is that accurate?

Adam Gunn (16:38)
Yeah, yeah. The buzzword is agents, right? Like creating AI agents that are working on your behalf. And yeah, the idea to be able to scale that workforce with humans alone is a hard proposition with the volume of data that's available to you. So if these agents can help extend your team and get you those insights faster, we believe that's ROI for our customers.

Pax (17:04)
Yeah, I love that. ⁓ you have talked about, well, really quick, ⁓ something that, that, ⁓ has been said a lot in the industry is, ⁓ you know, AI will continue to grow and develop. And, as that grows, people are constantly looking for like, what is the constant? What is the way to win? What won't change even if open AI is no longer a thing and suddenly make meta.

Lama rules the world. What doesn't change and what has been offered up is the person with the most data and the best data is the one who's going to win. So I think that's true in many fields, but especially true in marketing. So marketers need to get better at identifying sets of data, gathering and storing sets of data, and then using that data.

You have talked about, there's a lot of data that marketers have access to that they themselves don't realize is there. What would be some of those data sets that marketers should be looking at when it comes, it comes to like fueling future AI use.

Adam Gunn (18:19)
Yeah, think, you know, my, my only addition to your narrative there would be, you know, it's not just any data set. think first party data is where brands are going to win. So you have to be looking, you know, within your own data sets or owned, ⁓ tooling to find where you can drive that incremental, differentiation. And, know, obviously with

with full story on the mind. Like we're going to hopefully demonstrate the value of this behavioral data. ⁓ I think the future, like the future cast a little bit, like it's awesome that it's in the full story platform and that you can see and utilize and build reports and alerts and monitor there. the power of the future is going to be.

exporting that into a warehouse and pairing it with other data sets that you have, your transactional data, your CRM data, and ensuring that between the two data sets, there's an even powerful trigger to personalize an experience or mitigate frustration or circumvent ⁓ loss or churn because of the combined power of those signals. So I'm going to say first party data, and then the future is

combining it, warehousing it, and the ability to derive signals from that data.

Pax (19:44)
Yeah.

97FL (20:43)
Hey, everyone, it's Emma here. I helped to produce the campaign and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing and AI news. First up, let's talk about AI's rapid evolution in marketing content. Right now we're seeing giants like Unilater really lean into this. They've just launched something called Sketch Pro and it's an internal AI driven design unit built in partnership with IPG studios. Their goal is to create content three times faster. So right now,

They're taking something from concept to consumer testing material in just two hours, which is insane. They're using a bunch of AI platforms, including Adobe Firefly and Google Veo 3 to craft social first stories, moving away from a TV centric model. Their team in Jakarta, for example, boosted visibility on TikTok for brands like Rinso and Sunlight by over 22 % during Ramadan, just by jumping on to trending social content with the help of AI. This isn't just about being efficient. It's about being lightning fast and super relevant.

AI is letting brands react to real-time trends and create highly personalized content for specific channels at an insane pace.

Next, let's dive into some significant shifts happening in consumer behavior. A recent McKinsey study highlights that people are spending more time alone and online and they're all about immediate gratification and convenience. Digital connection and at home activities are really here to stay. Over 90 % of consumers in their survey

shops at an online only retailer last month and grocery delivery is still super popular and trending upward. That bring it to me mindset is solidifying and people have way less patience for anything that's not super fast and reliable in terms of delivery and e-commerce. Another report mentioned that 57 % of shoppers now hit up online marketplaces like Amazon for product delivery. So that's a 10 % jump from last year and 39 % bought something because an influencer recommended it in the past year.

So what does this mean for us? The consumer journey is way more scattered and digitally focused. Our strategies have to prioritize really seamless online experiences, extreme convenience, and getting in on that influencer and creator economy to become really discoverable for new audiences.

Finally, let's check out some innovative marketing campaigns. Burger King in France recently launched a campaign where they offered free whoppers to customers who shared their phone number with a complete stranger.

It was all about encouraging real life social connection in a very unexpected way. On a different note, Peroni just launched a beer sorbet and Stella Artois put out a limited edition white can for Wimbledon. These show how brands are using cool product extensions and event-based activations to create buzz and connect. Innovation isn't just about using new tech. It's about thinking creatively and challenging the status quo. Now back to the episode.

Pax (23:20)
I'm sure you are using full story at full story. I'm interested outside of your use of full story, you know, as the leader, you know, is your team integrating AI into other elements of your marketing? And what have you found to be successful? What have you found to be a little bit more smoke and mirrors? Is there anything that's working right now from your team?

Adam Gunn (23:44)
Yeah. I mean, as, as, as clean as the vision for our platform sounds, you know, I'll be the first to admit, and hopefully it resonates with most marketers. Like, you know, every executive team, every board is asking us, you know, to have AI initiatives and dang it, you know, the teams have heard it, they're responding to it, but I don't think we've seen the ROI or efficiency gains in the thrashing quite yet. So we're, you know, we're very much in the midst of

Pax (24:12)
Okay.

Adam Gunn (24:14)
objective herd ⁓ and we're trying and experimenting. But I can't say necessarily that at every aspect, you know, I'm feeling exponentially more efficient. ⁓ I think the, you know, the chat GPTs and the Geminis I think are the low hanging fruit. I think most of us have adopted those, you know, into our workforce. But, you know, as an executive leader,

You know, it's pretty easy to spot I had today or it was yesterday, you know, a team member send over a strategy brief. And, know, at the bottom were this list of tactics that we could do. And it was just obvious that they'd asked chat GPT and, know, it wasn't wrong. Like it was all the right things, but the human nuance that so far I haven't found AI helping us do is like at the end of the day, we have a certain amount of resources, budget, time and energy.

And that list of 30 things we could do aren't the reality of what we will actually do. And so there's still a lot of time, energy, and investment in taking the cadre of options and distilling it down to a true actionable strategy that fits time, energy, and budget that AI hasn't solved for us.

Pax (25:34)
Yeah.

Yep. I just had lunch with somebody today and we were talking about this very thing of, you know, people are expecting, I want to see a 40 % increase in efficiency and it's just not there. And what's interesting is it, it all works perfectly from a philosophical lens. But when you get boots on ground, it's doesn't quite end up working out like that.

Either the output is lower in quality or it's too basic. know, in some cases it feels like a very hard working intern. or, it's just not, yeah, it's just not quite as efficient as, it requires a lot of human, so much human intervention that the efficiency gets kind of sapped up in that. ⁓ I'm go ahead.

Adam Gunn (26:28)
Yeah.

The current words I like to use for AI, and again, I work remotely, so I spend a lot of time alone in a 20 by 20 office, but I do like having AI as a thought partner. I very much enjoy, sometimes I'll get anxious questions in a meeting or sometimes I'll just want a different point of view.

tapping into those tools as a thought partner, I think is very powerful. But oftentimes, you know, just copying and pasting that and calling it a strategy, I think is a dangerous game. And I think often, like it's amazing how much chat GPT is retaining of past conversations we've had and an understanding of my job and my role and bringing some of that back. But it's still a mirror reflection. It's still a lot of pantering and validating. And so, you know, I think you have to still

you know, be a little subject and funnel that back through either equal human thought partners or, or something. So, you know, it's definitely speeding up some of that front end, I think, which is really, you know, still critical. Like you can still take those narratives back to the board and say, you've been heard. I'm not getting 40 % out of this effort in terms of improvement, but we are seeing incremental gains and the tools will get better. The models will get better. And

Pax (27:36)
Yeah.

Adam Gunn (27:55)
You do have to lean in right now. Like I'm definitely someone who's bullish on the board needs to fill her, the executives need to fill her, but it doesn't mean you have to throw your arms up in abandonment. think there's still a lot to be learned through the journey.

Pax (27:55)
Yeah.

Yep. Yeah, I agree. ⁓ in fact, in another conversation today, I was, ⁓ talking with somebody about the importance of being willing to adopt, even though you're not going to see a 50 % improvement, being willing to adopt, even though it only means a 4 % improvement, because over time that percent will get higher. And what's more important is exercising that muscle that is being willing to adopt.

That's like that ultimately is going to provide the biggest return. But if you sit there and cross your arms and just say like this isn't providing 50 % gains and I'm not going to do anything until it does, that's going to prevent you from eventually getting those 50 % gains when they become more developed and possible.

Adam Gunn (29:00)
Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I've, I've tried to reflect a lot back on my career. Like what moment does this remind me of? And the best anecdote I can have is like when the iPhone came out and it was like, should we have a mobile app or shouldn't we have a mobile app? Like I think banks were the ones that were like, no one's ever going to bank on their phone. Like they were slow to adopt, but like it was inevitable. Like it was just, it was too good and it was, it was too.

future proof to not see that eventually every business would probably need to consider, every consumer business would probably need to consider a mobile app. And I think this is similar. Like you can be reluctant, but it feels inevitable that it's going to transform the way we work and the workflows that we have. And I'd rather be on the front foot. Like it's scary as a creative, I'll use Google vids for example. I don't know if a lot of people know, but Google has a vids tool that will literally

Pax (29:51)
Yeah.

Adam Gunn (29:59)
make videos for your brand off of, off of prompts. And we've got sellers in our business trying to use them. The output is horrendous. Like I do not want any of those seeing the light of day right now, but the, the, future that looks like that is inevitable. So what I like by leaning in is I can help my team see what the future looks like and they can start building tools that scale. Like obviously there's a, there's a brand template.

Pax (30:00)
insane.

Adam Gunn (30:29)
evolution that needs to happen that's behind the technology coming online. And so all these things will work themselves out over time, but it is scary. Like you see that and you're like, I cannot have sellers making videos with this, but the reality is they are going to. So then how do you respond to

Pax (30:47)
Yes, yes. So, ⁓ back to, you know, those things that just will never change. Another that I've, ⁓ thought about is the concept, which is marketing a one-on-one of you have to target the right people, talk to the right people and give them the right message. No matter what happens, whatever technology comes along, that principle will never change. And so understanding

information about this audience and who like who we're talking to how they think is super important. You've talked about ⁓ sometimes analytics can be too reactive instead of proactive. Tell me more like what do you mean by that when like ⁓ what are the signs that ⁓ our audience ⁓ from our audience that would indicate like their analytics our analytics setup is like too reactive as opposed to proactive.

Adam Gunn (31:47)
Yeah, I think there's, if someone were to bring that question, I'd probably ask them for two inputs. You know, if you saw a 20 % drop in conversions, like how many people did it take to bring that insight to bear? And then how much time did it take for that to come to your attention? And you know, the current world of analytics is, it's probably...

more people involved in getting that message surfaced and democratized to where action is actually taken and you lose too much time. you know, when it comes to conversions based on your AOV, like that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars over a given hour weekday. ⁓ so, you know, those things are, are really present to me as the owner of fullstory.com, but also to every full story customer, like our

our job and our responsibility is to get them those insights faster. And that's really what we take super personally and why we're on this AI endeavor. We believe AI is a means to getting those insights faster. Thus, we're going to pursue it on behalf of our customer base.

Pax (33:04)
Yeah. In the industry, marketers will hold up certain metrics. It's kind of like the Holy grail. Probably the undisputed is ultimately conversions, ⁓ revenue generated. But within that, there are many like favorites of traffic and bounce rate and things like that. What kind of data points do you say, like you wish more marketers cared about that is maybe like the unsung

important KPI or metric that we should be thinking about and caring about.

Adam Gunn (33:38)
Yeah. mean, I was, you know, probably not the best thing to admit, but like I wasn't a user of full story before I joined the company two years ago. I owned, you know, I was a core member of the Pluralsight.com web team and you know, we were hyper focused on how much traffic were we getting in? How much of that traffic were we converting to either trial or a sales, you know, ⁓ a sales led conversation?

⁓ but I don't think we were quite intentional enough of, of looking at behavior and sentiment as strong signal, either, you know, creating friction in those funnels or potentially looking at how we could use that behavioral sentiment to improve, ⁓ you know, improve conversions or improve flow, through those funnels. ⁓ funnel conversion is, fascinating. ⁓

the charts in our app, like you think you know, people go from this page to this page, to this page and convert. But when you actually see those cohorts of users and where the flow actually goes, there's so much ⁓ value in just being honest and integral for yourself and realizing that, you know, they're probably skipping your platform page as much energy and time as you've put into that. And they're going straight from home right into your pricing page. And if that's the reality, you've got...

work to do in terms of ensuring that whatever's on your pricing page also does some of the lifting of your platform page. those insights, true funnels and combined with sentiment are incredibly important.

Pax (35:24)
That's interesting true funnels tell me what does that look like visually? For people that haven't seen the platform

Adam Gunn (35:31)
⁓

Yeah, they basically map out, here's their entry point. 30 % of your traffic are going to this next page or taking this next action. 20 % are taking this action. X percentage are exiting. And then being able to watch that graphic grow to whatever conversion point you've set is a view that I love within our platform because you can, again,

you assume you know, our solution engineers use the cow path analogy. I don't know if you've heard that, but ⁓ there was an East Coast college that before they laid any sidewalks, they just planted grass and they wanted to see where people were walking before they invested in the sidewalks. And inevitably you see that human behavior isn't as linear or isn't as... ⁓

You know, routed exactly how you might assume that it's going to be routed. And the same thing applies to web flows and user behavior is it may not be as, as directional or as intended as you might think it is, but once you know what it actually is, then you can powerfully optimize and improve it.

Pax (36:48)
Interesting. I haven't heard of that cow path analogy, but that's fascinating ⁓ One item on that would be that there's a maybe this breaks down a little bit in that the You know there they could measure Whereas the the grass been trodden and that's now where we're gonna put the path but that gives a little bit of a bias towards those that have walked before and and there's some Large percent that are just walking where others have walked

⁓ Ashley Foss was on the show a few weeks ago and she describes, she has a book that she just wrote and released on this. But she talks about like, we shouldn't be using the funnel at all. She thinks of it as like a playground where we say, here's this and here's this and here's this and whatever you're interested in, it's here available for you. ⁓

which I see is similar to but slightly different from the cow path analogy in that the cow path analogy is then saying we're gonna let them find these paths and then we're going to engineer them in. And the playground is still much more free. ⁓ I could see a lot of boards not loving a playground view of this, because the end goal is we need to push them towards conversion and this kind of runs against that.

I'm interested, like, where do you sit and how do you view things knowing what you know?

Adam Gunn (38:16)
It's a, it's, it's a great take. And the reality is it's probably a mix of both. Like as you're talking about the playground, I'm starting to think about how disruptive the AI sites, chat GPT and others are to traditional traffic patterns and traffic flow. And in the world of how chat GPT is learning about your content surfacing, and it is probably more of a playground. It's a directed playground. You're asking it.

question, it's assuming what playground instrument you want to play on and it's going to surface that. But their intent is to give you enough information that it's zero click. You're probably going to stay and ask it another question. so us training, feeding, and coaching the algorithms and the LLMs is a massive undertaking that most marketing teams are now having to probably carve off some of their traditional

SEO teams to really think about and dive into. And yeah, it's, it's, it's a very nonlinear, um, conversation. think social, both paid and organic is probably a little bit more, you know, playground, but I still think when people are, you know, especially in software, when they're going to buy someone, whether it's your buyer, you're buying, you're buying committee or someone in procurement, they're usually going to end up on your website and

It probably needs to feel like a pretty traditional funnel at that point. And then if you want to really blow the metaphor, you know, the future is customer-based agents, ⁓ surfing our website. So, you know, historically we've built all of our experiences for humans, but agents are often going to be now going out and doing business on our behalf. And it's been easy as marketers. We've just assumed all bought traffic is bad for as long as years.

as I've been in the industry, but there's a future coming where you're going to have to be able to differentiate good agents from bad agents, good bots from bad bots, and build web experiences, digital experiences that serve the good traffic. And those experiences that they expect will be different than human experiences, and we'll have to build them accordingly. So our work is getting harder.

Pax (40:31)
Yes.

Yes. 100%. And that is a whole new world. I mean, there's no, that's a webless world in many ways, you know? So it's going to be interesting. Go ahead.

Adam Gunn (40:40)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't expect this. I

didn't expect my blood pressure to go up, yeah, think that just talking through that, I think raised my blood pressure. So we've got work to do.

Pax (40:50)
Hahaha

Yeah,

we do. I, this has been such a great conversation. ⁓ I really appreciated to hear your takes and perspective. And, ⁓ I, I do encourage listeners to go check out full story. ⁓ like my personal belief is as technology develops, the, the thing that needs to be true is marketers need to be connected to their audiences.

and you need to understand more about them, how they think, so that you can deliver the correct message at the correct time to this person. anything that gets you more of that information on who they are, how they behave, and how they think is exactly what we need more of. ⁓ I wanna end with just ⁓ maybe a prediction, maybe a bit of just like where your mindset is. ⁓ What do you believe marketers should be doubling down on?

and what should they be letting go of that we've just clung to.

Adam Gunn (41:53)
Yeah, I think that last back and forth we just had was awesome. You need to have a point of view, a strong point of view. Mine was, you know, is funnel-based, but you also need to be open to other points of view and go learn about them, go explore them. And I think we have two or three big pivots ⁓ coming in the future that the companies and individuals who are able to adapt and assess and

and change their beliefs on the fly will probably be the ones that will incrementally win and differentiate themselves. So being nimble, being willing to adapt and not being closed minded I think is a critical recipe for success.

Pax (42:39)
Awesome, I love that, I love that. Well thank you so much Adam for joining today. ⁓ Where should our audience go to connect with you and what would be the best place to go to learn more about Full Story?

Adam Gunn (42:53)
Yeah. I mean, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I try to be as present as I can, as busy as I am, but love new connections there. And then, yeah, we love web traffic. So go check out fullstory.com and do some rage clicking for us. We'll find you.

Pax (43:04)
if

And if you're, if you're sending, if you're listening to this five years in the future, ⁓ be sure to send your, your agent to full story.com agent.

Adam Gunn (43:16)
Yeah,

or send your agent to me and my agent. Thanks, Pac.

Pax (43:20)
Yeah. Awesome.

Thank you so much for, yeah. Thanks for joining today.