Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

All right. Hello, and thank you for joining us for this special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest is Jimi Gibson. Jimi is the VP of Brand Communications for Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, where he helps businesses clarify their message, amplify their presence, and drive meaningful growth through smart strategies and storytelling.

With over 25 years in digital marketing, Jimi has worked with everyone from solopreneurs to national franchises, helping them stand out in a crowded market and truly connect with their audiences. A TEDx alum and speaker, he’s also a magician, not just for the card tricks, but also for his ability to understand audiences and attention, timing, detail and what makes people lean in and take action. Jimi, welcome to the podcast.

Jimi Gibson

Wow, thank you, Bennie. I don’t know if I can live up to that intro, but it is an honor to be on the show today.

Bennie 

No, it is. It’s our pleasure to have you here. So I’m really fond of saying that marketing is a dynamic and generative and provocative combination of art, science and magic. And I’ve said that to rooms full of business leaders and innovators. I’ve had it in conversations with artists and creators. I’ve had the conversation with scientists and engineers.

But my friend, I’ve never said this and had a conversation with an actual magician.

Jimi 

Wow. Well, it was meant to be.

Bennie 

Do tell. It was meant to be. So let’s start off with that, with the magic. What first drew you into magic?

Jimi 

Wow. Well, Bennie, I was going through some boxes a few years ago and I pulled out this card and it on the front, was Merlin’s mail order magic club. And I was like, wow, I think I remember that. And so I’ll flip over the card and I did the math with the date on the card and I was four years old. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of crazy to get interested in something that young and for it to still stick with you.

Bennie 

Okay. Wow.

Jimi

And so that just followed me throughout, you know, elementary school and middle school. And when I was in high school, there was a gentleman that I met who worked at an ad agency. And he was part of a club that I was a member of, sort of an underground club of magicians. And he said that there was an international brand that was looking for a performer to help with some of their promotional shows when I’d be interested. And I was like, wow, absolutely.

Everybody else is working retail and cutting grass and I get to do what I love. And so that relationship lasted another 16 years and so through that, that led to other things where I produced shows for theme parks. I was able to do a corporate event at the MGM in Las Vegas. I had a tour in Savannah, Georgia that was on the Food Network that featured Buddy Valestro from the Cake Boss. And yeah, just all sorts of opportunities.

Bennie 

Okay, right. Wow. Right.

Jimi 

Opened up and then along the way, I also moved into a career in marketing and they sort of fed each other. So it’s been an interesting ride for sure.

Bennie

I love to hear about that kind of relationship. So when I think of marketing, there is that bit of wonder and showmanship and storytelling that I naturally find an affinity to magic in. But I’m a layman. I have not had the ability to be on stage and do a trick. What are some of the similarities that you find between the practice and performance of magic and the practice and presentation of marketing?

Jimi 

Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to be part of a training group of other magicians that studied under a gentleman who was a Broadway director. He was in the original cast of Annie. directed 22 Broadway shows. And so I was able to go to Montreal and it was a week-long event and we sort of dug in. You were to bring two and a half minutes and little to, you know, he didn’t tip.

Bennie 

Wow.

Jimi

What we were going to do with that two and half minutes, but each of one of us each night were critiqued on that two and a half minutes. And that critique went on for two and a half hours. And so through that process of like a forensic analysis of every turn of the head, every word that you said, every move of the hand, it became obvious to me that that’s really what we go through in a marketing sense. And I’ll talk about the three phases of a magic trick and how that relates to marketing. But, you know, when you think about a magic trick, and sorry to spoil it for the audience out there, but there is a trick. And so when you’re performing a magic trick, you’re trying to conceal what’s going on, so that the audience has that suspension of disbelief, and they go along with it. And they go, wow, that’s amazing. How did that happen? And so at its core, we want to wow the audience. That’s the purpose. I think we’ve lost a lot of that in our communication and marketing. I think we rush the relationship part of it. We don’t activate curiosity and we don’t time that climax of the illusion or that call to action to the point where

it’s timed perfectly with the emotions that are generated from the previous steps that happen. And so if I just describe in a basic sense, a card trick. So a magician might walk out on stage, hold up a deck of cards and say, hey, you know, I’ve got a deck of cards. Anybody in the audience have a deck of cards at home? And so most of the audience is going to raise the hand. And then I see you, Bennie, sitting in the front row. And I say, that’s a nice gentleman there. What’s your name? And you would respond, Benny. And I go, great.

Bennie, where are from? You would respond, Washington DC. My gosh, Washington DC. love Washington DC. I remember when I was a kid, I went to the Smithsonian, so forth and so on. So, you know, we’re making that connection. And then I go, Bennie, do you know the difference in different cards, right? We’ve got the club’s heart, spades, diamonds. We have ace through king. I want you to think about one of those cards. And so the audience starts to go, what? Usually the magician will have somebody pick a card, but wow, thinking of card, that’s incredible. And so I would go through maybe some other things that would pique your interest. And then eventually I need to get to the point where I reveal what that card is. And so if we just break down that sequence, the first one is connection, right? And I need to establish rapport. I can’t come out and go, I’m the world’s greatest magician and I’ve been doing this for 20 years. And everybody’s gonna go, okay, that’s great. We’ll be the judge of how good you are, right?

And so I’m making that connection. And because I look at that audience, not as 250 people, but because I look at it as individuals, been at year one, the person sitting behind beside you as another, then all of a sudden, everybody feels like they’re part of that. And if I turn my head and talk to somebody else, they’re going to go, well, Jimi’s not such a weird dude. I’ll probably will have a conversation with him. This is pretty good. That’s actually releasing oxytocin in the brain.

Bennie 

Right, right, right.

Jimi 

And so that’s a neurotransmitter that has that kind of feel good. This is going well. I like this sort of communication that’s going on, right? And so now I’ve been given permission to move to the next phase, which is activating curiosity. And so that’s where, you know, I’ve established rapport, you know, people are familiar with a deck of cards, but then I’m going to get into this curiosity phase. I want you to think about a card.

And so when the audience is mine, they’re going, I wonder what he’s going to do on what’s going to happen. And so that’s a release of dopamine. And, you know, we hear a lot about addiction to dopamine, right? Social media is not really the addiction to social media. It’s the expectation of a reward. And so when you post on social media, you’re hoping somebody likes it, they share it, they comment on it. And that can go on for a while, but after a while, it’ll wear you out. And so if I drag out this, think of a card, I want you to, you know, stand on one foot or you know, whatever the case may be, the audience is going to get bored. So I have to know my room, right? I have to read the crowd. And then I move into the next sequence, which is delivering that reward, which is the climax of the trick. And so let’s just say the card was the three of spades. If I turn over the three of spades, then you and the rest of the audience is going to go, Whoa, how did that happen?

Bennie

Mm-hmm. I know. You heard?

Jimi 

And so the whole thing is complete. And that’s a release of serotonin. And that’s another neurotransmitter that gives us a flood of, wow, it all makes sense. know, everything is right with the world. And so if we look at that same relationship from a marketing conversation, we can’t rush the connection. We can’t skip the curiosity and we can’t ask for the close or the call to action or the conversion too soon.

Bennie

Hmm. Right.

Jimi 

Or it disrupts the natural brain chemistry and something just feels weird about it. We were talking before the show about how we weren’t connected on LinkedIn, right? And so on LinkedIn, you do a connection request. Interesting that it’s called a connection request. Typically, you know, for the listeners out there, they’ve probably experienced this multiple times a day. People ask for a connection request, you sort of check out their profile, you go, okay, looks legit. You hit okay.

And then what happens? They immediately hit you with the clothes, a sales pitch. And what does that do? It turns you off. You have this sort of tightening where you go, Ooh, that’s weird. Why are they doing that? I haven’t given you permission to take that next step. So that was probably a little longer explanation than maybe you were asking for, but I wanted to set the tone as to how my brain thinks and what filter I bring that through sort of the magic filter.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

My friend, that was poetically beautiful. That was a wonderful journey to go on and really speaks to that. You can as marketers, you can hear that journey in the conversation, in the kind of trick and the setup in the building relationship. And then the trust paradigm that’s established. You’re so true on the LinkedIn space in there. You let yourself you let your door open or your guard down to let someone in. You think, they’re just connection requests. That’s what they’ve asked me for. They didn’t ask me to be sold to.

They didn’t ask me for a hard seller space in there. They asked for a connection. I’m willing to give that, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But there’s something about accelerating that path that really breaks that relationship. What was interesting is that wasn’t necessarily our digital path before. That’s kind of learned behavior. So I’d love to know, you’ve been, by your own admission, been doing digital marketing for the last 20, 25 years.

Talk a little bit about looking back in this hindsight being 2020. Talk a bit about that transformation that you’ve seen. 25 years ago, our permission arcs weren’t the same. What are you seeing today for businesses and marketing leaders? How much has that changed in terms of our digital relationships?

Jimi 

Yeah, I would say, of course, folks who have had a similar time span in the business world remember what it was like before that. We have digital natives who don’t know what that was like. And so I remember the point where most of the conversations that we had where you’re on the telephone or sitting around a conference table in person and as you walked into a business, there was somebody that greeted you. There was the escorting down to the conference room. There was shaking hands and catching up on things. And I wouldn’t say that’s completely different than what we experience across the screen. But I think there is a sense of urgency. Now there is a sense of let’s get down to business. We don’t have the opportunity to look around somebody’s office and see pictures on the wall, you know, what are the kids doing? What type of furniture? Did you get a new pair of shoes? And so the opportunity for connection is not as prevalent, right? And so we have to be intentional about looking for those opportunities or asking other questions. And so just in a relationship standpoint with a business associate, with a team member, with a vendor, you have to be intentional about that.

And so I guess I brought that back from, you know, the good old days, as they say, and trying to remember what that felt like when it felt cool to have that oxytocin that we talked about before. And I think that is lost in a lot of our marketing messages or how we approach a prospect or a client. It should be exactly the same. They should feel like you know them. You talked about the trust factor. And then not being impatient and letting that

Bennie

Right, right.

Jimi 

Relationship develop. So that’s kind of my read on it.

Bennie

It’s interesting you get a chance to be a strategic advisor and partner to a lot of your clients. Do you ever wish they listened to that message more?

Jimi 

Wow, that’s a very astute question. And it sounds like you’ve been there as well. I think we all want to have people hear us and appreciate the expertise that we bring to the table. But what’s often lost is we should be listening twice as much as we’re talking. Somebody told me an acronym called WAIT, W-A-I-T. And the acronym stands for Why Am I Talking? And you think about that and you go, do I just want to get my pitch across? Do I just want to present this wonderful thing that we’ve been working on in the agency? Or do I actually want to understand what the problem is and where their pain is? And I guess it goes back, I started out as a graphic designer and I would always ask the owner,

Bennie 

Okay. Mmm. Right, right.

Jimi 

Like, why are we doing this? What’s the problem they’re trying to solve? And I guess that just bugged them enough. They were like, okay, Jimmy, you just go talk to the client and ask them. And so having that inquisitive nature and having that true desire to understand the transformation from where they are and where they want to be, I think is also a skill that we’ve sort of tried to rush.

Bennie 

I think you hit on something that I think is really important for our audience to hear and for us to understand. We think about the modern development of strategy and marketing practice. So often people try to lock it into one space, right? Where all your partners don’t have all the information. So you end up with this asymmetry of information and the problem. So it’s a great example. You didn’t share the problem with a graphic designer. So, but why do you have a designer?

You’re not leaning into the skill superpowers and dare we say magic that that resource would have. If you don’t share the problem with your IT team, how will they be able to help you solve through the problem? If you don’t share it with your full staff and strategy, you miss these moments of power and impact. And like you said, you’re kind of growing going, wait a minute, before I do my work, why are we doing this? Which is one of the best strategic questions ever.

Jimi 

Yeah, and you’re exactly right. I think there is something about information and strategy that we try to protect other people from. But the more you open your arms and give that information, you would be surprised at, like you said, the magic that can come out of those discussions. And everybody should be on the same script. Again, going back to a magic framework. You know, when I was, we had a cast of 22 people in a production that I was involved with. And if we all didn’t understand our place and what the outcome was for the audience, it would be a mess. It would be chaos. And so everybody has their role to play, but everybody has to know what is the intent and where are we going with this? Yeah.

Bennie

Right, right, right. Which is so important. We think about teams in a sports context of that metaphor. The teams ultimately know they’re trying to win a championship. But that metaphor falls apart with other teams because what is that final end goal? Is it obvious to everyone in there and how do we gather around? So I’m going to ask a bit to talk about teams. How do you take the sharing of information, the sharing of success, and turn that into a way to encourage creativity among your team and clients.

Jimi 

Yeah, so think there’s two sides to any business problem, right? There’s a left brain side where it’s the money and the audience and growing the business. And that has to do with KPIs. And that has to do with all of the number crunching that makes a business work, right? And so, you know, we could be an artist and be selling our work, but in the marketing space, we’re solving problems.

You know, I had the opportunity to not only be the creative director of an agency, but run the agency. And so I got to put on the tie and go meet with a client and then come back and drive the process that we went through. And so the creative part of it, you have to respect the, the numbers side of it, but now we have to move over to the emotional side of it. And people make decisions emotionally and we have to understand what is the feeling or what is…

How do they need to experience our brand? How do they need to feel about our company? How do they need to feel about our product or service? And it ends up being like peeling the onion. Every question needs to be, but why, but why, but why to get to that root of what needs to happen. And those ideas can come from anybody. Depending on who’s on the team and what their experience is with that particular client or that particular industry.

Bennie

Right.

Jimi 

And you should welcome all of those things. And so again, I think we have to solve that problem once we get to the core of what we’re trying to do. And again, I’ll bring this back. There are basically 13 effects and magic, whether it be a vanish or production or transformation or whatever. If you’re not clear on what the magic is, you’re going to get a bunch of different creative ideas and you’re not going to know how to sort through all of those creative ideas. So the first thing that the team needs to do is again,

We need to understand what is at the core of what we’re trying to impact. And now we can open up the floor for a creative discussion about all the different possibilities that may make this achieve the goals that the company is looking for.

Bennie 

It’s really interesting those dimensions of magic that I never really thought about, but are absolutely, think they’re great parallels and continue to our conversation and marketing brand strategy. One of the things I want to lean into is you talked a bit about emotion and one of the emotions that we sense a lot, we see a lot in our conversations. I see it in the community of marketers and business leaders. It’s not often talked about and I’ve been wanting to lean into this emotion for our conversation.

And that’s the big F word, fear. Fear has become commonplace in our conversation about marketing strategy and tomorrow. How do you help your team members and your clients kind of navigate that emotion?

Jimi

Mmm. So just, I want to make sure fear of expressing emotions, fear of where we’re going in the future with marketing.

Bennie

I think it’s probably a combination of everything, but I normally hear fear of what’s happening now, where we’re going, and how do we navigate the future of marketing.

Jimi 

Yeah. So, and I’m going to lean into AI because that’s probably where a lot of the fear comes from. there’s also a fear from the, if I truly express myself or express the personality of my brand, is it going to trigger somebody? Is it going to offend somebody? Is it going to, you know, all of those things? And so

Bennie

Yes, yes. Right. Right. Right.

Jimi 

When we look at AI and how these large language models operate, again, going back to magic, it’s a really bad mind reader. It has a huge expanse of knowledge, but it’s trying to predict the next thing that it wants to feed back to you based on what you fed into it, right? It cannot express emotion. It is not empathetic. It does not know the scars and the bruises and the struggles that you and your team have been through or, you know, whatever the…

The backstory, the founder story of the client that you’re working with. And so what we’re seeing is a lot of generic trash, if I can be so blunt, that’s coming back related to content strategies. It’s very safe. It’s very happy. And this is a huge opportunity for brands who will actually be authentic, speak into things that may be uncomfortable. But what these large language models are doing now, it’s not so much put in a keyword and you get a search result back on a search results page. It is looking at brand mentions, it is looking at contextual clues about what the brand is about, how they feel. It is looking for subject matter experts within your industry or within your organization or your clients organization, that if you’re willing to go there, you’re going to reap the rewards.

And I would say, playing it safe is certainly a comfortable place to be. But if you’re trying to play it safe, you’re basically not saying anything to anybody. And marketing is as much about repelling the people that you don’t want as a customer as it is about attracting the customers that you do want. And when you can carve out that personality or that magnetization and you create this community around your brand, they’ll protect it, your customers will protect it and they will defend you on social media. And the it and let’s be honest, if there is controversy and I’m not talking about disrespectful controversy, but if there is discussion about what’s the right way or the wrong way that actually helps the algorithm generate that and feed that to more people so that… 

People can weigh in on the conversation. And people now have a choice whether they agree or disagree with your stance or your point of view. And I would say that’s an opportunity that I don’t think we’ve seen in a long time. And again, I’m not talking about being disrespectful. I’m not talking about being alienating to any type of person. I’m just talking about, yeah, you should have a point of view. I mean…

If I like strawberry or ice cream and you like vanilla ice cream, we can have a healthy discussion about why I’m passionate about strawberry ice cream. You know, that’s not going to offend anybody. But if I say I like all kinds of ice cream, then where do you go from there? You’re sort of at a dead end.

Bennie 

Yeah, so true. I mean, what you really speak to is we continue to sports analogy is this notion of playing to win versus playing not to lose. Right. And we’ve all had those brand experiences and been a part of teams and seen teams that you can tell they’re playing to win. They’re laddering it up. Everyone’s firing. Is it perfect? No, but this experience is perfection. Right. You’re in it. But then we’ve been a part of brands where no good idea goes left on the shelf.

Right? And it’s, it’s consistent to what we have done or what the world expects us or thinks we should do. And you’re right. It falls flat, which is the antithesis of winning in marketing.

Jimi 

Absolutely.

Bennie 

So, you know, I will ask this question because that’s really a culture question. And so when you’re thinking about your own team and your own agency, how do you inspire that culture? That culture to win versus the culture not to lose.

Jimi 

Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with what, what power are you willing to give to your team to be themselves and to be involved in a passionate pursuit? And so, you know, a lot of folks have core values and they have a mission statement and they stick it on the wall. We spent a lot of time on our core values and they spell growth, gratitude, respect, ownership.

Work ethic, think bigger, and honesty. And we spend a lot of time repeating those and living those in. So every Thursday, we have what we call thank a thriver Thursday, and about 175 people in the company, every person in the company participates in thanking somebody in the company, we have a little graphic that we send on our internal chat. You compliment them on something that they’ve done. Now imagine 175 people thanking 174 people within the agency. That’s infectious. We have what we call a high five club that you have to pick one of those core values. And then if you want to compliment somebody and they get a gift card, you just identify one of those five core values, which core value did they demonstrate? We just got off our company meeting this morning.

We have what we call the honor chair and we honor usually about four people within the company for what they’ve done and then other people in the company speak publicly in front of 175 people about why they nominated this person for the honor chair. I know, people feel like if they speak up, nobody’s going to smack their hand, they’re going to go, I respect that.

You know, in the agency world, attrition is at about 30 to 50%, which is insane. voluntary attrition that we’ve been able to maintain is about 5%. We have people that leave, you know, for a variety of reasons. Salary typically is the one. Well, when they get to that destination, what do they realize? They realize it’s a different company culture. That higher salary is going to demand nights and weekends that pull away from their family.

So we have a number of boomerang thrivers that come back. We discourage over time. We want you to be half happy, healthy outside of work. If you’re coming to, you know, if you’re spending a bunch of time, you’re straining your relationships, you’re not going to be a very good or creative employee. We encourage people to volunteer in their community. have a dollar matching program. If you have something you care about, we’ll match that. we track giving hours as a KPI at the

Bennie 

Okay. Right?

Jimi

Top level and we report on that every month and we have goals. So I mean, it’s just a bunch of stuff. It’s hard. Like, it takes up time to stop and thank somebody and think about who you interacted with. But it’s not up to the leadership, it’s up to everybody in the organization to step up and be part of the culture that they want. Right? You’re only as strong as your weakest link. And if somebody is struggling. Help him, ask him what’s going on.

Bennie

Right, right. I think it’s really powerful. We talked about the arc of what digital marketing was 20 years ago. This is really a reflection on what was agency culture 20 years ago. We weren’t having these conversations 20 years ago. Jimmy, you and I were working on the weekends and at night. And if a weekend had a weekend, we were working there too.

Jimi 

Yeah. Ha ha ha. And you felt guilty if you weren’t.

Bennie 

Right. But I would argue we see better, more dynamic, human, authentic, effective work today with that balance and bringing in the rest of our whole selves to the marketing work that we do. I think, you know, creates a better recipe for connecting with your audience and your brand.

Jimi 

Yeah, absolutely. And you’re just you’re respecting the people who are bringing their best for you and your clients.

Bennie

So true. So when you think about what advice would you give to the younger Jimmy before you stepped on the stage of marketing? What advice would you give? When you knew you going to be a marketer, you knew you going to be an agency, you knew you going to be a creative leader, what advice would you give to that Jimmy today?

Jimi 

I would say be more bold with being yourself, bringing all of your creative skills. I mean, we’ve spent what 30 minutes or so now talking about the fact that I was a magician, I could sit there and hide that and never bring that up in a conversation. But when I go to the corporate office, they want to see a magic trick, right? And so whatever it is, there’s some sort of personal abracadabra that you have.

That can differentiate you, can bring that. It’s the way I look at a marketing problem. So I would just say, don’t be shy. Speak up sooner. Ask for mentorship and be inquisitive with people who are ahead of you and genuinely follow what they say and ask for more help. And I don’t think I did that enough.

And not that I would be any further along or a different person, maybe I would, but I think I would have missed out on a lot of rich, deep, meaningful conversations that I would look back on and go, wow, I’m so glad I did that.

Bennie

Right. Mmm. Yeah, there’s these of these unexpected connections and conversations that come in. When you think about your client list, you talked a bit about boomerang staff. Have you ever had the fortune of having boomerang clients?

Jimi

We have and you know, the world of digital marketing is quite an interesting place. Everyone is an expert. And we have a lot of conversations early on in our prospecting with clients that they’ve been burned. And we feel bad and we feel sorry. And so we almost take that on as a responsibility to show them that there’s a better way, right? And so sometimes in a relationship, things can change within a client, organization, somebody can new can come in and they have their people that they work with. There may be some missed understanding or expectations that happen in a relationship. And we understand that. But often they come back and they go, you know what, that stuff you were telling us, we went on and tried it with another agency, or we tried to bring it in house, and it didn’t really work out the way we thought it was. Could we revisit that thing that we talked about before?

Bennie

Right, right.

Jimi 

And those are great. You know, you just have to go, okay, yes, let’s, let’s dig in and let’s make this happen.

Bennie

It’s kind of digging in. Can we come back and do that again?

Jimi 

Yeah, can we hit that reset button?

Bennie 

It’s important that you establish a space even for the clients and for your staff and team members that it’s a dynamic safe space to want to come back. We’re often counseled not to go back into territories and spaces but having that track record is really powerful.

Jimi

Yeah, I think we drive down a road that we call relationships and results. And that can be part of the team of what we expect of them and also what our clients expect of us. And there’s a ditch on either side. And if the relationship is all relationships and no results, it’s not going to be a good business relationship. If we venture over into the ditch, that’s all results and no relationship. If you don’t like working with the person, that’s not a good place either.

And so you’re never driving down the middle of that road. You’re always sort of veering off to one side or the other. Right. And so you just have to check yourself and go, which side am I getting off track on? And so that’s a good visual metaphor that we like to talk about a lot.

Bennie 

Right. Right, right, right. So when you think about that metaphor, how does AI play into this picture? When you’re bringing in that kind of firm foundation of the relationship, it gives you the ability to open up to have these explorations of AI. But what are the candid conversations that you’re having now?

Jimi

Yeah, I think the worry is what is it going to do to all the money that I’ve invested in the past, right? And so we’ve heard that SEO is going to get flipped on his head what’s happening to paid media. We’ve talked earlier about some of the challenges with the easy button of chat GPT generating generic content, right? And so we may have a client that comes in and we’re doing a website design and

Jimi 

We say, we’ve got in-house writers and designers. Would you like help with that? no, we have that covered. Well, air quotes, we have that covered. We know what that means. They’re going to go back and use Mid Journey and ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever the case may be. And when it comes back, we’re like, we have to have some tough conversations and we have to go, this is not representing your brand the way that you want it to. When we have folks that invested quite a bit in SEO and they go, you know, my search volume is down, my traffic is down and I go, okay, well, there has been research recently that’s been put out. I think SEMrush has just come out with one that LLM results convert at 4.4 times the conversion of a standard SERP result. And so it’s all relative. It’s a brave new world. We’re trying to navigate this. We can’t predict the future.

But what we see is if folks have participated in white hat SEO, they are probably showing up more often than not in LLM searches. Backlink profiles are different. I think the world of PR is coming back. If you can have relationships with media, whether you’re local, regional, or national, establish those relationships because now there’s more contextual reference to where that backlink appears.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Jimi 

And so yeah, think we’re just looking at all of these and telling them that we’re on this journey with them and we have their best interests at heart and we’re going to help them through this and whatever happens in the next weeks, months and years to come, we’re going to be on top of it.

Bennie 

Yeah, I think what you described, moving from the technical details onto that connected relationship is really important. As I think about the senior marketing leaders we talked to, they’re looking for partners who are going to have that conversation and ride with them. When I think about the advice I have to other mid and smaller agencies, this is how you want to communicate with your clients in order to move through this space together.

So as you think about the work you have today, what gets you excited? What creative work, what really gets you excited today?

Jimi 

Wow. Well, I’m kind of a geek. You know, I jumped on chat GPT at the beginning. My wife was like, you’ve got a new girlfriend now. And so she would always tease me. And then she started to come to me with questions and say, do you think it could do this and do that? And so I was away at a conference last week and she says, I see that chat GPT five just came out. Do we have that yet? And I’m like, how the tides turn. And so I’m very fascinated with

Bennie 

Hahaha. Yeah, now the tide’s returned.

Jimi 

Image creation. I am very fascinated with avatars. I created an avatar of myself. I cloned my voice. It’s not there yet, but it’s great to be up on that. I think the exciting thing for me at this point is a lot of the behind the scenes, know, again, going back to magic and what happens backstage to make the magic happen is this agentic world that we’re living in and how we can have AI do some of these repetitive tasks and do functions for us and allow us now to move out of that left brain and more cognitive load kind of things to open up our mind to creative problem solving and being more creative and solutions oriented and letting AI do some of the things that it does best, analyzing data, you all that type of stuff.

Bennie 

So head to head, who wins, AI or magic?

Jimi

Ooh, AI or magic? Well, it has to be magic. And I’m trying to figure out how can I incorporate AI into a magic trick. And you know, if you think about it, AI is kind of like magic, right? How in the world can it do that? So I think Einstein said, advances in technology that are so new cannot be, cannot be separated from true magic. And so the more we know about it, we sort of lose and the magic fades. But when they initially come out, just like the telephone and the TV, you’re like, how does that work? That’s magic. So I’m excited about it.

Bennie 

I can’t think of a better way to close out our conversation. know, truly marketing is still you validated for me, my friend. It is a combination that’s dynamic and generative of art, science, and indeed after this conversation, a richer sense of magic. Thank you for being a part of our humble podcast here and thank you all for listening to this episode of AMAs Marketing / And.

To learn more about the subjects here, please visit us at AMA.org. Please check out Jimi’s work, Thrive Agency. And thank you for being the best part of marketing.