Is AI really changing how people search—or just repackaging the old rules of branding? Why AI is just the new Yellow Pages, why consumers don’t change as fast as the tech headlines suggest, and how building a memorable brand still beats every algorithm.
Because here’s the dirty little secret: AI doesn’t make people change their minds—it just helps them justify the ones they already had.
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👉 Question for you: Is AI search the new marketing revolution—or just the same old Yellow Pages in disguise?
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On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business.
Now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI. And everyone is up in arms because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion.
Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff, a lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge.
The internet doesn't know what information is what, and so the user must decide.
Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're sales channel sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that.
Computer brains are changing; these brains, the ones in human heads, aren't changing much at all this year. And you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did.
Ryan Chute: On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business. Is search engine optimization dead, or is it more important than ever? Let's ask Chris to list everything that's wrong with the internet today, Chris.
Chris Torbay: So here's what's wrong with the internet.
People use the internet when they want the answer to any question. What's the capital of Tanzania? Dar es Salaam.
What’s the highest ranking achieved by legendary Hawaiian sumo champion Konishiki? Ozeki. He was so close to becoming Yokozuna, but alas, he was denied.
How long is an oboe? Yay big.
These are all things I actually know because of my profound, but somewhat haphazard, intelligence. But you could have looked those things up on the internet, and felt as smart as me. And the information is likely to be pretty accurate. Wikipedia is well-moderated, so inaccuracies are quickly rectified.
But ask the internet how good Nickelback is, and you will get a wide variety of answers, based on the wide variety of opinions people have posted. You will get some information from the legions of die-hard fans – and there are millions of them, by the way … that’s how they got to be one of the highest-grossing bands of all time – and you will get a bunch of snark from the haters who go on in great detail about how – and why – they are crap.
The internet DOESN’T KNOW what information is what, and so the USER must decide. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for you), that means people fall back on their own pre-existing opinions and use the internet to justify why they’ve been right all along.
A similar thing happens when choosing a business to patronize. In the Before Times – in the 1900s, back before the turn of the century – we had the Yellow Pages – a big book of ads from people saying, “Pick me.” You could buy a big ad or a small ad, but people still had to pick. Then we started Googling things like “Jewelry store near me,” and we’d get a list of retailers that WE thought were impartial. Companies could actually buy their way to the top of the list, but still, you had to pick one. Even when we see a ton of 5-star reviews – or 1-star reviews – from knuckleheads we’ve never met, it’s still up to US to decide what value we place on those opinions. If you really want the thing you’re looking for, and you’ve already made up your mind, you might look at those 1-star reviews and think, “Yeah, but this guy sounds like a knucklehead, so I can totally ignore his 1-star review, and just buy it! ‘Because I want it!”
So now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI.
And everyone is up in arms, because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion! ChatGPT, or Siri, or Claude will tell people which company is good at what, and the mindless consumers will do what they’re told.
“So, how do I get AI to say it’s me?”, you ask.
AI is still just another Yellow Pages. If you’d paid a guy to flip through the Yellow Pages and read the ads to you, it wouldn’t have made them anything more than a list of businesses you knew nothing about. If you’d paid a guy to read out the top five responses in a Google search, however weighted they may be by paid search, you would still have had to choose from the list of businesses you knew nothing about. So when you ask AI to find you a plumber, it’s going to do what the internet has always done and say, “Well, there’s this guy, and this guy … and this one has low prices, and this one has speedy service, and whatever random facts it manages to scrape from the various websites.
And just like before, if you recognize one of those names and you remember something specific about them, you’ll say, “Oh wait, I know these guys! They seem good. I should pick them.” Like we always have.
You will fall back on your own pre-existing opinion and use ChatGPT’s response to justify that you’ve been right all along. The AI-powered internet is still just the Yellow Pages – in a shinier package – and no one has ever built their brand on the Yellow Pages. You build your brand advertising offline and serving your customers, and however they search, when they find you, they will remember you, feel connected with you, and make the decision they are drawn to make, no matter what the search device tells them.
Ryan Chute: I don't care what ChatGPT says, Nickelback is crap. I can say that I'm Canadian, Mick.
If I had a nickel back every time someone asked me about AI search this year, I'd be a thousandaire. What are your thoughts?
Chris Torbay: I'm excited about AI, but not for the reason you probably think. What I love most about AI is that one, nobody really understands it. Two, whatever it is now, it will be something else in three years. And C, everybody feels they have to change everything. Is this good? Yes. But only if, like me, you zig when everyone else zags.
Throughout history, we've been told everything is changing, so you'd better not be left behind. And so brands dutifully make reckless modifications to their marketing plans because the only thing they know for sure is that they can't keep doing what they've been doing.
And the only ones who disagree with them are consumers. You see, consumers don't change their opinions, their preferences and their behaviors just because a bunch of software engineers tell them that they're going to. In fact, consumers are quite predictable, slow to adapt, and slow to accept new things.
There's a lot of inertia in consumer behavior. Brands can act quickly, but your customer likely doesn't, and that's why Chris can tell you about a focus group they did at Anheuser-Busch, asking what the Budweiser tagline was, and they said, “This bud's for you,” which they hadn't been promoting for about eight years.
So I said this was good, and here's what I mean. Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff. A lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge. So they're going to be recommending a lot of changes.
Your competitors are gonna fall for it. It's a whole new world. AI is here, and if you don't do it the new way, then no one's gonna be able to find you when they search for you on AI. Well, you know what? I've heard that shit before. And although computer brains are changing these brains, the ones in human heads aren't changing much at all this year, and you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did by talking to them over and over again about stuff. They care about, making them laugh, or think, or ponder like a friend, unchanging. If you ask me, the biggest opportunity in marketing that AI presents is the ability to differentiate yourself from your competitors by changing nothing.
Ryan Chute: If AI’s big secret is that people don't really change, then you're gonna love this next part. And that from our sponsors now at 25% more cussing.
Ryan Chute: We're back. Now, let's discuss whether Chris is living under a rock and Mick is just minging about those damn kids today.
I think we all agree that AI is changing where people are searching, but essentially, people are still searching like they've always been since the Yellow Pages. So, how does ChatGPT generate the responses when we ask, “best AC repair in Phoenix?”
Chris Torbay: Perhaps the mistake that we're making is that we are assuming that searching with AI is somehow a monumentally shifted way from how we've been searching before.
And here's what I'm getting at. When we talk about, well, people are searching on AI, and the people who are trying to sell you AI to help with your search are still basing it on something, on an assumption that is not quite true. It's based on the assumption that consumers do not have a preferred brand.
And that, by the way, is exactly how the Yellow Pages came to be, right? I mean, we've talked about the Yellow Pages before and what a powerful advertising medium it was, but it was really only a powerful advertising medium if there was no strong leader in that category. So if nobody in your town was the leading plumber, then you go, well, you go to the Yellow Pages, you just go to plumbers, and you look at all the plumbers.
And when you flip to the restaurant section of the Yellow Pages, there'll be big, big full-page ads for restaurants. But here's what wasn't there, McDonald's. They never bought a big ad in the Yellow Pages. They really didn't. And in fact, try this at home, Google “hamburgers near me” and you'll have to go through like eight or nine pages till you get to McDonald's.
And yet their parking lot is always full. So they have managed to skip Google. They skipped the Yellow Pages and got straight into people's heads to the point where, if there's a group of people that said, “We need to get a quick burger for lunch, where are we gonna go?” Somebody in that room would say, “Eh. Fuck it. We’ll go to McDonald's.”
And so they skipped it. Well, those people will also skip the AI search if they already know and love you and don't necessarily have to do that. So in that sense, I don't think it's changed much at all. We have to wonder, are we assuming that there is no leader in this category?
Ryan Chute: That’s a very, very valid point. And when we look at the data, the data does tell us that yes, a lot of people don't have a chosen provider, but that's probably because there's not a whole lot of companies doing a great job. Branding their companies and putting out a message that matters, which is a huge opportunity for the one or two people who do, big or small.
Mick Torbay: That’s kind of where I'm coming from. If the solution to getting more people to call your business is to find an AI solution, to get them to magically come to you, instead of going to somebody else when they're searching those bland, unbranded keywords. You know, category keywords, then that is just proving the point that there is no leader in that category, and that's a tremendous opportunity for brands. Then take that leadership position.
Chris Torbay: The other thing that's interesting about AI is everyone assumes, and I think it's because it speaks in plain language, right? Whereas your previous Google search would just give you a bunch of entries, whereas this one gives you a lovely paragraph, and it makes it sound like somebody smart has said something. “Well, I found this company over here, and they specialize in such and such, and I found this other company over here that specializes in this other thing.” And it was things like, “Wow, you've really dug and done some research.” And it's interesting, which is that it is still a product of whatever it can find.
And, like back in the seventies, when people still had big ENIACs that were the size of an office floor.
Mick Torbay: He means computers.
Chris Torbay: They invented this term GIGO, “garbage in, garbage out,” and that is still true today, which is, if all AI does is check everybody's website and take the random bullet points that are on everybody's homepage, then if everybody's saying the same things about low prices and quality products and qualified staff who really care about your needs, the AI is just gonna choose to say this thing from this guy's website and choose to say this thing from this other guy's. They haven't vetted them, it hasn't thought it through, they haven't checked and compared it with the reviews, and said, “Well, these guys say they have low prices, but a lot of people disagree.”
It hasn't actually done this thing, but because it presents the answer as if it were your best buddy saying, “Well, these guys downtown have this.” You seem to think it carries some weight, and it's really just grabbing random, random facts off the internet, and they may or may not be true.
Ryan Chute: My pal Tim Brown 🪝 at Hook Agency, recently posted about the most cited websites for the different AI models.
Number one, Reddit. It goes through 20 of these things, and these are just the top 20.
Well, why does this matter? Well, if we're thinking about how I can spend my limited marketing dollars the wisest and still get the volume and momentum that we get, that we want, that the big players are spending the money on, how do we compete against the big players?
Well, the answer is to say something that's relevant enough that you have customers talking to you on Reddit, about you on Reddit. You know, I think our friend down in the Rio Grande Valley who is absolutely eviscerated on Reddit.
Mick Torbay: There are four or five subreddits about how much his ads suck.
Ryan Chute: But then there are the people who support him, and there are the people who are for him and against him, respond to it and say, “No, I think he's great. It's amazing.” Yeah, that's right. And they say by name, and they say very specific things. And all of these things start to show up on Reddit.
Now, for a very tiny digital budget, this man is generating tremendous revenue, tremendous volume, and tremendous lead flow. And it's all because he has a terrific brand to get him in front of the competitors in his marketplace, rather than trying to be on 20 different things deeply and robustly with one marketing coordinator on staff and a respectable budget.
So this is very much about how do we win this game? Well, you can invest all of your dollars into digital saying things that no one cares about, and you're not gonna satisfy Google's EEAT, but the natural language processing that it's looking forward to say, “Yeah, these guys are relevant and they're saying something important.”
What in the world do we need to do? Well, we need to do exactly what you say, the same thing that we've always done. Tell stories, be relevant, look bigger than you actually are by having a huge frequency, not a huge reach. And say something that matters.
Chris Torbay: And give people a preconceived conception of somebody that they know in that space.
Ryan Chute: Know, like, and trust.
Mick Torbay: Our guy in Texas, because he's all over the television, he's all over the radio. Literally, everybody in that community has an opinion either for or against. But the point is, they have an opinion, whereas most air conditioning companies, people are not even aware of their existence. So our guy at least is, is on the radar and therefore, you know, even the people who say, “I hate that guy's commercial.” It's like, great, but name me an air conditioning company. There, fuck you. I win.
Chris Torbay: Where else are you gonna go to?
Mick Torbay: Because I wonder we're on the short list.
Chris Torbay: I also wonder if human nature, regardless of how much nicer, I guess, AI interaction is as opposed to just typing in queries and having to figure it out yourself, based on a list or visiting a few of the things to figure it out. You get this lovely text conversational response back. But I wonder if people, it's interesting you make that comparison to “let's get a hamburger.” If you asked your friends, “Hey, where, where should we go for a hamburger?” Does anyone say, I got a great idea, let's go on the internet and search through and see if we can find something. Or, would you rather have somebody say, “I know this really great place downtown. Let's do what Dave said. Cool, let's try Dave's place.”
Like I would much rather do that. I don't want to go search; I didn't want to have to Google it. I didn't want to have to dig out the Yellow Pages 25 years ago. And I don't necessarily want to write a good prompt for ChatGPT and spend all that time, if somebody can just say, “Hey, I got a brand that I actually, totally like, why don't we try with this place? You guys will love it.” Done.
Ryan Chute: Well, that's often why we went back to the same restaurants all the time.
Chris Torbay: Exactly, because he knew it was a sure thing.
Ryan Chute: We knew what to expect. We understood the consistency of it. The implied agreement was already in place, as you'd expect.
Mick Torbay: Well, and that's sort of what I was getting at at the beginning, is all these discussions have this assumption, which I think is flawed, which is before we buy anything, we always search. And it's like, well, that's only true when there is no preferred brand. If I said to you today, “Can you, can you pick me up some ketchup on the way home?” You would not take out your phone.
Chris Torbay: “Let’s see what all the ketchups are.”
Mick Torbay: “Which ketchup has the best, has the most five-star reviews?” No. There are actually some people who are skipping the search entirely, and that's what we are recommending.
We're recommending you skip the consumer taking the step of the search, which could be Google, in the day it was Yellow Pages, and soon it'll be, “Hey, Siri, tell me the best catch-up.” No, they're not doing it. We want our consumers to skip the search entirely, already have the solution in their head, or be standing next to a person who has a solution in their head and say, “Let's just do this.”
Chris Torbay: I think I've mentioned this one before. When I worked on the Porsche business, one of the things we knew about Porsche was that when people are ready to buy a car like that, normally, when people are ready to buy a car, they have a shortlist, and the average shortlist of all car buyers is sort of three or four. And so when you're ready, it's like, “okay, well I'll look at the Corolla and I'll look at the whatever, whatever, but I've got a shortlist of three or four,” and you maybe go to whatever.
When people are ready to buy a Porsche, their shortlist is on average 1.2 cars. They've spent their whole life saying, “One day I will buy a Porsche 911.”
That's where you want to be. And nobody says, “I'm 55. I've made a certain amount of money in my law firm. Now I'm ready to buy a car that I only drive, you know, two seasons outta the year.” I want “Google sports cars that I only drive in the summer.” You know, they don’t. They have always wanted this brand. They knew that one day they would get to where they could buy it. They're looking forward to when that day comes. They've got a brand in their head. They don't Google it.
Mick Torbay: Well, that's sort of my point is that these people who are trying to sell AI solutions, everything's different now because of AI. What they're doing is they're saying to people, when they're searching you, it's based on this flawed assumption that everyone is gonna be searching, and there is no leader.
Chris Tobay: There's no one who knows what they're looking for.
Mick Torbay: And so we need to stop them and say, “Hang on a second. Everyone is searching at all times, and there's no leader. That's a pretty huge assumption, which is not true.”
Ryan Chute: Well, and so are we optimizing for AI search? You're certain not to get to the top of the list unless you're the biggest. You could force it. For periods of time with gaming the amount of content that you're putting out or getting blips along the way, and having all kinds of AI-generated key wording to AI search.
Sure, but you're putting in a massive amount of effort for a short-term gain, and that is then going to be shifted over to paid search, where you're now going to be paying for not only to show up, but you're also going to pay against your competitors.
Chris Torbay: And you’re doing all this effort, as Mick says, for the people who don't have anything in mind, who are undecided. There are a bunch of people who aren't going to be captured by all that effort.
Ryan Chute: So it quickly spirals out of control. Like what you're saying is that we're dropping $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month, on trying to get the today customer on an AI search to be on all of these different search listings and beat our competitors and pay the person doing it and pay the pay-per-click tax when the cheapest pay-per-clicks that you'll ever get are always and unpaid-per-clicks. No-pay-clicks is the brand.
Chris Torbay: Your actual brand. Either Google your name or they type your name in, the consumer says, because they know you’re a reputable company.
Ryan Chute: That's right. And, that's good advertising, in the sense of they're typing in your name, but even typing in your brandable chunks, typing in little stuff from
Mick Torbay: Typing in the stuff from the ads they heard. The one with the kangaroo? “Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Google will figure out which one is the one with the kangaroo.”
Ryan Chute: Well, and AI will do it far better than anything else when you have this ultra, ultra uniqueness. Billy Ray's hole digging….
Chris Torbay: And, Wally, the walrus, know the Wal Air conditioner, walrus. If you type that in South Carolina, you will get Waldrop. And AI will give you Waldrop Plumbing Heating Air, in fact. So that's how you answer that question. How do I get AI to pick me? You ask AI, “Who's that walrus who fixes air conditioners?”
Ryan Chute: This is where I do enjoy AI search, is that I do type in incredibly vague things that I know about, that I have forgotten the names of specifically, and it's able to pull this stuff up.
Do I want to be trying to chase down AC repair guys that I like or the best AC repair guys in South Carolina or Greenville, or do I want to be the Walrus Air Conditioning Company in Greenville? Boom, you own that! You absolutely own that. Because your competitors can't be the Walrus Company. If they do, they're gonna fail. They can't be the Billy Ray hole-digging company because if they do, they'll fail. And you got that for fractions of the price.
Now, where did you invest the money? In the brand. The difference being that a brand is a compounding effect because you're building real estate in the brain. The real estate that you build digitally, is a sunk cost. They see it, they experience it. You pay for that experience of them experiencing it, and then it disappears from their brain, and you go back to being invisible again. Well, that's not a winning solution. You're just spending money to lose it. Where with branding, you're spending the same money, but you're doing it to build a compounding effect in the chemistry of the brain that's going to have you completely win out over the list.
Chris Torbay: And then no matter where, it was Google last decade, it's AI this decade, whatever it is, a decade after this. It’s going to win at that too.
Ryan Chute: Well, and it's moving to voice search, and people are going to do exactly what I do, which is poorly explain the thing that I kind of remembered because I've not had enough interface with the particular brand yet, but I knew I found something that I liked about it.
And then in two, three years time, as your brand is deepened in five years time, and 10 years time, as your brand is now entrenched in your community, you own it. And that really is what we're trying to figure out for our clients.
I perceive the marketing mix differently. I believe that the marketing mix is three different things, generally speaking. It's not about the channels, it's about what we do with our marketing. One being the brand awareness, two being the sales activation, and three being the lead capture. And when you get that mix right, your lead capture costs are going to start to dramatically drop, you're going to see the cost of this stuff go down because you are doing the things necessary to have the people looking for you, and you only.
And that's the real challenge. But 90% of the effort is in lead capture, the four, maybe five different ways. Five, if you have a showroom. Four different ways that you're going to get a customer? Well, the easiest, fastest, cheapest long-term strategy here is always going to be to have the brand that people know, like, and trust before they need you and come top of mind when the trigger happens.
That's always gonna be the way.
Mick Torbay: Well, and one other little thing that I think is worthy of mentioning is I don't think we give the consumer enough credit for being able to tell the difference between something paid and something not paid.
When you're, when you're searching on Google for something and a particular paid answer comes up, I think people know, well, that's not necessarily the best one. That's the one who spent the most.
Chris Torbay: Scroll down a bit here and see what else.
Mick Torbay: And as soon as people start paying AI to put their name at the top of that list, then you're not really asking your buddy, “Hey, have you heard of any good air conditioning companies?” Actually, what you're doing is you're talking to your friend who gets paid to tell people what kind of air conditioning companies.
And I don't think it's going to take that long for consumers to realize, “Wait a minute, they're not really trying to give me the best thing. They're trying to give me the thing they were paid to do.”
If I ask my friend who works at the Apple Store whether I should get a PC or a Mac, gee, I wonder what he's going to say.
Ryan Chute: It’s no different than asking your buddy, introduce me to a nice girl and he introduces you to a prostitute. That's ultimately what's, well, ultimately that's what it is though. You're, you're saying, “Oh, this is the one you pay for versus the one that you'd marry.” And there's a dramatic difference between the two. Both are fun, but one is much longer-lasting than the other. And at the end of the day,
Mick Torbay: Well, this has gotten awkward.
Chris Torbay: I'm gonna take your word on that one.
Mick Torbay: And he's married now, so it's fine. There's nothing weird about it,
Chris Torbay: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Ryan Chute: So many years ago.
You guys, so yes, is there an effort to be done in training effectively AI, that your brand is the brand of choice through unbranded keywords? Yes, but it's a fool's errand to invest the bulk of your money and to rely solely on that because what you become is the slave of the channel. I promise you that the channel wants you to be their slave, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Bing. All of these organizations are doing everything in their power to keep you on their platform and to contain you as a revenue source. It's an absolute tragic mistake for business owners to be thinking about how do I show up on all these things without asking the more important question of how do I show up for less?
Mick Torbay: How do I skip all of that shit?
Ryan Chute: Exactly. I show up, I'm present where people go looking for me, but because I've done something of impact.
I talked to a friend of mine the other day, Lisa Nichols, a very famous woman, she's buddies with Tony Robbins, and these guys are all transformational coaches, and she said, “You don't get fame without first giving impact.”
And this is true. Now, we have a parasocial relationship that we can create, and you have to earn your celebrity in your town. But you're never going to get that without first having done something that sticks with the potential buyer or the potential buyer's friend who's going to influence you to buy that parasocial relationship.
The long-term, much, much, much bigger winning game is to put a balance of your marketing budget into the brand awareness segment, and then to balance that out appropriately with lead capture in the unbranded world, but do everything you can to transition yourself away from the unbranded world as quickly as you can. Which is probably gonna be somewhere in the realm of three to seven years, depending on your market and your competition, and all of the different factors that you have at play that are affecting your competitive landscape.
Mick Torbay: The only alternative to doing it the easy way, which is what we're talking about, is to do it the hard way, which is to just try and buy your way out of this problem and spend your way to the top of that list.
Chris Torbay: And that is an endless pit of money.
Mick Torbay: And that is a ridiculously expensive, expensive way to do it. And that's the only thing that these channels will recommend you do.
Ryan Chute: And it's not lost on us that you need leads today, right? You need to go hunting. You need to feed your business, the cash it needs to survive. It's also not lost on us that it feels expensive when you can't attribute it. So you're like, “Oh, I didn't show up, so I'm not getting leads because of this.” No, it's not happening that way. It's a balancing act of the two, and you have to transition out of one and into the other. You will absolutely spend more on marketing if you're ambitious and looking to grow, and have an operation and capacity to support your growth, but then it's not expensive.
If you want it to remain expensive for a really long period of time, you keep dumping your money into things that don't give you any compounding effect in the brain.
Mick Torbay: Fight it out with all the other non-leaders.
Ryan Chute: It's way less expensive to own the real estate in the mind than it is to own the real estate in the digital presence. So if we can just get rid of the costs around the digital presence, will we still show up? Yes. But, what if you were able to get a thousand leads, like one of our clients does every single month, on their name, not on AC repair near me? That keeps their trucks busy. They do many, many tens of millions of dollars. This is possible, but it takes effort, and frankly, that's why branding is hard for people. Because they don't understand branding. It's not your truck wraps, it's not your logos, it's not your colors.
Mick Torbay: And Google is not going to recommend that you spend your money doing that. They're gonna recommend you spend your money with Google.
Chris Torbay: Yes.
Ryan Chute: Oh, absolutely. Golly. Like, no one wants to absolutely convince you. Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're the sales channel, sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that. They're not bad people. They're doing a service.
Mick Torbay: But their job is to sell the thing that they have, sell their service.
Ryan Chute: That's right. And they're in a silo. And that silo is perpetuating failure.
Mick Torbay: The billboard guy is going to say, “You should spend your money more on billboards if you actually wanna succeed.” We don't care where you spend your money. We want you to make money. The three of us.
Ryan Chute: This is it. Where you spend to say it more, maybe a shifting or nudging over how we say that. We absolutely care where you spend your money. We just want to spend the least amount of money for the most amount of results of impact. And that's going to mean that we're going to look at the whole landscape, online and offline, instead of just AI search, and that matters a lot.
EEAT. Have an interesting story. Say something that no one else can say. No one else can talk about Wally the Walrus. No one can talk about Billy Ray's hole-digging. No one can talk about Call Dad AC & Heating in the same way that our clients are talking about it. And that makes a massive difference. Not today, but for the tomorrow customer, that's gonna skip all that stuff and go right to where you're looking for. They might do it on AI, they might do it on voice search, but they're still going to be looking for “that” keyword, not the generic unknown keyword, and that's way cheaper, way more powerful, way more opportunity for your growth of your business at a much more reduced cost in the long term.
Most of the people that we deal with work with long sales cycles, high average tickets, and massive amounts of competition. So you have to find ways that you're going to be able to create efficiencies, and this is just one of those things. Not to say that you don't do those things as well, but investing your dollars in a slightly different mix is not going to garner a today result, but it is going to garner a tomorrow result, and then it's going to far outpace your next week's result. And I say that, on a consolidated timeline, three to five years is when you should see the multiplier effect of your brand kicking into play, not just the fractional growth that you would get from it normally.
Ryan Chute: AI isn't a magic bullet, and it isn't the death of SEO either.
It's just the latest version of the Yellow Pages; shinier, faster, but still dependent on what people already know and feel about you.
So here's your job. Build a brand that people remember so that they look for you by name. Unless you're a giant, you need to chase keywords that only you can own. “Best AC repair in Phoenix” is too expensive, but no one can steal your authentic and unique brandable chunk.
Content is king, but generic keyword content is dead if you want to truly get ahead. Until next time, this has been Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.
Till next time. this is Advertising in America.
Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?
Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.
The podcast that turns marketing into magic! Hosted by the brilliant Ryan Chute and the ever-entertaining Michael Torbay & Chris Torbay, this show dives deep into the world of American advertising, revealing the secrets behind the most successful campaigns and exploring the latest trends.
Are you ready to transform your business into a distinctive, emotionally resonant brand? Here's why hiring Ryan Chute, Wizard of Ads® for Services is the game-changer your business needs:
Distinctiveness Beyond Difference: Your brand must be distinctive, not just different, to stand out. We specialize in creating an emotional bond with your prospects to make your brand unforgettable.
Building Real Estate in the Mind: Branding with us helps your customers remember your brand when they need your service again, creating a lasting impression.
Value Proposition Integration: We ensure that your brand communicates a compelling value proposition that resonates with your audience, creating a powerful brand-forward strategy.
Wizard of Ads® for Services start by understanding your marketing challenges.
We specialize in crafting authentic and disruptive brand stories and help build trust and familiarity with your audience. By partnering with Ryan Chute, Wizard of Ads® for Services, you can transform your brand into one people remember and prefer. We understand the power of authentic storytelling and the importance of trust.
Let us elevate your marketing strategy with our authentic storytelling and brand-building experts. We can take your brand to the next level.
Maximize Your Marketing Impact with Strategic Alignment.
Our strategy drives everything we do, dictating the creative direction and channels we use to elevate your brand. Leveraging our national buying power, we ensure you get the best media rates for maximum market leverage. Once your plan is in motion, we refine our strategy to align all channels—from customer service representatives to digital marketing, lead generation, and sales.
Our goal is consistency: we ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page, delivering a unified message that resonates with your audience. Experience the power of strategic alignment and watch your brand thrive.
Transform Your Brand with Our Proven Process.
Once we sign the agreement, we visit on-site to uncover your authentic story, strengths, and limitations. Our goal is to highlight what sets you 600 feet above the competition. We'll help you determine your budgets and plan your mass media strategy, negotiating the best rates on your behalf.
Meanwhile, our creative team crafts a durable, long-lasting campaign designed to move your brand beyond mere name recognition and into the realm of household names. With an approved plan, we dive into implementation, producing high-quality content and aligning your channels to ensure your media is delivered effectively. Watch your brand soar with our comprehensive, strategic approach.
The Power of Strategic Marketing Investments
Are you hungry for growth? We explain why a robust marketing budget is essential for exponential success. Many clients start with an 8-12% marketing budget, eventually reducing it to 3-5% as we optimize their marketing investments.
While it takes time to build momentum, you'll be celebrating significant milestones within two years. By the three to five-year mark, you'll see dramatic returns on investment, with substantial gains in net profit and revenue. Discover how strategic branding leads to compound growth and lasting value. Join us on this journey to transform your business.
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