How A Successful Marketing Agency Is Transforming Its Business With AI
In 2017, Eric Huberman, founder and CEO of marketing agency Hawk Media , served on the advisory board of XPRIZE , a prestigious multi-million dollar competition that rewards breakthrough technologies. There, Marcus Shingles, the company's CEO, asks him a provocative question: "What will destroy your business?" Schindel envisions the rise of the freelancing economy that will replace traditional professional service providers such as Hawk.
Instead, Eric answered "IA".
The recent emergence of ChatGPT and other sophisticated bots makes this response highly sensitive and predictable. However, some time ago, the idea that artificial intelligence could replace marketing agencies seemed far-fetched. But Eric put a lot of thought into it, and before even writing the sales copy, he realized that AI could automate a lot of things marketers do, especially if it had the right data to work with.
“Good, excellent,” replied Shindel. "Then why don't you build it?"
Eric will have to remember that conversation at the end of 2021 when I attended the 2021 Giants Fellowship Week birthday party with Whisper entrepreneur Norm Brodsky and a group of economists. This is one of the key questions we ask the gathered entrepreneurs: "How can we achieve significant growth?" Eric spent a week answering this question for himself and always found one answer: software.
Now Eric is a smart, energetic and dedicated entrepreneur, so this idea came to his mind not for the first time. In fact, he has attempted to launch a software solution for a marketing agency three times over the last few years and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on development. But in the meantime, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have advanced rapidly, and more importantly, Hawk Media collects anonymous data about its customers' marketing campaigns (with their consent, of course). In fact, in 2021, he owns nearly 10 years of data from 4,000 companies. You see, Eric knows what many executives are starting to realize: his most valuable asset is his company data.
Back to the week of communication, Eric realized that it was time to pull the trigger. Right at that meeting, he sent a message to his colleague, announcing an opening for an AI developer vacancy.
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In the end, he found something much better. Coincidentally, Canadian company Morpheo sent out a chilling email announcing its newest product: an agency dashboard for managing multiple marketing channels. Eric realized that this was the ideal interface for his own software project, but it was missing key elements: first, historical data to measure the performance of the machine learning algorithms, and second, a real-time data stream, which the algorithms could use. . To identify deficiencies that need to be corrected. “This is something we used to do by hand,” he said recently. “The question is, how can I automate this?”
As usual, Eric acted fast. In year . Every. This may seem like a drop in the ocean for an agency whose typical engagement brings in around $7,000, but there are several key reasons why this revenue stream is quickly outpacing the agency's traditional offerings. Firstly, SaaS products are based on the cloud, which makes it very convenient to serve millions of customers simultaneously. Second, the total market available for Hawke's artificial intelligence is much larger than the agency market. Hawk Media prides itself on offering affordable marketing for small businesses, but at $99 per month, the barrier to entry is even lower. Third, while more agency clients mean higher payroll costs, SaaS computing is more attractive. Added the cost of a new customer paying a penny for additional cloud computing and storage costs. So, the more customers you have, the higher your profit. And unlike staffing increases, these costs go up and down.
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For Eric, this launch is just the beginning. Hawke's AI has proven to be highly accurate in its ability to predict marketing and advertising performance across multiple channels, but it also knows it can do many things, such as: b. Provide users with specific suggestions on how to optimize their marketing spend and, if necessary, automate these optimizations.
Does your business use the large amounts of data it generates from sources such as sales, purchases, and ad performance? Does it correlate with external data like weather or other command signals to improve accuracy? If not, you can leave money on the table. And if you take advantage of this information internally, how can you turn things around with lightning-fast products or services? Let me know in the comments!
Louis Schiff leads the Giants Fellowship program, a week-long guided strategic planning process that engages owners of the world's fastest growing companies. He is also Chair of Moonshots & Moneymakers: The Oxford Innovation Conference for American Entrepreneurs.
Interested in learning more about how Eric Huberman and other entrepreneurs turned their businesses from profitable to successful businesses? Sign up for the free monthly Birth of the Giants video tutorial series.
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