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Who we sat down with
LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now?
Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of Primer, joins Sophie to break down the complete state of B2B paid advertising, what’s broken, what’s working, and where the real opportunities are hiding in 2025.
Discussed in this episode
- Why LinkedIn & Google search are hitting a ceiling (and what to do instead
- How to get 80% match rates on Meta and 70% on Reddit for B2B audiences
- The only moat competitors can’t copy: your targeting
- Why you need to feed CRM conversion data back to ad platforms
- Holdout groups, attribution, and what actually proves paid ROI
- The truth about ads in LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok)
- B2B influencer marketing: the most undervalued tactic right now
- Founder lessons from 6 years and 3 pivots building Primer
Episode highlights
0:00 – The paid advertising crisis no one’s talking about
2:40 – AI’s real impact on ad costs
4:06 – Google Search & AI Overviews: what still works
5:04 – LinkedIn CPMs: $20 to $800 in 18 months
6:39 – Why B2B brands need to be on Meta, Reddit & Instagram
7:01 – What Primer does (80% match rates explained)
9:29 – The device fragmentation problem & attribution
11:16 – Holdout groups: the statistically proven approach
13:30 – Which channel to start with (and minimum spend)
22:18 – Paid ad creative: feed the algorithm with variants
25:14 – B2B influencer marketing & thought leadership ads
30:59 – Why you MUST push CRM data back into ad platforms
33:31 – Ads in ChatGPT & LLMs: what’s coming
35:53 – Founder lessons, mental health & iteration
Key takeaways
1. AI didn’t create new channels, it just made existing ones more expensive
AI flooded search, email, and social with more content, creating a supply/demand imbalance that’s driving up CPMs across the board. LinkedIn went from $20 to $800 CPM in 18 months. The channels are the same, they’re just getting pricier and more crowded.
2. Your targeting is the only moat competitors can’t copy
They can reverse-engineer your creative, your messaging, your channels. But they can’t see your targeting. Building a precise, high-match-rate audience strategy like 80% on Meta and 70% on Reddit is your most defensible paid advantage.
3. Go where your competitors aren’t, Reddit, Meta, and Instagram are wide open for B2B
Most B2B brands are still stuck on LinkedIn and Google. But your buyers are humans scrolling Instagram at night. Brands that crack Meta and Reddit now are getting cheaper inventory and less competition before everyone else catches on.
4. If you’re not pushing CRM data back into ad platforms, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing
Ad algorithms optimize for whatever signal you feed them. If you only give them form fills, they’ll chase form fills including junk leads. Closing the loop with actual pipeline and revenue data is what gets the algorithm working for you, not against you.
5. Failure is a feature, not a bug, iteration is the only path
Primer went through multiple pivots, near-death moments, and nine months in the dark rebuilding. Keith’s core belief: failure is a side effect of iteration, and you can’t reach the best outcome without it. The same logic applies to paid ads, test, fail fast, feed the data back in, and keep going.
Follow Keith Putnam-Delaney
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasrajamani
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/kcpdelaney
- Primer’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sayprimer
- Primer’s website: https://www.sayprimer.com
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
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GTM 195 Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:10
Sophie Buonassisi: CPMs over the last 18 months have gone from like $20 on average to as high as like 800. We’ve seen with some of our customers, which is insane.
00:10 – 00:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Keith Putnam Delaney, co-founder and CEO of primer.
00:14 – 00:37
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I really wanted Dev Tool, basically built on an agent platform to make producing integrations way faster. Nobody creates an account on Reddit or Meta with a work email. You get like a 2% 10% match rate. We get incredibly high, like 80% on meta, 50% on Google, like 70% on Reddit, manage rates for our customers. And then that kind of unlocks a lot of interesting possibilities.
00:37 – 00:41
Sophie Buonassisi: There’s a lot of talk about ads in Llms. What is your perspective on all this?
00:41 – 00:50
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Buzz perplexities had their ad program in beta. Obviously OpenAI just launched theirs. From my perspective, I’m excited for it.
00:50 – 01:12
Sophie Buonassisi: What other kind of tactical tips would you give somebody if they were thinking about running? Or they are running paid advertising?
01:12 – 01:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Keith, welcome to GTM now.
01:14 – 01:16
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Hey, Sophie. Thanks for having me.
01:16 – 01:42
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. We’re going to cover everything paid, and there’s a lot to cover. But let’s start off with the high level structural changes, because we always say with AI, there’s a lot changing in terms of the investment lens where value accrues with product being easier to build, that value shifts over distribution. We’re seeing the same kind of structural changes happen to specific areas.
01:42 – 01:44
Sophie Buonassisi: What’s happening with paid?
01:44 – 02:12
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think the the really interesting thing about paid is in the wake of all these incredible changes in AI, is that there’s actually a limited number of channels to capture people’s attention. Right? AI has not produced a new social network. It hasn’t produced something that people are sort of scrolling through for content. What AI has instead done is it’s sort of glutted the existing channels with more content.
02:12 – 02:40
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So you have essentially a supply and demand problem you have and of demand and limited supply, and that’s causing a crazy increase in costs on a lot of digital advertising channels. And yeah, I think it’s one of the unsung stories of the AI or revolution we’re going through.
02:40 – 02:45
Sophie Buonassisi: And with these rising costs, how should people be thinking about their acquisition motions?
02:45 – 03:10
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. Well, what’s really interesting, you know, if he again think about AI and go to market more broadly, it’s also created a glut on outbound. And everybody is talking about the decrease in effectiveness on outbound these days. So it’s sort of like all right what do you turn to? I think a lot of people are looking at community and kind of event field of field marketing and events again, which is cool.
03:10 – 03:39
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then on paid, I think a lot of people are left kind of scratching their heads a bit, which is too bad because they’re definitely are opportunities. You know, Reddit is seeing a surge in B2B demand lately. We are seeing more and more brands interested in trying to get Metta to work for them. Some very brave B2B brands are exploring TikTok, so there’s definitely an opportunity there.
03:39 – 03:47
Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s just that LinkedIn and search have diminishing returns at the moment. It seems like for most of the data that we look at.
03:47 – 04:06
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, you, you nail on the head where a lot of people are scratching their heads and you named a few channels there. Can we actually go through each of the channels and break down? What has changed now with AI and what people should be thinking about with each channel? Like what’s effective, what’s not? Yeah. Where should people be spending their dollars?
04:06 – 04:31
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. So with AI, let’s let’s talk search because it’s always kind of like the bread and butter default channel that marketers go to because it’s high intent. Right? Somebody searching for something, they want that thing. The AI overview is sort of killing search. Slowly but surely, especially unbranded search. AI answers are popping up the majority of time in something like Google and more and more Bing too.
04:31 – 04:55
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So what are people doing? What’s still working? They’re investing the money in competitor keywords, right? So they’re bidding on anybody and everybody. That’s a brand name that might be related to them that’s working. It’s still actually proven to be quite effective. It may continue to work for a while, but it also will suffer from diminishing returns as everybody else starts doing it.
04:55 – 05:04
Sophie Buonassisi: I have to say, yeah, I can’t tell you. Every time I search for a brand, I’m scrolling down six different ads before I actually get to the organic brand.
05:04 – 05:30
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And it’s really interesting. Google’s like, no, we’re not going to do like when people are searching for brands, we’re not going to do AI answers because they need to still make money, right? To fund all those CPU costs. So that’s that’s search kind of in a nutshell on LinkedIn. Wow. I mean, LinkedIn is just like CPMs over the last 18 months have gone from like $20 on average to as high as, like 800.
05:30 – 05:59
Keith Putnam-Delaney: We’ve seen with some of our customers, which is insane. So a lot of people are looking for efficiencies there. They’re still really cool kind of ad formats that LinkedIn’s playing with, thought leadership probably being the one that’s getting the most attention right now. Their CTV placements are actually still pretty effective from a the neat thing about CTV is you can’t skip it, which is kind of fun.
05:59 – 06:39
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So those are those are the kind of the two default channels, I would say for B2B marketers. I think one of the things that a lot of folks don’t realize is that there is the opportunity and possibility of unlocking more traditionally B2C channels. I think Clay just rolled out their ads product. I think it’s a really interesting sort of signal that that they see opportunity in helping users kind of stitch together, helping their customers stitch together, identity between kind of like the LinkedIn level and that, you know, B2C Instagram, you know, me at night sort of doom scrolling.
06:39 – 06:41
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.
06:41 – 06:42
Sophie Buonassisi: All humans at the end of the day.
06:42 – 06:43
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally, totally.
06:43 – 06:51
Sophie Buonassisi: In human behavior. Yeah. May look different B2B to be B2C, but truly it’s just humans. Yeah.
06:51 – 06:51
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.
06:51 – 07:01
Sophie Buonassisi: No, I’m asking all these questions about channels specific to pay because you are yourself an expert in the area. For anyone unfamiliar with primer. Can you give a little bit of context to what you’re building?
07:01 – 07:23
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Sure. So my background wasn’t always impede. I used to be more of a kind of a brand marketer, and then I got really intrigued by data and targeting because at the end of the day, marketing doesn’t really work if you can’t get it in front of the right audience. And what we’ve built, essentially a primer is a targeting layer.
07:23 – 07:47
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So one of the main problems with kind of trying to target people in meta or Google or TikTok or Reddit is they don’t have those B2B sort of filters built in natively. Right? So most folks try to upload a list of work emails, right? Right. And because nobody creates an account on Reddit or meta with a work email, you get like a 2%, 10% match rate.
07:47 – 08:10
Keith Putnam-Delaney: We can change that. And we do. We get incredibly high, like 80% on meta, 50% on Google, like 70% on Reddit, match rates for our customers. And then that kind of unlocks a lot of interesting possibilities, a lot of not only cheaper inventory, but still really effective channels. And then we’re doing some cool things on the measurement front.
08:10 – 08:22
Keith Putnam-Delaney: But yeah, I think what we’re really excited about is nobody really owns the B2B paid acquisition space right now, and we see an opportunity to build something powerful there.
08:22 – 08:34
Sophie Buonassisi: When definitely not across DDC channels like you mentioned, and being able to actually bring the identity of the B2B person over to those channels, that’s a huge gap, a huge gap right now.
08:34 – 08:54
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. But people are like I said, Clay is moving into the space. We’re in the space. Yeah, I think people see that the economics of these sort of two default channels are really working, and they’re looking for new opportunities. And where the money goes is where the startups will go.
08:54 – 09:19
Sophie Buonassisi: And what does that actually do for any kind of measurement? Because I think that’s a huge constraint for a lot of people that are, you know, behind the concept of, okay, we’re humans, we spend time on all these different platforms with scrolling different various things at night. Yeah, but it’s so hard to measure. I know it’s so hard to measure, and especially because, you know, we might scroll something on Instagram tonight, but a lot of the time a demo, for example, might be booked on desktop in the daytime.
09:19 – 09:29
Sophie Buonassisi: So you’ve kind of got the channel fragmentation and expansion, whichever is more suitable there. And they’ve also got it sounds like the device fragmentation too.
09:29 – 09:57
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. In the device fragmentation is sort of not something I think marketers give enough credit to. You know, even on LinkedIn, the majority of your engagement on LinkedIn is on mobile these days, not on desktop. So LinkedIn is the easiest to attribute because it’s still you. Still people go on desktop, they’re at work, they scroll through LinkedIn, they click on the ad, they go all the way through and they sign up, which is great ideal.
09:57 – 10:29
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I wish everybody did that, but they don’t. So the the challenge and there is no easy answer. If somebody had nailed attribution I mean attribution is where so many startups have gone to die. So attribution is tricky. But I do think like it’s just a process of triangulation ultimately. My friend Pranav over at Paranaque is doing some cool things on the incremental and media mix modeling side of things.
10:29 – 10:53
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think that’s where a lot of the future leads for the sophisticated paid teams and for earlier stage marketers. You really have to kind of not just look at first touch, last touch. You really have to sort of embrace causality like you have to do holdout groups. You have to even something simple like, hey, we turned up the dial on meta.
10:53 – 11:12
Keith Putnam-Delaney: We saw a ton of leads come in in May. We turned it off in June. We saw, you know, a significant drop. That’s that there’s a strong correlation. There is, you know, let’s. All right. Meta works for us. Let’s keep investing. It doesn’t tell you how much to invest, but at least it gives you signal.
11:12 – 11:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Directional data is holdout groups the best way for people to do that?
11:16 – 11:43
Keith Putnam-Delaney: 100%. Yeah. Hold out groups are the statistically proven way to do it, right? You basically have a control population, doesn’t see this ad campaign and expose population that does. You compare the conversion rates, all other marketing touchpoints being equal between the two groups. And you see if there’s a statistical lift. And like, honestly, it’s sort of a going back to the good old days of like Mad Men advertising.
11:43 – 12:05
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, that’s what they that’s what they do. You know it. Zoom is super famous for their they never did any digital advertising right. Only out of home and kind of sponsorships. And they would just compare markets. Yeah. Right. And they would look in Google Analytics and just compare Nashville versus Louisville, you know. Yeah.
12:05 – 12:18
Sophie Buonassisi: And a lot of companies are doing that now. And for out of home just as it’s grown right. That is the best way. And it’s funny we’ve just come over complicated things with attribution when in reality it’s more the directional side, like you said.
12:18 – 12:26
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. Yeah. And it’s just it’s hard to build a model. Everybody wants a model that’s perfect. Yeah, and it just doesn’t exist.
12:26 – 12:44
Sophie Buonassisi: Yes. Yeah, well, you mentioned something that’s super important. Statistical significance. Even if you’re doing holdout groups, what kind of size of company does this make sense to actually scale towards? To have that kind of end that you are hitting statistical significance? Yeah. Who is this for? If I’m kind of listening to this.
12:44 – 13:08
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, totally. I mean, for the marketer who’s trying to, you know, run a campaign to 500 companies or people, it’s not going to be for you, but you can do it with relatively small sample sizes these days, like even a, you know, a 5000 person audience. Given enough time, you can get to stat sig. Yeah, that’s.
13:08 – 13:30
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, pretty doable for a lot of companies. Totally. And what about channel? Let’s say you said the starting place is 5000 people. What about a channel starting place. If you’re, you know, advising any kind of companies and marketers building, is there a channel that they should be starting with, or is that perhaps new to each company?
13:30 – 14:00
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I still think the easiest place to test is LinkedIn. You know, just because they’ve got the filters built into their products. Right? You can define your ideal customers right there and try to go after them. So it’s definitely the easiest place to test. One of the things that I’m I’m really hoping that we’ll, we’ll get into as a, as a company in the next year or so is the barrier to entry to testing.
14:00 – 14:28
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Advertising is just very high, right. Because the, the cost of experimentation is really high. Yeah, that’s one of the things I think about a lot is if I was a kind of solo founder or seed stage startup, how could I? How could I be comfortable making this investment and expecting that it won’t just be, you know, it won’t just be lighting $20,000 on fire, which to me might be a lot of money at that at that stage for sure.
14:28 – 14:33
Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s something that I think we we’re going to have some cool features around at some point.
14:33 – 14:53
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh very cool. We’ll have to revisit this when it comes out. Super exciting. But you’re right, it is a hard barrier, kind of higher barrier to entry. And totally maybe just as we talked about at the beginning, certain areas become a little bit more commoditized, if you will. That is one area that kind of retains that barrier to entry is paid.
14:53 – 15:09
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. So when we think about at the macro level, know where those areas and gaps and opportunities and you call that a few different channels including community including page like where does page sit in terms of kind of where people are going. Are you seeing an uptick or are you seeing people pull spend.
15:09 – 15:10
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Out, know.
15:10 – 15:10
Sophie Buonassisi: What’s happening?
15:10 – 15:36
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think we’re seeing people double down on paid, just in part because outbound is I mean, paid is the is the top channel for for most companies. It takes a lot of for and I should say for most marketing teams and kind of go to market teams, you know products obviously you have I mean there’s there’s product growth loops that are really powerful.
15:36 – 16:08
Keith Putnam-Delaney: But I think, you know, paid is basically outside of product growth loops. The the biggest area of investment and is outbound really decreases in effectiveness. People are turning money into pouring more money into paid because they can still make the ROI pencil, even though it is getting more expensive. Yeah. And what I think as a result, though, of that increase in cost, is they’re turning to the channels where it’s cheaper to advertise and where they can still get that ROI.
16:09 – 16:10
Sophie Buonassisi: Which are the Reddit’s. Like you.
16:10 – 16:32
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Said, the Reddit’s the meta, you know, the Instagram. So the places where people like were there and it’s sort of kind of an obvious thing, but it’s like people that’s where people are spending their time. You should be where they are to begin with. Even if, even if LinkedIn wasn’t so expensive, you should probably still be on Instagram because that’s where your audience hangs out.
16:32 – 16:33
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, definitely.
16:33 – 16:45
Sophie Buonassisi: No, it makes sense. Are you seeing a certain kind of split between channels that people diversify across, or is that quite variable from company? Just as you know, marketers are thinking about their channel diversification.
16:45 – 17:13
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I think it’s somewhat persona dependent. Yeah. So Reddit right isn’t for everyone. You know, we’ve seen match rates on Reddit as high as 70%, 80% for IT and engineers and then 4% for legal or procurement. Right. Because it’s a smaller community and not everybody’s on their, I think, the same. Like it’s actually really interesting to think about the channels where people aren’t on LinkedIn.
17:13 – 17:13
Keith Putnam-Delaney: You know.
17:14 – 17:14
Sophie Buonassisi: 100.
17:14 – 17:46
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Percent like doctors, not on LinkedIn. Educate people in education, not on LinkedIn. So those are some of the things that I think are actually kind of quite interesting is it really varies by persona, but the majority, for better or for worse. And I think it’s for worse. The place where we see people continuing to dial up investment is on search, and I just think it’s kind of foolish, like I really do.
17:46 – 18:08
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I don’t think I they, they’re like, oh, well, we’re paying $8,000 for it, you know, for a good for an opportunity, you know, and it’s like we can still afford that. But it’s like, but is that the right question to be asking yourself? Like, is there not something much better, cheaper, higher volume way to get that. Yeah yeah, yeah.
18:08 – 18:13
Sophie Buonassisi: Why are people spending more and doubling down than if it’s only getting more expensive?
18:13 – 18:32
Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s a great question. Fear. I think I’m trying something new. The cost of falling on your face, you know. Yeah. You know, like, again, that lighting money on fire. It’s hard to know. Paid typically takes a fair amount of experimentation to get right.
18:32 – 18:57
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I’ll just. I’ll just say where I sort of teased it earlier, but I just say, like, what I think is hugely missing in in paid is benchmark data, right? It’s like understand like no. Why like it boggles my mind that there isn’t a company out there that doesn’t aggregate and anonymize segment by persona and then say, okay, here’s what’s working.
18:57 – 19:20
Keith Putnam-Delaney: If you’re going after cybersecurity companies, here’s what you know, here’s what’s working. If you’re going after HR and sort of helping like provide that data to help steer. Now, does it lead to like a reversion to the mean? Yes. But like and will the best marketers always kind of still take a first principles approach. But I think it de-risk a lot of the the investment.
19:20 – 19:29
Keith Putnam-Delaney: If you can learn from your peers in a way that’s a that’s not compromising, I guess is the right word. Yeah.
19:29 – 19:47
Sophie Buonassisi: You know, be hugely beneficial. And there’s benchmarks for so many things. So what’s the barrier to creating paid benchmarks? I immediately what pops in my head is the fragmentation we’ve been talking about. And people not actually having the data around what is effective because of the B2B involvement.
19:47 – 20:07
Keith Putnam-Delaney: If we keep growing, we’ll have the now we’re we’re starting to produce the data. Yeah. Yeah. We’re we’re working on kind of our first set of those. We’re just kicking off some fun data science around that. We’ve finally kind of hit the scale around certain personas where we can we can produce that, and we want to build that into the product.
20:07 – 20:23
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And that is what I think helps that maybe the marketer who’s spending $1 million a month on Google actually decide to put some of that money into meta, maybe that founder who’s trying out marketing for the first time to like, you know, press the on button, I guess.
20:23 – 20:42
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah, definitely, I love it. Well, we’re excited to see that. And then for companies that you’re working with as you’re growing and scaling what we talked about generally, what size of company or stage of company makes sense to do paid advertising? What stage of company does it make sense for them to look at primer?
20:42 – 21:04
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Typically we currently right. I think it’s going to change. But currently we serve companies with that are already investing about $10,000 a month on average in ad spend. It’s sort of that’s sort of the litmus test we found for like, all right, we’ve got a motion. It’s working. How do we and it’s enough where we can make it more efficient, basically.
21:05 – 21:16
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think at that point what we found is anybody spending under that is going to turn it off, turn it back on, turn it off, turn it back on. And as a software business, we don’t like that.
21:16 – 21:20
Sophie Buonassisi: So it’s certainly not ideal. Yeah.
21:20 – 21:25
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So that’s kind of what. Yeah. That’s a short answer to your question or maybe a long answer.
21:25 – 21:27
Sophie Buonassisi: People that have always on paid systems that scale.
21:28 – 21:33
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Exactly. Cool. Yeah. Typically around 150 to 100 employees, as well as kind of what we find.
21:33 – 21:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that’s a really helpful benchmark. And Keith, you know, a lot of people think about paid as just direct pipeline generation. But there’s so many other outcomes that come from anything that gives you data from the customer. Yeah. How do you think about the actual utility of like, how should people be thinking about their programs and what quantitative and qualitative information that they’re gathering?
21:55 – 22:17
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I think one of the coolest things about paid is that if you think about it, right, it’s it’s the thing that’s furthest up your funnel, right? Impressions are the thing that’s furthest up your funnel. So if you’re if you feel confident you’re reaching your ideal customers, you can get a lot of eyeballs on a lot of messages in a really short time frame.
22:18 – 22:44
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So it’s incredibly powerful, not just obviously like message testing, not just to drive those, you know, form submits and leads, but message testing that can help inform your strategy more generally, like what your website should should say. You can really iterate with messaging at a much faster pace than you can anywhere else, and that is one of the huge benefits that obviously AI unlocks as well.
22:44 – 23:03
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it sounds like the the actual learning loop itself from it. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. And what other kind of tactical tips would you give somebody if they were thinking about running? Or they are running paid advertising and they’re trying to kind of get more juice from the squeeze, like, what are the kind of the tried and true tips that you have?
23:03 – 23:09
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Oh, tips.
23:09 – 23:13
Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s a great question. Like, I’m trying to think, God, I could go in so many different directions.
23:13 – 23:17
Sophie Buonassisi: We can go in all of them. So. Yeah.
23:17 – 23:42
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, okay, I’ll talk about some like, some things that I believe to be true. More like philosophically you should. The hardest thing for a competitor to copy is you’re targeting. They can copy everything else. They can figure out what channels you’re on. They can figure out your creative. They can figure out your messaging. All of that is is is easy for them to to look up and imitate.
23:42 – 24:01
Keith Putnam-Delaney: You can’t figure out your targeting. So that can be a unique competitive advantage. Brandon Cammy, the former head of growth at Rippling Athena. I used to talk about that all the time. The second thing is go where your competitors aren’t. I think.
24:01 – 24:01
Sophie Buonassisi: It’s.
24:01 – 24:26
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Always channel wise. I always think that’s that’s really helpful is, you know, or go where the market generally is. It sort of take like that first principles approach. I think it’s like fun when you know out of home I feel like is having a resurgence. Yeah. Because like it was like I think I mean, these these channels or these tactics are cyclical, right.
24:26 – 24:50
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Everybody rushes in to do field marketing. That’s going to decrease in effectiveness. So what’s the thing they’re not doing right now. The other the other tip I have is kind of more philosophically I guess it’ll be my third point is I think these days buying credibility is a huge it has to be a huge piece of your marketing strategy.
24:50 – 25:14
Keith Putnam-Delaney: What I mean by that is you look at what’s happened in B2C marketing. Influencer is and it’s already happening in B2B. But I really do think that that we’re only at the beginning of what that really looks like. And one of the fastest ways you can grow is buying that credibility from people who already have the audience, as opposed to trying to create it yourself.
25:14 – 25:28
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I think also because of some trends in B2C, people don’t seem to really want to hear from brands very much these days. They want to hear from trusted people. Yeah, that they feel connection to.
25:28 – 25:41
Sophie Buonassisi: What influence does that last point? And those are all fantastic points. What influence does that last point have on companies approaches to more programmatic platform page spend? Like you’re talking about meta. We’re talking about LinkedIn.
25:41 – 25:42
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, totally.
25:42 – 25:51
Sophie Buonassisi: When we talk about the creator space. But you’re right. I think it’s like the early days of to be yeah. What does that actually do to somebody sitting in a seat and be like, where do I allocate my money?
25:51 – 26:13
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Okay, so there’s vehicles for accelerating that with paid like those those tools exist for example on meta. This has happened for a long time where if you get an influencer can share their basically give you access to their brand, and then you can promote their content, you can basically boost their their content.
26:13 – 26:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Which you can do.
26:14 – 26:40
Keith Putnam-Delaney: On like dollars and you can do that only. And then LinkedIn came out with that, right? 6 to 12 months ago. And I don’t I honestly don’t don’t see many brands doing that yet. And that promoted thought leadership. That’s not from someone within your own company. That’s from someone outside your company. I think that that is probably that’s that’s a hugely undervalued tactic.
26:40 – 26:41
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.
26:41 – 26:56
Sophie Buonassisi: I like it, I like it. That’s interesting about meta too, because I know a lot of marketers are working that on the LinkedIn side or wanting to do more of that on the LinkedIn side, but haven’t, you know, doubled down enough on LinkedIn itself if that’s where they want to start, but certainly haven’t cross the chasm? Namita.
26:56 – 27:06
Keith Putnam-Delaney: No, and I don’t think like I don’t think many BB marketers are doing it on meta at all. I do think that’s just a big opportunity though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:06 – 27:18
Sophie Buonassisi: So one thing you mentioned, Keith, was the actual targeting is something that your competitors can’t copy. So if we talk about defense ability overall and paid, what happens to the creative side.
27:18 – 27:24
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Man. Well I think a lot of creative.
27:24 – 27:51
Keith Putnam-Delaney: LinkedIn is just so bad. But at this like they don’t have nearly any of the tools that that meta meta is probably the best Google’s second best LinkedIn and read out of the worst on Reddit though I’ll actually give like. Quick aside, the key for Reddit is just making your making your ad content appear native, which is very which is actually easy to do if you’re thoughtful about it.
27:51 – 28:11
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think the the where where ad content on Reddit fails is when it just it’s like you’re in the middle of a subreddit and it’s just like that, you know, people just glaze over it. But if it looks like it’s actually a thoughtful post, people will engage with it. Shout out to Jason Larson at Confluent for kind of that playbook.
28:11 – 28:37
Keith Putnam-Delaney: In general, though, I think what’s happening with creative is you’re on like on meta and Google is the the dynamic optimization is huge. So you just basically have to feed the algorithm enough variance and enough mix of different formats and messages. And it will it will end up picking the winner. And it’s getting better and better at that.
28:37 – 28:40
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, LinkedIn’s got a long way to go though.
28:40 – 28:47
Sophie Buonassisi: So would that be almost that kind of moat in a way is your variant?
28:47 – 29:14
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. I mean, your your ability to iterate and produce variants, particularly video is really, really important that that is a moat or it’s something that it’s a it’s a muscle. I would say that is important to develop. And there’s lots of cool tools out there to help with this. Like Opus Pro. You know, something I use a lot?
29:14 – 29:36
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Riverside. And yeah, there’s tons, there’s tons cap cut, all of it. And that’s only going to get better and better and better with AI. Yeah, and easier and easier and easier the. The key is that that that can be a very big competitive advantage and then. Yeah. And then targeting. Yeah.
29:36 – 29:52
Sophie Buonassisi: How do you feel about AI videos. You know you work with so many different companies that are iterating on all their different video variations. What’s happening there. Have any like really done into pure AI variations?
29:52 – 30:17
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I haven’t seen much of it yet. Okay. Yeah, I really haven’t. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like it has to happen at some point and I see a lot more like kind of AI edited, like, you know, AI b roll mixed in. Yeah. But I haven’t really seen a ton of, like, purely AI output content.
30:18 – 30:18
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.
30:18 – 30:34
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m curious what that does for paid both on the video and the image side, just as we see a flood and maybe a flood of different variants that algorithms can run and test, if that will take away, maybe the targeting does remain that final mode.
30:34 – 30:58
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Could be, it could be. And that being said, I mean, I do think the the algorithms are also trying to take away aspects of targeting, but it is still something you have some power over in addition to the messaging. The last thing I’ll say is like, if you’re not pushing conversion data back into these platforms, you’re really in trouble to get success.
30:58 – 30:59
Sophie Buonassisi: Tell us more about that.
30:59 – 31:21
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, all right. So if the if ultimately if all these ad platforms are basically saying trust the algorithm, trust the algorithm, trust the algorithm, what is the algorithm going to optimize for. It’s going to optimize for whatever signal you feed it. Right. So it’s going to say all right you want form submits. Great. I don’t care how good those form submits are though.
31:21 – 31:42
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Right. Because I’m just the algorithm I want to I want to serve your eyes as much as possible. So you have to feed it basically CRM conversion data back into the ad platform in order to say, hey, no, no, no, no, no, you have to optimize for this, this thing that’s actually valuable to me, not the junk. And the Andromeda algorithm is actually getting.
31:42 – 32:05
Keith Putnam-Delaney: The meta algorithm is getting better and better and better at that. At a crazy clip. For as much as meta seems to be losing in some spaces, it’s still really fucking good at. Yeah, at there, you know, and I think a lot of people, a lot of B2B marketers really dip their toe into meta test. It doesn’t work.
32:05 – 32:09
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Then they come back. But like if you haven’t tested it in a while, it’s worth it. I try.
32:09 – 32:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And that’s one thing I want to double down on because you mentioned earlier, it’s really hard to get it right initially. It takes time. So for companies, marketers, founders that are trying to scale to new channels, like what should they expect? What kind of like time horizon does it take to actually get that right and to click?
32:27 – 32:30
Sophie Buonassisi: And how much money usually does it take?
32:30 – 32:35
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I actually don’t know if I have a great answer to that question.
32:35 – 32:37
Sophie Buonassisi: Can also be super variant.
32:37 – 33:18
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, that’s what I mean. It can really, really it can be really, you know, kind of again, like target market dependent. I do think that there’s like probably a floor of investment that you have to make. And then probably more than anything, it’s just coming in with good test design, you know, proper AB tests, knowing what metric you’re trying to optimize for and then giving yourself actually not not you giving yourself, but you getting maybe enough rope to not hang yourself to to basically prove that you to run enough experiments.
33:18 – 33:19
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.
33:20 – 33:31
Sophie Buonassisi: Super helpful advice. What about I have to ask you, you’re remiss if I didn’t. There’s a lot of talk about ads in LMS. What is your perspective on all this?
33:31 – 34:05
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Does TBD right? I mean, perplexities had their their kind of ad program in beta. Obviously OpenAI just launched theirs. It’s I don’t know from my perspective, I’m excited for it. But that’s because I, this is what I do. I mean, if you think about how much money Google has made off of this for so long, I mean, it’s going to it’s going to be really interesting to watch it unfold.
34:05 – 34:14
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I’m really interested in in how like actually what it’s going to look like. I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet.
34:14 – 34:21
Sophie Buonassisi: So when do you think ads will be live in chat to you had to give a guess.
34:21 – 34:27
Keith Putnam-Delaney: We should get Tommy Finke in here from OpenAI.
34:27 – 34:28
Sophie Buonassisi: It’s a call a friend question.
34:28 – 34:41
Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s right. Text them right now. I don’t know, I would guess. I mean, every so much over there seems up in the air at the moment, but in the next six months seems reasonable. Yeah.
34:42 – 34:42
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s very soon.
34:43 – 34:48
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. So soon they got to make some money if they want to oppo, you know, monetize those free users.
34:48 – 34:52
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. And I mean I said ChatGPT but it goes for every LM.
34:52 – 35:03
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. What one platform I haven’t mentioned is X, which is just excuse my language dog shit from an advertising kind of infrastructure standpoint.
35:03 – 35:05
Sophie Buonassisi: We need that asterisk donate on it.
35:05 – 35:18
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So. Yeah. But yeah but like like, you know, ads and grok and all of that I think yeah, I think that’s a natural extension if they can figure that out. Yeah I know they brought on a new CEO to help with the monetization. So we’ll see.
35:18 – 35:27
Sophie Buonassisi: It will be very interesting to see. Well, we’ll revisit that once we’ve got ads and llms and access potentially running more paid opportunities.
35:27 – 35:27
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Definitely.
35:27 – 35:53
Sophie Buonassisi: Well, great. We’ve talked a lot about paid advertising itself. But you know, what we haven’t yet covered is yourself as a founder. Love to hear. You know, now you’re over six years into building and you’ve got incredible operating experience also. Yeah. If you look back in time would have been some of, you know, the biggest lessons that you wish somebody had told you earlier in your founder journey that you would then pass along to.
35:53 – 35:53
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I.
35:53 – 35:54
Sophie Buonassisi: Think, someone.
35:54 – 36:16
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Else, I think everybody did tell me that’s the problem. I just didn’t listen. No. I mean, I joke that this is the most expensive MBA anybody’s ever paid for. Yeah. Thank you. To my investors, the GTA fund. Pleasure. Yeah. I mean, it’s been.
36:16 – 36:37
Keith Putnam-Delaney: There’s so many, you know, statements about being a founder. You know, one of the ones I love a lot is, you know, failure is a symptom of iteration, right? We have failed so many times. We launched a product, got great traction, you know, pivoted. It got great, you know, went down to nothing to like, make it an, you know, subscription product.
36:37 – 37:03
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Got it back up, you know, went down to nothing and then went into the dark for nine months and rebuilt and pivoted again. And it that that many times at bat it takes that you know that grit that people talk about that that belief that like irrational belief that this thing needs to exist, which, you know, paid advertising, not everybody would argue needs to exist.
37:04 – 37:15
Sophie Buonassisi: But but, I mean, it kind of does it kind of, if you like. It’s kind of one of the few things that actually has to exist, because if you have these platforms that have advertising potential, like you need to be winning on them, you need to.
37:15 – 37:39
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yes, yes. Like, I know I meant more like, you know, existential, but but so it’s like a weird thing to feel deep, so deeply passionate about. Like this, this, this is something I geek out about, but I yeah, I it’s just the everybody talks about the roller, all those things, all the cliches are absolutely true. But you don’t really realize they are until you go through it.
37:39 – 37:45
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I guess toward yourself at like that hardest nine month period.
37:45 – 38:17
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Not to take it out on my partner. Yeah, that was really important. It took me a long time to realize that I was the one responsible for my own happiness. I couldn’t seek affirmation or sort of like, you know, sympathy from somebody where it was just unfair to ask it from them. Right. Like I should be able to give that to myself was kind of like, that was a big unlock that helped me outside of work, have a healthier relationship with my work.
38:17 – 38:39
Keith Putnam-Delaney: That was big. It’s okay to have panic attacks. It’s normal. Get like, talk to people, get help. That’s really important. Yeah, I think and that’s one of the things that’s changed a lot in Silicon Valley in the last, you know, 5 to 10 years is like the embrace of mental health with for founders. I think that’s really cool.
38:39 – 39:02
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then yeah, just just recognize those moments where it can be just like a simple fork in the road. You could say, all right, I’m done. What does that mean for me? Or I want to keep going. What does that mean for me? And just kind of analyze those two options and pick the one. That’s right. I decided to keep going.
39:02 – 39:24
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And for better or for worse, seemingly for better. But there’s costs to keeping going to that. You just have to pay in terms of your relationships, your the opportunity cost potentially to your career. If because there is still no guarantee that even if you do decide to keep going, that it’s going to work out. Right? Right.
39:24 – 39:52
Sophie Buonassisi: So yeah, a lot of things to weigh, but you’re absolutely right. It’s a very kind of beautiful time to see people being so much more open about their mental health for founders and just for, for all humanity is it’s a cool evolution that we’re seeing and we’re continuing to see. And as you kind of gone along the founder journey, have there been any particular books or things that you’ve read that have really helped you in whatever, whatever capacity you found?
39:52 – 39:57
Keith Putnam-Delaney: You know, the books that have helped me the most? If I’m be totally honest.
39:57 – 39:59
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%.
39:59 – 40:20
Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s kind of like escapism. Like for me, at the end of the day, it’s funny, I like, I know I should do more business reading, but yeah, but I just like at some point I just need to unplug and fall into a different world. So I’m like a big sci fi fantasy nerd. I love it. That’s one thing, but that’s kind of a BS answer.
40:20 – 40:41
Sophie Buonassisi: No, it’s not a sensor at all. Actually, I read really recently something that I was talking about the the cost of actually not reading fiction anymore, just as people are consuming more short form videos and reading just pure business books. Those are the imagination and what that does for your actual creativity, for marketing, for the ad creative, for actually thinking through these campaigns.
40:41 – 40:52
Sophie Buonassisi: Because suddenly you’re served the experience visually, instead of reading the words and actually envisioning what that sci fi world looks like to yourself so could actually have downstream effects.
40:52 – 40:54
Keith Putnam-Delaney: You’re making me feel good about it. Yeah, right.
40:54 – 40:56
Sophie Buonassisi: Thank you. You’re saying. Yeah, yeah.
40:56 – 40:56
Keith Putnam-Delaney: There’s love.
40:56 – 41:06
Sophie Buonassisi: That there’s downfalls to all these or little trade offs to all the evolutions and things that we are doing. Totally.
41:06 – 41:33
Keith Putnam-Delaney: I will say though, on more of the coming back to the mental health said, I think Untethered Soul was really a amazing unlock for me to kind of, you know, let go. Yeah. Anyway, mindful on the mindfulness journey I’m still very much on, but that has helped enormously. I mean, I could, I could rattle off business books, but I actually think that those if I’m being like, really genuine, those are my two answers.
41:33 – 41:58
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s the only answer it would take is the genuine one. So those are fantastic answers. I love it. And yeah. Okay. Yeah, more of the personal AI side. But of course as you’re building, you’ve implemented some really innovative AI solutions and your personal using it and your team is using it. I’m curious if there’s been any specific use cases that you use other than your product, of course, on the media side.
41:58 – 42:06
Sophie Buonassisi: But for yourself, company building that you know are less obvious but have been really helpful in your journey.
42:06 – 42:26
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I mean, I’m sort of waiting for someone to create. I really want a dev tool that’s, you know, basically built on a platform to make producing integrations way faster, something that could, for example, look at your kind of like a.
42:26 – 42:55
Keith Putnam-Delaney: A version of cloud code or cursor that is more specific. It looks at your code base, understands how your frameworks for producing integrations, goes off, looks at API documentation, and churns out like a v1 of an integration, and then helps you with the infrastructure support around that too. I think that would be fucking awesome because integrations are such a bottleneck for so many, so many companies, and you don’t want to wait.
42:55 – 42:58
Keith Putnam-Delaney: They’re somewhat commoditized, but they take effort to build.
42:58 – 43:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
43:00 – 43:00
Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s.
43:01 – 43:08
Sophie Buonassisi: They’re also expected if you don’t have an integration. It’s actually a huge, huge kind of red flag in the deal process.
43:08 – 43:16
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally, totally. And it’s like ten years ago you could get people to pay for them, right? Like kind of a premium firm now it’s like, no way. Like I’m just going to go to your competitor that has them.
43:16 – 43:18
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, exactly. It’s a non-negotiable.
43:18 – 43:29
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. It’s like the let’s see expression, the Big Mac, the French fries on the apple pie like you don’t. You don’t pay like nobody’s buying a Happy Meal for the apple pie, right? Yeah.
43:29 – 43:32
Sophie Buonassisi: No, no. Certainly not.
43:32 – 43:53
Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then maybe more on the personal front. And it’s just because I’m dealing with this all the time, it would actually be a terrible business because it would have no recurring revenue. Yeah, but, like, I would love I’m going through a home remodel, and I would just love if there was some like, AI platform to help with with all of that, because the project management is like, I feel like I’ve got a whole nother full time job on the side.
43:53 – 43:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Probably do. That sounds like a real task.
43:55 – 44:04
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, it just sucks because, like, I would, I would happily pay for it. But as soon as the project’s over, you know, I churn out so terrible business, but would be real cool.
44:04 – 44:19
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s awesome. Well, Keith, this has been amazing. If you had to leave listeners with one piece of advice, you’ve shared a ton of really valuable advice. But overall advice, there are some kind of quota like motto that you kind of live by through years of experience.
44:19 – 44:47
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Oh. Another deep question. I don’t know. I think what I said I said before failures, side effect of iteration. I think that’s an eel and musk quote. That is something that I it’s kind of like I reassures me about the choices I make. It’s like, you know, you don’t you don’t kind of get to that best outcome unless you unless you fail, unless you try.
44:47 – 44:54
Keith Putnam-Delaney: So that’s something that kind of makes me feel okay when I make the dumb move that I do from time to time, as we all.
44:54 – 44:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Do, because they’re not dumb. Yeah.
44:56 – 44:56
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, exactly.
44:57 – 45:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I always think of it. It’s the same thing, just in different wording. But failure is a data point. It’s like if you don’t have data, you’re actually in the worst possible position that you could be, and you’ll have data on the success front and the failure front totally. If it’s not statistically significant, how do you iterate? Just like the paid side?
45:14 – 45:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Truly.
45:14 – 45:31
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, and it’s a weird sort of motto to to take into parenting. Kind of like it’s a weird way to phrase it in parenting, but I do think about that a lot with my kids. It’s like, you got you got to let them fail. You got to let them try something and have it not work out. Yeah, that’s my, I guess, nugget of wisdom.
45:31 – 45:36
Sophie Buonassisi: Very, very helpful. Keith, this has been wonderful. Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation. And Tom.
45:36 – 45:37
Keith Putnam-Delaney: Thanks, Sophie.
