Episode 23: Interview with Marty Weintraub

Marty Weintraub is the founder and president of aimClear, an Agency that links Social Media, Search and Display Advertisment with PR and Online Marketing. He is also a regular speaker with keynotes & panels at SES London, Media Suche Insider Summit, OMS, Charlotte Search Exchange.

Andre Alpar: Okay, today’s OMReport is with Marty. Marty, can you please introduce yourself?

Marty Weintraub: My name is Martyyyn Weintraub. Do you know what that means in German. Do you? Weintraub? Its a wine grape. It’s a vintner family. Vintner! And I’m really into wine! And you know what’s really cool? Being German by descent, my family from Eastern Europe and Germany, I got into wine as an adult. Like, over age 45 I really got into fine vine. It’s a very passionate hobby of mine. And then, at about age 50, I just went: “Shit, my last name is Weintraub! That means wine grape! Holy Crap!”

Andre Alpar: You didn’t see it all the time?

Marty Weintraub: I didn’t notice!

Andre Alpar: But you don’t have anyone in the family who used to make wine.

Marty Weintraub: No. Maybe generations ago. I wish I could say I come from a colorful Risling past. But… anyway, my name is Marty and to you, my German friend, I say Weintraub with great pride.

Andre Alpar: Perfect! Perfect! And I totally understand it.

So, we wanted to chat about psycho-graphics, which is the topic that you focus on. Psycho-graphics are not like demographics?

Marty Weintraub: Psycho-targeting for marketing mohos… mofos … Well, you don’t have to talk that out of this interview.

Andre Alpar: No, we won’t.

Marty Weintraub: Okay, Glass, take a picture.

Andre Alpar: When I think about Glass, I always think about that the battery won’t last for very long. How do you deal with it, I mean you have it on your eye for the whole day.

Marty Weintraub: Well first, it’s not so much the glass that is the issue for batteries, although it will drain across the day if you use it quite a bit. It’s more the phone that is tattered with bluetooth and hotspot. It needs the services from the phone.

Andre Alpar: So you switch off the bluetooth?

Marty Weintraub: No, I carry a brick and keep it plugged in all the time. Because when you have Glass, sharing is so effortless and important for SEO, by how you can effortlessly distribute to Plus and other social communities for SEO and engagement purposes that I just don’t care. I carry a brick around. I carry three extra cellphone batteries. Who gives a shit?

Andre Alpar: That’s true. And then on the other hand, luckily, here are places to plug your phone anywhere…

Marty Weintraub: Psycho-graphics! Before we got into psycho talk! The difference between psycho-graphics and demographics it that psycho-graphics are more about interest, proclivities, affinities, things that we believe in, occupations. Like, for instance, in Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, I know how to distribute content with paid things that look organic and social. Say, I want to distribute to all the molecular biologists in Eastern Europe, who speak English. There are various ways and targeting to do that. Psycho-graphics is where you target the part that makes the whole person that is conducting the search. And then the same people, who are searching, too, are distributing content along psycho-graphics nodes. It’s pretty big!

Andre Alpar: I think, Psycho-graphics are probably gonna be as big as AdWords, that is mostly based on keywords, right?

Marty Weintraub: Every single marketer in the whole world that runs content strategies, as sure as SEO practitioneers that must buy Search PPC, will be buying paid organic, which means organic looking paid units in social channels.

Andre Alpar: Something like promoted tweets? That would be an example or suggested posts.

Marty Weintraub: Or Facebook Page adds that are just in the feed.

Andre Alpar: So they are marketing, but they are in the feed and look like the rest, but they are still marketed.

Marty Weintraub: I tell you what. Raise your hand, if you get so much from SEO that you never in your career have to buy Search Paper Click ever. You get all you want with SEO for free!

Andre Alpar: erhm… not sure…

Marty Weintraub: Oh, nobody? No? No, okay half? No, okay, you like to have 10.000, so you can make your numbers for the month just from SEO?

Andre Alpar: That won’t work.

Marty Weintraub: Obviously, every search engines monetized with those searches, because there is not much above the fold for many searches that are actually organic. And paid ones in Google AdWords, like PLAs, they look organic to people?

Andre Alpar: That’s true.

Marty Weintraub: So, every engine, platform, community, network, site, social tool – every company that ever figured out how to make money with anything above the fold, organic and contextual (social) or search – we ended up having to pay for it and now there is no free content distribution, hardly. Well, there is – you can distribute things organically just fine. It works just fine organically. It just goes a lot slower than if it would if you amplify it.

Andre Alpar: Sure. So, what do you think. In Social Media, will there be a separation of the traits like with Search Engine Advertisment and Search Engine Optimization? Or do you think that, because the advertisement in Social Media is so native that you won’t be able to separate the two?

Marty Weintraub: That’s an amazing… that’s a better question even than the smart questioner knows, because we’d believed for many years that there is a hybrid model for community managers that have them running their own amplification. And at aimClear, the company I own and run creatively, our community managers, a dozen of them, come from a very strong hardcore public relations background, are amazing community managers and can run their own Page Posts Ads and Promoted Tweets and LinedIn Wall Promotions. And plus, we are talking about targeting psycho-graphics to amplify content native in channels. What’s really interesting to think about, and what we’ve never talked about in public, but we are going to, so this will be the first time we talk about that in public, we haven’t even written about it: You can use Facebook data to target Facebook network users, 1.2 Billion Facebook Ads targeting data. You can use partner data inside of Facebook to target Facebook network users and so you could use Facebook data mashed up with partner data using either the AND or the OR operator. For instance, they are interested in free wordpress widgets type pad, a massive blogger interests. And partner data, that means that they are homemakers and partner data that says they live in houses between $250.000 and a $1 Million a house. So what you have there is your rich mummy bloggers.

Andre Alpar: That’s nice! And then you can cater your content directly to them. In a native environment.

Marty Weintraub: Yes! What’s really interesting is that you go: “OK, well, I’ve got Facebook data, which is intra – inside channel network targeting. I’ve got partner data that’s inter – other peoples data. So now I’m mashing up intra and inter data, and then what really cool is I can take that partner data and go to my shading desk, my DSP, where I can target anybody in the whole Internet and I can use the rest of the targeting data from, like, for instance, there is Datalogic and Epsilon inside of Facebook, I could go to use all of Datalogic or Epsilon standalone serving banner ads to everywhere. And that’s radical targeting. That’s where you can target people by the length of their mortgage or shit like that. Crazy BtoB and BtoC targeting! Crazy!

Andre Alpar: Does it mean for you and your company that you are going to spread into helping people target their display advertizing campaigns?

Marty Weintraub: We already do! We already do! Anything you think of as radical Facebook targeting can easy be served across a couple of dozen data services internet wide. It’s not just Facebook. Another fascinating bit about psycho-graphics – so you know re-targeting, right?

Andre Alpar: Sure.

Marty Weintraub: Somebody is doing a page, use AdRoll or ReTargeter or one of them or even Google Remarketing. So… Well, actually Google Remarketing is closest to the concept as a standalone product. But anyway, right now I can set a re-targeting cookie and can re-target filtered by a additional layer of psycho-graphics. That’s what you do with re-marketing inside of Google Analytics.

Andre Alpar: So, just as an example, we have a quick place. So, lets I’m a big retailer and I put a remarketing pixel on anybody that visits me and then I cross-check with Facebook, who is already…

Marty Weintraub: You wouldn’t use Facebook, because Facebook doesn’t provide that service yet, but they probably will. You would have to do it with your own trading desk, your own DSP, but if you’re setting the re-marketing cookie yourself and you have a partnership with data services, it means that you can only re-marketing people, who have an affinity – there is that word again – in using high end credit cards online to buy stuff on the Internet or they are rabid buyers of a certain…

Andre Alpar: So I could adapt my re-targeting depending on how solvent the customers may be?

Marty Weintraub: Definitely financial considerations, online buying considerations.

Andre Alpar: Or just bid differentially, if I know they don’t have a big budget I probably bid less to display ads and for the others that I know have a lot more money I will bid a lot more, right?

Marty Weintraub: One thing to keep in mind about this: Filtered re-targeting, where you only re-targeted people based on psycho-graphics filters using a DSP that accesses exchanges using third party data objects like Bluekai or Epsilon or Forbes or Expedia data or Newstarts data objects, that only works at scale, because you filtered on audiences and in fact, just a clarifying caveat, it all works on a certain level of scale because there are 680.000 people in America who have very identifiable blogger interests. By the time you go ‘homemakers’, you just cut that down to 800 people. But that’s okay.

Andre Alpar: Because those are exactly the ones. That is purely content that you will probably provide especially for them, right?

Marty Weintraub: It’s beautiful for content distribution, because there are micro-buys to the right people. Just you have to understand that you could indulge in all the hyperbole you want about layers. But if you send a 180 people to your website and you want to filter that by the length of their mortgage, you just ran out of people, you know what I mean?
So, you have to always understand that, like for instance in Australia, it’s around 30 Million people, right? That means, if you’re targeting in Australia you might not get to be so fadsy. You might even get more traditional.

Andre Alpar: You have to go broad.

Marty Weintraub: You might to age, gender, marital status… so there is a short tail and a long tail and it’s depending on the size of the populations and scale. It’s a very important consideration. Maturity and psycho-graphics targeting is knowing, how not to go deep.

Andre Alpar: Alright.

I really want to talk about the blog post you did yesterday or the day before.

Marty Weintraub: Trouble! What was it called?

Andre Alpar: We have to find…

Marty Weintraub: Let’s find out… can we take a time out?

Andre Alpar: I know, because I read your collegue, who was helping me schedule…

Marty Weintraub: Okay, I got it… How much do I love the hand grenade. What do I love that! I’m so lucky. I have an amazing… okay, good… ready, set, start!

Andre Alpar: Alright, we wanted to talk about a great blog post Marty did. It’s called: “Easily buy SEO lift & disrupt Google’s vaunted search algorithm”.

Marty Weintraub: Boom!

Andre Alpar: So, it’s not just slightly irritating and slightly astonishing. Basically, what you were playing around with, or the examples that you talked about in the blog post that anyone can read…

Marty Weintraub: They are all real. It works like crazy. It always works.

Andre Alpar: so you’re buying native advertisements from Social Networks, pushing it to Plus or other Social Networks.

Marty Weintraub: Basically, if you look at the universe of psycho-graphics ads, promoted tweets, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, – I suppose to an extent – paid Reddits, then also Search ads, too, and then you look at… so that are ad platforms, right? So, now I look at potential social destinations: Plus posts, tweets, facebook posts, pins – pinterest pins. See, in every social side you can almost always get to the details page of it. They look like a landing page. And so, of course, you can take anything and put it on your Facebook wall. You could put Google SERPs on your Facebook Wall and if you put it on your company wall, you can repackage it. You could replace the image in the right format for Facebook page posts, you could replace every text field and you can essentially repackage it and serve… and Facebook will let you put any of it organically on your wall including pointing to GooglePlus. But they will not let you buy page post ads to GooglePlus, because, I’m guessing, they consider competition, which is interesting, because at least 52 people use GooglePlus.

Andre Alpar: They are not seeing each other as competition usually, but in that case they are.

Marty Weintraub: But Facebook lost, because they won’t let you buy ads to it.

Andre Alpar: Exactly.

Marty Weintraub: But with the exception of Facebook ads pointing to GooglePlus every single one of those channels I said will point to every single one. In other words, you can buy a Google Search ad to your pin or to you Youtube video, or to you Facebook post, or to Plus.

Andre Alpar: Let’s just make up an example and then we can spin it very specific. I made up a great summary: “Ten things to watch out when you go to PupCon and you’re from Europe.” So I put that on GooglePlus and I want to push my GooglePlus Authority, to be, like, one target and then I would buy Search Ads for people who are searching for PupCon Recaps, where people talk about it.

Marty Weintraub: That would be great!

Andre Alpar: And then I would push them straight to the Plus Page.

Marty Weintraub: But the trick is, you have to be magnanimous and very organic, like… let me do an exercise with you: If you where going to tweet that post and you were not thinking about amplification, and you’re going to just drive people right to your blog post, because you tweeted it, you go: “Hello! Smiley – Name-of-blog-post – URL-link”, right?

Andre Alpar: Yes.

Marty Weintraub: It would not be going “Try my product!”, you were just sharing it.

Andre Alpar: Sure, sure, sure, but the blog post could be just informational.

Marty Weintraub: So, what I could do instead of pushing to the blog post itself, I could push to the Plus detail page with an URL-link and than I could promote it to people, who are following the PopCon hashtag…

Andre Alpar: … on Twitter.

Marty Weintraub: On Twitter. And then I would introduce another post that would be purely social. That even didn’t barely had a link. That was something clever that a speaker said. Like this morning I was rotating a promoted tweet targeted to people, who follow Ad Matt Cutts and Rand Fishken for the SEO post on the PubCon hashtag with an URL link to the GooglePlus organic page at the same time as I was amplifying a picture of my pancakes in the restaurant and a tweet about breakfast in the same crowd.

Andre Alpar: Why do you do the second thing? Is that just so it looks more mixed? It doesn’t look so, you know, like a one way street?

Marty Weintraub: I do it because I think it’s really freaking cool to share pictures of my food with my fans.

Andre Alpar: Okay, but do you think that if amplification is happening in two places then it’s better, because it’s slightly distracting the pancakes, right? They are not really on topic.

Marty Weintraub: Well, first of all it ignited a conversation about my pancakes, second of all I wanted to run it for 20 minutes. If you run it throughout the day it’s stupid, and you look like an idiot, but if you run it for 20 minutes before the keynote from breakfast, than you’re sharing your pancakes with your fans.

Andre Alpar: And then there is a lot more attention for your next post

Marty Weintraub: Oh well, maybe I dont know. But do you know what the KPI is? Pancakes! How many fun!

Andre Alpar: How many comments!

Marty Weintraub: Fun! Just fun! If your shit doesn’t stand just as… You know what the KPI for the amplified page post is about Plus? Even though it will receive the good things that happened from going to Plus and traffic to the site, the KPI is freaking pancakes! It’s for fun! Great content is stuff that we just do it because we want to. Because you’re burning to share something that matters to you with the people that you love!

Andre Alpar:So what did you have with your pancakes, now that we are talking about pancakes? What did you have with your pancakes, like classic sirup or some ice dream or…

Marty Weintraub: Shitty fake sirup. Great butter. Eggs scrambled really, really hard, because I dont like raw eggs. And a medium, rare porterhouse.

Andre Alpar: Wow, that’s some breakfast!

Marty Weintraub: Was a shitty steak…

Andre Alpar: That’s actually not worth sharing. There is a lot of better food to have.

Marty Weintraub: No, no, sharing made the breakfast worth eating!

Andre Alpar: You ate it just so you can share it.

Marty Weintraub: I always take a minute to tweet my food before I eat, because the time it takes makes you more hungry and it always pays you back.

Andre Alpar: So, I don’t do it always, only when it’s a really good food and when I’m really convinced.

Marty Weintraub: Me too, but I always eat good food!

Andre Alpar: Ha ha, you didn’t this morning!

Marty Weintraub: I ate colorful food, though!

Andre Alpar: Ok, that’s true.

Marty Weintraub: Good isn’t about how good it tastes.

Andre Alpar: Ok, let’s talk about the amplification idea, because I really, really love the idea. So, you basically do that for customers as well or you teach them to do that it on their own or you manage their stuff?

Marty Weintraub: Another good question. Well, it took many years to settle on how to do that.

Andre Alpar: So it’s a slightely standarized process?

Marty Weintraub: Essentially we do editorial calender amplifications, where we flag things ahead of time to be promoted to predetermined audiences with teams that package them ahead of time, like figuring out what the wall is going to say, what a tweet is going to say and we watch our things to work organically in one channel and amplify it inter and intra channel.

Andre Alpar: How many people is there at aimClear?

Marty Weintraub: 26.

Andre Alpar: How long do you need somebody to coach him, so they can, you know, manage on their own, without you having to look over their shoulder every once in a while and tell them “Well, no, that’s not how you do it.”

Marty Weintraub: We at aimClear, with the speed of the change of the platforms, it’s hard for us to always have our teams fully up to speed. And there are certain bottle necks in the process. I would say that the people that run those campaigns for us, like four or five of them, I’d say they all have between five and eight years experience and two to three directly with us. And the people, who are specialists on the teams, who do pieces of it, they can contribute non-creative after three to six month and creative after about a year. It’s hard. I have a book actually, that’s a O’Reilly book… well, I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s good, it’s about community management.

Andre Alpar: We will figure it out.

Marty Weintraub: I remember what my first book was called, the second one, the book company named it… but if you just search amazon or “Marty Weintraub Amazon” there is a community management book that speaks about the middy-griddy of – we call it ed cal – editorial calender amplification. Everybody in the industry right now are talking about editorial calenders and content. And you know what? That’s the same shit we do with PR since 30 years ago. And aimClear is been doing that on scheduled amplification to predetermined psycho-graphics buckets as an appliances sort of services for like three years.

Andre Alpar: Alright. So does it work in other countries as well? Because as you said before, if the user base is not as big, it probably wont work.

Marty Weintraub: Yes, with all the other caveats that apply to all the other multilingual multinational localization. You know, think about English. Michael Jackson was bad! And… and what is ‘Blow me away’ anyway? I mean it’s… Like there is a vernacular… if you’re in an elevator in America you don’t take your pants off. Like there is just conventions that are important for our society and some of them might – that’s not unique to America, but you get my point. It works the same way in other countries in the same channels – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – and it works in native sites as well. The point is that you have the same set of concerns about addressing the vernacular of the translation and understanding customs. When an amazing agent business person gives me her business card, I take it and look at it like that, because that’s how you respect her as a business person by custom and convention in her country – so doing this in foreign lands is the intersection of pheromones, fanaticism, vernacular and customs localizations. And we do it. We are work with Andy Adkins Krüger and WebCertain in New York, couple of hours ride from London, in like 30 languages and trust me, everyone in the world will be doing this, because if you don’t nobody sees your shit. No matter how much your content is distributed nobody sees it. And social, so you get your 10.000 people following you, your 100.000 following you, the ones that see that by EdgeRank, who are the right ones to see it, you are preaching to people that already know you and that’s very valuable, but the organic sharing is not very much and so the problem with that model is that there is nothing introducing new people into that system all the time. And when you amplify content out by psycho-graphics it’s a steady stream of marketing to people that know you already and creating new people that know you already and driving people back to you content. The KPIs are psycho-graphics traffic to your site that performs as well as organic, content conversion in an attribution model over time in channel engagement, if they hang out there, follow, share, like, etc etc., intentional distribution to PR psycho-graphics for natural link building…

Andre Alpar: That would be amazing.

Marty Weintraub: Well, it just works that way! This takes care you get social signals, you get links, you get traffic, you get engagement and you get conversion. What am I missing?

Andre Alpar: Nothing. It’s all good

Marty Weintraub: It’s the secret sauce!

Andre Alpar: And I think even on top you’re building a brand. Probably. On top of all these.

Marty Weintraub: Yes! When people say: “Oh, I want to brand my company. How do I prove it?” I go: ”Well, I just described to you. Proves are just fine.

Like, my favorite brand? It’s a sale! I can prove that I branded, when I sell you something. I can prove that I branded, when you follow me.

Andre Alpar: Or when you just drive traffic.

Marty Weintraub: Those five nodes I just said. It takes care of SEO, takes care of social, takes care of traffic, takes care of branding. Like, bite me, what is missing?

Andre Alpar: No, it’s all good. It’s alright there!

I think that’s a great way to end. Right, Marty, thanks so much for the interview!

Marty Weintraub: I like it! That was really, really fun!