Episode 644: What Worked in 2024 that We Want to Double Down on in 2025 with Eddie Maalouf of BAD Marketing

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Lauren Petrullo welcomes Eddie Maalouf, founder of BAD Marketing, to discuss strategies for navigating the evolving marketing landscape. They talk about how affiliate marketing, influencer trust, and tailored content creation are shifting in 2025, especially for e-commerce, local businesses, and info products. Eddie shares firsthand insights on creating impactful ads, handling post-holiday marketing, and using AI effectively without overcomplicating campaigns. This conversation dives into what’s working now and how brands can position themselves for what’s next.

Chapters

  • 00:00:00 – Kickoff: Welcome to Perpetual Traffic
  • 00:01:23 – The Story Behind Eddie Maalouf & Bold Marketing Moves
  • 00:04:24 – 2025 Predictions: Affiliate Marketing’s Trust Game
  • 00:08:38 – Future-Proofing Info Products
  • 00:12:36 – Winning Tactics for Local Business Marketing
  • 00:14:00 – Ads That Work for Local Audiences
  • 00:17:23 – Post-Black Friday: Next Steps for E-commerce
  • 00:18:37 – Upcoming Trends for New Year Sales
  • 00:20:02 – Agency Insider: Insights from the Frontlines
  • 00:23:47 – Effective Media Buying
  • 00:28:10 – AI’s Role in Shaping Marketing
  • 00:32:09 – The Evolution of Interactive Advertising
  • 00:37:16 – Final Predictions and Takeaways

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

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Read the Transcript Below:

What Worked in 2024 that We Want to Double Down on in 2025 with Eddie Maalouf of BAD Marketing

What Worked in 2024 that We Want to Double Down on in 2025 with Eddie Maalouf of BAD Marketing

Lauren: Welcome to the perpetual traffic podcast. I am your host for today. It is Lauren E. Petrillo, founder of Mognus Media as Ralph, our co host is letting me connect with our very special guests. very talented agency owner himself, Eddie Malouf. And I’m so excited to connect with Eddie, who is here today to talk about everything that he has seen working in 2024 and some predictions of what we think is going to help our clients and future brands in the year ahead.

Lauren: So yeah. Yeah.

Eddie: you. Thank you, Lauren. Happy to be here. Super excited for our talk today. It’s already gotten a little exciting behind the scenes that people are never going to hear, hopefully. so I’m excited to continue the fun conversations. successful. 60 million

Lauren: For those that aren’t privileged enough to be in the pre recording time, you got to miss how we broke down the success of Cardi B’s OnlyFans account and why and where. Yeah, very successful, whether it’s top of funnel, middle funnel.

Eddie: They might not know that

Lauren: Yeah. 130, 000 a day successful.

Eddie: crazy.

Lauren: so Eddie, for those that, do not know you, whatever reason that’s silly, silly, silly them.

Lauren: Can you tell us about yourself and bad marketing?

Eddie: yeah. So I’m the, founder and CEO of bad marketing. we’re a digital agency specializing in three verticals. So we have one vertical for local businesses, one for e commerce businesses and one for info products and courses. We have about 200 employees total. We’ve done this in about four years, a little bit more four years and four months now.

Eddie: And, pretty cool. We got to learn a lot of marketing lessons. I mean, I’ve been running ads myself for about 10 years, but as an agency owner would like actual staff on payroll of some sort, we’ve been doing it for a little bit over four. So it’s been a, exciting and stressful journey. You can see all the gray hair on the side of my head that comes from this business.

Lauren: Well, for those not watching on YouTube, he says you could see his gray hair, but he’s rocking a hat that’s hiding most of the gray

Eddie: see it on the side, right? Like it’s like that side gray, the beard gray, you know, you gotta give me some gray credit. I mean, it’s cool if you can’t see it even better for me,

Lauren: No, I can’t. I can’t. So that’s like 10 years. You’ve been doing this. I was like, I think you’re like three, four years younger than me. So I was like, how old were you when you started?

Eddie: I was young. I couldn’t even drink when I started.

Lauren: So there you

Eddie: I’m 30.

Lauren: 30, 200 employees and, continuing to grow bad marketing, which for those that. Are hearing correctly bat b a d. His company is called bad Marketing like you got to explain that a little bit before we jump into the actual content of the

Eddie: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like the liquid death play, right? It’s like the anti hero. , and so long story short, basically we had another name that was like super boring and we had it for years. That was because like the original partners I had and they were no longer partners. So the name didn’t make sense anymore.

Eddie: And so, we basically got a lawsuit over our name cause someone else was using the same name and it was just like this giant thing. And I was like, this is stupid. So let’s just pick another name and then we’re like, what’s like the crate? Like we can pick whatever we want. We have case studies. We have staff we make money already.

Eddie: Like we don’t need to like do something that pleases people. So like if we really wanted to be ourselves, who would we be? And we all decided, you know, the way we act is like super bold, disruptive, like the anti of everything else. And that’s kind of how we’ve always done things in one. And so someone sarcastically said, why don’t we just go with bad marketing?

Eddie: And they all laughed. And I was like, that’s a great idea and went to buy all the domains, the handles and everything over the next few months. And we ran with it. And it’s been awesome, honestly, like it’s been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made in the company.

Lauren: To go it’s been so good since you went bad

Eddie: So good since we’ve gone bad. And our motto is actually we make good brands go bad.

Lauren: That’s good. Or is that bad?

Eddie: Depends if it’s capitalized or not. Even internally, capital bad is like one thing. Fully lowercase bad is bad bad. Like, not good bad.

Lauren: Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool. so with that, I mean you’ve been in the space for 10 years. You have a team for four years. what I was really excited to talk about with you, agency owner to agency owner, like a lot of people listening to this podcast. We’re close to Black Friday, end of year. most people are already in their Black Friday holiday promotions, but what they’re not ready for necessarily are The things to come in 2025.

Lauren: So I thought it’d be really cool just to hear from you. Like, what are some of the things that you’re looking for and gearing up for in 2025 for your clients? Like, what is there any? Area that you’re doubling down in for either info products, e commerce or your local business clients.

Eddie: I think we’re doubling down on a lot of affiliate promotions as a whole. So like, you can look at it. Per platform, if we’re talking like info products, it’s probably more like shared JV lists, cross promoting from list to list. if we’re talking about like e commerce, it’d be like affiliate marketing on things like tiktok shop or amazon through influencers.

Eddie: those are definitely things that we’re doubling down on in every category. We’re You know, on the info side, creating a lot of JV partnerships between people in the same spaces that sell non competing products, it’s just kind of free money for everyone across the board. They’ve already spent the money for those leads.

Eddie: And then on tick tock, we’re doubling down and basically bring on our e commerce clients on tick tock shop, just on profit share agreements and, building basically a giant network of affiliates and creators that can sell their products. And, we know that Lauren is really good at pet products, for example, whenever pet products come our way, we, source them to Lauren.

Eddie: And then she promotes them and that becomes like kind of her niche and category for clients like ours. so definitely something I’m doubling down on as a company. And I think the reason was of this whole year, I think there was just a lot of lack of trust. It was hard to get people to check out, in e commerce.

Eddie: It’s harder to get people and info to show up to a sales call because there’s a lack of trust. On and on and on in every industry, right? And someone used the term, I forgot what it was, but like trust inflation or something like that. Basically, just like, it’s harder to earn someone’s trust now than it was a year or two years.

Eddie: I mean, heck, when I started running ads 8, 9, 10 years ago, like I just run anything and anyone would buy anything and submit a lead for like pennies on the dollar. today it’s much different, right? You got a, Earn the trust a little bit more. And so I think affiliate marketing is the fastest way to earn that trust because you’re going through someone else.

Eddie: I think there was a period where like influencers were less trusted because everyone knew that they were making money.

Lauren: Yeah. Hashtag ad and how that

Eddie: exactly

Lauren: everything with Instagram.

Eddie: everything. Right. And now people are like, Oh my gosh, like this guy’s just doing it for money. And so like conversions went down. And then now because of things like Tik TOK shop, it’s actually the opposite.

Eddie: It’s like, I’m proud that I’m making money from this. And it’s okay that I’m public about it. And the people that I’m talking, that know I’m talking about this product, no, I’m making money off this product and I’m actually just building trust with them because I’m actually only selling them good products.

Eddie: And so now the trust has kind of shifted to like, Oh, if I’ve bought something from this creator, it’s a good product. I trust him. And so now it’s actually the opposite. Whereas instead of having less trust, there’s actually so much more trust because they’ve established that over time from selling other good products.

Eddie: so it’s a very interesting time we live in, This has been a rollercoaster of trust on the influencer space. And I think we’re gonna have a pretty good opportunity of the next few years in it.

Lauren: I think it’s interesting where it’s like you talk about, when we think about influencers and like two years ago, especially for Gen Z buyers. They grew up with influencers, bought what influencers said, and then a lot of influencers selling supplements, unsafe, untested products, tanked their reputation.

Lauren: Obviously what happened with the Jenner Kardashians and some of the stuff that they’ve promoted, Fyre Festival being like one of the most obvious cases, that trust in celebrity influencers really tanked. But what you’re talking about is a lot more creators, content creators, where this is their full time business.

Lauren: And I think what is really powerful in a lot of that is, You don’t necessarily have to be an influencer to be influential because I bet you there are a lot of micro and nano influencers, maybe even some content creators with 100, 000 followers that are super loyal and they’re super dedicated because they’re talking about stuff in the equestrian space, for example, and when you’re A content creator at the top of your game for that specific field.

Lauren: And you have a product that you actually put your name and brand behind, not just your face. I think that makes sense as a way for a lot more people to double down on that. Trust inflation. If that’s the term that makes a lot of sense, of course, as well. you’re talking about the e commerce side. I’d love for you to go even deeper on the, Info side, because I bet a lot of people are in the space right now where people aren’t showing up to these phone calls.

Lauren: They’re not attending the webinars or watching them all the way through. They’re consuming content and it’s just this like content overload. And it’s just, why aren’t you following through? Didn’t you love what I had to say? Oh

Eddie: Yeah, I mean, it’s, as of the time that we’re filming this, like these are kind of the lowest show rates I’ve seen in a while across most call funnel or, you know, high ticket or info product brands as a whole. I think we just kind of have to go further of. It’s either at the beginning of the funnel or in the middle of the funnel.

Eddie: We have to drag it out a bit, meaning like, how many touch points are we giving the consumer before they become a lead? Or how many touch points are we giving the consumer between the time that become a lead and the time that they show up for a call? and how easy is that process versus making it more difficult?

Eddie: So The value is there for them showing up the call because how much they’ve already invested prior to the call. and something that we’re conscious of is like, yeah, like people aren’t going to watch everything. And so, we always like have layers. So like, let’s just take a webinar at the top webinar, you know, let’s call it two hours, for example, sake to our webinar.

Eddie: I mean, not everyone’s going to watch that, right? Let’s just say 30 percent of people are going to watch that. Another 20 percent from replays. Okay, so we call it 50%. There’s another 50 percent that will just never watch that, because they realize how long it is. But what if I just sent that 50 percent a 16 minute VSL of the same content that was in the webinar condensed?

Eddie: Would they watch it? Well, let’s just say another 50 percent would go watch that out of that 50. Now I have 25 percent remaining that haven’t watched anything. I probably can’t get 50 percent of those people to do anything, but if I can get 20 percent of those people, which is another 5 percent of the original total, To read something.

Eddie: Hey, how about I give it to them instead of a video format? How about I turn the VSL into like a really good sales page and how many of these people that didn’t attend, didn’t want to read any of this, or watch any of this because they don’t want to sit there and watch would gladly spend a few minutes scrolling on a toilet seat to understand everything that they originally were interested in for.

Eddie: I have friends who sit on the toilet for 20 minutes, and they’re just reading the whole time. You know what I mean? So,

Lauren: Now, are these friends with kids? Because there’s also like privacy where you’re like, it’s 20 minutes of silence. So they’re locking that door and be like, I’m in the bathroom.

Eddie: no, those are like 45 minute bathroom breaks for those friends. That’s another category of it. But yeah, I mean, that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re basically like trying to find different mediums for people to consume the same information and starting with the one with the, you know, the most time with the consumer between us and them and then slowly dwindling it down.

Eddie: Essentially, it’s probably different opportunities to consume the same info.

Lauren: So if that’s you’re finding that in 2024, you’ve been distilling the information that people are missing because they’ve already opted in, they’ve shown interest in wanting to consume it. But we’re busy human beings, we’re forgetful human beings. And we’ve got a lot of things competing for attention. So you in 2024, what you have found working has been distilling that information down to shorter form of content and to diverse forms of content for them to consume.

Lauren: How are you going to take that further in 2025? Does that apply for just in time webinars, like live webinars, everything and everything in between?

Eddie: Yeah, I mean, I’ve already done that. it’s for we do that for everything at this point. Obviously, we’re not going to do it like day one because we don’t know if that webinar is going to convert. And when we turn into the VSL or sales page doesn’t make sense. But like once a webinar is running, those are ways that we basically re optimize it.

Eddie: And so I mean, going into 2025, It’s not like this is something that everyone is doing yet. I mean, I know a lot of people selling info products, and I don’t think any of them are doing something like this just yet. And if they are, they’re definitely not taking it to a tech sales page. So I think there’s just still so much opportunity to still take the same exact path we’ve been taking just with more people and rolling it across the board versus just being kind of something that we tested this year.

Lauren: what about for local businesses? What have you seen help local businesses in 2024 that you’re going to then double down in for

Eddie: Yeah. Yeah, great question. I think content creation is something that local businesses struggle at for ads. And so I’ll give you an example. Let’s just take, I don’t know, local chiropractor. So, like, four years ago, I could run a square image on Canva saying 29 back adjustment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Eddie: And then I get flooded with leads and they come in. I can do the same thing now. Leads will be more expensive. Less of them will actually respond and show up. Kind of all the metrics of trust are dwindled, or I could invest time into one time, just scripting some really creative concepts and videos for the local businesses.

Eddie: They film them on their phone. I edit them to be an engaging, educational and funny type video. , and I run those as ads and let’s just say I say I pay the same price as the person who’s running an image ad to get a lead. but my leads are better. They’re more educated, and they show up more and purchase more, much more compared to the ones and just square image with the promotion.

Eddie: So we’re doubling down on that. We have, on the local business that we’ve never had video editors. We just have graphic designers and stuff like that. Cause it’s like local businesses. now we’re building an entire video editing team around local businesses and doing it for those businesses as like a service.

Eddie: They film it on their phones. They send it to us. We do it again. I’m not going to post organically. but I will do it just to have better ads because our while be significantly better and then as a local business, we’re advising them on posting organically because there is so much money to be made from just posting organically as a local business.

Eddie: And even when you run ads, the thing is, like, if you really look at the ads path, A lot of people, what they’re doing is, they actually go to an ad on Instagram. They don’t actually click the button on the ad. They go and click the profile of the person that is running the ad. And then the profile essentially becomes your landing page slash like business card, whatever, however you want to take that essentially, that’s what it becomes.

Eddie: so, I heavily advise them all and give them advice on how to build their social media organically for that reason for me. But, really what I’m doing is I’m just investing more heavily into content. I look at what everyone’s not doing and that’s what I try to do. So like everyone is trying to replace people with AI.

Eddie: Conversational bots. Cool. I could do that. I’m just another person. It’s not a special edge. Everyone’s trying to do automations on go high level. Great. Not a special edge. Everyone’s trying to white label ICO. Great. Not a special edge. How many people are actually like doing really sick ads for local businesses at a low cost and running them at scale? None. Like, I mean, obviously not none, but like it’s like single percentage digits. and that’s what stand out. So that’s what we’re focused on. And the difference is night and day between someone who has a really good video and someone just has like an average ad like everyone else.

Lauren: Yeah. So a lot of local businesses, when you’re saying there aren’t a lot of people that will do it because local businesses tend to have really small budgets. And they have a smaller market. They can only attract the drive in market if they have one single location for brick and mortar. What I have seen, at least, a lot of local businesses will hire their best friend’s niece or their neighbor’s nephew.

Lauren: Someone that is just like a younger kid that can film their videos, but they don’t have the conversion mindset for a lot of that storytelling, which I think you’re saying is Is enriching their performance against what is easy, a canvas, static image ad or something that doesn’t showcase personality. And authenticity and who they are as a local business.

Lauren: And you’re bringing in additional team members cost effective means because you have such a large production that you can pass those cost savings onto a local business. So it’s like they’re being treated as if they’re an enterprise client, even as a local business.

Eddie: Exactly. And in today’s world, things are more expensive online. It’s harder to advertise. It’s harder to get to the consumer. They have way more. So not only. Is it more expensive? But they have way more options. maybe they used to look at 100 posts a day. Maybe now they’re looking at 1000 posts a day.

Eddie: And so like the amount of the percentage of their total viewership that you possibly could have is going down. It’s becoming more expensive to do so. Everything’s just becoming more difficult. And so like you gotta out edge someone in some category. and to me, the easiest one that I see is just like better ads content wise.

Lauren: Better ads content wise, but you said earlier that you don’t put those videos that you make for local business. You don’t recommend that they put them in their organic feed.

Eddie: No, no. I just don’t manage their organic feed. So like, you know, I’m not making the videos for the purpose of their organic feed. I’m making them just to become a sale.

Lauren: Makes sense. Makes sense. So then, with coming out of black Friday and moving into the holiday season, is there anything, that you find that you’re super invested in? Like, I know everyone’s focused on black Friday right now. And then the free commerce, at least ship before Christmas. But what is, that next focus?

Lauren: For your clients. And we can go vertical by vertical, like for e commerce. what is that pivot immediately after they can’t shift or they can’t in time for Christmas,

Eddie: Yeah. I mean, the shipping time for Christmas one is kind of a weird one because at this point, most of the brands we work with are prepared to like get everything up to like the 22nd, 23rd there on time. What we used to do though, cause we would yeah. I mean, someone will come up with a new product.

Eddie: We’d sell out way too fast and then we’d have like, you know, a 20 day period where they definitely couldn’t get it. we would give them like the ability to buy it, to pre purchase it essentially, and like have their name on a top specifically. and then we just give them like some sort of bonus, to kind of compensate for it, but make it still a good enough offer for them to be worth buying, upfront.

Eddie: But as soon as black Friday, cyber Monday ends, honestly, like we’re pretty focused, um, unless it’s like a. gifting type brand. we’re, we’re pretty focused on like you want. So I’ll give you an example. we’re really heavy into supplements. supplements like don’t necessarily smash it in December.

Eddie: but like as soon as December 26 comes around supplements, start killing it. Like

Lauren: new year, new you.

Eddie: Yeah, new year, new you like people now don’t think like, Oh, I’m saving up to buy gifts for Christmas or whatever the thought process is like vacation mode slowly kind of goes away. January 1st. There’s like another uptake because vacation mode like really goes away.

Eddie: there’s like, I don’t know why, but like half of the world thinks like between Christmas and New Year’s like there’s not a week and it’s just like, you know what I’m talking about? It’s just like, they’re like retired for seven days. New Year’s, like, basically start New Year’s Eve starts on, like, the 26th.

Lauren: Well, that’s my birthday is New Year’s Eve and I start celebrating on the 26th. So let’s be real. I have a female, my mom saved the best for last the real. Truth story was though that she demanded I got out by midnight because she wanted the tax incentive.

Eddie: so funny. That’s crazy.

Lauren: Subscribe to New Year’s Eve starts December 26 because

Eddie: Why wouldn’t you? It’s your birthday. I mean, for me, it probably started December 1st. If that the case, you know, uh,

Lauren: my mom’s birthday is December 2nd. So I have to give her her Her time to shine, but I’ll, I’ll evaluate December 3rd.

Eddie: December 3rd. I mean, even even the 10th, I give her a week. You know what I mean? She’s done a lot.

Lauren: Should I did come out of her body. So thanks mom.

Eddie: but yeah, we’re focused, we’re focused on January and even like from an agency perspective, right? If you’re an agency owner, I already have landing pages, ads, everything built for January from now to get more clients and all of them are around like the obvious angles, which is like, did you miss your black Friday targets?

Eddie: Did you miss your Q4 targets? That’s a very strong time of transition for e commerce brands like they decide if they did or did not hit their annual goals. And like usually the first person that they’re blaming is the marketing agency. So always, right? It’s like, why didn’t you fix my entire company?

Eddie: Well, because I’m only in charge of two facebook ads, and not the other 900 things that you have.

Lauren: Right. But it’s a make or break it season for a lot of e commerce brands. Cause they could be getting as much as 50 percent of their entire annual revenue in a matter of two weeks.

Eddie: exactly. Right. So it is make or break. so basically a lot are breaking is really the point. as an agency in January, you definitely want to focus on that angle. I started in December. Like, as soon as Black Friday ends, I literally turn on the ads and it’s like, did you miss your targets for Q4?

Eddie: Did you miss your targets for Black Friday? Cyber Monday? make you one better than Q4. And it’s like my entire angle. And That’s how I mean, that’s how we built our agency, right? I find the angles that make sense based on the time of the year and everything that’s happening. And then I write it. So like even this year, like there was like the whole election, like I ran an entire angle with a trump actor got make marketing bad again.

Eddie: and just like rode the wave of, trump almost getting shot and everything else in between. Right? And so, Same for Q1. I am, I’ll ride the wave of all the people in Q4 that are complaining that Black Friday wasn’t as good as it was what we thought it was going to be this year. There’s too much competition, blah, blah, blah.

Eddie: so as an agency, that’s what I’ll be focused on. and then as an e com brand, again, some of these guys like naturally thrive in Q1 more than they do in Q4, to be

Lauren: Yeah. The health and wellness space is just, it is your black Friday. For until what, February 16th, when people give up on their new year’s resolutions.

Eddie: think that’s called January 2nd.

Lauren: Okay. Oh, look, I’m going to celebrate my birthday for at least a week. I’m going to hold my new year’s resolutions for at least a month. That’s how this works for

Eddie: Okay, that’s good.

Lauren: But yeah, no. So, I mean, for, for sure, there’s a lot more brands as even in the info space, because everyone’s in a place of reevaluating where they are, how was their year reflecting on what they want 2025. So even for those. Info clients, I’m sure is there. It put in the self help personal growth business space.

Lauren: If they have something that can either be a biz op or an opportunity for you to improve yourself as who you are, you can have a bang on January and find that you’re slower, come August, come September when kids are back to school and you’re prepping for the holidays.

Eddie: Yeah, that’s so accurate. I mean, January, January is like across the board. January competes with November for us in every space because of that reason. And info, it definitely beats it. Like, we know January is usually like our best month. and we treat it accordingly. Like we double budgets in January compared to, March, for example, just because new me.

Eddie: New initiatives, new life goals, everything like that. Right. And a lot of honestly, a lot of the info products that we work on are either biz op, like money making based or health and wellness space. And both of them are like January. They’re just like a different level of motivation and higher buyer intent as a whole.

Eddie: So I

Lauren: So then what is something that you saw either clients come to you with or prospects are talking to you about that you’re like, I. Stop that right now. We are not doing that moving forward. That was such a gimmick. Go away. You watched a Tik TOK video where this thing works. It’s not going to work anymore.

Lauren: Like what is the thing that you have seen a lot of brands ask you about or that current or past clients were doing that you’re like, Nope, this is not going to continue moving forward.

Eddie: Yeah, I think it’s really just media buying hacks. I’ll put it in like a whole category. So like, they’ll hear someone who’s supposedly spends a lot of money on ads somewhere say like, Oh, if you like. Click this button and run this ad this way specifically and blah, blah, blah.

Eddie: Then, you’re going to absolutely blow it out the water and that’s all you really need to change this whole account. honestly, I’ll tell you like my most successful accounts that spend the most money with the most return on ad spend. Have the simplest media buying structures with the best ads and copy and angles and funnels and so many people look at the ads as if they’re like the thing that runs the whole business when it’s really just like The area where they transact.

Eddie: So like the landing page, let’s call it for, you know, marketing sake, like the landing page is much more important than the traffic and the content on the traffic is much more important than the buttons that are being pressed in the traffic. And so, like, even internally, like when we go to solve an account that maybe is underperforming.

Eddie: My media bars will be like, Oh, I’m going to do a cost cap structure and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, okay, cool. How about you just duplicate that? You do that for you and duplicate it for me and change this headline to this and add this at the beginning of this video ad and tell me who wins and I’ll crush the results.

Eddie: because I think we’re in a world where like, Facebook and Google algorithms, TikTok algorithms, like they’re getting really good. AI is getting integrated into them, whether we are told that or not. and they’re just going to continually improve to find the right buyer pool based on previous data.

Eddie: And it’s our job just to have The highest level copy messaging, creative, whatever it is, because that is going to be the highest leverage thing compared to like trying to really refine more technical button clicking side of things. I just don’t think that’s going to be as high of a leverage activity as it has been, for the last 10 years.

Eddie: So I think I think that’s probably my biggest thing that I like, like, even now, a client saw a video he said make this change i’m like we just got a 12x return last week Why would I change anything? Oh this video from this guy said that i’m like that guy learns from me like yeah, there’s a lot of opinions out there of things but I just think we’re moving in a direction where those assets are going to be more valuable than the technology necessarily.

Lauren: Interesting. So the assets will be more valuable than the technology. I hear you when, you said, talk about earlier about like the trust inflation and then you just have this when a client is like, this is what I’ve seen. This is what I want. It’s like an affiliate or an influencer. And their space, because a lot of clients are intermediate marketers.

Lauren: Like they know enough about it. And if you’re listening to this podcast and you own a brand yourself, like, you know enough about marketing, so you can hold your agency and your marketing teams accountable to the results you’re looking for, but it can be like those hacks and those viral videos where this works really well for me. For me, I get so annoyed because I’m like, there’s not an entire picture here. How much money did they spend? How much profit did they have? This blew up in one category, but look at the window you’re looking at. That says 2020. That was a pandemic year. Those numbers are not the same. We need to back this up.

Lauren: Like I feel granted, we’re coming off of the election and it’s just been a fact checking kind of space anyways. But a lot of those hacks that come forward or come from conversations, I’m like, yes, we can absolutely test it. Always be testing. Don’t get me wrong. wrong, but let’s have fair and realistic expectations because what one person said may not necessarily be true because a thousand and a half other factors that can go into it, but it sure made them popular for that instant real.

Eddie: That’s for sure. I’ll tell you the political reels right now are very popular. I am, I am not shy to say I am taking advantage of. The viewership. I never talk politics, but I’m like, it’s working right now. So I’ll talk about him for a little bit

Lauren: Well, I think that’s a really important part for a lot of people listening for 2025. At least I can say that what we have found working in 2024 that we want to continue and caring is how do we disrupt an existing conversation by inserting a brand or a story. And so you’ve been doing that really well.

Lauren: With politics and where you’re intersecting a trending conversation and leveraging it in a way that fits your brand, whether you’re a Trump fan or not, that’s not the point you’re leveraging, his slogan and applying it to marketing so that you can interrupt the feet of what people are already consuming.

Lauren: So I think that’s really important. I mean, you’re talking about like doubling down on content, creating quality content with AI. There are so many tools that enable you to make content. So quickly and so cost effectively, but what I’ve at least seen in 2024 that I don’t want to continue in 2025 is the devaluation of quality because when you’re using AI, you’re using lots of tools, you’re creating more a lower quality and you’re just, you’re doing a spray and pray and playing a volume game and forgive me on this Eddie, but this is how I assume men date on Tinder apps.

Lauren: It’s just a volume. I’m swiping on everything. Copy, pasting, copy, pasting, copy, pasting. and I can’t imagine that. Most of those individuals find love, maybe what they’re looking for, they’ll find, ’cause it’s a volume game. But if you’re trying to like, build a relationship with the brand and get customer loyalty, that personalization, that quality is gonna be a stronger play.

Eddie: Yeah, no 100 percent I mean I agree with you on all aspects of it I’m interested to see where I does take us though because I mean I can’t afford to be obsessed with it If I was like jobless and didn’t have a massive company to run then I would probably be obsessing with AI and I Going crazy over it, but, I don’t have that blessing.

Eddie: So, I put myself in like the early adopter phase, but not in the, like, whatever comes before that. but

Lauren: Mm. Yeah. The, super fanatics, the ones that are gonna break the systems and

Eddie: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like I’m going to learn from someone else. I’m not going to be the one paving the way by any means on that side. but I, can already tell like creatives are going to be the thing. That has the biggest leverage from the marketing side, at least short term. And a lot of people creatively are going to be out of jobs or going to have to find ways to use AI to output 10 X, what they currently are in order to keep their jobs.

Lauren: When you say 10 X, for me, when I agree with you, 100 percent like AI inserted into the marketplace for marketing has been amazing, but also hard for a lot of businesses. I can only speak to what we’ve done at Marmos Media. We use AI. We’ve been using Jasper for years. We’ve been using Surfer SEO. And by years, I mean, Jasper has been around for like three years.

Lauren: That’s not actually a long time that an AI software has been around, but we have been using it so that we can produce higher amount While maintaining quality at the same price that it would have taken us to do before so we’ve become more efficient But there’s definitely a like the 10x piece where we have found ourselves and Others that aren’t leveraging AI that 10x.

Lauren: It’s just it’s a growing delta because we can maintain great for a good price You And you don’t have that same dichotomy and I bet you that’s gonna be true too for creators in that 10x where you can definitely 10x in terms of quantity all day long, but the 10x in terms of quality when you have that creative conversion based mindset and you’re, if you’re an existing good creator and you leverage AI, you become a great creator, but if you’re bad and you leverage AI, you.

Lauren: Lowercase b,

Eddie: Just making sure,

Lauren: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you’re a lowercase b awful creator and you leverage AI, you’re just amplifying awful

Eddie: Agreed. Yeah. And it’s,

Lauren: volume, not quality.

Eddie: And again, it’s like conversational, right? Like you’re feeding it the inputs that are going to require the outputs. And if you suck, then it’s going to just give you stuff that you like, which usually sucks. So, I love where it’s moving though, towards like us, at least commercially being able to like read spreadsheets at scale and data at scale and contracts at scale and all these other things.

Eddie: I think that’s going to be massive. I think it’s definitely going to hurt. Lawyers who are billing 400 bucks an hour to read a document thousand bucks an hour to read a document you know, they’re kind of all negligent. Now I can read 100 page document in 16 seconds. So, I’m really that’s what I’m most excited for on the side because, from a productivity standpoint, I could probably run.

Eddie: 10 times more businesses with the same amount of time just from being able to process information significantly faster and being able to make decisions based on it. So it’s really cool. We’ll see a year from now where we’re at, but it’s growing exponentially though. Super excited.

Lauren: Okay, so, in closing thoughts and, final ideas of coming into the end of the year, your new Black Friday being January. is there anything right now that you feel is missing from marketing toolkits and from technology has not yet developed to the way or like, what are those like crystal ball predictions are like, I just wish this resource was made possible to make your job and your campaigns that you’re running more successful.

Lauren: Do you have anything?

Eddie: Yeah. So there’s something that I’ve been talking about since I was in university, like back in 2012 ish. and I’m starting to see it a little bit. so basically what I, what I was thinking back in those days, I was, this is exactly the situation I was sitting on my couch in my like dorm, like, central living room area.

Eddie: And my roommates were there and like a Domino’s ad popped up and we’re watching, like, I think we were watching like Wimbledon or something, some tennis tournament and, Domino’s ad popped up and I was like, How, lame is it I can’t just, like, turn this into a transaction by, like, clicking yes on my remote?

Eddie: how come it doesn’t connect to my phone directly to just open the Domino’s app or website on my phone by me clicking on it? And then, now this year, Amazon Prime came out with that feature. when you run ads on Amazon prime, if you’re connected to Amazon of some sort, you can basically click like down on your TV and it’ll basically open it on your phone, to where that product is on Amazon or some sort of Amazon hosted site.

Eddie: And so I’m really excited to see where that goes, because I think that is what’s missing because now you’re turning. Television into such a lower friction source of click. And if we can turn mass media like television, Netflix, streaming services, et cetera, into like more clicks rather than impressions.

Eddie: Cause like the click through rate on those ads are so low because you’re not really clicking anything. You have to like go type in a website, scanning QR code, whatever it is. Right. but if I could just like, Next to me and something because I’m like, that looks sick. And like even just downshift and they’re down, press and like save it to my phone as a bookmark.

Eddie: I think techno, I mean, man, from a marketing standpoint that opens up so many doors, so much more. Advertising so much more data that we have in those spaces to on those consumers and their households that now we can like advertise using. So, that’s something that I’ve gotten a taste of a little bit through Amazon, but it’s only on Amazon.

Eddie: Like if you watch the ads and they’re like Papa John’s at, it’s never going to have it because it’s not on Amazon, obviously. but I’m excited for that to become a mass adoption type situation where it’s We can connect our devices via the Wi Fi in the house or wherever we’re at and take a call to action From our phone or from our remote to our phone from seeing that on TV.

Eddie: I

Lauren: I mean, there’s no one that’s watching TV without their phone in their hand, and we know that people are like, look, I mean, Amazon has it where you have x ray and because you’re like, Oh, what do I recognize this actor from? And it’s just allowing you to dive deeper into the content you’re consuming.

Lauren: And further into that is you might be watching something like, I love the jacket she’s wearing. Where do I get that with Google image, like you can scan a picture of anything, and then it will pull up the Google shopping feed to give you a Something similar, but it does require extra steps. It’s not a single button click.

Lauren: and it doesn’t give you that frictionless buying experience. And even further is imagine if that becomes personalized, where you already have a history of buying books that are referenced in specific TV shows you like watching, and then you can have like a small pop up want to add this to your Goodreads list, want to add this to your cart, things of that nature.

Lauren: So that all you have to do is like with your AirPods, you can shake your head. Yes. If that’s how you’re listening and then it’s already taking that transaction step, but I do, I don’t know if you remember this, there was a Super Bowl ad and I want to say it was Domino’s that did it where they had in the ad where it was like, Hey, insert the name of the apple.

Lauren: human voice that if I say it right now, she’s going to start talking to me. Hey, uh, order me Domino’s pizza.

Eddie: Yeah

Lauren: And so they had tried to take it where they could use the internet of things and different devices from TV to force it. And it was just like, wait, I didn’t order that. Hold on. She’s listening to the wrong

Eddie: so funny.

Lauren: Yeah.

Eddie: so funny. I feel like I remember hearing that Uh,

Lauren: to say it was Domino’s, but it was definitely a, maybe it was a Papa John’s or Little Caesars, but there was a pizza brand. Anyone that’s listening to this, if you remember that or find that exact commercial, like please go to the Telegram group, pretzeltraffic forward slash pretzeltraffic. com forward slash Telegram and please send it to me because I was like, oh my gosh, it was brilliant.

Lauren: But the lawsuit side of it ended up getting more earned media because. It was an intrusion to their listening devices, but there was no precedent or law that said you couldn’t do it.

Eddie: that’s crazy.

Lauren: Yeah.

Eddie: I can’t believe like that wasn’t even thought of as a consequence.

Lauren: Well, look, when there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s always a way to hack or, leverage emerging technologies, because usually the people that are designing the technology aren’t the evil geniuses of how they can leverage it for their specific use case. Well, Eddie, thank you so much for jumping in and helping me like riff, like agency owner to agency owner, like what you think is going. Obviously you have such a successful lead bad. Marketing company, capital B. but I think a lot of listeners are super lucky to hear your insight because of the number of accounts and clients you’ve had the chance to work with and work on, if anyone that’s listening, wants to further connect with you, where can they best find you?

Eddie: yeah, so, uh, Instagram, just my first and last name, Eddie Maloof or YouTube first and last name. YouTube is more long form, like very in depth, kind of high IQ ish content. Instagrams, bits and pieces of that other stuff with some nice cars. Fun stuff. So, I run all my social stuff on Instagram.

Eddie: So if you DM me, it’s, me answering, not a appointment center or a robot. So feel free to reach out if you guys have any questions or anything I can help with.

Lauren: Cool. That’s Malouf. M a L O U F Eddie. Thank you so, so much for joining and for all of us that listening. I hope you got just as much value as I got out to it. And, Wishing everyone, your clients, your brands, very happy Q4 and a even more momentous Q1.

Eddie: Love it. Same to you, Lauren. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Appreciate it.

Lauren: See ya!

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