Marketing Metrics & Moxie: A Candid Conversation

Masters in Marketing Agency

Dive into a riveting session with Matt Butler Co-founder & CEO of Bonsai as he unpacks the world of precision marketing. This episode explores the intricate dance between analytics and agency success, from the struggles of justifying ad spending to leveraging first-party data—a candid look at what fuels motivation and discipline in business and beyond.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• SEO and web design referrals
• Leveraging first-party data
• Scaling up with Overstory
• Truth about incrementality in ads
• Building motivation and discipline

Resources:

• Bonsai
• DevNoodle
• The Book of Why

Connect with Matt Butler:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 34:02 - I would argue the ones, a lot of the people that have right to complain and don't end up being the most successful people that you meet typically. And I totally agree with you. I've always had this rule for myself of, you know, if you're gonna complain, either do something bad or shut your mouth, you know, like we don't have time for that.
  Alex: Yeah, 100%. You gotta look for the solutions right away. Like you spend your time complaining. It's just, I know Josh has this thing, he calls it stress-free shampoo. But you should basically, without going into, unless Josh, you want to, but you surround yourself with this like negative thought as you're complaining about the things and you just, you get into the cycle of consistently thinking about it instead of like, I gotta get out of this. What's the solution? Let's just focus on that.
  Josh: Yeah
  Matt: Failing is painful and a lot of people, like, I failed constantly, right? And it sucks. And you can put complaining on as a way to like, give yourself an excuse to not feel so bad about those failures
• 28:05 - Josh: Maybe we should have another podcast just called Fucking Motivation.
  Matt: Yeah, no, I do like, there's a, there's probably a market for that. No, I the way I would always feel about that is like, yeah, I mean, there'd be times when I would say I wouldn't try to go people into like, you know, razzing me or digging, digging me. But like, I do think I had a little bit more of a spark in the face of like, essentially that, you know, that you mentality as opposed to like, someone lavishing you with, you know, oh, you're great. Isn't this wonderful? Like, I didn't really, I never responded that well to like overarching phrase, but if you really wanted to get my gears going right, go ahead and, you know, like poke the bear a little bit, right? Like say like, yeah, no, you know what, you can't do it. Like I, I knew you couldn't do it right? Then it's like, all right, let's see about that. Right? Like there's, I think, I think that drives people in many ways. I think that's important too.
  Matt: And I think you need to call on that sometimes too, by the way. So like, there, your motivations and like the thing that will keep you disciplined and focused isn't the same every single day. And there's these periods that, you know, that might be something you need to tap into all the time, right? Like, if you're just like constantly acting like the world's against you
• 44:57 - That's totally true. We had a few pilot smaller clients maybe before them that were, let's just say that I'm not sure they were really paying clients, but we were teasing out like, well, what is it that we do? Like how do we help an organization understand its information and then build a growth strategy on top of that first party data? But yeah, I mean like that's how it got going. 2020 happened, the pandemic happened, we got into a great relationship helping ancestry kind of rethink how they wanted to orchestrate and measure their marketing success, which then led into like a whole slew of where we're at today around like having an actual solution and technology to do those things and more.
• 19:12 - Josh: The thing that like resonated internally for me though is like this idea of, I think sometimes people think of discipline and focus as being these sort of skills in a vacuum that you can, you know, oh, you need to have it, you can train it.
  Matt: It's just a matter of like powering up that discipline bar and then like, or you know, same thing with focus, right? And I think my big, maybe it isn't quite as straightforward as that. The discipline and focus comes when you have like a why behind it. Like a reason that you want something, right? And then there is that element of the belief, right? Like you speaking for myself, I tend to find that if there's something out there that I wanna achieve, if I tell someone about it, that's great. But by and large people don't, they're not necessarily not, no one's necessarily expecting success for you. And that doesn't comes across as really negative.
• 35:20 - To close out that stress-free shampoo theory, a lot of it is basically like, you know, the people that are really stress, they usually surround themselves with stress-free shampoo and stress-free poems and stress-free whatever. And all you're doing is surrounding yourself with the word stress, even though it says stress free. And I think what Alex was kind of getting at is complaining is the same thing where, you know, you start to complain and then you make it your personality, even though, you know, you don't want to keep complaining, but it becomes you and you post memes about it and you post, you think it's a silly little Instagram post, but you're really like making your personality.