Meet Your New Co-Hosts: Season 2 is Finally Here! – S2E1

Travis Ketchum 0:01
There’s all these different facets that I think every business either overlaps with already, or could very easily plug into their existing system to give them a multiplier effect.

Chris Bruno 0:12
Welcome to the all about digital marketing podcast, the show that dives into the best strategies, tactics and tools for entrepreneurs and marketers looking to exponentially increase their results online. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the all about digital marketing podcast Finally, for a season two, yeah, that’s right. Most of you have probably forgotten who I am. I’m Chris Bruno. And I’m now the co host of this podcast. It’s been about 18 months since we finished off season one, although we probably didn’t acknowledge the fact that we finished season one. But today, I’m really excited. As we launch season two, I get to introduce you to my co host, Travis Ketchum, who’s here with me today, Travis, why don’t you say hi to everybody,

Travis Ketchum 0:54
everyone. It’s great to be here. Happy to see your podcast, getting some legs back under. It’s been quite a while since I was a guest. So I’m super excited to be here as a co host,

Chris Bruno 1:03
you were a guest, I think was back in October 2019, which feels quite some time ago, but also feels quite recent COVID has really missed those times up for us. But more importantly, it’s almost 10 years, give or take to the day that we first met in San Francisco for the LAUNCH Festival. Thanks to Jason Calacanis,

Travis Ketchum 1:24
the site will be different than the fire festival.

Chris Bruno 1:28
Nothing like the firefighter. Actually, there was some people that we met that weekend, if I remember correctly, that could have been at the fire festival quite

Travis Ketchum 1:35
easily. Or we could have been promoters for the fire festival, I

Chris Bruno 1:38
think for sure. But listen, it’s absolutely great to have you here. I’m really excited about this. So the show is getting a bit of a revamp, we’re going to have some different style of content, the two of us are going to be talking about certain different topics to do with digital marketing, I know that you’ve already started interviewing a few other people as well, which is going to be great. And I’m gonna be doing a few interviews as well. But we’re also going to be looking at some educational content and some video content to try and help people out as well. So before we jump into all of that, and we talk a little bit more about our plans, Travis, you want to give everyone a quick update or a little introduction, I should say about who you are, what you’re currently doing. And just let everyone know a bit about yourself.

Travis Ketchum 2:15
Sure. So my name is Travis Ketchum. And I sort of got my start in software by building a platform called contest domination, which recently got acquired in the second half of last year. And you know, had over 20,000 users and to generate it helped people build viral contests and, and that was pretty awesome. Generate over 30 million options, which is kind of wild to think about for something that was kind of a little, you know, Test Case Study kind of thing started as a WordPress plugin, turned into a SAS and, and then actually gets acquired as kind of a cool arc. But for the last few years, and and now my main focus is actually building an email marketing automation tool called campaign refinery, I’m sure you’ve been hearing it on little AD, AD rolls for, for the podcasts because you know that everyone who listens to all of our digital marketing is smarter than your average bear. So we want to make sure we got in front of those, those people. But we were doing interesting things over the email world trying to help people get their email to actually inbox. So that, you know, the average customer between two and four acts as their opens and clicks. And so, you know, the fun part about this opportunity is not for it to be, you know, one long running ad for Campion refiner by any stretch of the imagination, but what it means is we get access to some really elite level doers, right people that are actually in the trenches doing stuff. And so, you know, bringing them into here and exposing other people and talking about really interesting marketing ideas and where the landscape was going. That was the cell for me to chat about where things are headed. So super excited about it.

Chris Bruno 3:47
Well, you’ve said it there as well, like, where things are going. And I think this is the it’s not even a million dollar question or a billion dollar question. It’s probably a trillion dollar question. Nobody knows for sure, obviously. But there are some huge topics that you and I are going to be digging into over the coming weeks months. And I’m looking forward to that massively. One of them that I know you and I probably offline have had many a conversation around, which is, and I’m sure everybody else listening to this has heard a lot about it as well. But this idea of how AI and from my point of view, generative AI is really playing a big part for marketers in general, and also for pretty much a lot of other people as well.

Travis Ketchum 4:23
Yeah, AI is really exciting times. And what makes it even more interesting from sort of an intellectual standpoint, to me, at least is that we often thought, or the I guess the common train of thought was that AI would first replace blue collar workers, right? But it would be like the, you know, manufacturing line, that would be the first to go. And well, you can ask all Elon, how that went his first attempt with building the model three, you know, the Dreadnought machine, the machine that builds the machine kind of thing, and there were a lot of pitfalls in there. And what’s actually turned out is that, you know, we thought that the raiders in the white collars would be the ones that would be the last to be hit. But the reality has actually been flipped on its head. And I think that’s what caught most people, myself included, by surprise, when this sort of took off, you know, Chad GPT, being by far the fastest to 100 million users, and seeing things like art, and some form of critical thinking, being the first to go at a mass scale has been surprising, exciting, scary for some. And so I think you and I can sort of talk about how we’re all navigating this together. And some of the pitfalls that we’re finding in our own workflows, as well as the exciting opportunities, you know, it’s like, it’s like everything, when you mentioned the computer was it was a lever, and I see AI as an extension of that lever, so that you can do more with less.

Chris Bruno 5:49
It’s definitely blowing people’s minds to see what’s actually happening. And you said it there, right. It’s the reversal of we thought, you know, everyone from factory workers to through to Amazon deliveries was all going to be automated, it was going to be AI, it was going to be drones, it was going to be whatever robots in factory man assembly line. And there

Travis Ketchum 6:10
is some of that to be fair, but it wasn’t, it didn’t become as ubiquitous as we expected before this next wave happened.

Chris Bruno 6:16
But it’s insane to see. So basically, anyway, I don’t know whether or not we go into this conversation because otherwise this, this was supposed to be the introduction to season two. And I feel like we’re gonna get dragged, warped, and ended up talking about this too much. And we won’t have anything to talk about in the actual episode. Listen, but the idea of this was really to say to everyone we are back, I’m really excited, because again, we are going to have these conversations just like that, between Travis and myself. And that’s going to be really exciting, we will probably also be bringing some other people into the fold to have those conversations with us with the two of us. And also at the same time, both of us are gonna be talking to some individuals along the way, when we feel that there’s a good exciting conversation to be had. And something that will bring some extra value to everyone here at the all about Digital Marketing podcast. But more importantly, Travis, I know that you’ve already recorded a couple of interviews. And I don’t know if you can give anyone any sneak peeks or any kind of information about what sort of stuff you’ve been talking about.

Travis Ketchum 7:14
Yeah. So there’s a handful of episodes that are recorded, that is just me in the guests that will sort of weave in here, but you have some amazingly talented and very savvy ad buyers, high ticket people, there’s just all these different facets that I think every business can either overlaps with already, or could very easily plug into their existing system to give them a multiplier effect. I’m always looking for people that are doing interesting things that will give me outsized leverage, right, you hear we use that reference really about like extending the lever, because those are the things that I always found, at least, when I’m building a business, be it Software Information, or even, you know, way back in the day doing my own agency, those are the things that were always most exciting, and give you a complete step change, right? Like a 5%. performance boost is great, a 5x performance boost. Now we’re talking right now, it’s exciting. Now if you get it half, right, you’re still gonna smoke your old results. And so there’s a handful people that across various different industries and skill sets that have already interviewed that you guys get to hear from that are amazingly well defined at their craft.

Chris Bruno 8:20
And I can’t wait to listen to those because I haven’t even had a chance to listen to them yet. So I’m looking forward to that. And there is one other thing as well, I’m going to be talking to a couple of people that are also working very similar to what I do for a living, but it’s fractional CMOS. So this is a fairly new concept. For some of you listening, you may have heard of this, some of you may not. But it’s all about the idea of how you can actually save money on terms of what you’re doing with a marketing team, whether or not you need that strategy, that high level cmo kind of position, or whether you actually just need people to help you execute. So it’s a really interesting space. We’re doing it mainly in the web three kind of thing. So blockchain projects, and FTS, all this kind of stuff that you’ve probably heard about, and maybe know a little bit about, or maybe you don’t, but we’re also gonna be talking to a couple of people who are doing this in completely different industries. And I think it’s a really interesting concept that’s happening more and more at the moment. So we’ll have those new episodes and like we said, I think our next one is definitely going to be around AI if you’re okay with that Jarvis.

Travis Ketchum 9:16
Yeah. I mean, that’s, it’s not just the most exciting because it’s what’s most exciting right now. But it has all the hallmarks, in my opinion of being as transformational in different ways. But as transformational as the iPhone moment was, because of its appeal to sort of the normies, right, like, my litmus test was I stuck Chad GBT in front of my parents, who, you know, my mom’s almost 70 And my dad turns 83 This summer, and they were immediately blown away by what it could do and they could immediately grasp the value. And that to me means we’re hanging on to a rocket ship and so hopefully we can all find out where it goes together.

Chris Bruno 9:55
I like that your litmus for things that have to do a tech or with your parents minds with my partner who He’s nowhere near that age and still 5050. I don’t know how impressed she was when I told her that. That’s how I wrote a poem. But that’s, that’s a conversation for a different day.

Travis Ketchum 10:10
When you use the poem in the in your card for Valentine’s, it takes some of the power out of it. So you know, maybe that was the first.

Chris Bruno 10:18
Before we sign off for this episode, as well, we are creating, obviously, with somebody like Travis on board. Now, as a co host, we are creating a brand new newsletter list. But we don’t want to talk about how we’re going to send you updates and let you know about what we’re doing. What we are going to talk about instead is Travis, we’re going to be giving everyone the opportunity to download our tech stack. Is that correct? Yeah.

Travis Ketchum 10:39
So you know, who wants to sign up for another newsletter, instead, we want to give you something that’s actually valuable. We get asked all the time, because you know, of course, we’ve got our core tools that are really visible everyone knows about. But you know, I talked about extending that lever and finding leverage in all aspects of your business. The amazing part is, tech can help you do that. So there’s a lot of interesting little tools and systems and automations, you know, that I use for my software business and Chris uses for, you know, for his business as well. And so we want to share with you guys basically just a direct, cliffnotes cheat sheet about what we use, why it’s useful and why we chose it over its competitors. And so you know, totally free of charge, check it out. So if you’re looking to do something similar to what we do, these are things that can really help you speed up the cycles and give yourself more leverage.

Chris Bruno 11:23
That’s it for today’s episode. Travis, thank you so much. I’m really looking forward to this. I think it’s gonna be absolutely awesome. Both of us having the opportunity to co host these episodes going forward.

Travis Ketchum 11:32
Absolutely nothing like talking shop with a good buddy.

Chris Bruno 11:36
After only 10 years of friendship, I think this will be a bit of an interesting next step in our relationship. Yeah, we’ll see where it goes. Thanks everyone for listening. And if you are watching this on YouTube, please do hit the subscribe button and give us a thumbs up. Leave any comments or any thoughts you might have down below in the comments. And we will see you in the next episode. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai