Sam Tomlinson Podcast Transcript
Sam Tomlinson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the digital executive today’s guest is Sam Tomlinson with a background spanning business data and finance. Sam Tomlinson is a radically different kind of marketer. One with a singular focus of making businesses better. This background combined with a unique combination of analytic skills, performance, marketing expertise, and deep understanding of the brand, allow him to challenge the status quo, see hidden opportunities, develop novel strategies, and build scalable systems to capitalize on those opportunities.
In his role as executive vice president, Sam leads. Warschawski’s award winning digital and analytics teams in the development, execution, and optimization of integrated digital campaigns and measurement strategies. Sam has established a data driven culture throughout the agency while delivering exceptional bottom line growth for clients through the fusion of innovative digital strategies with robust multi channel marketing campaigns.
Well, good afternoon, Sam. Welcome to the show.
Sam Tomlinson: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Glad to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time. We’re just an hour apart today, Baltimore to Kansas City. Just, uh, well, probably a three hour flight, but I appreciate you making the time and dealing with the time zone change and so forth.
Sam, jumping into your first question here. How has your background in finance and data analytics influenced your approach to performance marketing and brand strategy?
Sam Tomlinson: So I think, I mean, I did five years, almost six years in finance, uh, primarily in real estate. And a lot of what you do there is you’re working on spreadsheets and you’re, you’re adding up a lot of things, right?
You’re trying to figure out the right way to make, to make a deal work so that everybody’s happy. And. A lot of marketing when I came to it, a lot of marketers have always been allergic to numbers. I mean, obviously we’re, they’re getting better at that, but you know, having that ability to go into a spreadsheet or to really look at what you’re adding up and to understand, okay, well, what, what’s going to move the needle for a client, what’s possible in the platform.
And what levers can we pull as a marketer, as an agency, as an advisor to a brand to say, okay, here’s how you can go from where you currently are to where you want to be. And here’s the numerical roof to back it up. Here’s the financial data that shows you that this marketing isn’t just working in the amorphous sense that a lot of marketers do, but to say, actually, no, no, no, no, no.
Here’s your P and L. And here’s the markets where we tested this. And here’s the change, right? Here’s how this marketing is actually helping you and driving not just more sales, but more profitable growth. And for a lot of our clients, that’s been a missing piece. So being able to actually, you know, use that background and use all the time that you spend in Excel to help those clients see the real benefits, I think is great.
And I’m, I’m so delighted that, you know, we work for a lot of e commerce brands and that’s finally coming to the forefront. I’m really happy to see that, you know, marketing is finally getting the right cool seat at the table that I think it’s deserved for a long time, but never been able to articulate a case for.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And they always say the magic is behind the data. You make data driven decisions, and I’m glad that you shared. Your past experience has melded beautifully as you came into the marketing space. So I do appreciate that. And Sam, at Warschawski, you’ve established a data driven culture.
What steps did you take to foster this environment? And how has it impacted client outcomes?
Sam Tomlinson: It’s been a long journey. So I’ve been at Warschawski for over 10 years now. But when I came in, it was just me and it was like, okay, let’s figure out how to do this thing. But then over the years, I think we first started with, okay, let’s hire a few people who have a similar background, have similar skill sets.
And we did that right. But then after that, it was, you know, constant result of asking, well, why did you do that? What did you use to make that choice? And then for a lot of time, we’d hear from internal and external people as well. Kind of felt right, like, okay, well, do we have a case that we could make for this?
And if the answer was yes, then it was great. Like, how do we make that data more available to you? So that hiring a few people who did the digital marketing and analytics, then turned into let’s hire a data scientist. And let’s do that really early before most agencies were doing it, because we saw huge value in data.
And then it was, hey, we should really have the ability to collect different kinds of data. So then we started getting our team trained in things like Tag Manager. Right when it came out, we started being able to access more and more data and started to not just use that data, but also condition people on art across the team.
The agency really to say, Hey, like, it would be great if we could get this piece of data so that we could get this result, or we could get this outcome, or we can share this with the client. And I think it was a constant battle towards finding, I want to say battle battle feels bad, but it was a constant evolutionary process.
We’ll call it. to get everybody to say like, Hey, I don’t have to just go on gut instinct anymore. I can ask for data and we can find data and we can use that data to make better decisions and we can make those better decisions faster. And it turned into a virtuous circle because everybody on our team started to see the value of, Hey, I don’t have to just pitch this idea to a client.
I can go to the client with data that says, Hey, when we tested this angle, the results were X. So we want to expand on this angle. Or we want to use this angle for a new audience. Or we want to try this, a variant of this for the new product you’re bringing to market. And clients responded much more positively to that.
I think for pretty clear and obvious reasons. And it just turned into this virtuous cycle where, you know, everybody on our team now doesn’t just ask for data, but they expect to get data and they expect to be using it. It’s a little different than most agencies, but I think it’s turned into something where we demonstrated value and showed people how it could be helpful and help them do their jobs better and help their clients get better results.
And they’re just, they’re delighted.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I really appreciate that. You know, you’ve been there quite a while. You’ve obviously had some foresight, some vision to see that data can make right decisions, strategic decisions for Warschawski, but also you brought a lot of value to your clients, which is great.
And I just love that amazing culture around data, which is awesome. Sam, next question I have for you, if maybe you could discuss a novel strategy you’ve developed that successfully combined analytics with performance marketing to drive business growth.
Sam Tomlinson: Sure. There’s been a lot of those. I think there’s a few favorites for a fitness company that we worked with.
We had some insight into their life cycle marketing. They were doing a lot of generic re engagement emails to their, to their membership as a connected fitness company. And the challenge they were facing is basically they were sending out more and more and more emails, but the revenue attributed to those emails kept going down.
The engagement on those emails kept going down, and they couldn’t figure out the right mix to get people back into classes, back into subscriptions, etc. And what we started to do was look at their data, what they had available. We started to append some of that data, not just to like their subscriber data, but also append their product data.
What people have used before, what pieces of equipment they’ve reported that they have, gender, et cetera. And we started to say, you know what? There’s a better way to do this. Let’s test what happens if we don’t just show somebody a generic listing of, for instance, classes, we show them a specific set of classes, only classes that number one are primarily geared towards.
No, their gender and their workout goals. So if you’re looking to lose weight, you know, obviously, that’s a that’s a certain type of class. If you’re looking to build muscle, that’s a different type of course, right? Let’s do that. And then let’s look at the equipment that you have. And let’s only show you classes that use that equipment so that you’re not seeing a class for an exercise, a connected bike if you don’t have a connected bike.
Let’s try that. And we ended up creating this whole matrix of signals and then creating custom emails that ended up only pulling in the right set of classes for each little each kind of quadrant in this matrix for a little area of this matrix. And we started sending that out, right? Very rudimentary to start, but got more and more complex.
But what we started to see is that the engagement rate started to spike up. Sales went up almost 60 percent as a result of just thinking like, hey, we’ve got more data. We can make these emails more relevant. We can make these SMS communications more relevant. And we can get people and show them only a set of things that they would be super high probability to use.
And then you take that same strategy and you flip it on the other side and you say, well, hey, we can cross sell these people. Now, if I know you have a bike and connected freeweights, amazing. Well, I can sell you a rower and I can show you the benefits of that because I know your goals, weight loss. And rowing is actually a really fantastic both strength building and weight loss exercise.
So I can now say, Hey, you can take your workouts to the next level. You can get to your goal faster by adding this to your home gym. So it turned into a really interesting connected strategy where you combine. The data that we have in some novel ways we weren’t doing pair that with creative that adjusts to the person.
So, for instance, if you’re a female, you see only females, right? If you have a bike, you see a bike in the imagery. You see only bikes in the classes. And then you then pair that again with some knowledge about the person’s goal and objective and then starting to use that goal to motivate them to take further action.
That was a fun one. You know, we’ve also done a lot of cool things. You know, for instance, with a client in Gore Tex, we did stuff around the weather because people tended to be shopping for things like boots and umbrellas and Gore Tex products. When it was raining, so we triggered ads to only run when it was raining in places where it was raining using weather data from dark sky, which was a pretty cool thing.
Unfortunately, dark sky shut down, but that’s a very interesting thing. We still do that with some search ads. Actually, it’s an interesting way to combine some real world data with some ad account data to give people a more relevant tailored experience.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I love how you can take, again, all that data, you know, you talked about the fitness space, right?
You had all the demographics, what equipment people had or may not had, what they wanted, what were their goals, and bringing that probability or likelihood that you could sell them a new piece of equipment that would align with their goals. I think that’s really cool. So thank you for sharing those examples.
And Sam, the last question of the day I have is, given your experience and current trends, Where do you see the future of digital marketing heading and how can businesses prepare for these changes?
Sam Tomlinson: I think we’re, we’re starting to see some glimpses of the future. You know, I think there’s a few things that are really interesting and exciting.
You know, the one that I have harped on for a long time is I think. AI is going to do some revolutionary things, but it’s going to enable some revolutionary things in, in the search landscape and in the task accomplishment landscape, I started to get some, some previews from some industry colleagues about what ads in LLM responses like a chat GPT or a Claude or, or a Gemini response could look like and what they could do.
And I think those are going to be revolutionary when they come out because the utility of the ad just skyrockets. In the sense that, you know, typically today, right? You see an ad on Instagram or Google or Microsoft or whatever you see, right? You click on it, you go to a landing page, you maybe skim the landing page, and you have to add it to a cart or complete a form, and then you have to wait for either a schedule or for it to be shipped, et cetera, right?
When you see these LLM ads, these things are agent powered ads. So now you’ve, you eliminate so much of that step because in the actual LLM response, you get the full landing page, you get the relevant sales pitch created for you. And now when you press buy, there’s a workflow on the back end that can very easily take that.
Okay. Yeah. That sounds like the right solution for me and immediately handle everything else that happens afterwards. And you just get a confirmation email. So the value of that ad is exponentially higher because the risk profile is dramatically lower. Right? Like you’re, it saves you time, you get the results you want, and the brand doesn’t have to worry about what was my landing page good, was the creative good, did they read enough, did they, right?
It’s done for you. So I think that utility is going to skyrocket. The second thing I think is going to be very popular is, as crazy as it sounds, I think a new era of PR is going to be upon us pretty soon. Which is, as a digital marketer, is something that I didn’t think I would say, but when you look at an increasingly fractured media landscape, right, and I’m sure we all, we all saw this, a great example was the election that just happened a few months ago, but I mean, the most, the most consequential event of that election wasn’t, wasn’t an interview.
It wasn’t a debate. It wasn’t a rally. It was an interview with a, with a guy who was a comedian slash whatever else Joe Rogan was, right? Like, that’s where millions of people get their information. And we saw the same thing with Kamala Harris in Call Her Daddy. You saw the same thing with millions of people.
And like, like yourself, Brian, I mean, you’re a media outlet. You have a following. People come to you for information. This traditional paradigm of, okay, PR is only pitching to The media writ large has come to an end, but I think what we’re seeing in its place is an emergence that number one, a lot more people can be media.
That media is increasingly niched down and it’s increasingly done by people who actually have legitimate subject matter expertise on a variety of formats. And all of that content being created, we now have the LLMs, the ability to synthesize and understand at a much deeper level. So what you end up with is this world where.
Getting mentioned next to things and getting mentioned by this increasingly diverse group of influential people or influential outlets, podcasts, newsletters, standard websites, blogs, articles, et cetera, right? That’s what powers the results in AI overviews and those AI overviews are getting more and more powerful and more and more prevalent and more and more useful.
So the question becomes then, well, how do you get there? And the answer is PR. It’s just a new kind of PR. I think we’re going to see an emergence of the brands that understand the intersection between traditional public relations and how to pitch somebody or how to pitch a story and how to make it really appealing.
And the agencies and the marketers who understand, okay, this is how generative AI optimization functions. This is how these LLMs work. This is what they look for. And if you can marry those two things together, I think you’re gonna be well positioned for, for success in the long run. And obviously the cherry on top of that is, is of course social media, right?
That’s not going anywhere. So I think you’re seeing an increase in content creation. You’re seeing an increase in social media usage, social media usage among, for instance, Gen X is way up. I’m sorry, Gen Z way up. I always get those two mixed up. So I’m a millennial. I shouldn’t, but here we are. So you end up in this world where I think we’re an increasingly online media environment, increasingly diverse media environment.
And then the answer is, well, the person who figures out the groups who figure out, okay. In order to get here, I need to do this, they’re gonna have a great time because like I said, the utility that LLMs enable is massive. It’s something that marketers have never had before. So I think we’re poised for a new golden age of marketing.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you for the insights, sharing those examples. I definitely think AI is definitely the future. I think we need to have a lot more ethics around it. But it is bringing in your example around the marketing. It brings it all together, can bring it to the landing page, the backend, logistics, et cetera, definitely brings more value in high utility.
But I like what you talked about. You know, you mentioned the election. You’re absolutely right. People are looking for messages that resonate with them, but also they’re looking for the truth. They want to change. They want to find, gosh, I can’t keep watching mainstream. I’m not getting what I want. Let me go do some exploration.
So I appreciate those insights. I really do. And Sam, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sam Tomlinson: Thank you, Brian, for having me. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sam Tomlinson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
