November 25, 2025 • 29 mins
Jeff Greenfield is a three-time entrepreneur, advisor, and innovator with 30 years of experience driving growth at the intersection of marketing, measurement, and strategy. Today, he’s leading Provalytics, a privacy-centric, AI-driven attribution platform designed to solve marketing’s most pressing challenge: there is no single source of truth.
For CFOs and finance leaders, this isn’t just a marketing problem—it’s a business problem. Without reliable attribution, companies struggle with budget allocation, wasted media spend, and proving ROI. Jeff bridges the gap between marketing data and financial clarity.
CONTACT DETAILS
Email: jeff.greenfield@provalytics.com
Company: Provalytics
Website: https://provalytics.com
Social Media:
LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgreenfield/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/provalytics/
Remember to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss "Information That You Can Use." Share Just Minding My Business with your family, friends, and colleagues. Engage with us by leaving a review or comment on my Google Business Page. https://g.page/r/CVKSq-IsFaY9EBM/review Your support keeps this podcast going and growing.
Visit Just Minding My Business Media™ LLC at https://jmmbmediallc.com/ to learn how we can help you get more visibility on your products and services.
For CFOs and finance leaders, this isn’t just a marketing problem—it’s a business problem. Without reliable attribution, companies struggle with budget allocation, wasted media spend, and proving ROI. Jeff bridges the gap between marketing data and financial clarity.
CONTACT DETAILS
Email: jeff.greenfield@provalytics.com
Company: Provalytics
Website: https://provalytics.com
Social Media:
LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgreenfield/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/provalytics/
Remember to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss "Information That You Can Use." Share Just Minding My Business with your family, friends, and colleagues. Engage with us by leaving a review or comment on my Google Business Page. https://g.page/r/CVKSq-IsFaY9EBM/review Your support keeps this podcast going and growing.
Visit Just Minding My Business Media™ LLC at https://jmmbmediallc.com/ to learn how we can help you get more visibility on your products and services.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Speaker 1 (01:45):
Welcome to Just Mind in my Business Media. I hope
that you are having an amazing day and I am
so so excited to bring to you today Jeff Greenfield,
who is a three time entrepreneur, advisor, and innovator with
thirty years of experience driving growth at the intersection of marketing,
(02:10):
measurement and strategy. Today he's leading Probalytics, a privacy centric,
AI driven attribution platform designed to solve marketing's most present challenge.
There is no single source of truth. Wow, welcome Jeah.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Thank you so much. Ada. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Pleasure to have you. All Right, Well, let's jump right in.
So why marketing lacks a single source of truth? Let's
go there first.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Well, there's no single source of truth because we're spending
dollars at different places, and every time we spend money
out of different from place, they have an opinion on
how well it performed. Let me let me give you
a good example, because this kind of underscores at all.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
And this all comes.
Speaker 5 (03:10):
From this saying there's this famous quote in marketing, which
is half the money I spend as marketing is wasted.
The only problem is I don't know which half. And
that's something that has bothered marketers for years. So here
here's a great example. Let's say you created this incredible
new garden hose. It never leaks, it's the best garden hose.
(03:33):
Everyone loves it, and you decide you're going to start
running ads on Facebook, which would also be ads on Instagram.
You got this great video and then you got a
cool name for it, so you run ads on Google,
so if somebody is searching for it, they would find it.
So someone comes along, they're scrolling through their Facebook feed
and they start to take a look and they see it.
(03:55):
They pause for a second, but they don't click on
it or do anything.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
It just gets there.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
And then about a week or two later, they're going
through Instagram and they see the video again because you're
running ads there too, and you're actually showing ads to
people who like paused and noticed it, and they watched
the whole video. And this person says, my god, this
hose is great. When my hose starts to leak. I'm
gonna get this hose. So then about a month later,
(04:22):
they're out doing some gardening. They go to open their
hose up and it leaks, and they're like, my god,
I gotta get that hose. And they pull up their
phone and they're like they search for it in Google
and they click on the ad and they buy it. Okay,
so we know what happened. What happened is is that
it was the ad on Facebook that got their attention.
(04:43):
It was the ad on Instagram that really built their
awareness and got them to the point where they really
wanted to have it. And all the ad on Google
did was kind of just navigate them to your website
to buy. That's all that happened there. But here's what
happens is that if you're the marketer and you multiply
(05:03):
that like a thousand times over a month and you
have a thousand sales. At the end of the month,
Google is going to tell you that they got you
all those sales, and so is Facebook. So if you
add them both up, they're gonna tell you you had
two thousand sales, not a thousand sales. And then the
problem is is that if you're using something like a
(05:25):
Google Analytics for GA four, it's gonna tell you that
all those sales came from Google because that's the only
thing somebody clicked on. And so marketers are confused like, okay, well,
which one's correct? Is it Facebook or is it Google?
And what a lot of marketers do because they use
GA four is they say, Okay, Facebook's not working, I'm
gonna move all my money over to Google. But the
(05:47):
problem is the only reason you searched on Google is
because you saw the video on Instagram and the video
on Facebook. But what happens is if you cut your
spend on Facebook and Instagram, you're not going to notice
it right away because that whole journey that we talked
about was about a month and a half. It took
someone a month and a half to have that awareness
(06:07):
and attention and get them through there. So now that's
just a simple example, like if you owned if you
had this cool hose that you were selling. Now imagine
you're like a big company like some of our clients
that are spending and then tens to hundreds of millions
of dollars a year, and you're not just at Facebook,
Instagram and Google. You're also on connect to television, podcast,
(06:29):
advertising influencers, and every place you spend dollars has an
opinion on how well of a job they're doing because
they don't know about everybody else. And that's the problem
is that, and now multiply it even more. Is a marketer,
you want to get more money to spend, and when
(06:49):
you march into finance with all these numbers, they laugh
at you because your numbers don't even add up. And
that example, you only had a thousand sales, your Matt
says you had two thousand. So this is the problem
for today's modern marketer. There's more places to put our money,
but it makes the problem just so difficult.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I really like how you explained that, Oh, thank you,
and the hose was perfect because I scrolled on TikTok
and my hose busted, So now I need to buy
a new hose.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
I can definitely relate.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So what does your company do to help get rid
of the confusions.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Well, what we do is is that, as you said earlier,
we actually come in and we take in data from
all of these different places, but we don't trust their
math because we know their math is wrong. And so
what we do is we take in the reports on
what you actually did, how much money did you spend
each day, which ads ran, what was the name of
(07:58):
the campaign, and more importantly than anything else, more important
than clicks because most people don't click on ads anyway,
is how many ads did you show every day? Because
that is what you're actually doing when you spend dollars,
you're actually trying to get attention, and so the best
measure of that is how many ads were shown, And
(08:18):
we take all of that data from all of the
different places, and then we also take in how many
orders you had, what was your revenue that came in,
and any other things like if you're selling on some
of the marketplaces, like how many things did you have
in stock? How many different items did you have? Because
if you know someone, if you go into a clothing
(08:38):
store and you walk in and let's say you're a
size medium and you walk up and they've got no mediums,
well you're not going to buy anything. So availability of
product has a lot to do with this. So we
take all that in and we apply very sophisticated machine
learning and AI to figure out what we call the
incremental impact, meaning for all of those places that you're
(09:03):
spending dollars, how many sales did each one of those
bring in that you would have not received if it
wasn't for that particular ad. And that's what people want.
They want to know it because for a lot of businesses,
if they completely stopped advertising, their business wouldn't go away.
People are still talking about them. They've been around for
(09:25):
a long time. But there's a percentage of your sales
that comes from advertising, not all of it. If you're
brand new, of course.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
All of it.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
But if you've been around for a long time, sales
are going to come in anyway, and you may already
have existing customers. What folks are interested in is that
if I spend a dollar in this place, how many
sales is it going to generate for me? And what
is going to be my incremental revenue that's going to
come in. We calculate that and then we tell them
(09:55):
what works, what didn't work as well as you thought
it did, and then we provide recommendations on how to
move your money around so that you get more sales.
And that's what we do for them, and then this
becomes the new source of truth, if you will, for
the Organization for the marketers to use for finance to
(10:18):
use so that they can have honest conversations because the
numbers they all add up now, which is what people want.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yes, absolutely, Wow, you explain that so simply, Oh, thank you,
And I know the work behind it is tedious and
for most companies is even more tedious. So having your
company around definitely makes that part of life a whole
(10:46):
lot easier for sure. So if custom businesses want to
work with you, how do they connect?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
Well, the best play is to go to our website
probalytics dot com. They can also go to just make
it easy or get Prova. That's get p r o
va dot com. Prova is actually proof and Italian. And
what people want to know is, you know, I need
proof before I'm going to spend more money. I need
proof that this actually worked. And the best way is
(11:16):
to go there and uh and check us out there
to learn more.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Okay, So prior to that's going online, we were talking
a little bit about the companies that you serve, so
can you tell everyone which companies you serve?
Speaker 5 (11:32):
We work with great, great marketers. We tend to keep
our clients private by their request, So we have clients
that we work with day in and day out, but
for most of them, we tend to be like a
hidden secret if you will, uh and so, because they
trust us with their data and it's important for them
(11:55):
that we don't reveal any detail secrets about it. And
one of the those requirements is that we keep them quiet.
But I can tell you that we've worked with some
of the biggest names in the industry, such as the
JP Morgan's of the world, the US Banks of the world,
and so on and so forth. We've been in this
space since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Wow. Yeah, wow, So you are I know we talked
about CFOs and finance leaders. Yes, so tell us a
little bit about how you serve them.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
In your company. Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
Ida for them, you know, when they look at their
p and L every month, one of the biggest line
items in the p and L, besides headcount the number
of people that are working there is the marketing expense.
And the problem is is that it tends to be
a blind item for them. And the reason is because
for the data that marketing provides, it doesn't seem like
(12:52):
that there's any proper attribution that's being provided that they
know or that they actually believe the marketers know that
this actually of sales and there's definitely no incrementality behind us,
as we talked about before, So finance for years has
been wanting to get a handle on understanding what's actually
(13:12):
going on and where is the waste add in the
marketing because when you're a finance leader, what ends up
happening is is that you have to make sure the
numbers work every quarter, and sometimes that means as you're
progressing through the quarter, you need to cut some places,
but you don't want to cut any place that's going
to impact growth because in order to hit your number,
(13:36):
you have to have a certain amount of growth, but
you also have maybe have to have a certain amount
of profitability or ebada or something like that. And so
for them we come in do a similar service that
we do for marketers, but specifically it's more of a
marketing accountability audit where we come in and we look
at the trends that are going on with the data
analyze and let them know where are areas which are
(13:59):
not incremental, where are their dollars being spent, where those
dollars they could actually stop spending on and it would
not impact sales or any KPIs at all, and so
that lets them know these are areas where money can
be taken away from marketing and deployed elsewhere of the
overall organization. So that's the service that we provide marketing,
(14:21):
sorry for finance, to help them get a handle on
understanding what's actually happening on the marketing side of the house.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yes, yes, and that's critical, you know, to be able
to have that support as opposed to pulling your hair
out of time to.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Figure it out.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Absolutely absolutely, yes, yes, indeed.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
So let's talk a little bit about CTV Yes, okay,
and why channels like CTV, podcasts and retail media matter
but a notoriously hard to measure.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Well, the biggest thing is that since most marketers today
are focused on clicks, clicks are the big thing, and
the reason is is because they're easy to measure. You
can always tell that when someone came to your website,
you can count that click. But the problem is is
that most of the emerging marketing channels today don't have
(15:25):
any clicks.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Associated with them.
Speaker 5 (15:28):
A great example is podcast advertising. We're on a podcast
right now. There may be ads running in this I
don't know, but if there are people are listening, there's
nothing for them to click on. And even when you're
watching a podcast on YouTube, even though there's ads there
and people can click on it, most of YouTube today
is being watched on a big television.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
It's not a clickable thing.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
It's so most of that type of advertising is not clickbased,
and so that's podcast advertising connected television, which is also
like streaming as well, like Amazon Prime, Netflix, nothing to
click on. And then also you know old style billboards
they now called digital. They used to call it out
(16:12):
of home. They now call it digital out of home.
So you could put a billboard up, you know, it
used to be you had to have a billboard designed
and then you had to have them made and shipped out.
Remember they used to paste them up. Yes, Well, now
you could have that designed by someone in fiverr in
a couple of minutes and you could order up billboards
(16:33):
all over the country through a whole digital network of billboards,
and so all of a sudden, like within an hour,
you could show up on the highway someplace. But guess what,
there's nothing for anyone to click on now. I know
people put QR codes on billboards probably not a smart
thing because you don't want drivers like trying to QR
code a billboard at fifty five miles an hour.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Not not really good.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
So again, these are some of the largest growth areas
in marketing today and yet there's nothing to click on
and that makes them impossible for folks that are measuring
using GA four. That's why you need to have a
single source of truth that incorporates everything that looks at
what's driving the attention, which is those you know, how
(17:17):
many ads are out there and with out of home
like that, guess what they tell you how many cars
drive by every day. So you've got those numbers that
are readily available, and that's why those channels are difficult
to measure because they're not click based.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So you know what my next question is, how does
your company use that the data from those resources to
for measurements.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
Well, what we do is that we look at it's
all based on the understanding of how marketing works. So
as we talked about a minute ago with the click
most marketers today that have only done digital there haven't
been around, you know, before there was digital marketing. Their
belief is you invest dollars to buy clicks, and clicks
(18:08):
lead to sales. But the reality is you actually buy media,
You invest dollars to buy attention, and that attention you
do that attention to build awareness, and when awareness is
built up enough, people will walk into your store. And
if you store happens to be online, that's clicks, and
(18:31):
then that leads to sales. And so clicks are way
down at the bottom. So the way that we do
it is we're way at the top. We're focused on
that attention metric.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
And the way we do that is.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
We look at how many ads are you actually having
out there every single day. And oddly enough, this is
an old school metric. This is not anything like brand new.
What's new about it is how we're utilizing AI, machine
learning and super fast computers to deliver the data. That's
(19:05):
what's new about it. But the technique are the same
techniques that brands like BMW and Pepsi and Cokey used
to build their their big business machines over the last
sixty seventy years.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah, because before that it was computers. That's all we
had was Billbood and TV. That's right, And it just
so happened to ride by. If it's a brick and
mortar and see it.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
That's right exactly, Yes, yes, indeed.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
So let's go over the AI and how machine learning
provides probabilistic truth when the deterministic tracking base.
Speaker 6 (19:49):
Yeah, so this is a little bit on it. Yeah,
we did, but that's it. It's pretty exciting because it's
also kind of scary for a lot of marketers too,
because you know, it used to be before all these privacy.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
Changes, there was what we call a lot of signal,
meaning there was a lot of information you could get.
But now since the lockdowns, they've kind of reeled all
that in, so there's not as much signal. There's a
lot more noise that's out there, and so what we
have to do is there's a lot of gaps, and
(20:26):
so we use AI essentially to fill in those gaps
and to help us complete the math so we can
accurately figure out what's working and what's not working. And essentially,
the way it actually works is is it looks at
all of the data and it actually turns out that
(20:47):
most marketers don't know that they're running, unbeknownst to them,
thousands of little experiments every single day, because every day
you never buy the exact same number of ads. Things
change a little bit every day, but they're so small
that someone with the calculator couldn't figure it out. But
(21:07):
a super smart, super fast computer with some AI can
determine what's actually working from that. And that's really the
key and the secret behind it is that mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yes, but AI plays a significant role in every business now,
you know, whether it comes whether it's creativity, you know,
like you just said, you know, putting the pieces together,
animals and data. You know, it's a huge, huge tool.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
It's a tool that's emerging at a very fast paced
what's interesting that you'll find amazing items that I was
gonna call with a series of other industry folks probably
about a month or two ago, and we interviewed about
eight young people fourteen to sixteen years of age from
(22:05):
different parts of the US and also from different parts
of the world to find out how they were using AI.
And my other colleagues were asking questions like, you know,
how do you use it? Which engine do you use,
Perplexity or chat, GPT, how much you're using Google?
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Those were their questions.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
My question revolved around the question that most people are wondering,
which is most of us are saying, my god, this
stuff is moving so fast. I can barely keep up.
I asked them, does it feel like it's moving as
fast to you? And they all said no, that it
(22:45):
just felt like technology to them. And that's when I
realized that when we were sixteen, there was stuff that
was going on in our world, and technology obviously was
not as it's vance asta as it is now that
folks who were in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and
(23:06):
seventies were freaking out about that.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
To them, it was moving really fast.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
So it's all based upon your perspective and in terms
of how you look at it. But this is technology.
Technology is always continuously reinventing itself. But it doesn't it's
not really moving that fast. It just feels like it is,
(23:34):
just based upon where we're sitting.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
At m H. Absolutely absolutely, because for me, I'm a
tech person, so I view it differently than somebody else.
It's an opportunity to stream on my life in so
many different ways in the work that I do.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
That's the way I look at it exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
I embrace it, you know. At the same time, I
do realize that there are some dangers that you need
to be aware of.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Yeah, well it's like any tool, you know, anything that's good.
The reason we define it is good is because it
could also be a bad side to it. Yes, it's
like a car.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
Car is awesome.
Speaker 5 (24:23):
It helps us get someplace fast, faster than if we
walked or rode our.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
Bike or something.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
But the bad side is is we're not watch where
we're going. We may hurt ourselves or someone else.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
So in order for.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
Something to be positive, there has to be a downside.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
To it as well. And that's anything in life.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yes, the world works on negative and positive.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 5 (24:47):
Just like we only call it day because there's a nighttime.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
If it was no night, we wouldn't call it day.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Absolutely absolutely, Wow, this has been amazing. So yeah, one
other questions, So, if a company reaches out to you,
what are some of the I guess intake type questions
or processes that your company goes through.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
Yeah, so when we first start working with someone, we
find out who their different agencies are, what channels are
they advertising in, what are they spending on average each month,
and then we get connections to each of those platforms
and then kind of automatically suck in that data into
(25:35):
our platform. Some data you can't get automatic because it
comes from behind their pipelines and stuff like that, so
it gets delivered to us through a bunch of different
mechanisms so that we can get a.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Handle on it.
Speaker 5 (25:48):
That's usually the initial intakes or that, but that gets
the pipes running and that allows us to do the math.
But also at the same time, when folks come to us,
there's usually a series of questions or problems that they're facing,
and you know, with good organized data and the type
(26:08):
of output that we have, there's a thousand different problems
that we can solve, So we try to focus on
what is the number one thing that you're looking to
accomplish with this, So that's those are kind of the
big intakes for us.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
M Yes, and that's just what i'mking is companies like yours.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
It just takes the pressure off.
Speaker 5 (26:31):
Well, that's that's exactly right. You know, marketers tend to
be very creative people, and marketers went to school because
they want to like, they want to come up with
big ideas and they want to help clients move along.
And unfortunately, most marketers today are actually doing more math
(26:52):
than the finance people because they're trying to put these
numbers together that don't make any sense, and it's like
most of them are very frustrated because they're like, if
I'd known there was this much math in this, I
would have never gone in it. So our philosophy is,
let let our platform do the math. It's designed for that,
so that you can be more creative. That's really the
(27:15):
plan behind it. Let us let us do the heavy listing,
or let our let our platform do it for you.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yes, yes, and that sounds good to me because, yeah,
I try to take as much off my plate as possible.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
That's super smart and that's that AI can definitely help
with that.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Definitely.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh yeah, I basically know that.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I mean AI is my friend.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So again, how do businesses connect with you?
Speaker 5 (27:44):
They can go to getprova dot com that's g E
T P R o Va dot com. Or they can
also look me up on LinkedIn as well. Either one
works for us.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Okay, well, this is definitely you have dropped so many
gems today in such a short period of time. Is like,
I don't know what else says Yeah, because you've covered
everything that's important to the business owner to be able to,
(28:16):
you know, analyze where their marketing dollars are going.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
That's exactly right, and then also tell them how they
can take that same amount of money and squeeze more
return out of it. Which is is is you know
that those are the two functions as a marketer. One
is to report on what happened and then to report on, Hey,
this is what I'm gonna do with it, and this
is what I'm gonna get out of doing that. Yes, absolutely,
(28:43):
we've got it all covered for them.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yes, it sounds like you do, Jeff. So again, how
do businesses connect?
Speaker 5 (28:52):
All right, they're going to getprova dot com. That's g
et p r o va dot com, which means to
get proof or they can find us on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Oh okay, wow, this has been amazing, Jeff. You are
you brought it today?
Speaker 4 (29:08):
So we thank you for sure. Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Absolutely, and thank you audience. It's always for tuning in.
We appreciate you too. Thank you to our guests and
you our values audience.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Let's stop you by.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
We truly appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Many blessings to you and yours
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Speaker 1 (01:45):
Welcome to Just Mind in my Business Media. I hope
that you are having an amazing day and I am
so so excited to bring to you today Jeff Greenfield,
who is a three time entrepreneur, advisor, and innovator with
thirty years of experience driving growth at the intersection of marketing,
(02:10):
measurement and strategy. Today he's leading Probalytics, a privacy centric,
AI driven attribution platform designed to solve marketing's most present challenge.
There is no single source of truth. Wow, welcome Jeah.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Thank you so much. Ada. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Pleasure to have you. All Right, Well, let's jump right in.
So why marketing lacks a single source of truth? Let's
go there first.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Well, there's no single source of truth because we're spending
dollars at different places, and every time we spend money
out of different from place, they have an opinion on
how well it performed. Let me let me give you
a good example, because this kind of underscores at all.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
And this all comes.
Speaker 5 (03:10):
From this saying there's this famous quote in marketing, which
is half the money I spend as marketing is wasted.
The only problem is I don't know which half. And
that's something that has bothered marketers for years. So here
here's a great example. Let's say you created this incredible
new garden hose. It never leaks, it's the best garden hose.
(03:33):
Everyone loves it, and you decide you're going to start
running ads on Facebook, which would also be ads on Instagram.
You got this great video and then you got a
cool name for it, so you run ads on Google,
so if somebody is searching for it, they would find it.
So someone comes along, they're scrolling through their Facebook feed
and they start to take a look and they see it.
(03:55):
They pause for a second, but they don't click on
it or do anything.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
It just gets there.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
And then about a week or two later, they're going
through Instagram and they see the video again because you're
running ads there too, and you're actually showing ads to
people who like paused and noticed it, and they watched
the whole video. And this person says, my god, this
hose is great. When my hose starts to leak. I'm
gonna get this hose. So then about a month later,
(04:22):
they're out doing some gardening. They go to open their
hose up and it leaks, and they're like, my god,
I gotta get that hose. And they pull up their
phone and they're like they search for it in Google
and they click on the ad and they buy it. Okay,
so we know what happened. What happened is is that
it was the ad on Facebook that got their attention.
(04:43):
It was the ad on Instagram that really built their
awareness and got them to the point where they really
wanted to have it. And all the ad on Google
did was kind of just navigate them to your website
to buy. That's all that happened there. But here's what
happens is that if you're the marketer and you multiply
(05:03):
that like a thousand times over a month and you
have a thousand sales. At the end of the month,
Google is going to tell you that they got you
all those sales, and so is Facebook. So if you
add them both up, they're gonna tell you you had
two thousand sales, not a thousand sales. And then the
problem is is that if you're using something like a
(05:25):
Google Analytics for GA four, it's gonna tell you that
all those sales came from Google because that's the only
thing somebody clicked on. And so marketers are confused like, okay, well,
which one's correct? Is it Facebook or is it Google?
And what a lot of marketers do because they use
GA four is they say, Okay, Facebook's not working, I'm
gonna move all my money over to Google. But the
(05:47):
problem is the only reason you searched on Google is
because you saw the video on Instagram and the video
on Facebook. But what happens is if you cut your
spend on Facebook and Instagram, you're not going to notice
it right away because that whole journey that we talked
about was about a month and a half. It took
someone a month and a half to have that awareness
(06:07):
and attention and get them through there. So now that's
just a simple example, like if you owned if you
had this cool hose that you were selling. Now imagine
you're like a big company like some of our clients
that are spending and then tens to hundreds of millions
of dollars a year, and you're not just at Facebook,
Instagram and Google. You're also on connect to television, podcast,
(06:29):
advertising influencers, and every place you spend dollars has an
opinion on how well of a job they're doing because
they don't know about everybody else. And that's the problem
is that, and now multiply it even more. Is a marketer,
you want to get more money to spend, and when
(06:49):
you march into finance with all these numbers, they laugh
at you because your numbers don't even add up. And
that example, you only had a thousand sales, your Matt
says you had two thousand. So this is the problem
for today's modern marketer. There's more places to put our money,
but it makes the problem just so difficult.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I really like how you explained that, Oh, thank you,
and the hose was perfect because I scrolled on TikTok
and my hose busted, So now I need to buy
a new hose.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
I can definitely relate.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So what does your company do to help get rid
of the confusions.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Well, what we do is is that, as you said earlier,
we actually come in and we take in data from
all of these different places, but we don't trust their
math because we know their math is wrong. And so
what we do is we take in the reports on
what you actually did, how much money did you spend
each day, which ads ran, what was the name of
(07:58):
the campaign, and more importantly than anything else, more important
than clicks because most people don't click on ads anyway,
is how many ads did you show every day? Because
that is what you're actually doing when you spend dollars,
you're actually trying to get attention, and so the best
measure of that is how many ads were shown, And
(08:18):
we take all of that data from all of the
different places, and then we also take in how many
orders you had, what was your revenue that came in,
and any other things like if you're selling on some
of the marketplaces, like how many things did you have
in stock? How many different items did you have? Because
if you know someone, if you go into a clothing
(08:38):
store and you walk in and let's say you're a
size medium and you walk up and they've got no mediums,
well you're not going to buy anything. So availability of
product has a lot to do with this. So we
take all that in and we apply very sophisticated machine
learning and AI to figure out what we call the
incremental impact, meaning for all of those places that you're
(09:03):
spending dollars, how many sales did each one of those
bring in that you would have not received if it
wasn't for that particular ad. And that's what people want.
They want to know it because for a lot of businesses,
if they completely stopped advertising, their business wouldn't go away.
People are still talking about them. They've been around for
(09:25):
a long time. But there's a percentage of your sales
that comes from advertising, not all of it. If you're
brand new, of course.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
All of it.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
But if you've been around for a long time, sales
are going to come in anyway, and you may already
have existing customers. What folks are interested in is that
if I spend a dollar in this place, how many
sales is it going to generate for me? And what
is going to be my incremental revenue that's going to
come in. We calculate that and then we tell them
(09:55):
what works, what didn't work as well as you thought
it did, and then we provide recommendations on how to
move your money around so that you get more sales.
And that's what we do for them, and then this
becomes the new source of truth, if you will, for
the Organization for the marketers to use for finance to
(10:18):
use so that they can have honest conversations because the
numbers they all add up now, which is what people want.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yes, absolutely, Wow, you explain that so simply, Oh, thank you,
And I know the work behind it is tedious and
for most companies is even more tedious. So having your
company around definitely makes that part of life a whole
(10:46):
lot easier for sure. So if custom businesses want to
work with you, how do they connect?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
Well, the best play is to go to our website
probalytics dot com. They can also go to just make
it easy or get Prova. That's get p r o
va dot com. Prova is actually proof and Italian. And
what people want to know is, you know, I need
proof before I'm going to spend more money. I need
proof that this actually worked. And the best way is
(11:16):
to go there and uh and check us out there
to learn more.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Okay, So prior to that's going online, we were talking
a little bit about the companies that you serve, so
can you tell everyone which companies you serve?
Speaker 5 (11:32):
We work with great, great marketers. We tend to keep
our clients private by their request, So we have clients
that we work with day in and day out, but
for most of them, we tend to be like a
hidden secret if you will, uh and so, because they
trust us with their data and it's important for them
(11:55):
that we don't reveal any detail secrets about it. And
one of the those requirements is that we keep them quiet.
But I can tell you that we've worked with some
of the biggest names in the industry, such as the
JP Morgan's of the world, the US Banks of the world,
and so on and so forth. We've been in this
space since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Wow. Yeah, wow, So you are I know we talked
about CFOs and finance leaders. Yes, so tell us a
little bit about how you serve them.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
In your company. Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
Ida for them, you know, when they look at their
p and L every month, one of the biggest line
items in the p and L, besides headcount the number
of people that are working there is the marketing expense.
And the problem is is that it tends to be
a blind item for them. And the reason is because
for the data that marketing provides, it doesn't seem like
(12:52):
that there's any proper attribution that's being provided that they
know or that they actually believe the marketers know that
this actually of sales and there's definitely no incrementality behind us,
as we talked about before, So finance for years has
been wanting to get a handle on understanding what's actually
(13:12):
going on and where is the waste add in the
marketing because when you're a finance leader, what ends up
happening is is that you have to make sure the
numbers work every quarter, and sometimes that means as you're
progressing through the quarter, you need to cut some places,
but you don't want to cut any place that's going
to impact growth because in order to hit your number,
(13:36):
you have to have a certain amount of growth, but
you also have maybe have to have a certain amount
of profitability or ebada or something like that. And so
for them we come in do a similar service that
we do for marketers, but specifically it's more of a
marketing accountability audit where we come in and we look
at the trends that are going on with the data
analyze and let them know where are areas which are
(13:59):
not incremental, where are their dollars being spent, where those
dollars they could actually stop spending on and it would
not impact sales or any KPIs at all, and so
that lets them know these are areas where money can
be taken away from marketing and deployed elsewhere of the
overall organization. So that's the service that we provide marketing,
(14:21):
sorry for finance, to help them get a handle on
understanding what's actually happening on the marketing side of the house.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yes, yes, and that's critical, you know, to be able
to have that support as opposed to pulling your hair
out of time to.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Figure it out.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Absolutely absolutely, yes, yes, indeed.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
So let's talk a little bit about CTV Yes, okay,
and why channels like CTV, podcasts and retail media matter
but a notoriously hard to measure.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Well, the biggest thing is that since most marketers today
are focused on clicks, clicks are the big thing, and
the reason is is because they're easy to measure. You
can always tell that when someone came to your website,
you can count that click. But the problem is is
that most of the emerging marketing channels today don't have
(15:25):
any clicks.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Associated with them.
Speaker 5 (15:28):
A great example is podcast advertising. We're on a podcast
right now. There may be ads running in this I
don't know, but if there are people are listening, there's
nothing for them to click on. And even when you're
watching a podcast on YouTube, even though there's ads there
and people can click on it, most of YouTube today
is being watched on a big television.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
It's not a clickable thing.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
It's so most of that type of advertising is not clickbased,
and so that's podcast advertising connected television, which is also
like streaming as well, like Amazon Prime, Netflix, nothing to
click on. And then also you know old style billboards
they now called digital. They used to call it out
(16:12):
of home. They now call it digital out of home.
So you could put a billboard up, you know, it
used to be you had to have a billboard designed
and then you had to have them made and shipped out.
Remember they used to paste them up. Yes, Well, now
you could have that designed by someone in fiverr in
a couple of minutes and you could order up billboards
(16:33):
all over the country through a whole digital network of billboards,
and so all of a sudden, like within an hour,
you could show up on the highway someplace. But guess what,
there's nothing for anyone to click on now. I know
people put QR codes on billboards probably not a smart
thing because you don't want drivers like trying to QR
code a billboard at fifty five miles an hour.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Not not really good.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
So again, these are some of the largest growth areas
in marketing today and yet there's nothing to click on
and that makes them impossible for folks that are measuring
using GA four. That's why you need to have a
single source of truth that incorporates everything that looks at
what's driving the attention, which is those you know, how
(17:17):
many ads are out there and with out of home
like that, guess what they tell you how many cars
drive by every day. So you've got those numbers that
are readily available, and that's why those channels are difficult
to measure because they're not click based.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So you know what my next question is, how does
your company use that the data from those resources to
for measurements.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
Well, what we do is that we look at it's
all based on the understanding of how marketing works. So
as we talked about a minute ago with the click
most marketers today that have only done digital there haven't
been around, you know, before there was digital marketing. Their
belief is you invest dollars to buy clicks, and clicks
(18:08):
lead to sales. But the reality is you actually buy media,
You invest dollars to buy attention, and that attention you
do that attention to build awareness, and when awareness is
built up enough, people will walk into your store. And
if you store happens to be online, that's clicks, and
(18:31):
then that leads to sales. And so clicks are way
down at the bottom. So the way that we do
it is we're way at the top. We're focused on
that attention metric.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
And the way we do that is.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
We look at how many ads are you actually having
out there every single day. And oddly enough, this is
an old school metric. This is not anything like brand new.
What's new about it is how we're utilizing AI, machine
learning and super fast computers to deliver the data. That's
(19:05):
what's new about it. But the technique are the same
techniques that brands like BMW and Pepsi and Cokey used
to build their their big business machines over the last
sixty seventy years.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah, because before that it was computers. That's all we
had was Billbood and TV. That's right, And it just
so happened to ride by. If it's a brick and
mortar and see it.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
That's right exactly, Yes, yes, indeed.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
So let's go over the AI and how machine learning
provides probabilistic truth when the deterministic tracking base.
Speaker 6 (19:49):
Yeah, so this is a little bit on it. Yeah,
we did, but that's it. It's pretty exciting because it's
also kind of scary for a lot of marketers too,
because you know, it used to be before all these privacy.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
Changes, there was what we call a lot of signal,
meaning there was a lot of information you could get.
But now since the lockdowns, they've kind of reeled all
that in, so there's not as much signal. There's a
lot more noise that's out there, and so what we
have to do is there's a lot of gaps, and
(20:26):
so we use AI essentially to fill in those gaps
and to help us complete the math so we can
accurately figure out what's working and what's not working. And essentially,
the way it actually works is is it looks at
all of the data and it actually turns out that
(20:47):
most marketers don't know that they're running, unbeknownst to them,
thousands of little experiments every single day, because every day
you never buy the exact same number of ads. Things
change a little bit every day, but they're so small
that someone with the calculator couldn't figure it out. But
(21:07):
a super smart, super fast computer with some AI can
determine what's actually working from that. And that's really the
key and the secret behind it is that mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yes, but AI plays a significant role in every business now,
you know, whether it comes whether it's creativity, you know,
like you just said, you know, putting the pieces together,
animals and data. You know, it's a huge, huge tool.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
It's a tool that's emerging at a very fast paced
what's interesting that you'll find amazing items that I was
gonna call with a series of other industry folks probably
about a month or two ago, and we interviewed about
eight young people fourteen to sixteen years of age from
(22:05):
different parts of the US and also from different parts
of the world to find out how they were using AI.
And my other colleagues were asking questions like, you know,
how do you use it? Which engine do you use,
Perplexity or chat, GPT, how much you're using Google?
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Those were their questions.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
My question revolved around the question that most people are wondering,
which is most of us are saying, my god, this
stuff is moving so fast. I can barely keep up.
I asked them, does it feel like it's moving as
fast to you? And they all said no, that it
(22:45):
just felt like technology to them. And that's when I
realized that when we were sixteen, there was stuff that
was going on in our world, and technology obviously was
not as it's vance asta as it is now that
folks who were in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and
(23:06):
seventies were freaking out about that.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
To them, it was moving really fast.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
So it's all based upon your perspective and in terms
of how you look at it. But this is technology.
Technology is always continuously reinventing itself. But it doesn't it's
not really moving that fast. It just feels like it is,
(23:34):
just based upon where we're sitting.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
At m H. Absolutely absolutely, because for me, I'm a
tech person, so I view it differently than somebody else.
It's an opportunity to stream on my life in so
many different ways in the work that I do.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
That's the way I look at it exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
I embrace it, you know. At the same time, I
do realize that there are some dangers that you need
to be aware of.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Yeah, well it's like any tool, you know, anything that's good.
The reason we define it is good is because it
could also be a bad side to it. Yes, it's
like a car.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
Car is awesome.
Speaker 5 (24:23):
It helps us get someplace fast, faster than if we
walked or rode our.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
Bike or something.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
But the bad side is is we're not watch where
we're going. We may hurt ourselves or someone else.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
So in order for.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
Something to be positive, there has to be a downside.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
To it as well. And that's anything in life.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yes, the world works on negative and positive.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 5 (24:47):
Just like we only call it day because there's a nighttime.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
If it was no night, we wouldn't call it day.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Absolutely absolutely, Wow, this has been amazing. So yeah, one
other questions, So, if a company reaches out to you,
what are some of the I guess intake type questions
or processes that your company goes through.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
Yeah, so when we first start working with someone, we
find out who their different agencies are, what channels are
they advertising in, what are they spending on average each month,
and then we get connections to each of those platforms
and then kind of automatically suck in that data into
(25:35):
our platform. Some data you can't get automatic because it
comes from behind their pipelines and stuff like that, so
it gets delivered to us through a bunch of different
mechanisms so that we can get a.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Handle on it.
Speaker 5 (25:48):
That's usually the initial intakes or that, but that gets
the pipes running and that allows us to do the math.
But also at the same time, when folks come to us,
there's usually a series of questions or problems that they're facing,
and you know, with good organized data and the type
(26:08):
of output that we have, there's a thousand different problems
that we can solve, So we try to focus on
what is the number one thing that you're looking to
accomplish with this, So that's those are kind of the
big intakes for us.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
M Yes, and that's just what i'mking is companies like yours.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
It just takes the pressure off.
Speaker 5 (26:31):
Well, that's that's exactly right. You know, marketers tend to
be very creative people, and marketers went to school because
they want to like, they want to come up with
big ideas and they want to help clients move along.
And unfortunately, most marketers today are actually doing more math
(26:52):
than the finance people because they're trying to put these
numbers together that don't make any sense, and it's like
most of them are very frustrated because they're like, if
I'd known there was this much math in this, I
would have never gone in it. So our philosophy is,
let let our platform do the math. It's designed for that,
so that you can be more creative. That's really the
(27:15):
plan behind it. Let us let us do the heavy listing,
or let our let our platform do it for you.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yes, yes, and that sounds good to me because, yeah,
I try to take as much off my plate as possible.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
That's super smart and that's that AI can definitely help
with that.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Definitely.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh yeah, I basically know that.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I mean AI is my friend.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So again, how do businesses connect with you?
Speaker 5 (27:44):
They can go to getprova dot com that's g E
T P R o Va dot com. Or they can
also look me up on LinkedIn as well. Either one
works for us.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Okay, well, this is definitely you have dropped so many
gems today in such a short period of time. Is like,
I don't know what else says Yeah, because you've covered
everything that's important to the business owner to be able to,
(28:16):
you know, analyze where their marketing dollars are going.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
That's exactly right, and then also tell them how they
can take that same amount of money and squeeze more
return out of it. Which is is is you know
that those are the two functions as a marketer. One
is to report on what happened and then to report on, Hey,
this is what I'm gonna do with it, and this
is what I'm gonna get out of doing that. Yes, absolutely,
(28:43):
we've got it all covered for them.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yes, it sounds like you do, Jeff. So again, how
do businesses connect?
Speaker 5 (28:52):
All right, they're going to getprova dot com. That's g
et p r o va dot com, which means to
get proof or they can find us on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Oh okay, wow, this has been amazing, Jeff. You are
you brought it today?
Speaker 4 (29:08):
So we thank you for sure. Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Absolutely, and thank you audience. It's always for tuning in.
We appreciate you too. Thank you to our guests and
you our values audience.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Let's stop you by.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
We truly appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Many blessings to you and yours
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Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
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