How to Unlock Massive Social Ad Improvements With Artificial Intelligence

How to Unlock Massive Social Ad Improvements With Artificial Intelligence

RJ Talyor, CEO and Founder of Pattern89, joins the Social Pros Podcast to discuss the value of artificial intelligence to improving your social ad strategy.

In This Episode:

RJ Talyor

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Full Episode Details

Embracing Artificial Intelligence

The subject of artificial intelligence has become nearly impossible to avoid no matter where you look. Whether the discussion is about science, movies, or even marketing, AI seems to be dominating the conversation.

While this may leave many marketers nervous about their place in this new landscape, RJ Talyor of Pattern89 believes that the human marketer will always be an invaluable part of the equation. At Pattern89, they use advanced artificial intelligence to conduct testing far beyond what any human or team of humans could achieve. By analyzing thousands of facets of successful ad campaigns, Pattern89 is able to show businesses ways they can better reach their audiences.

Ultimately, though, it takes a human with real creativity to create real emotional connections with customers. The future is not a terrifying one of machines dominating the workplace, but a step toward harnessing technology to drive creativity and real human connection between businesses and consumers.

In This Episode

  • 06:48 – How Pattern89 uses artificial intelligence for a more effective testing process.
  • 10:43 – How Pattern89 uses data from all of its users while maintaining anonymity.
  • 14:47 – How to keep up with customer preferences.
  • 21:41 – When a tool like Pattern89 makes sense for your social strategy.
  • 24:08 – Why artificial intelligence is not replacing human social marketing pros.

Quotes From This Episode

We can think we're testing, but we're actually influencing the testing with our own biases. Click To Tweet

“The biggest challenge that social marketers have in the next year is how to become more agile in managing creatives.” — @rjtalyor

“Optimizations that come from human creativity are infinite. Humans are the ones who are going to come up with new ideas, new memes, and new ways to express ourselves.” — @rjtalyor

Resources

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Episode Transcript

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Jay Baer: 00:00 Hey everybody, it is Social Pros, the podcast for real people doing real work in social media. I am Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert, joined as always by my extraordinary cohost. He is my special Texas friend. He is the executive strategist at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He is the one, the only, Adam Brown. What is going on my friend? Adam Brown: 00:21 Jay, what an introduction, and great to see you today. This is something a little bit different. Jay Baer: 00:26 The video, episode one, season nine, year nine of Social Pros on video. If you happen to be watching us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, or somewhere else, welcome. Nice to see your faces. If you're listening to us the old fashioned way on the podcast, welcome back. We love each and every one of you. Adam Brown: 00:43 And what a great show to kind of start this new technology with, because this is a show really about really emerging, bleeding edge technology of artificial intelligence from Pattern89. Jay Baer: 00:54 Yeah, R.J. Talyor, who founded Pattern89, he's the CEO as well, is our guest this week. What an interesting start up company that helps brands optimize their social media ad spend by using, check this out, 2,500, 2,500 different testing elements to give you a report that says, hey. You think this is a good image. It's not. You think this is a good headline. Maybe it could be better. It is super valuable. Some of our clients have used it at Convince & Convert and seen boffo results. If you spend more than just a handful of bucks on social ads, you've got to listen to this episode. Adam Brown: 01:29 And Jay, I think that's one of the interesting things about this. We're all hearing about artificial intelligence. It is a big thing, whether it's happening with Salesforce or Microsoft or Google, but what R.J. has here, it's an amazing technology that does one thing very, very well, and that helps you optimize your paid social spend. The way that the talks about it and approaches it with those 2,500 different parameters is really interesting, and I think it's something everybody should know in this space, because this is where we're going. Jay Baer: 01:59 We certainly are going there. It's kind of a mind blower. You're gonna like this one, friends. It's a great way to kick off the year. Another great way to kick off the year before we get into the show and bring R.J. on is to acknowledge our sponsors. Our friends at Salesforce Marketing Cloud back, they're again back on the show sponsoring this episode and this great podcast. Adam, thank you to you and the whole team at Salesforce for being such a great partner for a bunch of years now. We love you as I've told you in the past. Jay Baer: 02:26 Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a terrific free guide on how to use social media the right way for B2B. Tells you how to figure out where to put your channels, what kind of content, how to spend your budget, how to measure social and B2B, which isn't as easy as I made it sound in the previous sentence. You can get this guide put together by the social media team at Salesforce for nothing. For free, and you can get it at bit.ly/socialb2bguide. That's bit.ly/socialb2bguide. It's all lowercase. Don't put any capitals in there, mess it all up. Socialb2bguide, that's where you can get it, and super fired up. We have a new sponsor on the show this year, Adam. Adam Brown: 03:04 We do, we do. This is a sponsor that's near and dear to my heart. I'm good friends, full disclosure, with Andy Sernovitz, the founder of socialmedia.org, and it's an org that I remember way back when it was still called The Blog Council. Jay Baer: 03:20 The Blog Council. Adam Brown: 03:20 Jay, do you remember that? Jay Baer: 03:21 I do. I do remember The Blog Council. It also sounds like a really terrible band name, but it was not. It was the precursor organization to socialmedia.org, which is an association of social media managers at big brands. In fact, a lot of the members, or many members, of socialmedia.org have been guests on this podcast, have been here on the Social Pros show. So what we wanted to do was partner with socialmedia.org to make sure that all the social media listener, all the Social Pros listeners understand the organization, and if it makes sense for them, they think about joining. Adam Brown: 03:54 Yep. I was lucky to be a member, one of the charter members when I left social Coca-Cola and then at Dell. The value of the organization is one of the reasons that I'm currently probably not allowed in the rooms. That is it's a vendor free type of organization. So what you're able to do is be able to have a relationship with the other people who do very much what you do in other organizations, but without any of the pressures of a vendor and the biases. You can talk about us. You can talk about vendors. You can talk about strategies with the confidence of knowing that this is an organization that is going to help your career personally, but also help you and your performance of your social media leadership. Jay Baer: 04:37 Yeah, it's a heck of a group. If you are in a major brand and you are running social media, you absolutely, positively need to consider joining socialmedia.org. Here's how you do it. Go to socialmedia.org/socialpros, special landing page just for our listeners and viewers. Socialmedia.org/socialpros, and you're gonna fill out a little questionnaire. Now, they're not gonna take everybody. It's actually kind of tough to pass the screening process, but if you pass it, it will be the best decision you make for your career and for your company's social media. We can guarantee you that, yeah? Adam Brown: 05:10 I agree. Jay Baer: 05:11 All right friends, without further ado, thank you to Salesforce, thank you to socialmedia.org. Please enjoy this week's episode. Here comes R.J. Talyor, CEO, co-founder of Pattern89. Jay Baer: 05:30 R.J. Talyor, CEO and founder of Pattern89. Welcome to Social Pros. We are long time friends, and I am so psyched to have you on the program. What you're doing with Pattern 89 is kind of crazy, actually, and I just, before I get into it, I just want you to describe basically for our listeners what it does, because when you hear about it the first time, you're like wait. That's not actually possible, is it? Tell us the story. R.J. Talyor: 05:57 Yeah, Pattern89 is an AI platform for paid social. What we do is help marketers discover which of the 2,500 different dimensions about their paid social programs drives performance. So we look at everything from headline to body copy to imagery to call to action to audience and tell you what to do. Jay Baer: 06:16 2,500 dimensions. Adam Brown: 06:18 Wow. Jay Baer: 06:19 That's crazy. That's what I say when you hear about this, you're like, wait a second. There's that many things that you can actually tweak and test? And there are, and I guess I'll ask you the obvious question first, R.J., which is many of our listener, and if you're part of this community at Social Pros, you're probably doing paid social, and if you're part of the Social Pros community, you're probably doing some level of testing and optimization about paid social. We had a great guest on the show recently from Purple, Alisa Gammon, who won Facebook's award for best monetization. She's doing some really interesting stuff. Jay Baer: 06:48 So a lot of our listeners are sort of DIYing the testing process with their social ads. Pattern89 takes an artificial intelligence and a machine learning approach to that. Why would we use a tool like Pattern 89 instead of what we have been doing, which is like, hey, here's three ads. Let's see which one works. R.J. Talyor: 07:05 Yeah, well, for a bunch of different reasons. One is because the machines help humans in a way that humans can't do, and even what you just described, a lot of marketer say like, yeah, we test stuff. We test three things every time. Well, what about all the things you're not testing? Or let's say you're testing those three options. Who decided on those three? Probably a human decided on maybe a man or a woman or a dog in the image or something. It's actually- Jay Baer: 07:33 I don't care what color it is as long as it's blue. R.J. Talyor: 07:35 Yeah, yeah. So it's this funny thing. We think, oh, we're testing, but we're actually influencing the testing with our own biases, and so that's where the machines can really take those biases out and help us figure out what to do and what to test, and then make it almost infinitesimal, rather than just testing three, because that's what we can actually handle on the day. Adam Brown: 07:55 So R.J., are we almost kind of going from, as you kind of articulated, AB testing or AC testing to AZ testing, where we're testing thousands upon thousands of permutations. I can see the benefits of that, but I can also see the overwhelming nature of that. Does that mean that we have to create thousands and thousands of permutations, or is your technology assisting with that as well? R.J. Talyor: 08:16 One of the things that we learn in the first iteration of Pattern89 is that a lot of marketers want to test, but by the time they get around to test, they can't spend a week or two days of that campaign life cycle creating and launching the test. They don't have the time or it isn't built into the program. They need the results right now. So what we've actually done is created a platform that surfaces what's worked best and what do we predict will work, so we'll show you what to, we basically take away the need to do a lot of the testing because we know the marketers want the results right now. Everybody says they want to test, but you got to build another week to run it to make sure it's statistically significant. Let it run the weekend, et cetera, and that's more and more time. We need the results right now. R.J. Talyor: 09:00 So we'll take all of the testing that you've done in the past and all of the, run our algorithms across everything that you've tried as well as against all the other advertisers who have connected to Pattern89 to then show you what's going to work best, or the three things you should try and test. So we're not curating a whole bunch more work for you to try all these different things, but instead get into right into your normal workflow. Jay Baer: 09:24 I think that's such an important point to re-emphasize for our listeners, and I say this as somebody who's used Pattern89 and familiar with the tool. It's not about testing 900 photos. It's about the Pattern89 algorithm, which is powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence saying, you should test based on our analysis, you should test this bit of copy. You should test this CTA. You should test this kind of thing. It almost serves up the recommended recipe more so than having to create all of those things. The key to that, you just sort of touched on, R.J., is that you have a pool of data, and it gets smarter over time, because as more and more companies use Pattern89, they're learnings go into the collective, shared insights pool, which then makes everybody smarter in lockstep, yep? R.J. Talyor: 10:12 Yes, exactly, yeah. We'll show you the recipes or the creative formulas that drive the best performance and allow your brand and your humanness to come out in the brand. So we're not, it doesn't become so rigid. We'll tell you things like 72 character headlines work for this part of the audience, or this specific goal, and content where videos are 15 seconds with three scene changes, the first frame should be a picture of a puppy. Those types of recipes come to you. Jay Baer: 10:38 Always the picture of a puppy. R.J. Talyor: 10:40 Always the, sometimes a cat, Jay. Sometimes a kitty. Jay Baer: 10:42 Oh, good. Good to know. Adam Brown: 10:43 Especially if they're playing a piano. I tell you, the part of that, R.J. that really fascinates me is this idea of group learning and that this is not only taking and inhaling all the information from your own personal campaigns, but the campaigns of other Pattern89 users. How do you compartmentalize that and how do you say, listen, this is all the benefit of the group. The group gets the benefit of these insights, but there are some things, for example, perhaps, around my campaign or my program that I kind of want to keep to myself. R.J. Talyor: 11:15 The way that we do that is by first off anonymizing everything within our advertiser dataset, so there's no information that's shared outside of anonymizing aggregated data. Then we look first to the audience. So is it an audience of 18 to 35 year old women or men? What are the things that are resonating for those audiences, and then we can segment it back by vertical or considered purchase versus a transactional purchase or something that takes 18 months to decide on, like a new mattress or a bath tub or something versus buying a new shirt or something. Also time frame, holiday, and then each step of the funnel. So nothing's exposed from a proprietary secrets perspective, and we do that by anonymizing and then focusing specifically on that audience. Adam Brown: 11:59 Where does this fit in the overall scheme of things? So we've got our creative department that's creating the ads. You've got your account service and media buying teams that are doing that. Perhaps you're working with an agency. Where does Pattern89 kind of come in in terms of the process and methodology of creating campaigns, managing campaigns, et cetera? R.J. Talyor: 12:19 We come in in two ways. About half of our customers are agencies, and half of them are direct to consumer brands who have brought that work in house. Regardless of whether it's an agency or a brand, those conversations that sometimes are heated discussions or even arguments where the creative team says, hey, I think we should ... and then paid social folks say, no, no, no, I think we should. We're right in the middle of those discussions, because we'll surface the data and the ideas that not only everybody agrees to work on, but we have the data underneath it to mitigate the arguments between the creative and the folks that are actually creating and launching the campaigns. R.J. Talyor: 13:00 Then on a day to day basis, our platform helps marketers who are managing paid social programs to optimize in about 5-15 minutes. We provide a to do list for our console rather than them having to pull through the tables and excel spreadsheets and go get the analytics teams involved to go do some heavy lifting. That all comes through on our console. So right in the center is really the answer, Adam, but whether it's the agency or the direct brand, we're pretty much in the same place. Jay Baer: 13:25 R.J., what's the most surprising thing that you have found analyzing this data, or maybe a different way of asking that question is what do you consistently see advertisers over or underestimating? R.J. Talyor: 13:38 Oh, well, 2018 has been all about video, right? The rage is video, and so we've seen a lot of marketers devote a ton of time and money into creating just tons and tons of videos, and the surprising thing is that video doesn't work across all audiences, and it doesn't work across all levels of the funnel. So a lot of marketers we work with or agencies are like, no, no, no. That's not true. That doesn't work, and then we surface the data and say, here. For your audience, for your objective, images or gifs actually work a lot better and they're a lot cheaper for you to create. You can spin out a bunch of different versions of them in the same amount of money that you're spending on video. So that's been a big surprise in 2018. R.J. Talyor: 14:16 Now, video works super well for a lot of different segments and lot of different goals, but food videos, for example. We've been doing a lot of analysis on food videos. Food videos killed it this year on both Facebook and Instagram. The top food video had spaghetti and meatballs in it, so kind of a surprising thing that I wouldn't have guessed, but food in general always performs really, really well. So had a return on that when it was 38 times the average. So video has been a lot of our discovery this year. Jay Baer: 14:47 You mentioned this year, and I want to have you elaborate on that. They say that you can never step in the same river twice, because once you've stepped in the river, you have altered it in some inexorable way. How much do you see now or do you anticipate seeing the conclusions drawn by the Pattern89 algorithm changing as audience preferences change, as the people using different social media platforms continue to evolve. I suspect there is no truth that will last forever or even for very long in some cases. R.J. Talyor: 15:19 Yeah, so the old story I like to tell is when I worked at ExactTarget, we published a report on the best day to send email, and the ones that was published then that was the worst day to send email for the- Jay Baer: 15:30 Because everybody said, Tuesday's it, baby. Only send on Tuesdays. R.J. Talyor: 15:33 Yeah, so in [inaudible 00:15:35] publishing, then it was Wednesday, then it was Saturday, or whatever the case is, in the same way, but even faster, paid social changes on a daily or weekly basis. So our algorithm reruns every 24 hours and the customers that we see the best results from are optimizing daily. They're literally figuring out what works and what doesn't work for that day. Talking about things in this year is probably a bad way of describing it, because it's like what worked last week, or what worked last month? I think that's the biggest challenge that social marketers have in the next year, which is how do we get into a lot more agile way of managing creatives? So a lot of customers we're looking with are- Jay Baer: 16:15 Yeah, if you have the conclusion, how do you do something about the conclusion? R.J. Talyor: 16:19 Yeah, and quickly, right? So a lot of marketers are like, well here's our February or March plans back in December. It's like, well, what if everything changed by then? What if there are new app formats? What if video doesn't work as well or those types of things, so it's how do we get into those rapid iteration cycles. Adam Brown: 16:34 I think to even take that one step further, one of the things I talk about with our customers are being able to certainly understand what content is performing better than others. But then you have the why. Why did that post perform better? To the example you used with email, was it because you posted it on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday? Was it because we had a question mark in the post rather than no question mark? Was it because the hero shot was purple instead of blue? There's so many different ways of looking at this, and it sounds as though your technology can get to that why, not only what everybody knows. This is the top performing post, but dissect the why. I would love to hear more how you're able to do that and categorize and be able to say irrefutably, this post is better than others. It could be because of the AZ testing. It could be something else. R.J. Talyor: 17:21 Yeah, so it's exactly why our business exists is to understand the why under the what. We work with a lot of eCommerce retailers, and top performers are running over 40,000 ads a year. So all of the different- Adam Brown: 17:38 Different creative units. R.J. Talyor: 17:39 No, across, yes, across for your week? Or is it the picture of three people smiling with a kid different creative units to then discover the why on a rapid basis. We started out the call talking about the 2,500 different dimensions, and a lot of times, people are like, whoa, that's way too many, but we actually are trying to discover the why within every ad. Why is this thing performing? Is it the hex code of the color that's in the background that for some reason that color of turquoise is really driving performance this or whatever the case is. R.J. Talyor: 18:09 So it really can be all of those different factors, and the way that we've gotten to the answer is by building this giant data advertiser set where we can understand what's working about an individual ad, and then comparing it to all of those that have the similar characteristics so that we can find statistical significance about that specific item so that you can confidence in investing in it, rather than it just being a fluke or maybe this thing. So we're looking across all the ads that also have the color turquoise or all the ads that have dogs or all the other ads that have kittens playing piano or whatever the case is to figure out that that's actually the element that's driving the best performance. Adam Brown: 18:46 As I hear you talk about this R.J., I harken back to my days at Dell where we were doing a lot of SEO/SEM. It was our largest digital media expenditure, and very oftentimes we would be outbidding ourselves on SEO/SEM, and of course, Google at the time was very laissez-faire. They said, if you want to outbid yourself go right ahead. To what you're doing, I'm curious, obviously the advertisers, obviously the agencies love you, because you're making their advertising more effective. But are the platforms, the Facebooks, the Instagrams of the world a little hesitant about this because you're meaning that they don't have to buy as much advertising or it's because of this they're actually buying the same amount. It's just being a heck of a lot more effective. Curious kind of what their perspective is on what you're doing. R.J. Talyor: 19:30 Yeah, so we view ourselves as a content partner in helping to enrich advertisers' content, but in turn makes Facebook or Instagram or the individual platforms better. A lot of times, customers are, they've allocated a certain amount of dollars to it, and if we can show that your dollars are even more effective on Facebook and Instagram, then you're gonna continue to invest in those things that drive the best performance. I'd hope that Facebook and Instagram view us as a strategic partner in terms of creating the content that drives the best performance, because the opposite could be true that an advertiser runs something and it doesn't work. Especially on new formats, so then they abandon the format. Instead with a newer format or a newer placement or algorithm change, we'll help marketers discover what works quickly, and then so they can invest their dollars in creative content that supports that specific objective, that specific format, et cetera. Adam Brown: 20:21 And assign blame too. The blame was the creative, it wasn't the platform. R.J. Talyor: 20:25 Yep. Yep, exactly. They certainly have the audiences and the reach, so we just gotta figure out how the content plugs into that formula. Jay Baer: 20:32 R.J. Talyor, you're a CEO and founder of Pattern89, Pattern89.com is our guest this week on Social Pros. R.J., you mentioned Facebook and Instagram, and I know that the overwhelming majority of your dataset and your program is on those platforms and Facebook and Instagram. Do you think that the lion's share of all dollars being spent in just two platforms, which is actually just one company, is from an advertiser's standpoint, a net positive or a net negative ultimately? R.J. Talyor: 21:04 I mean, from an advertiser's perspective, it's probably a net positive because it means there's less to manage. One of the surprising things that I hear from agencies and from brands is how much of a pain billing is. The fact that it's a single bill coming from one company makes a lot of sense. I know that advertisers are trying to figure out how to diversify dollars and figure out where the opportunities are, but keep coming back to Facebook and Instagram because that's where performance is, and that's where they're seeing the conversions. R.J. Talyor: 21:32 So likely it's a net positive. That said, I know that advertisers are trying to figure out how to diversify their investments so they don't get squeezed. Jay Baer: 21:41 Speaking of investment, I wanted to ask you, when does Pattern89 make sense? So in what sort of budget level or what sort of circumstances does it become a no brainer to use Pattern89 to improve your paid social? At one point are you either selling something that doesn't really work as well in your system, or you just aren't spending enough to yield the kind of return in ad spend improvements to make this all work? R.J. Talyor: 22:08 Yeah, we typically look for two things. Customers who are spending more than $10,000 a month on paid social are perfect customers for us, but maybe even more than that is that customers who have the attitudinal ... We ask them a few questions when we get started, like are you willing to trust a machine? Are you willing to make changes to things that you have tried and true, to what you've done in the past? Those types of attitude normal questions often show us a better chance of success because the platform's not gonna sugar coat anything. It's gonna say, this works better, and then a marketer's gonna have to decide whether they want to trust that for their brand or not. Sometimes they're different than what they've done in the past, and habits are hard to break. Jay Baer: 22:56 Well, especially because it's so fascinating when you say that. Especially because we're supposedly good at this. You know what I mean? We're marketers who have some training either classroom training or certainly on the job training at being ostensibly better at this than just somebody randomly selected off the street. Now who's this robot to tell me that I don't know how to write a subject line, or whatever the circumstances are. I get it. You're like wait a second, that's my job. They took our jobs! Yeah, that's really fascinating that you can say that, that you've got to almost personality profile your customers to make sure they're not gonna freak out and go off on their own, even when the algorithm says, no. You've got it all wrong. R.J. Talyor: 23:41 Right. As we profiled our most successful customers, it really is that it's who's willing to not go with their gut, or to let their gut be challenged or to balance their gut with the machine learning. That's a big challenge, for me too. Sometimes we see this data. I'm like, that can't be right. Then you go back and check it and it is, and you think, oh, okay. Well, let's test and confirm. Trust but confirm, right? Adam Brown: 24:08 I do want to follow up on that, because I think it's an interesting idea, and for a second, R.J., I want you to take off your CEO and founder of Pattern89 badge for just one second, because I think you're right that us as marketers and as communicators, we think that we have an inherent skill, and that we have something that perhaps the average person does not. We see where AI is going, and I'm probably leading the witness here a little bit, but we see that AI is now writing book. We see AI has, if you have a new DGI drone, can follow you around the room and shoot and make things look very nice. We've seen AI be able to edit content. Where is this all going? Are we gonna get to the point where we are not necessary here, where we just tell AI kind of the product that we're selling and who our audience is and say, good luck. We'll come back, set it and forget it. Here's your $100,000, call us when you're done. R.J. Talyor: 25:08 I believe in creativity as a human thing, and that optimizations that come from creativity, which ultimately comes from humans, are infinite, and that humans are the ones who are going to come up with new ideas and new memes and new ways to express ourselves and new, that's the infinite well that's never gonna dry up. Jay Baer: 25:29 Humans came up with Pattern89. R.J. Talyor: 25:31 That's right. Adam Brown: 25:32 To a point. Jay Baer: 25:34 It wasn't like the robots, you know what we should do is create a start up to import us as robots. Adam Brown: 25:37 The chicken or the egg there. R.J. Talyor: 25:40 Right now, there's a lot of hype around natural language generation as well as this AI that can actually construct imagery or construct videos for us, but I think that photographers and illustrators and artists and marketers who are artists in some way are required to make these brands feel and talk and seem different, and that machines, if left to their own devices, will make us all sound the same, and that's where the human intervention with machine learning platform is required. Otherwise we're all gonna sound the same. We're all gonna look the same. These platforms are gonna be super boring to look at because everybody's gonna be a red shirt with a dog and a bicycle and a mountain in the background. It's gonna have all the same attributes, and we [inaudible 00:26:22] the brands represent different things. That's where the creativity and that's what AI can't do. I think that there is a giant opportunity for human creativity being augmented by AI. Adam Brown: 26:32 A rebalance of art and science, yeah. Jay Baer: 26:36 Yeah, because even if you say, look, you should have a puppy in the first shot of your video, there's a lot of different puppies out there. R.J. Talyor: 26:40 You got it, yeah. Yeah. Jay Baer: 26:41 What's that puppy doing, right? Is it juggling? Because if it's juggling, I'm even more interested. R.J. Talyor: 26:45 I'm gonna click. Jay Baer: 26:46 Yes. Adam Brown: 26:47 That's right. Jay Baer: 26:47 Indeed. You mentioned interventions, and R.J., you have had a series of interventions with a very interesting person, the Prime Minister of St. Lucia, which is a fantastic Caribbean island. It is jungly there. They are known for their twin mountain peaks, the Pitons. I know this because I vacationed in St. Lucia two years ago. I had a terrific time. That is not a story that I have heard from you in the past, so please regale our listeners with the story of R.J. Talyor, a friend to the Prime Minister of St. Lucia. R.J. Talyor: 27:19 Well, I don't know if I'm gonna go so far as to say friend, but it's a funny story. My dad would take us on these family vacations back when we were growing up, and he had my sisters, we were going to St. Lucia. My dad was a big scuba diver, and he'd have my sisters write to the foreign dignitary in advance of our visit in hopes of scoring some sort of exclusive experience, and- Jay Baer: 27:42 Genius. I love that angle. Adam Brown: 27:45 No, I couldn't- R.J. Talyor: 27:45 It's a pretty good scheme. Jay Baer: 27:46 What am I doing? I can put my kids to work. We go somewhere every summer. I feel like I've completely dropped the ball on this opportunity. R.J. Talyor: 27:51 Roy Talyor's pretty smart on this. So he had my sisters who I think were like eight and nine at the time write pen pal letters to John Compton's kids. He has five kids. He had five kids. He's passed away now. They wrote back. John Compton was a Prime Minister of St. Lucia, and we got invited to the Prime Minster's house. We had dinner with his family. It was awesome, pictures back in the 80s with us with their family, and then 20 years later, we went back to St. Lucia for another Christmas trip, and my dad spent about a day on the phone talking to all the foreign dignitary officers or whatever, track down John Compton's assistant and said, hey. We had dinner with them back 20 years ago. We're coming back. We'd love to see if we could take John Compton out to dinner. R.J. Talyor: 28:38 He said yes, so John Compton was a Prime Minister, lost power and then came back to power. We went back out to dinner with John Compton, and it was such a ... Being about 30 at the time, it was an amazing dinner. He was the godfather to Prince William, and we had this amazing dinner about foreign politics and gun control and being part of the Commonwealth. My dad has been in sales his whole life, and he has this amazing ability just to ask, because all they can say is no. We got these amazing pictures and a cool story of having dinner twice with the Prime Minister. Adam Brown: 29:22 That's a good one. That's incredible. Jay Baer: 29:22 All they can say is no, and all the algorithm at Pattern89 can say is your creative sucks, among other things, or that it's great. Or that it's great, which I'm sure happens on occasion. As a devote of Pattern89 myself, folks, if you're doing paid social and you're spending 10 grand a month or more as R.J. said, which I know many, many, many of you are, thousands of you listening to my voice right now are. Trust me, do yourself a favor. Go to pattern89.com and check it out. A free trial is available, and it's pretty slick. You're gonna be blown away. Jay Baer: 29:54 R.J., we're gonna ask you the two questions we've asked every single guest here on this show as we enter now our ninth year. Adam, this is the first, this is episode one of year nine of Social Pros, which is crazy. Adam Brown: 30:07 What's the anniversary gift after nine years? Is it still paper or wood scraps? Jay Baer: 30:13 No, I looked it up. It's actually optimized social ads. Adam Brown: 30:16 Oh, there you go. Well. Jay Baer: 30:17 Yeah, it's more of a modern gift. Adam Brown: 30:20 What a progressive- Jay Baer: 30:20 I also noticed, Adam, that you have put your glasses on. Is that gonna happen every show now at the 30 minute mark? You just decide to enhance your vision? That was an interesting move. Adam Brown: 30:32 I think it was try to enhance my overall appearance, actually. Jay Baer: 30:34 Okay, I got it. Good. Now that we're doing this on video, for those of you out there who are watching our video, hello. It's nice to see you very much. All right- Adam Brown: 30:42 I'll take them off and on with a flourish from this point. Jay Baer: 30:44 I like that, yeah. With more of a, yeah. I could do that too. Adam Brown: 30:46 I could even do this, you know? Jay Baer: 30:50 We can both do that. That's good. We can both do that. All right, R.J., what one tip would you give somebody who's looking to become a Social Pro? R.J. Talyor: 30:57 My tip would be to experiment more. I think everybody talks about it, everyone talks about experimentation, but it's like the first thing to get cut, and I've seen great results from brands that have a, sometimes they're called growth marketers, or sometimes there are other titles. Jay Baer: 31:13 Like packers, yeah. R.J. Talyor: 31:14 Experimentation manager, and they're killing it. I think a lot of times, if we don't have that title, we don't feel like we have the permission to experiment or fail, and I don't know. Ask if you can change your title or something, because that experimentation always nets results, and especially social where things change so quickly, you have to. So just experiment more. Adam Brown: 31:32 Fail forward. R.J. Talyor: 31:33 Yeah. Jay Baer: 31:33 That's great. Last question, R.J. Talyor, CEO, founder, Pattern89, pattern89.com, optimize your social ads. If you could do a video call with any living person who is not the Prime Minister of St. Lucia, who would it be? R.J. Talyor: 31:50 So I just finished this book called Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. He also wrote a book called In the Heart of the Sea. They're historical accounts of, just amazing historical accounts. This Mayflower book's all about the founding of America and their first few years here. I would call him. I want to understand his [inaudible 00:32:10]. I'd call him right now, just because I want to understand the book more. Jay Baer: 32:13 I love it. Great answer. Adam Brown: 32:14 That's a new one. I like it. Jay Baer: 32:15 That's terrific. I'm gonna have to look that up. We'll link it up in the show notes as well, which is a good opportunity to tell you ladies and gentlemen that you can get every single episode, the entire eight years before this one, at socialpros.com. Transcripts of every episode, links to all the resources mentioned on the episode. Obviously the audio as well. Socialpros.com for all of that. If you're watching us on video, don't forget that Social Pros is now available on YouTube. Go to our YouTube channel and subscribe and you can never miss an episode. R.J., thank you so much for being here. Congrats on the success at Pattern89. Cannot wait to see what happens next as more and more smart marketers and smart Social Pros listeners start to optimize their social with your fleet of smart robots. R.J. Talyor: 33:08 Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. Jay Baer: 33:11 Good to see you. Adam Brown: 33:11 Thanks so much. Jay Baer: 33:11 Adam, man, we did it. Adam Brown: 33:13 We did. Jay Baer: 33:14 We did an episode in 2019. Nothing's gonna stop us now baby. Adam Brown: 33:20 Isn't technology wonderful. I'm glad to see you here and I'm looking forward to 2019. Jay Baer: 33:27 Absolutely. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week on what I hope is your very favorite show. This has been Social Pros.  
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