MBA Training Marketing

Leaders Insights
Leaders Insights
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Management
  • Weekly

MBA Training Marketing. Strategy in brand, growth, performance and MarTech, for marketing leaders and aspiring CMOs. New episodes every week, transcripts at mba-training.com.

  1. 6d ago

    Professional services CAC: partner time and lost bids

    Why is client acquisition cost wrong in nearly every law firm and consultancy? The episode argues that a CAC built only from the marketing budget is too low by a multiple, because referrals and partner outreach bring in nearly two-thirds of new business (Hinge) and lost RFPs, conflict checks and AML failures never reach the number. Listeners learn to price partner hours at the realized rate with a practice-level displacement factor, load pursuit write-offs into CAC, and track 18-month sales cycles as quarterly cohorts. The discussion covers Loopio's 229 RFPs a year, go/no-go criteria, SPI Research utilization data, BD time credit at Wilson Sonsini, Sidley and White & Case, and why per-partner CAC becomes a weapon. 0:00 Partner time versus the events budget 0:44 Why marketing-only CAC undercounts 3:09 RFP volume and lost bid costs 5:08 Pricing partner hours at realized rate 7:22 Cohort CAC for 18-month sales cycles 8:41 Partner shaming risks and bid discipline

  2. Oct 19

    Publicis pitches CEOs on AI: what PepsiCo means for CMOs

    Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun told analysts his group now pitches chief executives directly on AI, pointing to PepsiCo's roughly $1.9 billion media move from Omnicom with no formal pitch. Does the CMO still control the agency decision? The hosts disagree: one says the CEO who owns the AI bet should own the agency choice, the other says the CMO who runs the work must be in the room. You will understand how a media capabilities review differs from a competitive pitch, why consolidation after Omnicom bought Interpublic means fewer contests, how principal media creates conflicts of interest, and what to watch next: the Coca-Cola media review, responses from Omnicom and WPP, and CEOs discussing marketing on earnings calls. 0:00 Sadoun says Publicis pitches CEOs directly 1:20 PepsiCo leaves Omnicom without a pitch 2:41 Media capabilities review versus agency pitch 3:24 Do CMOs lack C-suite weight? 4:33 CEO AI fear and holdco consolidation 6:06 Bravado, principal media and who decides

  3. Oct 13

    Geotargeting errors: who owns a wrong Portland ad buy

    Defending Main Street, a super PAC backing Susan Collins, paid about $25,000 for digital ads attacking Troy Jackson in Portland, Maine. Media buyer Cross Screen Media, part of the 1903 Group, ran them in Portland, Oregon, and a stranger on social media caught it. The episode argues that "it has nothing to do with us" is the wrong response for a CMO, because the brand takes the joke while the vendor takes the refund. Listeners learn how geotargeting by city, ZIP code and media market can fail, why Google's Ads Transparency Center exposed this error when brand ads stay hidden, and how to check location delivery reports and add a named sign-off to agency agreements. 0:00 Super PAC ads hit the wrong Portland 2:00 Vendor blame and who owns the mistake 4:04 How geotargeting picked the wrong city 5:40 Why brand campaigns hide location errors 7:36 Delivery reports and agency sign-off rules

  4. Oct 12

    Automotive CAC: adding $3,192 incentives to the $739 ad cost

    What does it really cost to win a car buyer? Most automotive marketers quote NADA's $739 in dealer advertising per new vehicle, but Cox Automotive puts incentives at $3,192 per vehicle, more than four times that figure. The episode argues every acquisition dollar should be counted once, on the ledger of whoever pays it, as front-end gross falls at dealers like Sonic Automotive. Listeners learn to build a fully loaded CAC that adds co-op, OEM incentives, floorplan assistance and lead-vendor fees from Cars.com, CarGurus and TrueCar without double counting. A worked example shows a $3,931 blended CAC, and a holdout test shows how to compare cost per incremental sale against new gross plus F&I income. 0:00 Why the $739 dealer ad cost misleads 3:18 Co-op advertising double counting fixes 4:42 Portal subscriptions and TrueCar fees 5:56 Floorplan assistance in or out of CAC 6:51 Fully loaded CAC and incentive holdout tests 9:09 When to use fully loaded CAC

  5. Oct 9

    Price promotions: why 75% can't say which discounts pay

    Brands spend about twice as much on price promotions as on paid media, yet 75% of 250 UK consumer goods leaders surveyed by Censuswide for Les Binet and Kantar's Dom Boyd can't estimate which promotions make money. The episode weighs practitioners' faith in discounts against margin data, including a Nielsen analysis where nearly two thirds of 300 million promotions lost money, and argues for adjusting promotions rather than abolishing them. You'll learn how the promotion dependency spiral erodes pricing power, why judging promotions over less than 13 weeks hides the hangover, how econometrics puts promotions and advertising on the same basis, and how to bring your CFO a list of loss-making promotions to cut. 0:00 Binet and Kantar price promotion research 1:14 Promotion hangover and the dependency spiral 3:12 Brand strength versus discounts: the evidence 5:13 Econometrics and the six-step promotion plan 6:05 Making the case to cut promotions 7:19 Black Friday measurement and first steps

  6. Oct 6

    TikTok Buy Direct: who owns liability in agentic ads

    TikTok announced eight products at Advertising Week New York, including Buy Direct one-click checkout in the For You feed, a conversational Shopping Assistant, Agentic Leads and US access to the TikTok Ad Network built from Pangle. The position here: the real story is not the checkout button but the shift of product answers, qualification and transactions into systems TikTok runs, while the brand stays merchant of record for tax, refunds and disputes. You leave knowing how to treat TTAN as a separate channel, what the DoubleVerify and IAS controls do and do not prove, why GMV Max adding commissions and coupons breaks your benchmarks, and why auditing stock, sizing and shipping fields comes before any eligibility test. 0:00 What TikTok actually launched at Advertising Week 0:55 TikTok Ad Network and 400,000 outside apps 2:09 Shopping Assistant errors and merchant of record 3:48 Agentic Leads, Smart+ and GMV Max changes 5:02 Is agentic commerce ready, or a pilot 6:51 Attribution loss and auditing your product feed

  7. Oct 4

    Creator agency fees: only 42% are fully transparent

    Where does creator budget actually go, and why do hidden agency margins, AI content measurement and publisher-sold GEO all arrive in the same week? The position here is that each one is an intermediary being asked the same three questions: what unit was counted, who counted it, and how much money passed through to the people doing the work. The ISBA poll, TrinityP3's 35% versus 60% talent split, SPUR's five telemetry events, Future and Ziff Davis selling GEO, the Ahrefs llms.txt data and MIT Sloan on Alturas Capital Partners all sit in that frame. You leave able to audit an invoice on unit, counter and pass-through, test an AI visibility vendor against cited, displayed and engaged, and write an AI use declaration into creator contracts. 0:00 Only 42% of creator fees are transparent 1:23 Bundled versus unbundled: 35% or 60% to talent 2:34 SPUR's five AI content telemetry events 4:41 Publishers selling GEO and the llms.txt problem 6:18 In-house AI and agency pricing after Alturas 7:53 AI use declarations for creator contracts

  8. Oct 2

    ChatGPT ads: the measurement gap capping budgets

    Seven months after ads launched inside ChatGPT, should a brand move real money in? The position here is no, not yet. Digiday reported Accuracast seeing zero conversions on a UK lead generation campaign for two weeks, and roughly 100 platform clicks against 20 of its own. Other agencies, including AdRoll and Jellyfish, report timing lags of 24 to 36 hours rather than missing data, and many advertisers never switched tracking on because legal teams will not sign OpenAI's tracking terms. You leave with a way to test without trusting the platform's own counting: a geographic holdout, KPIs defined in advance, a legal decision date on the tracking terms, and two signals to watch, named third-party measurement partners and stable cost per acquisition from conversion-optimised bidding. 0:00 Zero conversions reported inside ChatGPT ads 1:38 Who disagrees: late data versus missing data 2:16 The tracking terms catch-22 with legal 3:05 Bidding on clicks while inventory swings 4:59 LiveRamp, AppsFlyer and third-party measurement 6:37 Set a measurement framework before you spend

See All (98)

About

MBA Training Marketing. Strategy in brand, growth, performance and MarTech, for marketing leaders and aspiring CMOs. New episodes every week, transcripts at mba-training.com.

Information

More From Leaders Insights