How Ex-Googler Sharon Park Built a Winning Agency in the AI Era

Episode Description

In this episode, Frederick Vallaeys sat down with Sharon Park, founder of Sage Digi, to discuss her journey from Google to starting her own digital agency. They talked about the transformation of Google Ads PPC, the impact of generative AI on marketing, and the future of Google in a rapidly evolving PPC landscape.

Sharon also shared insights on how agencies can stay competitive, creative, and profitable while leveraging technology like connected TV, YouTube, and AI.

Episode Takeaways

The Future of Agencies:

• Sharon shares her experience transitioning from consulting to running her own agency.
• She emphasizes the importance of building a senior team to challenge assumptions and drive real business outcomes.

Generative AI in Marketing:

• Generative AI is changing the game by enabling more personalized customer engagement and efficient campaign management.
• While it’s still early, its potential to revolutionize digital advertising is significant.

Connected TV and Video Ads:

• Short-form video ads (5-15 seconds) on connected TV and YouTube are becoming the norm, offering high reach at low costs.

The Importance of Measurement:

• Even though measurement has advanced, there are still many gaps, particularly in connecting offline and upper-funnel activities to digital results.
• Companies must be cautious not to rely solely on PPC metrics like ROAS without considering overall profitability.

Career Longevity in PPC:

• New marketers must continuously adapt to change, learning to integrate tools, data, and technology to stay competitive in the evolving landscape of PPC.

The Future of Google:

• Sharon and Fred discuss the challenges Google may face in the future, especially with the rise of AI-driven search and the potential for the company to lose dominance.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. Today I have a very special guest, a good old friend from my days at Google, Sharon Park. She’s the founder of Sage Digi, an agency, and I thought it’d be really helpful to bring her into the studio today and hear a little bit more about what that process was like of her founding her own agency, what it did for her to have worked at Google before, How she thinks about growing the agency and what are some of the risks in this world of digital and generative AI?

And is that changing how agencies operate and how they are successful? So with that let’s get rolling with today’s episode of bbc town hall sharon. Welcome to the show. Good to have you here

Fred, we’re back together again.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s right. How many years ago was that?

I don’t even know. Ted?

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, I left Google, yeah, 12 years ago.

So so I left in 2012. What year, what years were you at Google?

Sharon Park: I went there twice, but my final, my final stint there was 2018. So it’s been a while now. I’m a slime.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, slime does fly. I looked younger. You look the same. You look good.

Sharon Park: Yeah, well, I just colored my hair, so that’s why.

Frederick Vallaeys: Ah, yes. Well, I actually started dying it a little bit as well.

So now instead of gray, it looks blonde. It’s a little strange.

Sharon Park: It’s a California beach, beach babe.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s right. Well, thanks. Somebody call me a baby. All right. And now I’m blushing. So Sharon, tell us about your background at Google and what did you do in your first stint? And how might that be relevant to the people listening today who are all in PPC?

Sharon Park: Yeah early on at Google, this is back in 2006 now, I answered the 866 hotline. So thank you for calling Google. How can I help you? Everyone from businesses that spend 9 a day to businesses like Zappos, Pandora. At that time, they were tiny startups and they wanted to learn how to scale up to 100, 000 campaigns.

They came in off the 866 hotline. I would service them, build campaigns for them. And help them to grow. And if they’re really big, we throw them over the fence to the, at that time, direct BSL, right? We throw them up the fence to the DSO team.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Google at the time was split into two organizations. Sharon and I were part of what was called OSO online sales and operations, and it meant online because it was really a self service platform.

So if you were a smallish advertiser, you’d have to set up your own ads, log into the system, do everything yourself. But, if we made you successful enough, or you started with a lot of money or where you were a named account, then you’d fall under the direct sales organization and they’d have a lot more handholding.

But Sharon, I find this interesting when you say like they were spending a hundred thousand. I mean, I know the answer, but are we talking like a hundred thousand a day?

Sharon Park: Yeah. 100, 000 a day. Businesses like Zappos, they were very well funded at that time. They were experimenting a new business model, which is selling shoes through the internet, which nobody thought would work, but it did.

And they really needed to scale up customer acquisitions. And so they were ready to spend. I was shocked at that time. I was in my young 20s. So We’re shocked by these numbers. I would ask, are you sure? I think other, other huge names came in through the eight, six, six hotline, Microsoft came in through eight, six, six Obama, Obama came in through eight, six, six,

Frederick Vallaeys: did you talk to Obama?

Sharon Park: Yes. I talked to his peons, peons, peon who at that time wanted to build a GDN strategy. One of the largest GDN campaigns. That had ever been built at that time. I don’t even think it was called GDN yet. It was called GCN, the content network. And after building those campaigns and watching the returns, I felt, I knew that he would be president.

I hadn’t seen any campaign behave like that before. And so we did a lot of creative testing. We had Michelle’s picture. We had their dog’s picture, the girls, the family portrait, everything. And they had incredible returns, mainly from small donors. But they came in off the 866 hotline.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s amazing.

And so right now people watching this we’re weeks away from the election in the United States Really interesting is that you had talked to Obama and for them The display network was sort of this big new thing And if you use that right you had a good chance of winning And then where we saw trump it was a lot of the social and the fake news whether it’s fake Fake fake news or real fake news like we can debate that another way but really like there’s these things that there was a small organization out of russia that basically spent a hundred thousand dollars And was beating hillary clinton’s budget of over a billion dollars and she was going more the traditional way and they were using in russia They were using a hundred thousand dollar campaign to see people’s social media feeds make like click worthy clickbaity sort of content and so again, that was the new shift You now in this campaign, any take on what’s like the cool new thing that’s going to get you to win and whether it’s in politics or obviously this applies as well to to any business, right?

Like what’s the cool new thing these days?

Sharon Park: The cool new thing, probably connected TV. It’s been a theme for the last few years, but connected TV, capturing the eyeballs, where they’re the cheapest. They YouTube offer really low rates for huge reach. The targeting is really easy to do geographically. So here in California, we’re not really seeing those ads, but I can only imagine what they’re seeing in Pennsylvania, all of that ad money targeted to connected.

You know, we’re in a mobile first world. So any kind of video streaming or social streaming you could do specifically for mobile I think it’s very, very important. And also the brevity, you know, people’s attention spans have gotten even shorter. So five second ads are just, I mean, they’re not unheard of, right?

Five seconds. You could say a lot in five seconds. So we’re seeing a lot of really short commercials coming out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean personal story. So I was watching a YouTube video I think it was actually YouTube TV last week with my son and a brief ad popped up for Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey the circus They are still around

Sharon Park: and

Frederick Vallaeys: they don’t have they don’t have animals and it’s it’s completely different circus, but The gist of the ad was, Hey, listen, we’re in town this week and it’s a whole new show.

And I was like, yeah, okay. So then I went and looked at the website and it is, it’s kind of like America’s got talent with acts from all over the world and a lot of songs and dancing and. Just really fun. But yeah, that five seconds was enough for me to be like, yeah, let me check it out. We bought tickets and two days later we were at the circus, really enjoyed it.

And like you said, right, it doesn’t have to be, I mean, we, we’ve been so conditioned to these 30 second commercials and like the traditional TV where it’s 23 minutes of content for seven minutes of ads. That doesn’t have to be that way. Like if you can get your message out quicker, do it.

Sharon Park: With the holidays coming up, a lot of our clients are preparing their P4 ads and they’re asking, Oh, do you want 15 seconds or 30 seconds?

You have five, give me fives and fifteens. Nobody’s watching the 30 seconds. If you do, you’re lucky. So just give me those anyway, but the five and fifteens are really all you need right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: And what about producing those ads? Cause that’s usually the hurdle, right? We’ve talked about big brands right now, like Zappos and Microsoft and Obama campaigns.

So if you have deep pockets and you have a media production budget, sure. Even a 30 second ad is this. Feasible but would you also recommend connected tv for smaller campaigns at this point and how do you get the creative?

Sharon Park: I mean, there’s a lot of inventory out there that wants to be monetized. So even with small budgets, some, one of our clients is using an animated version of their creative.

They also have a more expensive creative with actors and whatnot. The actors have to be paid, I think, royalties. And so it’s cheaper to run the animated versions for very, very short clips. And then when they have a splashy placement or a direct buy, they’ll probably use the. Higher quality creative.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. And have you found any like good platforms to make sort of these five seconds? The animated thing, was that like a high production value or was that some tool that most of most small advertisers could have access to?

Sharon Park: You know, I don’t know. I, our, our business is pure hands on keyboards for optimization.

And so we really don’t touch the creative side. We just ask clients to provide them because it’s just a world that I’m not professional with. I know a good creative when I see it. But I wouldn’t know how to create one.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s exactly my problem. And that’s where, if you think about generative AI, it can do amazing things with creative, but, but then often I sit there at the prompt for Dolly and I’m like, I don’t even know how to describe the thing that I have in my mind.

And, and, and that’s. The challenge, right, is how do you translate that vision that you have into something in words to then produce it? And the other thing that I’ve seen about generative AI is that it’s basically it scales your work work. The whole point of it is that in a few words, you can describe something and it comes back with 1000 words that more elaborately.

Or better say that same thing. And the same thing with a picture, like a picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t have to put in a thousand words to get a great picture. But so for me, I really love using GPT for writing scripts because I can very specifically say to it what I want it to do, and then it writes the code for me, and so that’s where it helps me, but for something where I have no experience or no aptitude, like design, it’s very difficult for me to to use generative.

Sharon Park: I mean, most PPC people were math people, right? There are full service agencies, larger agencies that can do it all, but we’re math spreadsheet optimization, algorithmic people. And so when it comes to creative, it’s just, I mean, I feel like I know a good one when I see one, but I, I really couldn’t make one for you.

Frederick Vallaeys: So going back to your early days at Google Sharon, what What were the key things you learned that you still use today?

Sharon Park: A lot. Even though a lot has changed, I find that the fundamentals have not changed. And in school at UCLA, I was a music major, and I think about it as practicing scales, scales and arpeggios for hours and hours and hours.

Even as a senior in my undergrad year, we did scales two hours a day. Those fundamentals translate through every piece of music you’ll ever play. When I think about the early days at Google, we were building tremendous volumes of campaigns. At a level where I don’t think very many agencies could compare, maybe just huge agencies, like the top five or whatnot, but the volume of work that Google needed out of us created an opportunity for us to practice a lot of different techniques.

I really couldn’t even count how many campaigns, but I think in terms of ad spend. Managed it was in the billions and we could see patterns. Over courses of months and years, you can see patterns of what structure works, what structure doesn’t work right now. Someone on my team, Mike Pierce, he and I were at Google at the same time, along with Kamal Taylor, he was there too, way back when, even if the three of us are not speaking to one another, it is scary how similar we’ll approach a build.

How granular, how broken out, how the ad copy is structured. Those principles, I don’t think have changed that much. And so making sure that you’re building for that high quality score factor is very, very important. And I think will remain, will remain important into the future.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you got your chops at Google, but then something compelled you to start your own agency.

So talk us through what happened.

Sharon Park: It was a reorg actually. I hadn’t been dreaming. My family were entrepreneurial. So I had been dreaming of one day leaving and starting my own business. And you know, the target can move. Oh, if I save a hundred thousand dollars, then I’ll be safe. And then I could start a business.

Then I’m like, Oh, maybe 200. I don’t know. Maybe I need more. The target always kept moving over a decade past stayed with Google, but there was a reorg that morning. Actually, I had a dream that I would quit the company. And then when I came into the office, like, Ooh, did you hear? I’m like, no, I didn’t hear it.

Like, okay, your position was eliminated. So you could either take this layoff package or you can apply for a new job. And so of course I went the secure route, man. I’m going to apply for a new job, but the job that I landed really didn’t fit my talent in any way. It was kind of like a pencil pusher position.

So I took the layoff package, was grateful for it and started. Consulting. I didn’t even know what consulting meant, but someone said, try consulting, you know, you could do very well there teaching people how to do PPC or running some PPC for small businesses. So that’s really how Sage was born.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so how did it transition from consulting to an agency?

Sharon Park: Consulting, I think, widely is done on an hourly basis. And I just really couldn’t think of a number that would be good enough that a market would accept. Like, how much do you charge per hour? I’d love to say 5. 50, but that’s not really going to be competitive with PPC. Like, I think right now people are maybe 1.

50, something like that. And so I began to think about retainer based clients and how that would offer me a lot of stability and offer them a lot of flexibility. You could spend You could scale up your spend quite a bit, doesn’t mean I’ll charge you more. And so I did an experiment and put and pitch someone on a retainer based basis.

There was a small startup at that time, but they’re closing a large round of funding. And so they signed and said yes to my astonishment. And I got my first larger, larger client. They’re happy with the model. They actually signed a three year contract after working together for a few months. And so that was the model that I began to build the business on.

Long term contracts with,

Frederick Vallaeys: with good retainers. So that’s the financial model from a marketing and pitching yourself model. Obviously you’ve got the Google background, which helps, but what are the other things that you bring into make your agency and Sage Digi look more compelling?

Sharon Park: I think we’re a very senior team.

And so on average stages have 17 years of experience. And it’s mainly because I’m not like the best manager in the world. So I can’t coach like a youngster to like, get really good. Just want to know, like, do you know how to do this very, very well? And can I trust this client in your hands? Yes or no. Give, give my employees some tests.

If they pass them, they’re in, we have a very senior team. So, which means they bring a lot of experience to the table and we challenge assumptions that our clients make. Like if we had a, if we had 160 percent ROAS, we’ll be good. before or after agency feeds. We’ll ask them, are you sure? How do you know this?

Because I looked at your CRM setup and it doesn’t support that number. So having a senior team, they’re a little bit more comfortable challenging the folks in the room and really driving to a true answer, a true answer of like, where does performance need to be? And once we reach that, what are the opportunities to scale up?

I think that’s a pretty big differentiator compared with, like, other agencies that may have a large junior team and maybe a couple of seniors that help and support and grow that talent.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And as a senior team, you just have more of that confidence to ask those hard questions that, you know, a more junior team just get steamrolled a little bit.

Very interesting.

Sharon Park: Yeah, and we, we just. We want to make sure, because if we’re not sure, then sooner or later we’ll be fired. And so, you know, the CFO is going to come marching into the room and say, Hey, 160 isn’t good. But your team told us so, like, yeah, sorry. And so we just have to keep pushing and make sure that what we’re optimizing towards is the correct metric

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean my one of my favorite stories was the agency That had 160 percent ROAS target and after six months they were asked So why did you have 160 percent ROAS target?

Like what business metrics support it? They were like well, there’s Last agency did 150 and client came to us and said, you need to do better. So make it 160. The

Sharon Park: agency got fired though.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. And next day, exactly. They all got fired at that point. Yeah, but understanding how these It’s also the funny thing because I think In the early days of Google, like there was no return on ad spend.

There was no value measurement system. Like when I started, there wasn’t even Google analytics, there wasn’t conversion tracking. So all of the metrics were CPC, CTR, and those were the levers you had, but they were disconnected from the fundamentals of the business. And so you were guiding a ship sort of hoping, I mean, look at, okay, there’s more money in the bank account at the end of the month, at the beginning of the month.

So good. It’s, it’s probably working, but we didn’t really know. But, and now that we have these better measurements, but we have to acknowledge they’re still disconnected in some way from the business. Right. And even row ass, like, is that a profitability metric? Well, sure. It can be if you make it. So if you feed in the correct value that supports your, Profits, but if it’s just like the basket value without taking into account margins Then it’s not a profit metric and you could you could have the most amazing raw ass in the world and still lose tons of money for your business Because it’s a it’s a ppc metric.

It’s not a business metric.

Sharon Park: Yeah. Yeah It’s amazing how far measurement has come but how many holes are there? It’ll exist within most businesses on measurement and trying to understand the efficacy of all of their different media channels. So we spend quite a bit of time before any new campaigns go live.

We probably spend about a month going back and forth with clients, checking data, all 100 percent of the time, the data is wrong, so we have to fix it.

Frederick Vallaeys: We had a recent guest who was talking about media mix models, Ben Vigneron. And is that something that you use? Because when it, I mean, even in my business, right, I do a lot of conferences, we make a lot of brand investments.

And ultimately, these are the less measurable things in a traditional PPC sense. But we know that they help the business, but quantifying it is often a difficult thing. And so when you look at those bigger clients that you have, who are connected, TV is somewhat measurable, at least like in that because it is connected.

But in terms of the business results, there’s a disconnect, right? Because cookies get dropped. We’re increasingly being more private, third party cookies going away. So how do you connect all the dots in those bigger organizations that have investments across different media?

Sharon Park: The answer really is that you can’t, and that’s a tough skill to swallow.

I mean, in performance marketing, we can measure a lot. Especially singular singular platform like Google, you can it’s pretty clear what the performance is like, then you can smoosh together all of your other channels and your upper funnel campaigns and build averages. But I have not seen a single platform that can definitively measure and deduplicate where conversions are coming from.

One of our customers use Marketo, very advanced measurement capabilities, but still the question of deduping it really isn’t possible until advanced customers start building data lakes, assigning user IDs, and then you can deduplicate who has come in through which door. Even then there is a margin for error.

Frederick Vallaeys: So, so, so one theme that’s coming up a little bit more is that maybe we’re over measuring things just because we’ve conditioned and we’ve had these, it’s, it’s almost like the technology is out there, so let’s use it, but it doesn’t always tell us the full picture. And the right answer, right? And I think you just sort of alluded to it in the fact that there’s duplication of conversion across different channels, but each channel is fighting to get that conversion data because it means a bigger investment in Google, a bigger investment in meta.

And at the end of the day, the business is just like using all this data to make the wrong decisions. So do you ever get the sense that we’ve gone down this path of data too far and that we should really back in?

Sharon Park: Well, yeah, and it’s, I mean, I could cry about it and say it’s not fair because the same advertiser that’s hounding me for metrics and perfect data is running a billboard.

So I’m like, hey, maybe you could give me some of that billboard love too, but it’s just the world that we live in, sitting at the bottom of the funnel. Yes, we push our advertisers to think of the full funnel. Rarely it happens, but sitting at the bottom of the funnel, it’s the standard that I’m held to.

And so we aim to do a very, very good job there. And then there will be other channels, like we’d also like to run a brand list study on YouTube. Like, okay, so you know that the metric there is eyeballs, right? Like, oh, no, no, but we want you to give us ROAS. Okay, so that’s not a brand list study.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Now let’s talk about generative AI and in performance marketing and being accountable to sort of the bottom of the funnel and the actual transaction.

There’s a little bit of a notion that generative AI is helping people become better informed. So by the time they get to the landing page, they already know exactly what they need to know. And it’s just about doing that transaction. Do, do, do, do you have a sense of is generative AI changing the game for your clients and changing.

The performance metrics that are expected.

Sharon Park: I think we’re seeing early, early signs of more sophisticated clients adopting generative AI to feed the customer learning journey. About half of our clients are B2B, very high ticket size B2B lead gen. And so the more advanced ones are starting to understand how to follow up in a customized way or how to engage with clients in a very segmented way.

But I think it’s still early. I do think that it’s a snowball that’s just been pushed down a very steep hill. And I think that the business that we work in today may be unrecognizable in a few years.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Both of us haven’t come out of Google. How do you see the future for Google? It’s

Sharon Park: a scary one to be frank.

Frederick Vallaeys: What’s that? What’s the scariest? I think it’s a scary

Sharon Park: one. I mean, not to be too negative, but I, I’ll keep it real with you, Fred , when I think of the day, okay, I grew up in the Bay Area my whole life, right? And so we’ve seen Titans fall very quickly. Remember like PayPal, eBay, A OL, I mean, they were.

Astronomic climbs and then catastrophic crashes. Google has been a Titan for a very long time, probably about double the amount of time that’s normal for a Bay Area, Silicon Valley giant, I think their day is coming for a few different reasons. One, they’re probably too big to move fast. It’s just kind of like, as you approach the speed of light, you get too much mass.

Two, there will, I think Google’s fall really isn’t like, okay, search is over. I think Google’s fall may come at that first earnings call where they say, you know, traffic has declined by X percent for the first time. And we’re moving to a world now that’s less browser dependent. If people are talking to Siri or Alexa or Google through their phones, but there is no like Chrome experience, there’s no Firefox experience.

And so how will the ad be served? Someone said audio ads or whatnot, but that would be so annoying. If you ask Google, what’s the temperature going to be, and they’re like, here, the first list is this ad. So, I’m not sure. The answer is I’m not sure, but I do think that the writing is somewhat on the wall.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, the writing is on the wall. Yeah, makes sense. What do you think?

Sharon Park: I mean, I know it’s your podcast. I’m going to ask you some questions, but what do you think?

Frederick Vallaeys: I agree with you. I mean, I think the world is fundamentally changing and this is the first time in 20 years that I think there is a better user experience to finding information than what Google offers now, and it’s a generative is obviously the answer right now, Google has Gemini, which is also generative and Google has the luxury or the benefit of having spent more than two decades figuring out what is the most Accurate and trustworthy answer for any question that’s out there.

And if they layer generative on top of that, that’s amazing, right? And that, that makes for a better user experience. But like you said, I, I see them being slow, too conservative in certain ways and, and it’s because of regulation. They’re being watched by a lot of regulators. And so when it comes to like generating an image ad, I’ve tried it on Gemina and I’ve tried it on Dali, and Dali generally gives me.

More of what I want and with google it almost feels like they could do a good job But if I ask for a human to be in the picture, they’re like, yeah, you know, maybe we’ll maybe it’ll be racially offensive Maybe it’ll be like stereotypical in some ways. So we’re not even going to go there and then from my perspective it’s like well that makes it useless So then i’m going to go to the other one that is going to make mistakes But i’m going to use my human judgment to still get something out of it and then take it to the next level so that’s where i’m worried for google You But, but, but I think as, as advertisers and marketers, what I always say is like, there’s an addressable universe of how many conversions are out there to happen.

And at the end of the day, I think wall street has been overly focused for a long time on the wrong metrics. And I don’t like when you were at Google, we would always listen to the earnings calls CTR as like, nobody cares about CTR. There’s just like, right. What we care about is how much. Money Google made from all the searches that happened.

And, and, and that, but, but now you’ve now saying, is it actually a bad thing? If you were searches happen, not necessarily, if you’re more quickly able to answer what the customer needs and give them that transaction, then that should be seen as a win that you actually were more useful and you still had this addressable universe of conversions to make the connections.

And so. The same amount of stuff was sold in the end. It just took fewer searches to get you there, but Google can still monetize that really, really well. And then that’s a little bit, the risk then, right. Is that the market looks at it and says, Oh my God, impressions are down. Like we’re going to sell all of our Google stock.

And now Google is like no longer the darling and doesn’t have the funding to actually pursue some of these projects to make the very expensive generative AI work really well. So yeah, that DOJ lawsuit, the monopoly in what ways is Google is going to be asked to split itself up, which is going to make more nimble business units, but they’re not going to have the benefit of talking to each other and helping each other.

So I’ve never gone through a monopoly, so I don’t know exactly how to change as a company, but we’ve seen it with Microsoft, where it was tough for a while. And now Microsoft is like doing amazing. I’m saying a lot here, but did the other question for me has always been like if meta and facebook ran away or if instagram went away Like, yeah, it would suck because I wouldn’t be doom scrolling the whole time.

Like I’d be a little bit bored potentially, but like, would it really make my life worse? No. If Google goes away, like I literally will not find my way to my next meeting because I don’t have Google maps. I will not know. How to log onto my meeting with the zoom link, because I don’t have Google calendar.

My Gmail is going to be gone. Like Google is just so foundational and woven into people’s lives and the actual utility that it offers is so important. Right. And what’s risky is if the ad platform, which is funding, all of these things gets broken, consumers are not willing to pay for a lot of these things that are really, really good.

And that’s one of the big questions in the monopoly from Google is like, sure. The government is saying like, Hey, you guys might have to split up. But is that helping consumers? When, if you put the Google box and a different box right there and ask the consumer, which box would you like to have 90 percent of us would say, give me the Google box.

I love the Google box. Like, and the fact that it’s easy to get to it on the iPhone, that’s fantastic. Sure. Maybe it’s monopolistic, but it’s the thing consumers want. So like, is the government actually helping the consumer in this case, or are they hurting the consumer by using outdated standards for defining what a monopoly is because monopolies.

And the definition of that that was invented before the internet before it was one click to go from One experience to another right? You don’t like google i’ll type in bing. com It’s done like how can that be a monopoly, you know, and

Sharon Park: the impact I think will be outsized by age So like people who are our age and older we could survive I don’t know how i’m going to survive without navigation, but we could survive and but younger These folks were given You know, Google products for free at school.

And so being able to change platforms will be a lot harder. They’ll have an outside impact on, you know, younger generations. So the future is unwritten. Anything can happen, truly anything.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s where it’s exciting to be founders and agency owners and business owners, because we do have a lot of control and power to have our teams build what we believe are the right solutions for this.

And so when Sharon talked to us a little bit about when you went from founding or first being a consultant, then the consultancy turned into an agency, did you at some point go from being a founder to being a CEO?

Sharon Park: Yeah, I mean, it’s a transformative process, and it happens incrementally, but today I have a team of five full time employees, five part time employees, a lot of people to be responsible for.

I think that a CEO has to look further into the future and, you know, be five steps ahead of the others and make sure that my team’s going to be taken care of both financially and, you know, In terms of positioning our company, I think a CEO will largely leave the day to day and think more about, okay, how’s my business being positioned?

Is our pricing correct? What’s our financial future? Learned a lot about finance over the last few years. How do I leverage what I currently have for more security in my business? And yeah, I think, I think it happened slowly. I think it happened during the pandemic. When my team size grew, you know, I hired people that I never met before in person, it was so strange,

Frederick Vallaeys: but you also hired some good friends and some really solid people and Mike and come on.

Yeah. Now obviously there’s a lot of responsibility there to your team, right? And you want to provide them a great career path money to support their families. Like these are all critically important things with generative AI. Part of the thing that Sam Altman. Has said, and I keep repeating this in the show.

So apologies for those of you who’ve heard it before, but he said 95 percent of marketers would lose their jobs due to generative AI in the next five years. So I always thought, I don’t see that happening necessarily in part because GPT is inexpensive enough, even the paid version that I see it as an additive.

Right. I want to have great people. And have them have the best tools and together they’re going to outperform the tool by itself or a human by itself. Now strawberry strawberry is the next model of GPT, which is purported to be at least 10 X better, but also 2, 000 per month on a subscription. That that’s the rumor.

It hasn’t been confirmed. And that got me thinking like as a CEO. Now the question to me is no longer, hey, do you want to pay 30 per user to have GPT? But the question has become, do I hire another staff for 2, 000 a month or do I pay the 2, 000 subscription? Now I think that’d be a stupid question. Who can

Sharon Park: you hire for 2, 000 a month?

Let me meet them.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I know and that’s a fair point So in the bay area, you certainly can’t but you could hire a content writer in the philippines for about fifteen hundred dollars a month and so I would say well, but definitely i’m gonna hire the human right but but you also have to kind of think GPT is not stupid, right?

If they’re going to charge 2, 000, like there must be something so good about it that it actually does human level work. And, and, but, you know, think back two years ago, like none of us even foresaw that chat GPT would be as good as it was even back then. So for us to say, like, there’s no way that it could be worth 2, 000, like, I think that’s short sighted.

I think it could actually be worth 2, 000 and we legitimately have to change the decision from human or machine because they’re equal. And sure, if I can afford both, that’s still going to be better, but the decision has sort of changed. Like, how do you think about that and the generative and humans versus humans together with humans?

Like, how does it work in

Sharon Park: I’m freaked out. That’s how that works out. When I first saw chat APT, I’m like, Oh, this is strange. Does it know I used it like 20, 30 times. Then Gemini was released, use that a bunch of times. And then I had a freak out meltdown. Because I could see progressing into the future and how quickly a I can self improve.

I know a I is dependent on human inputs, but it’s almost maybe I don’t have the education or the expertise, but it’s almost hard to imagine what it will be able to do in a year or two. Like you said, you know, improvements don’t come incremental. There are 10 X improvements. People say the new iPhone is very, very impressive.

I think we’re seeing the infant stages of what Google has released really fun features for a phone, such as, like, you know, the photos are self cropping. You remove people from the background and fill it in. But I think it’s still early days. And so, as it pertains to the job market. You know, the industrial revolution had a huge hit.

I think the AI revolution will have a bigger one. Tips, tips that I see for, you know, people entering the job market or mid career is like, get familiar with these tools and learn how they play with each other because every large company will be pressed by their boards to push out AI features. Funding is very interested in AI driven businesses.

So your CRM, your ads platform, your measurement tools, all of those will have AI components that could potentially work together and you, the human being, that’s your value. You have to figure out how to make them play together. And make them valuable for your business.

Frederick Vallaeys: And do you think there’s an angle here where you said that coming out of Google, we were never trained to be creatives.

We were more built to be spreadsheet users and data analysts and sort of very analytical in our approach. I think there’s actually something to be said for GPT often does make mathematical mistakes, although that is getting much, much better. So that’s a safety for our career. But at the same time, it’s also something that.

Seems like it could be programmed much more easily. So then creativity and creative comes in forms, right? So there’s the creative of like, Hey, I just need a picture of a man on the beach. And that’s fine. But then there’s like, how do you make it more compelling? How do you make it look? Amazing in a way that you said you and I we can’t do it because we’re not designers but is that something where generative is going to struggle more?

And so how what would you say to someone entering the ppc feel like where should they focus to maybe be? More have longevity in the business.

Sharon Park: It’s a great question Longevity in the business is dependent on your ability to learn rapidly. So keep studying there When I graduated this job didn’t even exist You And so your ability to keep up with the market test new things.

It’s very, very important. And to keep that beginners mind of saying, you know, what worked in the past may not work anymore, be willing to make changes fairly rapidly. They’re going to be challenged, I think, to make changes faster than any other generation proceeding. I think being more technical is very, very valuable.

Like you said, we’re spreadsheet people. We happen to be likely liberal arts majors who are like really, really good at math also. But having, having an eye on what technically can happen for your business the management team, they’re not going to know they’re aged out, they’re going to be asking, they’re going to be asking the experts, hey, what, what should we be doing?

Give me some soundbites. What should I be telling the board? What can be automated and give them examples like, hey, this is a creative that the AI spit out. Are you happy with it? I think the human eye, whether we deem ourselves creative or not, we can tell right away if an image is like off, you know, like that uncanny valley, like something seems a bit off and you can see already in some commercials, right?

It’s like, is this a real person? They look very plastic, you know, but I think we can tell whether or not you’re a creative by professional designation. You know, just get familiar with, with what the AI is putting out there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I like that advice. And we’ve always been in a field that’s rapidly evolved.

So you have to be willing to keep up with the change and be a leader and push the boundaries of what’s possible. And then that’s how you set yourself apart. I agree. Sharon let’s do a couple of rapid fire questions. Everything you said so far has been fantastic and very helpful But the first question rapid fire what’s something you wished you knew before you got into marketing?

Sharon Park: I wish I knew Okay, when I didn’t know what marketing was, like I said, i’m a music major and I didn’t even know what it was but if I had known in the early days, I wish that I had known that the recipe for success is a repeatable one Because looking back I reinvented the wheel way too many times and communicating to our clients, sharing best practices, like a playbook, a checklist.

Wish I had known that because I would have created a lot more. But yeah, the recipe for success in PPC is a repeatable one. So. I would have probably spent more time thinking about what the structure should be for our clients.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. And you also gave the example about your days at Google and over time you learned that certain things just work better and turning that into a playbook and a recipe.

So next question. What is one common PPC myth that you would like to debunk?

Sharon Park: That anybody could do it. It is simply not true. Do not train just anyone to do it, even though they’re Google certified, even though they’re a premier partner, or what have you. Look for the people who’ve done it a lot. And, yeah, there are best practices.

There are a lot of, like, lessons and playbooks on how to do things well, but at the end of the day, it comes to pattern recognition. Right? And there are just so many different levers and pulleys that you can adjust in PVC. But if you cannot recognize by instinct, which comes after thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of practice, that, hey, something feels off, then, I mean, you’re not with an expert, you know?

And so I really don’t think if it were my wallet, I wouldn’t give it to someone unless they had 10, 000 hours of

Frederick Vallaeys: great. What’s a one innovative way you’ve used AI.

Sharon Park: I mean, I use Gemini kind of a lot, especially when I have to do things that are like, I don’t know, put together a sales comp plan and it was like really, really good.

And then you, I refined it. And then, you know, I’ll always have to up level the end result, but it saves a few cycles in my own brain. And so I use Gemini quite a bit.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, makes sense. We use it for anything from PPC management and answering questions to just taking an internal memo that we wrote and rewriting it in a different tone.

Very useful.

Sharon Park: I mean, it’s amazing.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what’s one skill that new marketers should learn? They kind of talked about this before a little bit, but like it’s

Sharon Park: a brand new marketer. There’s just so much to learn, but I think understanding how, how the major platforms play with each other is, is important. So how does HubSpot connect to Google?

How does that end up connecting with the financial part of the business? And understanding how all of that measurement happens, I think will be foundational to a really, really good career.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Well, Sharon, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing a little bit about your background and how you got into an agency and what’s worked well and how AI is impacting everything.

If people want to learn more, obviously they can go to SageDigi. com and follow you on LinkedIn. Is there anything else you would like people to know?

Sharon Park: Use Optmyzr. I use it all the time. I use it all the time, especially for new pitches. Just stick that account in there, have Optmyzr spit out the grades and say like, Oh, wow, you have like a lot of work to do on your negative keyword strategy, but for me to manually dig through that would take hours.

So, I mean, my parting thought, Fred didn’t tell me to say this, by the way. I use Optmyzr every day.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, thank you. Now you got me blushing again. So on that note everybody, thank you for watching this has been episode 99 big number 100 is coming for the next episode. Really honored to have had Sharon Park on the show today.

If you want to see more of these, please hit the subscribe button We’ll let you know when the next episodes are coming out. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you next time.

Sharon Park: Thank you