Unorthodoxy: A Contrarian Marketer's Guide to the New Internet

Episode Description

In this episode, Frederick Vallaeys talks to Gil Gildner, co-founder of Discosloth, a marketing agency.

Gil presents a refreshing and contrarian approach to modern marketing. This approach resonates with marketers who want to differentiate themselves in an increasingly uniform digital landscape. Drawing on his experience as the co-founder of Discosloth, Gil challenges traditional digital marketing tactics by emphasizing long-term brand building over short-term gains.

Resources

Find out more in Gil’s new book here: https://www.amazon.com/Unorthodoxy-contrarian-marketers-philosophy-surviving/dp/1733794867

Episode Takeaways

1. Writing and Purpose of the Book: Unorthodoxy

Gil shares the challenges of writing and rewriting his third book, focusing on the effort needed to make it meaningful for readers.

The book avoids tactical advice and focuses on mindset and strategy, given the rapid shifts in digital marketing.

He aims to offer a fresh perspective on how marketers can differentiate themselves by embracing unorthodox methods and strategic thinking.

2. Navigating a Centralized, Platform-Driven Internet

• The internet has become highly centralized, with major platforms dominating and limiting the individuality of user experiences.
• Gil observes the decline of niche communities, suggesting that standing out now relies on personal branding and unique engagement rather than solely on platform optimization.
• He argues that this centralization limits creativity and encourages marketers to find ways to break out of the “walled gardens” of platforms.

3. Embracing Authenticity and Personal Branding

• In a market saturated with similar content, authenticity is crucial for standing out; he encourages being true to personal style, even if it’s unconventional.
• Gil explains that corporate branding often feels overly polished and inauthentic, and people respond better to genuine personal connections.
• Personal branding requires balancing relatability and professionalism, aiming to make an impact without alienating audiences.

4. Long-Term Strategy and Experimentation in Marketing

• He critiques short-term, agile approaches for limiting true innovation, advocating instead for larger, more impactful projects.
• Success in digital marketing, he argues, comes from long-term thinking and occasionally taking big risks to avoid the mediocrity of iterative, minor changes.
• Gil emphasizes that being on the high end of the bell curve requires risk-taking and a deep understanding of foundational marketing principles.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to a very special episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also CEO and co founder at Optmyzr, a PPC management tool. So for today’s special episode, we’ve got Gil Gildner, who’s just written his third book on the topic of PPC and digital marketing agencies.

He’s got some interesting things to say, so we brought him in and he’s going to share what the book is all about and what we can all learn from it. So let’s get rolling with this episode of PPC Town Hall. Hey Gil, good to see you again. Good

Gil Gildner: to be back.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes. Last time you were actually physically in the studio here in Mountain View.

Gil Gildner: I was. Staying in our remote,

Frederick Vallaeys: Because we, we really wanted to talk to you. Very shortly after you released your third book, which happened this week. It’s September 16th. So congratulations. First of all,

Gil Gildner: thanks. Yeah, it’s quite it’s a quite the amount of work to to write a book. I feel like I’ve written it like three times over.

I have deleted so much. So it’s finally out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Well, and as an author. By the time you’ve done so many revisions, you feel like, yeah, nobody probably wants to hear this. It’s pretty repetitive, but exactly

Gil Gildner: what I think I was telling Anya, I was like, there’s nothing groundbreaking in this, like read this three times.

Like, and she’s like, well, to you, but hopefully, hopefully it’s a little contrarian.

Frederick Vallaeys: Contrarian unorthodoxy. So that is the title of the book. I only read the Kindle version, so I don’t have a nice physical copy to show to the camera. Do you have one?

Gil Gildner: I do. There you go. Right there. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Unorthodoxy. For people who read the two previous books, it looks like the Coffee mug on the cover or the pool that was half empty.

And now there’s a cigarette, but yeah, coffee mug.

Gil Gildner: So does that mean

Frederick Vallaeys: this is the last book?

Gil Gildner: I’ve run out of the whole, the whole concept is, is over. I have no more, nothing to go beyond this. So, yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: But but yeah, let’s jump into it. Right. So there’s kind of like three core parts of the book, but tell, tell people listening today what the book is all about.

Gil Gildner: Well, I would say the first thing about this book that. I think it’s unusual is that it, I intentionally had to really struggle to not be tactical and to, because I kind of think things are changing so much right now that it’s very difficult to be very specific in digital marketing. It just feels like things are, are undergoing a polar shift, just.

Swapping. So I was trying to think of like what actually sets apart a really good marketer that can kind of weather the storms of we’re so platform focused now. And that kind of, that’s the second part of the book is that. The internet feels like it’s, it’s been centralized. Everything happens on Facebook, Instagram X, you know, Tik TOK, whatever the platforms are.

And the old internet of blogs and even like professional websites and stuff. It’s, it’s going away. It has almost has gone away in a big, in a very big way. So like the only thing I think survives this shift is. Brand or influence or more personal networking. And that’s kind of what the whole intention of the book is about is like, you’ve, you’ve got to be a little different.

You’ve got to be unusual and you’ve got to break out of the. Kind of the mainstream just slog of putting stuff out there. Like it it’s out there because it works right now, but it’s not always going to work. You know, there’s only so only so long can people get on LinkedIn and post, you know, multi paragraph thought pieces and have that mean anything.

It’s, it’s, it’s reaching the end of its useful life. I think platforms may be reaching the end of their useful life. So I don’t know, it’s a lot of this book has come from like a lot of frustration from me because I’m used to, you know, I was like, I was like 12 years old at the, you know, in the turn of the millennium, and that was where like.

Every niche pursuit had its own five competing forums, and you could find those strangest people in the world talking about these unique things. The internet now does not have that. Yeah, so.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, that’s interesting, right? Because the internet did hold a promise of Enabling the long tail and the uniqueness and everybody could find what was right for them.

And so you’re making the point that we’ve gone back to sort of mainstream. And I agree with that. Even if I do a search on Google nowadays, looking for creativity and inspiration, that inspiration is often not there because there’s a homogeneity in terms of what’s being offered. And I think in my job, I get to travel the world quite a bit and it’s amazing to see how similar.

You know, Bali has become to New York and obviously, like, they don’t have the skyscrapers, but the types of restaurants you’ll find, the type of food you’ll eat, the types of things people use, it’s all very, very similar. Right. And I think that’s kind of what you’re saying.

Gil Gildner: I was in Uganda a few years ago and I was out in a little village and, you know, they didn’t even have electricity, but there was an older man that had a little flip cell phone.

He was listening to the radio on it and it was Call Me Maybe. I just, I had this Just this shift where I was like, holy like we’ve we’ve lost something. We’ve gained something And we’ve lost something like call me. Maybe is not a song that should go out into the the bush of Uganda It doesn’t deserve that but yeah, that homogenous nature

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, but I’ll be I get what you’re saying.

Gil Gildner: It’s a catchy song. It’s not too bad

Frederick Vallaeys: No. And then you get the flip side of that as well, right? So K pop, which is obviously Korean, but now they’re making songs basically geared towards the American market and everybody is kind of going for that bigger markets. And again, that’s what introduces the sameness across everything.

Now, I mean, let’s bring it back, right? So you talk about three, like, really fundamental shifts that we as marketers have to think about. And the first one is about being unorthodox. And you talk a little bit about everybody believing that there’s a bell curve and that we all fit on the bell curve.

So what this made me think about was the fact that you didn’t want to offer tactics in the book. And oftentimes that’s not necessarily appreciated because we all want to know, like, what I know, exactly. But I think the point that you’re coming at this from is listen if I give you tactics They’re going to be the standard tactics that they’re going to give you average results And there’s enough information out there about how to get average results.

Like how do people run pmax? How do people bring dsas into the mix how they do it around youtube campaigns like it’s out there, right? Like we can’t really have anything unique to that. But your point is like don’t be average be unorthodox. Try something new Shoot for defenses Because because there is actually no average like average doesn’t work.

So talk more about that.

Gil Gildner: Yeah. So, so that the idea is that You know, we, we, I feel like, especially in marketing, because we’ve, we’re so close to so many numbers and metrics, we feel like we know that everything’s part of a bell curve and we’re all in the 50th percentile. And from that we can assume, Oh, everybody kind of knows how to use the internet.

Everybody kind of knows how to use Google Analytics. Everybody kind of knows how to set up Google Ads campaigns. Actually, no. There’s nobody is in the 50th percentile. 90 percent of humanity is, is down, like, has no idea what Google Ads, Google Analytics, or anything is. And they’re way down at the bottom.

And then you have a very small subset of, of humans and consumers and professionals that actually do know this stuff. And even within that, if you zoomed into that, you’d have, you know, people that kind of know what they’re doing. And then a very way at the, you know, the longest of the long tail, you have some incredible experts.

There is no such thing as average when it comes to a lot of this technology, in my mind. What that means is that it takes a very little bit to go a very long way. Simply reading an article on Google Analytics, Gets you in the top percentile of the world, actually, probably read a few books, watch a few videos, use it a little bit.

And you’re one of 10, 000 people who know how to use the thing really well. Like, it’s pretty, the numbers in, like, are mind boggling if you look at it. From that, from a pullback.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I mean, if you start with 8 billion people, then obviously like only a fraction of us are digital marketers. So we even know what Google analytics is and how to use it.

But, but there’s also a notion maybe that and I have a strong opinion on that, but I want to hear yours. So do we even need to know what Google analytics is as a marketer? Do we even need to know? How to calculate a CPC bid when we all have access to automated bidding. When a lot of this, like the modeling that happens in analytics platforms, like it’s done for us, right?

Like third party cookies by and large going away. So the precision of that measurement is not there anymore. And there’s statistical models replacing and giving us a modeled answer, which could be good enough, but to what degree does it even matter to understand that, or can we use it and get pretty decent results?

Gil Gildner: Well, I think my answer 10 years ago would have been entirely different. Now the modeling. Is honestly getting pretty good, you know, Pmax is, it’s getting pretty good. So do most people need to know? Actually, probably not, but if you do know you are in the top percentile and that is probably worth it.

It’s worth it to me. If I want to be in the top percentile of digital marketers. I want to be really good at this. And even if I don’t have to do it on a daily day to day basis, I want to know the formula. I want to know how it works. I think that makes me a better marketer than anyone else who gets to that point.

I don’t ever think not knowing something is better, but that’s just my opinion.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and I agree with you. I think it’s important to understand fundamentals. At least at this point in time, it still is interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that was basically saying, listen, people like you and me and most of the people.

Say 30 and older. Or no, actually anyone with a job today in pay per click or digital marketing, like we came from a world where we had to understand how things worked. And so even if we get generative AI, that does a lot of the work for us, or we get an automation from Google that does the work for us.

It’s fine because we can still pick up on. Okay. Maybe then do the job exactly right. Like I know how to go and fix them because I know how it got to that wrong place, or I know how it got to 80 percent of the right answer, but kind of like missed that last bit. Now the risk is that if you’re just starting out in your career and you’ve never had to do these things manually, and you’ve never educated yourself on how these things work.

It’s just magic, magic, right? And that’s all, you know, and, and GPT breaks and GPT drifts. I’ve talked about this, how, you know, it gives you the right answer today, but tomorrow magically it’s no longer the right answer. It shifts, it drifts. And then what do you do? And that’s the frustration that we’ve so long seen with automated bidding from Google is that, like you’re saying, it does a really good job.

It does a much better job than 10 years ago, but once in a while it goes haywire and then you’re like, well, I can either turn it off or I have to. But if I turn it off, then what do I do? Right? I have to go back to manual. And if I don’t know how to set a CPC based on the signals that I’m seeing, then I’m kind of in a tough position.

Gil Gildner: Yeah. And I think it’s like,

honestly, most people probably can just turn things on automatic and it will probably be okay most of the time, but it’s more of a diagnosis and like a critical thinking that you have to know, like, if you really want to. To ensure that you’ll, you’ll have a job 10 years from now, you need to know how things work, you know, like, yeah, it’s, I think it’s

Frederick Vallaeys: average, you got to know how it works to you, you aspire to be like at the best of the best, right?

So I think that was like one really key point that I picked up on your book. And there’s many more key points that I’m probably glossing over here, but I’ll talk about the second one. This whole. notion of the platform standardization. I think some people call it just the walled garden. There’s more control by the Googles, the Metas, the Amazons.

What do we do in those scenarios? Do you have any advice or is this more of just a like, Hey, we’re a little bit frustrated by what’s happening.

Gil Gildner: I don’t know if I have advice because if I could solve this, I would. I think to illustrate that, think about. 10, 15 years ago, if you wanted to, to, to start an e commerce store and sell something it was expensive and difficult.

You spent years on conversion rate optimization, making sure your checkout worked, your checkout process would break all the time, tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands to develop e commerce site, Shopify now for 30 a month, it gives you the best, the The, the most optimized and beautiful platform in the world.

You don’t have to do much to take it further from there that has created like this, both a walled garden and just a barrier to entry that’s so low that it’s just, it’s there. It’s, it’s handed to you almost on a silver platter. It’s a benefit because anyone can start a store and if they have a good idea, hopefully it will work, but it’s a huge downside.

As well, because. It’s just clutter and, and now every shop is on Shopify or, you know, one of the, you know, alternatives. I don’t know. It’s, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, and that’s maybe where then it goes into the third part of the book for me, which was the storytelling, the branding elements.

Because if everything’s the same, then how do you stand out? And if we’re arguing that there is no middle of the bell curve for many people, Or if the middle of the bell curve is not good enough for you, then how do you stand out and everybody has the same shopping cart. Everybody has the same coupon.

Everybody has the same third party data. Everybody’s using the same

Gil Gildner: P max.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So then what do you do? And that’s where Brandon’s story comes in. Yeah.

Gil Gildner: I, and that’s, yeah, that’s what that whole third part is. I think. You know, even if it’s unlikable or distasteful to some people, maybe if it’s weird to other people, if it’s there is also, there feels like there’s a lack of authenticity in a lot of the branding and the, and the, the corporate.

The corporate vibe, the, it just, it feels like it’s a little workshopped. Like everything’s a little workshopped and I hate that. I think the only way to, to break out of the walled garden is to just be you. And I know that’s such a kitschy phrase, but like people don’t, people don’t do it. People are afraid to do that.

And it works when people do it when people have a very strong or, you know, some idiosyncrasy that. bothersome people, but it’s the only way to do it. You just got to be weird

Frederick Vallaeys: and orthodox. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta be you. And so I think there’s also two levels to this, right? So if you think about a brand and how it communicates and what it stands for.

That’s always by nature impersonal because a brand, as much as it’s maybe a person for taxation reasons, it’s not really a person. And that was my role at Google was, Google would get invited to speak at a conference, but nobody, like, you can’t put Google on stage, you need to put a person on stage. And if that person was a new person every, you know.

Every quarter, then people would be like, Google doesn’t care. It like, there’s no person behind that. So I said, Hey, let me be the person who goes repetitively to all these companies year after year. And at least if people get frustrated about something Google ads is doing, like they, they can yell at me or they can yell at Matt cuts and people like that.

And you know, obviously you have to get up there. You have to represent the corporate brand. But there’s also a personal element, right? Like, are you a dog person or a cat person? Are you you know, are you a tequila person or a scotch person? All of these things make you human and makes people connect with you and in ways that I think you’re saying mean a lot more than just that corporate veil.

Gil Gildner: Yeah, and the corporate veil is, is usually Perfect. You know, it’s just, it’s polished. And while that is maybe good in a PR sense of like, Oh, look at this. Perfect. This perfect company. It’s not real. And people know that. And you know, any evangelist that gets up there to stand. You know, as the face of a, of a brand is, is personal and is probably flawed in a lot of ways, but people don’t actually don’t care.

Everybody’s weird. Everybody’s flawed in some way. But if, if you’ve ever had sat down and had drinks with someone or sat in a room and listened to someone talk, you’re much less likely as a human to be very upset at that brand. If you know, there’s someone real that works at that company that’s, you know, trying to push things through the pipeline for you.

That’s the reason evangelists exist.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s correct. And I’m not sure you want to talk about this and this is maybe a little bit of a risky area, so we can cut it out if need be. But in terms of being real, so I put myself out there quite a bit, but I do have fears about being truly real because we live this is a moment of everyone being woke, and there’s a lot of political divisiveness.

And that happens both in the United States and abroad. So there’s a lack of respect and communication. And I think there’s a lack of nuance. And people very quickly want to jump down somebody’s throat for something that they said where they misspoke or they didn’t really mean it. There’s no conversation anymore.

It’s more of a black and white. And so how do you consolidate those two when you’re saying like, listen, be true to yourself, who you are, the flawed person, but also the opinionated person. And how, how does that work when you’re potentially going to get a lot of backlash?

Gil Gildner: That is very tricky for me personally, but I’ve, I’ve tried to, I’ve intentionally tried to change that over, over the past few years.

When I think of the people I know on a personal basis, I have extremely liberal friends, I have extremely conservative friends, and on a, no, I have extremely normal friends and extremely bizarre friends. On a personal basis, actually, I don’t think anybody cares. That’s the thing. On a face to face basis, we’re at the same barbecue.

It’s only really when you’re, when you get on the internet and there’s like a, there’s a barrier in between you and everybody else that people feel free to just, you know, pull out the guns and they’re just like, look at all these idiots with an opinion that’s different than mine. If, if they were in person around the same table, I very seldom do you have anyone that’s So my opinion has been, yes, it’s super risky for me to be opinionated and I’m super opinionated.

I don’t put half of what I think out there, but I kind of think if, if I’m going to follow my own Intuition on this. I just have to be who I am. If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. Like, I’m never gonna make them like me, right? And I don’t think anyone or brand or entity or anything will ever make someone like you unless they already do.

It’s, it’s way more intangible than, you know.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I suppose at the end of the day, listen, we’re gonna Potentially piss off some people. But like you said that they’re pissed off in their online personas, but when they sit down and you face face, it’s it’s not going to be that VMR. And at the end of the day, with 8 Billion people in the world, do we really need to be everybody’s friend or can we run a very successful business with other people who are real and who are willing to come to the table to have a conversation as opposed to just like a very locked in view, right?

Gil Gildner: Do I want to work with someone who doesn’t like me? Like, no, like there’s, there’s 8 billion other people out there and I can find someone who does like me, it’ll be so much easier to work, you know? So, yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I agree. Now you made a point LinkedIn posts, multi paragraph posts I do quite a few of those or not.

I mean, not that many, but I do them occasionally. You said the the days of those are numbered

Gil Gildner: big difference. Okay, I read your LinkedIn posts. They’re great.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m

Gil Gildner: talking about there. There was the, there was like the mean the formulaic, like sentence by sentence, you know, impactful short sentence. You know, it was a, it was a specific format.

It just drives me crazy. It was super viral and super effective for about two years. And now anyone who’s still doing that is like two years behind, behind the curve. That, I just use that as an example of like those kind of memes that, that the communication trends that people, the bandwagons people hop on.

And I think that’s kind of just the internet and it’s one of the interesting things about the internet or hive minds kind of create memes. But yeah, that, that’s just my personal pet peeve.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, that makes sense. Okay. So. But ultimately what you’re saying is like aim to be on the high end of the bell curve because that’s where success exists.

You also made a point about experimentation, right? Don’t, don’t try average small change sort of things, but swing for defenses. Actually, do you want to talk about that for a bit? Like what you think about experimentation?

Gil Gildner: Yeah. And a lot of a lot of my opinions on, Maybe you could call it the agile methodology come from trauma in my, my past professional experience, companies I worked with there was one in particular that could not do a single thing without throwing it into a sprint and being very iterative.

And so the whole company just made these little tiny little stumbles and not once. Was any project worth doing ever approved because it was risky? The risk was still there. The company is no longer in existence. So, but that was because they couldn’t they Excuse the French, but they just they didn’t have the balls to do anything worth doing.

Frederick Vallaeys: So then don’t let the process get in the way of what you need to achieve and you also make that point in terms of long term Versus short term thinking.

Gil Gildner: Yeah

Frederick Vallaeys: I think there’s a similar point, right? So yeah, sprint focused as opposed to what do we need to do? Bigger project.

Gil Gildner: And it’s not to say that, you know, sprints aren’t useful, especially in software that’s it, that’s probably the best place for iteration to be.

But I, this book, I couldn’t have sprinted my way into this. I’ve tried that before. I couldn’t have iterated this book. I have to sit down and write the book. Otherwise. It’s just a collection of blog posts, you know, and that can work, but at some point you just have to sit down and commit a few months and.

Yeah, some sweat and tears and do something big because nobody else will do it and it puts you in the top end of the curve. Nobody else spend a couple months on something

Frederick Vallaeys: big effort. Going back to authenticity and branding. So you you have a great story in the book about visiting an Ebola. Hospital field hospital and how there was a BBC news crew and they basically had suited up in hazmat suits Just the the reporter who was on camera, but behind everybody was just in like flip flops and shorts Yeah, and and so the point I think that you were making was they were building a news story and they wanted it to be sensational and like scary looking and so that’s why they did These things clearly not authentic A little bit of fake news for sure But I’m sure you got eyeballs, right?

And so, like, again, how do you meld these two together? When in the world of marketing, we need to grab that attention. We need to be different. But you’re also saying, like, be authentic and sometimes authenticity. And I’ll give you an example for me, right? So Google makes an announcement and Whatever. It’s, it’s a different privacy tracking framework.

And I’m like, nobody cares.

Talk about it, right? So we got to say something grandiose because that’s what’s going to get the eyeballs. That’s what’s going to get my LinkedIn article, get some comments. Like, how do you meld this two together?

Gil Gildner: Well, you know, those, those LinkedIn articles with the little truncated sentences. They are that way because they get eyeballs.

The thing is how many people are doing that and how, like, if I do the same thing, am I setting myself apart? Like, am I adding any value? Does anyone care? Then at that point, it’s just a race to the bottom. It’s just churning out stuff. And I can do that. That’s a game we can all play. And that’s my default.

Yeah. It’s think that’s everyone’s default or. I could just sit down and think about it a little bit, maybe be a little more honest about it, maybe harder, may not have the exact numbers, the eyeballs at first, but I think people will remember it a little more. Yeah. If, if you’ve ever watched the blooper reels of, of like meteorologists you know, on a hurricane in Florida or something like that, and like, And they’re like holding, you know, they’re holding their, their rain jacket and their umbrella, and they’re kind of like, they’re getting blown away.

And then the camera zooms out and it’s like, it’s like, there’s someone like walking down the sidewalk naturally. It all comes out in the end, you know, the stuff bubbles up from the bottom. And in the longterm, if you know, if, if I’m going to be working for five, 10, 15, hopefully not 20 more years, then. I’ve got to do something sustainable for me, you know, from a professional brand perspective, and I can’t fake it for, for 15 years.

I just can’t fake it for that much longer. Even if it’s, even if I go slowly, even if I get one new fan a year, who really, really likes what I had to say, I’ll, I’ll take that route over the hundreds of thousands of people that will flip on me on an instant, because I’m not in the latest trend. It’s just a, it’s a personal preference though.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, Gil, thank you for putting that all down in a book. I thought it was an interesting read. So everybody go and get the Kindle or the paperback version. It’s on Amazon right now. It’s called unorthodoxy. Gil has also written a couple of other books. So you can check those out about building an agency together with his wife.

This is the first book I think that you’ve authored by yourself on the topic of agency. That’s a change right there. But but yeah, and then if anyone wants to connect with you, Gil or Discosloth, I guess they’ll find you on LinkedIn. Anything else people should know?

Gil Gildner: Yeah. I tweet often on X GilGilner.

So that’s, that’s where I’m. Usually throwing my thoughts out into the ether.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Hey, well, thanks for joining me on the podcast today and sharing a little bit about the book So everyone hope you’ve enjoyed watching and listening If you did, please subscribe and we’ll let you know when the next episode comes out And when we have special one off episodes like this when we read a cool new book or there’s a breaking industry development so thanks Gil.

Thanks for watching and we’ll see you for the next one