Nasser: 

Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today I’m joined by Jared Hendrickson. He’s the vice president and general manager of our New York office. And objectively, Jared is one of the more interesting people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with at my 16 years here at DAC. How long have we worked together Jared? 

Jared: 

I’ve been here for 13 years now. 

Nasser: 

13 of my 16 years. So you’ve really kind of shaped my time here. We’ve gone through a whole kind of narrative arc, you know, friends became enemies, enemies became enemies, bigger enemies, and then they became friends again. But joking aside, Jared is one of the people who has the twitchiest radar in kind of marketplace shifts, landscape shifts, client challenges, and aside from being exceptionally good at his job, is actually someone I consider a really good friend, on good days anyway, right? 

Jared:  

Yes.  Well thank you, Nasser. That was a very lovely introduction, and the feeling is mutual. 

Nasser: 

That’s as good as it’ll get for this episode. 

Jared: 

Absolutely. And I do have lots of photographs of us when we both had hair. 

Nasser: 

Thank you. Maybe we’ll share that at some point. 

Jared: 

Maybe. Maybe not. 

Nasser: 

So, Jared, one of the reasons why we wanted you on today’s episode is I feel like it’s a very anxious time, right?  People out there are struggling with enormous anxiety as it relates to AI, budget pressures, changing platforms, measurement going away right? Higher expectations. And so when you’re talking to clients or teams, where do you see most of that anxiety showing up? 

Jared: 

Well, I’d say, you know, anxiety if you look at the root of it, it’s based in fear, right? What am I missing? What am I not doing? Is this something I’m capable of understanding? You know, all those questions come up especially, you know, for more lay folks like you and I that don’t have a degree in tech, as you would say. So right now, it’s all amplified because of the, you know, velocity as a word that we use here. Right? The velocity of change.  

And it’s not one thing I have to figure out, or two things. It’s a lot of things going on at once. And I think not only figuring that out, but in your own head, trying to figure out where you start is a is a big piece of it right now as well. 

Nasser:   

So where do you think it comes from most? Is it primarily the speed of the velocity of this, or is it figuring out what changes actually matter? Because one of the things about our industry is we’re really good at latching onto shiny things. And, you know, remember the metaverse? That was awesome. I think I think you created a lot of anxiety internally about it. 

Jared: 

This is the metaverse we’re in right now, isn’t it? 

Nasser: 

So you’re a savant. What can I say. But you know, being able to… is that a challenge? Does that create anxiety in terms of not knowing whether something matters or not? 

Jared: 

Yes. I mean, you don’t want to be the boy who cries wolf too often and what’s important or what’s not important. You know, I think the way we try to engage that a lot is by what we’re hearing from other people especially clients right now, you know, with all the talk of AI and LLMs and you know, then hearing stuff about  agentic search and agentic Commerce is here. Well, not quite so fast.  

And, when you start thinking about it, especially around agentic commerce, you know, the potential impacts on the media landscape or how businesses run, it could be quite profound, right? Again, not tomorrow, but in the future. So you don’t want to  miss being prepared for that. And I think it’s really choosing, you know, right now at least where you’re going to place your bets and where you’re going to prepare for first. 

Nasser: 

And of course, you know, this is all in the context of massive economic disruption and, you know, real concern, real fear in a lot of instances. And people don’t want to be wrong. 

Jared; 

No, you don’t want to be wrong. You don’t want it to be three, six months a year out and say, you know, why didn’t we think of that? Or why didn’t you tell us about that? Or, you know, and some of it is looking into a crystal ball, but the biggest way, you know, what we’re trying to do with folks right now is looking at the different elements and pieces. 

If we want to talk about, you know, your brand’s visibility and presence on LLMs, right? You know, how we were talking about that six months ago is very different than from how we are today. And the challenge with trying to chase a technology or a platform that’s evolving at rapid speed, is it too is constantly changing. So the change is changing. So that’s anxiety about the change and then anxiety about how the change is going to change. So it just all amplifies and snowballs itself, and you can’t let yourself get wound up in that.  Or you do nothing and have nothing. 

Nasser: 

That was almost like a Donald Rumsfeld reference there about unknown knowns and known unknowns 

Jared: 

It was.  I’m starting to sound like your previous guest Dan here a little bit. 

Nasser: 

Oh. God forbid. 

So, Jared, one of your superpowers is turning anxiety into action. What is the first thing that a marketing leader should do when their team feels stuck or paralyzed in uncertainty? 

Jared: 

Well, this is going to actually be counterintuitive to some of the other, things that I’ve been saying. But slow down first right? You know, when a team is discombobulated or confused, it’s usually because they don’t have clear direction on what to do next or a unified direction on what to do next. So I’d say slow down first. 

Secondly, right now is getting the right group of people together to have a discussion. You see a lot of times with two individuals having a thought about their opinions and deciding everything’s right, and then a third coming along two days later and saying, no, you’ve got that completely wrong, right? How often does that happen? So slowing down, getting the right folks together and then going through, you know, a basic list of questions, trying to understand, you know, what are we trying to do? Why? Do we have the right people here? 

Somebody might say, oh no, we need X, Y, or Z. It’s like, all right, well, we’ll get them right. And then collectively forming a plan of what to do next. You know, rather than letting individuals kind of go off on their own and come back. Everybody’s going to have different thinking then. So it’s aligning that team and getting a group agreement right, on what our right path forward is, because we all know where we’re where we’re going. And that’s very important right now to stay aligned and end up with something rather than little bits of nothing. 

Nasser: 

And while consensus sometimes gets a bad rap, at least what it does is it gives perspective and the idea that it’s been thought through from different perspectives. 

Jared: 

Yeah, absolutely.  And it might slow you down at first, but it definitely leads to better outcomes in a more timely manner. 

Nasser: 

100%. Yeah. I remember once a client saying to me, don’t tell me that you’re going to come back in three months and tell me what to do with the rest of my year, because every week that goes by, I fall 6% further behind my number. 

Jared: 

Correct?. 

Nasser: 

So doing something is better than just sitting there and being paralyzed. But you need to do it in an informed way. So how do you know when a team is being appropriately cautious and measured and careful, versus when fear is slowing them down entirely and paralyzing them? 

Jared: 

I don’t know, it’s difficult because things always seem to take too long right? And, you know, where were we yesterday?  I think as long as we’re looking at things and thinking about today what we’re going to do differently tomorrow. As long as that mindset is being applied right? And we’re taking learnings and expanding upon it, not just dwelling on what may or may not be the right way to look at something or to do something that you can feel the progress in that regard through the conversation. And especially, in the instances where we’re able to in certain new technologies, partner with clients as part of their teams, trying to figure all this out to and make change. In some instances, broader change in an organization, the daily process and the inertia behind that is probably the biggest measure of if something’s not moving fast enough. 

And some of it isn’t necessarily the number of widgets that you’re producing right now. I think actually a lot of it is an understanding to, of what needs to be done rather than the work outputs itself. 

Nasser: 

So small incremental improvements, but consistently every day versus wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, do nothing and then do it all at once. Correct? 

Jared: 

Correct. Yep. Yeah, and another piece of that too is, you know, the waterfall approach just doesn’t work right? Over to the content team to the SEO team, back to the copy team. Right now again because it does move faster it’s groups of people working together, and not certain individuals giving direction to others on what should or should happen next. 

Nasser: 

So people look for confidence, and the market is not giving us signals around what the right path is. How do you build trust in that environment? 

Jared: 

You know, on a lot of topics today and this extends from new media platforms, new campaign types, how ads are working in ChatGPT versus Gemini. We go into presentations now and say this is what we think right now. This is our best understanding based on the talent and the people that we have. They’re really smart about all this stuff. One thing I can guarantee you is that in six months this will be different. 

And I think that honesty and saying we’re trying to figure this out together is the best thing you can do around this, right? For two reasons. One, we’ve seen plenty of AI companies founded in and shut down in the last 12 months. There is no solution or there is no formula right now. Like I said, it’s evolving because the change is changing, right? So I think that honesty and going in, knowing that things are going to change, and presenting a team of people that are going to be best equipped to adapt with that is the strongest thing you can do right now when you’re talking to folks. 

Nasser: 

So I’m happy that you’re talking about people because as a general manager, you are responsible for strategy, you are responsible for delivery, but most of all, you’re responsible for people. And how do you keep a team of people motivated and action-oriented in a time of change and anxiety? 

Jared: 

I think by instilling the notion of that, you know, of not being afraid to fail, right? I’ve seen too many things including today, what do we do next? Well, we have to do this. And I was like, okay, we’ll just go do it. Well, I’m not really sure. Right, well let’s just do it and see?  I think that making sure folks aren’t walking around on eggshells or afraid to make mistakes is probably the biggest motivator, right now? Or food. 

Nasser: 

So on that, food aside, how do you create an environment where people are aren’t afraid to fail? 

Jared: 

I talk to them about my own experiences, right? And failures and books that have been written about, you know, making mistakes quickly. One of the things we talk about on our teams is this notion that we’re all here getting paid to learn right now.  And how great is that? You’ve got the opportunity to sit here, understand something new, learn about it and take it with you wherever you go. We’re paying you right now not to have the answers, but to figure it out. And that mindset, I think makes people comfortable, right. Less stress and more willing to be open to new ideas or new ways of thinking about things and new ways of working together too. 

Nasser: 

So, Jared, if a marketer is listening to this episode and they feel overwhelmed by change, what are the first three questions that they should ask themselves when they wake up tomorrow morning? 

Jared: 

You know, I’d start out with how you’d ask yourself a question about any marketing initiative, right? What are the intended outcomes of any effort? And I start with that. And the reason I’d certainly start with that as leading to the second question of, you know, are we comfortable looking at this as not necessarily something we’re doing for tomorrow right? But that’s going to benefit us in the future. 

We have, especially in the e-commerce space, you know every client is worried about revenue, ROAS, net new customer growth, and very specific KPIs that we’ve been trained and ingrained to our heads. Sell more of this.  Is that at the bottom of the brief right now? You know, ultimately it you know, it is. But I think, you know, what’s the outcome, the time frame. 

And then the third is, you know, it’s probably very obvious, right? But what are our measurement goals here. And in a lot of the new AI emerging platforms or generative search actions that people are taking. You know, those KPIs of measurement may be a little bit different, right? And we’re starting to talk as some as potential leading indicators that are going to pay off in the future. But they’re very important now for the business and this is why. So yeah those would be the three big ones. 

Nasser: 

I would agree with that. And I think maybe one to consider as an additional item, maybe because the technology today allows for rapid prototyping and testing, like what’s the one thing that you would do as a test to move the business forward incrementally tomorrow? 

Jared: 

Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree with that. And like I said before, every day you should be thinking about and trying something different right now. Or at least have a different thought or opinion that’s probably slightly more informed than it was yesterday, more than ever. 

Nasser: 

Well, that sucks for someone like me where I have no original ideas. 

Jared: 

None. None at all other than this podcast, which is phenomenal. 

Nasser: 

Wasn’t even my idea. Thank you very much. 

Jared: 

Fantastic. 

Nasser: 

So, Jared, let’s round this out by completing this sentence. When shift happens, the best leaders… 

Jared: 

Have plenty of toilet paper. 

Nasser: 

And that’s why we have you on the show. So that’s the shift folks. Uncertainty is not going away. AI platforms, budgets, measurement, consumer behavior will keep changing. But the best marketing leaders don’t wait for perfect clarity. They create enough clarity to move. They ask better questions, focus on outcomes, test with purpose, and help their teams and clients turn anxiety into action. 

Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens, leave us a review and share this episode with your team. If you have any questions for the podcast, please email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com, we’d love to hear from you. Jared, thank you for joining us. 

Jared: 

Thank you Nasser. It was a pleasure. I look forward to spending the next few days with you here too. 

Nasser: 

Me too Jared. Thank you very much for listening and watching wherever you are. I’m Nasser Sahlool.