S9 51: Marketing Mythbusters: What Really Makes Customers Buy with Jeff Greenfield
“The truth is, when you start checking out other brands, you will start to notice how inconsistent they are. So just by being consistent, you're already ahead of the game.” —Jeff Greenfield.
Most entrepreneurs are drowning in a sea of marketing noise, desperately trying to be heard while burning through limited resources with little measurable return. But the real battle isn't about having the most sophisticated tactics, but about crafting a message so compelling that it cuts through the digital clutter and speaks directly to our ideal customer's deepest desires and unspoken needs.
Jeff Greenfield is the Co-Founder of Provalytics, a cutting-edge analytics platform that transforms how companies measure marketing effectiveness. With decades of experience decoding complex marketing data, Jeff has advised some of the world's largest brands on optimizing their advertising strategies.
Tune in as Justine and Jeff expound on marketing analytics, revealing how businesses can leverage historical mathematical techniques, harness the power of digital platforms, and make data-driven decisions that dramatically boost profitability—all while telling a compelling brand story that resonates emotionally with their target audience.
Connect with Jeff:
Jeff Greenfield is the Co-Founder and CEO of Provalytics, where he is revolutionizing marketing attribution with privacy-centric, cookie-less solutions tailored to a rapidly evolving digital landscape. With over three decades of expertise in strategy, growth, and marketing innovation, Jeff has a proven track record of building transformative companies and delivering measurable results. At C3 Metrics, which he co-founded, Jeff developed industry-first technologies like the cookie-less identifier. These innovations helped clients such as JP Morgan and Nestlé achieve marketing ROI improvements exceeding 25%.
Jeff’s journey began with his studies in biochemistry at the University of Maryland, where he developed a data-driven approach that has shaped his career. His diverse expertise spans strategic leadership, technology innovation, and creativity, drawing from experiences that include aviation, magic, and healthcare. Today, Jeff leads Provalytics with a commitment to empowering marketers to make smarter, faster decisions that drive measurable impact, helping businesses thrive in a privacy-first world.
Episode Highlights:
02:29 Marketing: From Traditional to Digital
07:37 Why Old-School Marketing Techniques Still Work
10:25 Ancient Math Powering Modern AI
14:40 Building Brand Awareness with Limited Budgets
22:58 Navigating Social Media Platforms
26:53 Turning Data into Millions
29:14 Beyond Clicks: Rethinking Marketing Metrics
Tweets:
What if your marketing could predict success before you spend a dime? Tune in as @justine.reichman @provalytics CEO, Jeff Greenfield explain how analytics can transform your business strategy. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #MarketingStrategy #BusinessGrowth #Analytics #DataDriven
Inspirational Quotes:
02:00 "You can't track something if you're not measuring it, you need to measure it, and then you can look to improve upon it." —Jeff Greenfield
02:32 “Half of them (analytics tool), you don't know how to use. The other half, you don't understand the impact. But you haven't wrapped it around how what they're doing can impact what you're doing and connecting the dots, people fly blind a lot of the time." —Justine Reichman
18:20 "The more frequent that you're there and the more updates you do, it always wins." —Jeff Greenfield
20:15 "The why for me is that I get to show people a different picture than they've ever seen before. They've looked at the same object for many years, and now I'm taking them on a journey to the other side of the street, and they see it completely different." —Jeff Greenfield
21:59 "People don't just like to listen, they also like to watch. Video is what drives all of this social media." —Jeff Greenfield
28:25 When somebody talks about a brand on a podcast, there's nothing for them to click on; they're just hearing it. When you shift it to something where you're getting that type of return, that adds up to a significant sum of money really, really fast." —Jeff Greenfield
29:53 "When awareness is built up to a high enough level, people will walk into your store." —Jeff Greenfield
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I am Justine, your podcast host. I'm so excited today to have Jeff Greenfield. He has a company called Provalytics, which is all about analytics. And for those that are tuning in that are looking for inspiration and looking to build a better for you innovation or just be in that space, what better place is there to go, but to the analytics? The proof is in the pudding, right? So I want to welcome our new guests that are tuning in today, whether you're watching the podcast or tuning into the videocast. I want to welcome our guest, Jeff, for joining us and sharing with him what he's built in the analytics, and how it can impact those that are innovating today, and those that are only just beginning to research and develop what they're going to do next.
So Jeff, welcome to the Essential Ingredients Podcast.
Jeff Greenfield: Well, thank you so much for having me, Justine. I'm excited to be here. And you're right. When it comes to analytics, people don't understand how important measuring and looking at things is. For me, before we even get into the marketing speak, I think about, there's an obsession now. We all start to understand how important sleep is. And if you wear the Apple Watch at night, it breaks down how long you sleep, your deep sleep, how much you're awake. We don't know what happens during deep sleep exactly, but we know how important it is, and we don't realize that it could be an issue until we start to measure it when we start to measure when we realize that maybe we're only getting a couple of minutes a night of deep sleep, and maybe that could be causing some other problems. Well, now I'm aware of it. And so now, I at least have a way that I can measure it to see if I make changes that they actually improve. And that's really what it's all about because you can't track something if you're not measuring it. You need to measure it, and then you can look to improve upon it. So that, I think, from a big broad perspective is really, really important. And marketing is one of those things that a lot of folks tend to forget about, or they tend to neglect, or they put way too much emphasis on it. And so hopefully, we can demystify some of that because it's really gotten complicated over the last decade or two.
"You can't track something if you're not measuring it, you need to measure it, and then you can look to improve upon it." —Jeff Greenfield
Justine Reichman: Oh, I couldn't agree more, and there's all these tools too. Half of them, you don't know how to use. The other half, you don't understand the impact. But people are using them. You haven't wrapped it around how what they're doing can impact what you're doing and connecting the dots. People fly blind a lot of the time, right? They're just saying, I'm going to start to do this, and I don't know what it's going to do. But if you take a step back, maybe, and you look at some of the analytics, it can help you. I would imagine. And you correct me if I'm wrong, but tailor your marketing accordingly.
Jeff Greenfield: You're absolutely right. You kind of hit it right. You hit the nail right on the head, that there's a lot of stuff that folks don't understand. But I think the biggest, most important thing for everyone to comprehend is there's an old saying from a famous marketer in the Midwest by the name of John Wanamaker, and he's attributed with saying, half the money I spend in marketing is wasted. The only problem is, I don't know which half. And that was before there was digital marketing. So you can imagine that before there was digital, there was print, like magazines and newspapers. There was a radio. There was direct mail, like coupons that came to your house. And then there was TV and billboards. Let's say you had a furniture store and you're running ads on TV every week, there's no way to actually know deterministically how many people came in because they just drove by. How many people came in because they saw some furniture at a friend's house, and how many people saw the sale advertised on TV. You can't absolutely positively be certain, primarily, because you're dealing with human beings. And we don't respond to just one thing. There's typically not one thing that happens. It's a series of events and exposures, and there's an emotional component to it. And so back before there was digital advertising and all of these different places to advertise, what marketers would do is they would rely upon these statistical tools.
One of the most famous ones is known as marketing mix modeling or MMM. And what that would do is that would actually count the number of what we would call impressions. And an impression is every time an ad is shown to someone that would count as an impression so you can look at how many things you buy, how many ads you essentially buy every day, how many people are supposedly looking at it, and they would look at the relationship between that and what your sales were. And when they had enough data, they could actually do a really good job of predicting based upon how many ads you had out there, what the sales were. And then if you said to them, well, I want my sales to be 25% higher. They would run the math and they say, okay, well, then this is what you need to do in this combination. And they would do it. And that's how brands like Coke, Pepsi, BMW and all of these brands that we know that are still around and huge. That's how they built their businesses by relying upon the analytics and the math behind it in order for things to work. But when digital came around, marketers got very excited. I think it was like having a little bit of a dance with the devil. Because what happened is that, all of a sudden, now you would buy ads on Yahoo or some website. This is way before Facebook.
At the end of the month, you would get a report of how many clicks you purchased. And finally, there was a way where you could actually count, okay, I spent this amount of money. I showed X number of people ads, and this number of people visited my website. It was concrete, it was deterministic. And marketers were like, okay, this seems closer to the sale because there's an action. And so they started moving a bunch of money towards this type of stuff, and that built this whole kind of empire, if you will, of Facebook, Google and all of that stuff. And even though it's easy to do for the bigger brands, what they've realized is that as they got closer to that sale, when you think about sales, it's like a funnel. You send out messages to say, hey, I'm selling this. Are you interested? And some people are, some people aren't, and it gets further down the funnel. But when you move your dollars there, you're actually reaching fewer people. And so the bigger brands now are realizing that maybe we went in the wrong direction. We need to go back to do more of this type of branding. So digital has this catch 22 for marketers. It can be very targeted, which is great. But that also means you're telling fewer people about your product.
“Half of them (analytics tool), you don't know how to use. The other half, you don't understand the impact. But you haven't wrapped it around how what they're doing can impact what you're doing and connecting the dots, people fly blind a lot of the time." —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: What I'm hearing, though, which I think is super interesting, is that we're going back to what we used to do for that greater impact. And I think there's so many ways that we're seeing that, whether it's about the vegetables and going back to agriculture, and how we're going back to none of the pesticides and all those kinds of things. It's happening here too, which I just think is an interesting conversation because we go back to the beginning.
Jeff Greenfield: You're spot on with that. I just read the other day that the CEO of Bumble, who also founded Tinder, she's redoing Bumble, this dating app. And because they realize that in order for someone to be in a relationship, first, they have to love themselves. So they are designing a series of quizzes and essentially games on the Bumble app so people will learn to feel better about themselves. And then they are promoting offline events where people actually get together, and they do this strange thing face to face and have a conversation. Imagine that which is so anti app. So you're 1,000% right. As when the pendulum swings so far in one direction, it can't get any further. And what's fascinating, Justine, is that over the last two decades since the beginning of digital marketing, a lot of new methodologies have come out to measure the effectiveness of marketing. But it was all based upon being able to track individuals across the internet. Well, guess why? Now things have changed. And just like with the vegetables, just like with the dating app, we are going back to the future. And the techniques that we use here, and others like us, we are using the same techniques that Coke, Pepsi and all these big brands used before there was digital marketing. We've improved upon it, but we are using old school techniques. In fact, the math that we use in our platform, one piece of math is from the 1700s. The other piece is a formula that we created in the early 60s out of the University of Chicago. So literally, the only thing that's new about what we're doing is that the computers we're using are a thousand times faster than they even were five years ago. So we can actually calculate the stuff, but the math is old. Really old. All pre internet, which is wild.
Justine Reichman: You mentioned something that was back in the, not the 60s, the earlier one. 1700s?
Jeff Greenfield: It was a formula that was created by a preacher, and it's called Bayesian. And interestingly enough, Bayesian is what's driving most of the machine learning and AI these days. And the reason for it is because when you're trying to have a system learn. So a computer learns, and it's accumulated tons and tons of knowledge. And now you say, hey, there's new information. You want to update it. There's two ways to do that. One way is to go back and recalculate all of that data, which means the computers have to keep getting faster, which they are. But when you get more and more data, it accumulates really, really fast. But human beings are really interesting with the way that we come to decisions based upon new information. So I'll give you an example. Let's say I gave you an axe and there's a small tree that you have to chop down. Just a small, little bush or something. And I give you the axe and I say, before you start chopping, I want you to give me an estimate of how long you think it'll take you to chop this down. And you've never done anything like this and you say, three hours. I say, okay. And your guess of three hours is based upon all of the information that you have, you made your best guess. And so now, I allow you to chop for a minute and ask you to stop. I say, do you want to revise your answer?
And of course, you say, yeah, I think it now to be an hour and a half. And each time you take every new minute, if you stop, the answer that you come up with will actually be very, very close to the actual result. And essentially, this Bayesian formula simulates the human beings ability to say, based upon all of the information I have, this is my best guess based upon that. And that's what Bayesian is. And what's fascinating is that this formula from a preacher from the 1700s is used in some of the most sophisticated platforms and machinery that's out there. It's been used to crack codes in World War II. It's one of these things that people would be shocked about how it's utilized, and that it's been around for so long.
Justine Reichman: Wow. That is so interesting. We go back to that, and that's what's actually going to fuel us and connect with the future. AI being the future, this being of the past. And then connecting the two and saying, wow, this is what we need to do in order to get even further. And I think it's such an interesting concept. I do want to ask you though, right? When I think about traditional advertising, whether it's outdoor, or print, or radio. To me, I just hear dollar signs. And maybe it's because I was a media planner back in the day, and I knew what things were doing. But for those businesses that might be tuning in today, we're going to have small startups, and we're going to have larger companies, and their goal is to have an impact in a positive way on the environment, for our health and our wellness. Really, we're about the impact of food on the future of our health, wellness and the planet, right? People are really mindful and scrappy before they get to be strategic often in the beginning. So as an expert in this industry, we come to you to be able to provide a resource for our guests so that guest that's tuning in today and saying, oh, my God, we're going back here. That sounds like I'm out of my league. And then you have somebody, it could be a large company and they could have a budget, and they're saying, okay, I can totally do that. But I want to focus on that smaller entity and say, what would you say to them?
Jeff Greenfield: Well, what I would say is that you need to start thinking about, number one, who your specific audience that you're trying to reach, because it's very easy to get a little too broad. And if you go back to before digital, here I go back before. And if I was a large brand and was going to be buying television, I would buy specific programs based upon the demographic, the age range that I would be thinking about. And so when you think about today's world, in fact, I just read something today. Interestingly enough, Netflix has more TV viewers in the 24 to 34 age group than any TV network or cable outlet today. That was just announced today. So that's pretty powerful. Now obviously, if I'm a small business, I'm not gonna be able to afford Netflix. It's very, very expensive. I'm not going to be able to get on TV. But we want to start to think about, if I'm targeting men and women in the US that are over the age of 35 to 40 plus, they're not in Tiktok, they're not on Snapchat, they're on Facebook and Instagram. And so what I want to think about is I need to develop a community, and my website is Facebook. And the reason I say this is that when my wife and I think about going to a new restaurant and I wonder about their hours, we have two different types of habits. I go and google them. I go to their website, but she lives in the metaverse, in the meta world of Facebook and Instagram, she goes to their Facebook page. And if their Facebook page is not up to date, she's like, should we even think about going there? Because that's her reality, and that's demographic.
And so you want to think about things that you can do where you don't necessarily have a lot of budget. One of the things that you can do, which just takes a lot of elbow grease, and that's what you have to do in the beginning is start building out a community on Facebook and Instagram. Start taking pictures, start creating content. Start doing that, and you have to do it, unfortunately, on a daily basis. But what you can do is there's platforms out there, very inexpensively. They'll allow you to create a piece of content and then pre-load it so you could actually, on your weekends, create a bunch of content for the next month. Load it ahead of time so you don't have to do it every day. It'll automatically post it for you. And there's even free tools out there that'll do that as well.
Justine Reichman: I think that that's really important for people to think about. So you're saying posting every day on Instagram. Are you telling stories? Are you saying in your grid?
Jeff Greenfield: I think you should do both, because what you want is, let's say someone is discovering you for the first time on Instagram, and they're there, and there's no story. That says to them, oh, is someone not up to date on this? And then the first thing they're going to do is they're going to look at the post and say, when was the last time they posted? And they're like, oh, a week ago, 2024. So having something new every day saying, hey, I'm here. I'm responsive, and we're on top of this. This is the most important thing in the world to me, and that's what you want to come across with.
Justine Reichman: Are there analytics? Are you familiar with the analytics behind that and the impact it has by doing it every day versus two or three times a week?
Jeff Greenfield: Analytics behind that show that the more frequent that you're there and the more updates you do, it always wins. It wins number one with the algorithm. Because remember, in the meta world, so meta owns Instagram and Facebook, and they're in the world of selling advertising. So the more stuff there is for people to look at in between that stuff, they can put ads. So if you are giving them content to show to people, you're going to show up more frequently, versus someone that is just doing two to three times a week.
Justine Reichman: Wow. Okay, that's great to know. Because sometimes, we hear different ideas around that. Sometimes, people say that you don't need to post every day. It doesn't really impact it. Other people are saying, do more stories than the grid. And I don't really know the answer. That is not my core competency. I ask on behalf of the community. Are there maybe three things that you might recommend to those that are looking to up level themselves in a space, whether it's for brand awareness, whether it's to sell more product, whether it's to make more partnerships, etcetera.
Jeff Greenfield: I would say the number one thing is make sure your messaging is consistent. That's number one. Number two is make sure that you have your story that you want to tell that is tight, that it's a good story, that it's compelling, and that it has an emotional hook to it. The WHY behind what you're doing in this space is incredibly important. For me and my space, my space is all about numbers. It's not very sexy at all. I get to be in the middle of a lot of big decisions with some of the advertisers who spend the most amount of money in the world. And that's very cool, because I'm up on the most exciting stuff that goes on. But the WHY for me, why I'm doing it now is because when people have the proper numbers and the proper metrics, it requires a change. Because all of a sudden, the world has a different perspective. It's like walking across the street and looking at something in the middle of the road from a different perspective. If you were going to draw it, if you draw it from a different angle, you see a completely different picture.
"People don't just like to listen, they also like to watch. Video is what drives all of this social media." —Jeff Greenfield
So the WHY for me is that I get to show people a different picture than they've ever seen before. They've looked at the same object for many years, and now I'm taking them on a journey to the other side of the street. And they see it completely differently by doing that that expands their horizons. And the fun part for me is the resistance that I feel and that I see, and helping people along that journey. To me, I feel like it's not just helping them do their jobs better. But every time I see something different through a different lens, I have this, oh, my god moment. I didn't realize that. So it expands your own horizon. I think having that reason there is important, because that's also that emotional hook as well. And I would say the third thing is that you can never have enough people that are talking about you and talking about your product, and that the number one thing you should do is get people a video. We're on a video podcast right now. Video podcasts weren't even a thing a couple of years ago. This is all brand new. Podcasting has been around for a long time, but the video component is new because people are realizing that people don't just like to listen, they also like to watch. And video is what drives all of this social media. It's what's driving your audience. And so the more people you can have talking about how much they love your product, that's the best thing. So I would say, get more testimonials.
Justine Reichman: Number one, testimonials. Okay, so I'm curious now because you brought up the differentiation between the podcast and the video cast. The podcast, whether it's on iTunes, iHeartRadio, etcetera, it's really kind of clear how we can reach out to people and engage, and get more listeners and viewers. But I'd say it's a little different in the YouTube space. What do you know about the YouTube space and leveraging your video or your content on YouTube to be able to get more of a community, and a community that's engaged, that's liking, that's asking questions, that's connecting?
Jeff Greenfield: I think the tough thing with YouTube is that when you create a community there, it's really not your community. It's Google's community. You could have 10 million subscribers. But if your videos aren't as engaging as they once were, meaning there's not as many people watching, they're not watching as long, so there's not an opportunity for them to generate enough advertising. Those subscribers of yours are not going to be as up to date as they were with you, because the algorithm is going to shift. So you're always at the mercy of that algorithm. The advantage of Facebook or Instagram, is that most of the content is very short form. It's a lot shorter and stuff like that. For folks that are looking to create a true community that has video, and also folks that have the capability to actually write and are good writers, and they like to tell stories, platforms like substack are evolving. Because back in the early days of the internet, the way that brands would create a community is they would have a website and would have a discussion forum that they owned themselves. And that way, that was their community. They could communicate a message to people. They would get it. They were in complete control. When Facebook first came around, a lot of those communities like folks in dog rescue and different organizations moved to Facebook because there were no technical hurdles. It was so easy to take care of it. And then they've noticed over the years these shifts and the algorithm.
Justine Reichman: When you talk about substack and you're creating this community there, and you're comparing it to a newsletter, let's just say, because it does have a newsletter, it has the ability to allow the community to engage and connect with each other, which is what a lot of people want. How much more work and time does it take to set up a substack and make sure that it is constantly fresh?
Jeff Greenfield: Well, in order to do that, you have to add the content to it. You have to create the content. So that's why I say this solution is viable for someone who loves to write, who likes to put out content, someone who could write out an email newsletter to their fans every single day, something like that. Well, I would say substack is not necessarily everyday. Substack is more like a monthly or depends upon how often you would want to update them. You could do it even weekly.
Justine Reichman: What would you say the impact differential between doing it once a week versus once a month, and then creating other engagement within it?
Jeff Greenfield: I would think now that we're talking about it. If you're out every day on the social programs, platforms, driving people to sign up at your substack as long as you're timely with it and you're updating it, let's say monthly, with the big update. But I think the nice thing now, because we talked about video, I believe you can add video now to substack and doing a video update, which you can do with your iPhone very easily, is so simple. Sometimes, it's a lot easier than writing a long blog post. I would say, if it was me and I was an emerging brand, I would be doing it probably on a weekly basis.
Justine Reichman: Jeff, awesome. So many great insights, so many great tools. My last question for you is, maybe you could share a story about one of your clients that you've seen where the impact has really been great, and maybe share some statistics around it so that people can really get the gravity of what you're talking about the impact it can have.
When somebody talks about a brand on a podcast, there's nothing for them to click on; they're just hearing it. When you shift it to something where you're getting that type of return, that adds up to a significant sum of money really, really fast." —Jeff Greenfield
Jeff Greenfield: Yeah. I think one of the greatest stories is for a large multi billion dollar retailer who was following the numbers, they were following what their analytics was telling them, and the majority of their spend was on search. So people search for an item, and you could click on it right there, which is very expensive because you're in an environment where everyone is competing, and the prices keep going up. And they had tried things like connected television, podcast advertising and things like that, but the numbers were never able to prove them out. And as a result, the C level executives wouldn't support that increase in budget. And so we came in with our platform and did an analysis of the last year, and we were able to demonstrate for them that they had overspent with search to the point where they were actually losing money. They were losing almost 50 cents of every dollar that they were spending in search, which was shocking to them. We showed them that those little tests that they had done with connected television and podcast advertising actually had an amazing impact. So the end result was we had them shift the dollars that they were losing in search, and move them over to more of these awareness type tactics at the top of the funnel. Because when somebody talks about a brand on a podcast, there's nothing for them to click on. They're just hearing it. And same thing as with connected television. And the end result for them was that in the quarter following them making those changes, it resulted in an incremental $15 million in profit. Because when you start to think that, hey, I'm for every dollar I spend in advertising, I'm expecting like $3 or $8 back in return. But when you're losing money on those dollars, when you shift it to something where you're getting that type of return, that adds up to a significant sum of money really, really fast.
Justine Reichman: So as we sort of wrap things up, are there any tools for analytics that you might recommend for some of our viewers or listeners that are tuning in today?
Jeff Greenfield: Yeah. What I would say is the most important thing as you start to dabble in digital marketing is everyone is addicted to the click because it's something that you can count on. And what ends up happening is that most marketers will calculate how much each click cost them, how many clicks they got per day. And it's important to remember that the way marketing works is that you invest dollars, not to buy clicks. You invest dollars to buy eyeballs, right? And that job is those eyeballs, you're trying to build awareness. And when awareness is built up to a high enough level, people will walk into your store. If your store happens to be online, well, then that will be the clicks.
Justine Reichman: That being said, Jeff, so great to have you on today. What a plethora of resources and insight. I know I learned myself, which I always love on these podcasts. There's always a takeaway for me. I feel that there are takeaways, there's so many other people that are gonna feel that there are takeaways, so I want to thank you for sharing that. I want to thank our guests for tuning in, and those that were new. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining the community. And just say that each week, we have a new guest on our podcast with new innovations, new resources, something to inspire our community to build a better for your future, whether it's for our health, our wellness or the planet, but it's a great place to tune in each week to be inspired. We hope this inspires you, and we hope this inspires you both, whether you're making personal changes or you're innovating in the space. Either way, it's all about being able to make more informed choices. So thank you again for tuning in to our guests. Thank you, Jeff, for being such a great guest. We hope to see you here again next week.
