Mastering Marketing ROI and AI: Insights from Noble Studios' 21-Year Journey

Now, if you are thinking about scrapping your agency and just using AI and just using some of the cool tools that are available that can replace the people and the expenditure of those creatives, you might want to listen to this show because I've got the founder, co founder and CEO of a company called Noble Studios. He's joining me from Reno, Nevada and he's run his own company for 21 years. So they've managed to survive as an entrepreneur, but also to help their clients thrive with creative advertising. My client today is Jared Lopiccolo. Jared, welcome to the show.

Jim, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to talking with you today. So, yeah, let's dive into it.

Yeah, well, you and I had a few sort of reschedules and you're a very busy man running Noble Studios. You've got offices in America, offices in the uk. I know you're thinking about expanding into the Far east as well sometime, but, Jared, people are thinking about ROI on marketing. It's getting very confusing with AI. So I'd love for us to talk about AI and the impact on creativity and whether it really makes any entrepreneur creative. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about Noble Studios and why you've got over 70% of your clients still with you five years after you started the relationship, which is an amazing achievement, especially in agency land.

Thank you. Well, I think at the end of the day, it starts out with wanting to build deep, meaningful connections with other people. And as an entrepreneur, right, you usually have this gift or you have this trade that you want to sell into, this demand that you see. And that's like step one, but then step two is about how you show up and how you actually treat clients. And when you build these deeper sort of meaningful, connective relationships, you can sort of work through those patches of stormy weather. And I always say, like those fair weather sort of entrepreneurs, they just don't last because it's impossible to be, especially on a 21 year journey, to not expect these ups and downs and to make mistakes and to, you know, fall and skin your knees a little bit. And so I think it's really about showing up. So when our clients, when you ask them why is it that they stay with Noble Studios, oftentimes it starts with, well, we can just be honest with them, we can connect with them, they own our problems as if they're their problems. And then on top of it, you mentioned the word roi. We really focus on providing that return on investment. And so a lot of times we don't talk about vanity metrics of sessions or, you know, hits or likes or comments. We really get down to brass tacks like conversions. We talk about stuff selling more products or if you're in the B2B space, downloading more demos and those things. So we really own at the very front end, what does a conversion mean to that company? And that's what we talk about when we have our monthly sort of reporting and insights is really about that roi we deliver.

So Jared, when you talk about roi, return on investment, tell us, how do you do that? That is the holy grail. Because with digital now, of course, attribution is very possible, right? Yeah, it's the old days of you run an ad, you see who turns up to the store, but you don't know the connection between the two. That's over. So can you give us some tips, some guides? What do you do at Noble Studios to ensure this connection between the person who's out there, the customer journey, and them taking specific action for the client?

Well, yeah, I think it really starts with reframing what you're providing for your customers. And so, and we don't work with, you know, restaurants, they're just too small. But using that as an analogy, if you work with a pizza restaurant, at the end of the night, they have to sell so many number of pizzas to get to their margins, to afford their team, to afford their own local marketing and, you know, to stay open six days a week or, you know, whatnot. And so I think you really need to get to talking about what it is that they're actually selling. What does the bottom line mean? And so if it's, you know, we work a lot in the travel and tourism space, they need what they call heads to beds or what we like to say, like hearts to beds. But it's the idea that they need hotel bookings. And so when we talk to our client, we don't talk about how much traffic we sent to, you know, the Marriott in that one location. We actually talk about the Marriott had over 1500 room booked nights, you know, because of the effort that we did. And we can, to your point, you know, attribute all that marketing back to those things. If we're working in the B2B space, as I mentioned, it could be that, you know, demos lead to, which is an MQL leads to an SQL and that leads to a conversion, like an actual sold piece of business. So, so we're talking in the form of demos. We need to schedule 400 demos a month or you Know, so it's just like that. I think, I think a lot of marketing and advertisement agencies, they still stay in the metrics world, you know, of marketing as opposed to living in the world of your customers and what it is they actually sell and what actually moves the needle.

Jared, just help us though. You had an MQL and SQL for those of us that are not living and breathing every day. Just help us with the terminology.

Yeah, I like it's an Alphabet soup world that we all eat and drink all day long in the marketing world. So MQL stands for Marketing Qualified Leads. So any sort of marketing effort that you do that draws, you know, an actual like invitation in for a conversation or whatnot, they call that an mql. Once you have that conversation, if it is qualified. Oh, they actually need our services or they need, you know, or they want to buy that demo or they want to buy that product or buy that pizza, it moves to a sales qualified lead and then, then the sales team actually has to carry it over the line and close that piece of business, whether it's in a contract or like I said, it's a sold pizza or whatever it is. But, but yeah, MQL to SQL this to a closed piece of business.

Jared, in my experience, clients were always reluctant to share the sales information. You know, and I used to run a PR firm and I would say if you let me see the metrics on the website, I can show you an uplift, for example. And they're like, no, that's, that's internal. We don't share that.

Right.

What's your advice for entrepreneurs that are holding agencies at arm's length?

Yeah, it's an age old problem. Right. You see that. And you know what, it started really in the sort of big corporate world, I would say in the 60s and 70s when you had these very active sales teams and then you had this marketing team and they were always separate, right, in different buildings. They never communicated with each other. And the reality is they need to be hip to hip. And so anytime we take on a client, we always talk about, you know, bringing the sales and marketing teams together. So we look at these sales activities and what they're doing, we look at the marketing and what they're doing and we line those two up. And oftentimes what you'll find is that, you know, when you're doing this sort of marketing tactics and you drive a lead, you know, marketing qualified lead to the sales team, if you don't have that round trip feedback, if you, if it doesn't come back and say, actually they weren't qualified and you're not getting information. You're just going to keep driving those same number of marketing qualified leads, AKA unqualified, you know, opportunities. So you really need to close that gap. And it takes a few months, it takes anywhere from like three to six months to really dial that in. And then once you get the sales and the marketing teams working in harmony, that's when you start to really mine those channels and mine those opportunities and those campaigns, and that's where the lift really starts to happen.

So if I could sort of maybe take away from that, that the key insight for anyone listening to this is to let the agency in, if you had them as a partner, treat them not as a, as a, as a supplier, but as a real member of the team. Right. Because I remember being so frustrated by that. And I can see as well, Jared, on your website, which is noblestudios.com yes. That you've got quite a range of services and you've had the agency for over 21 years, so credit to you for that. You've got everything from brand strategy to marketing analytics. Now, why are you not focused on just doing one thing? Because it's kind of fashionable to have one service, own that and be niche. But are you not following that advice, Jared? You've got a large range of services.

This is great. So as we extended into the UK with our office, which we did about six years ago, we decided you could either lead by service, by geo or by vertical. And we decided let's lead by service in the sense that we only wanted to be performance marketing in the UK one, because you Brits are so damn clever and creative that we couldn't compete on that level of branding and wit. But also, you know that it is the, it is the way to do it these days, Right? Because so many people are specialized and the industry is so wide and so deep and everyone, you know, is somehow connected to marketing. Whereas 21 years ago they weren't right. It was really easy. You could do everything. You could do brand, you could do pr, you could do web, you could do all these things with a very small, you know, team member set. And what we found, though, as we grew, when we could be that sort of record agency where we own all the creative, when we can own all the digital experiences and create websites and, you know, landing pages and meeting the users where they're at digitally, and then we can own the performance side, we're the most effective for our clients. I think if we were to start over today as, as an agency, I would probably go a lot more specialized. It's easier to focus your attention, your skill building, you know, where you go for conferences, what conversations you have with clients. But because we started 21 years ago, it's natural that we have all these services. And so now we've built partners around these services as well. So when the core team hits capacity limitations or whatnot, we have this really great group of partners that we can bring to the table to extend those services that much further.

Right. And I think my experience as well, Jared, running an agency myself for 25 years in Asia, Singapore and China and India was right, quite large companies really want one vendor, right?

Yeah.

And they want to have, as you say, you mentioned an agency of record, which is what made me think of it. You know, I work for people like Nortel and Philips and they said, jim, we just want you, you manage your suppliers, we want to have one meeting with one person who manages it and in effect, you become their outsourced marketing director, don't you? And presumably, Jared, that's what you and your account team are playing as well, that role?

Yes. And after being in market for 21 years and having all of this experience, the trust has been built for clients to come to us and say, listen, we want you to manage everything and we trust you to bring in. So, you know, influencing influencer marketing is not something we provide as one of our core services, but we've got many, many partnerships and the client wants to go through us to carry paper, own the relationship, hold the accountability of those other partners. But I would say, yeah, again, starting out today, I'd probably go into one niche field. It's a lot easier to control and manage and that that depth of knowledge you need for each service line just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And so what I think is if you were to start an agency today as a full service agency, it would be quite difficult. You'd be sort of 1 inch deep with 11 mile across.

Jared, we've got to move a little bit into the conversation around AI. I started at the beginning because if you are, if you like, providing strategic counsel and a portfolio of services to the client as you are, I think you're fairly safe because AI is not going to do that for anybody. But help us with your view where you see AI impacting the ability of entrepreneurs to co create with AI, self create, to do away with the bespoke service. What's your view on that?

Well, so we've always been early adopters. I think that's one of the reasons why we did so well in Those early days post.com boom was that people came to us and we were experimenting with HTML5 when only two companies in the world were messing around with it. And so when I got to meet Jeff Hahn, who was the creator of a multi touch and now every single phone and tablet is all multi touch. And so we've always been really close to this sort of what I want to call bleeding edge, but taking one step backwards and living in the leading edge. Because what we don't want to do is use our clients as, as sort of guinea pigs, as we say here in the us. But in terms of AI, when we started to see the rumblings of this coming about almost two years ago, we really thought, okay, you know, let's treat this like any other technology revolution, any other tool advancement and that let's lean in really hard, let's understand it, let's remove any sort of skepticism or, you know, you know, sort of, you know, biases that we might have around it and let's start to really sort of mature ourselves in it. So we bought all the different licenses for the mid journeys to the Dollys, to, you know, the ChatGPT, and extended that to our team. We created an AI task force which included about five individuals on our team, multidisciplinary individuals coming from, you know, different areas within the company. They meet on a monthly basis. We created a point of view, you know, around AI. We've involved our legal counsel and we created a matrix of all the different tools and the terms of uses so we could properly communicate to our clients when we're using AI. So this was sort of the, the foundational setup of how we could adopt it. Now what's so great is which everyone sort of experienced is that AI has been acting as sort of an optimizer or an efficiency time saver, right? Maybe even like a notch up in terms of quality. But what we're finding is that because we're so leaning into it hard, that it's actually giving us a lot more time to be creative, to experiment. You know, we're pitching ideas to clients and we're, we're able to generate imagery of what that potential campaign could look like or ideas. We do a lot of photo shoots and video production shoots. And so we're actually creating, instead of just a set list that you would type up, we're using a photographer set list. So we're actually pre building all of the, the different photos of the People, we want the diversity that we need in there, the camera angles, you know, all those things. And then we're exposing that to the client. We're getting sign off on that. And then we're working with the photography and videographer crews to say, okay, here's your shot list. Let's now let's do it with real humans. And so it's allowing us to like, really own a more of a creative process than, than, than just thinking of it as an efficiency tool.

You did mention in there, Jared, about we're going to do the photo with real humans.

Yes.

Why does the client still need real humans? Because they've got all the illustrations, they've got the graphics. Why not just go live with the renders? I mean, that's what people are now doing with avatars like from hey Jen. Or Synthesia, for example.

Yeah, I think there's, at some point there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a line that gets crossed and humans and people just can see through that it's artificially generated or, and so we're, we're really trying to subscribe to the artificially assisted as opposed to the artificial generated. And, and there's something of value that this can't be created, that anyone else can't create this. And so there's this level of originality, this level of ownership. At the end of the day, competitors when, when you're competing from one company to another, they want to be able to own something that can't be created on their own without the level of effort and strategy and thinking and foresight and expectations and, and measurables. And so I think, you know, using as a tool to build to a final product, but then the actual final product itself is human generated. I think there's a, there's a big competitive advantage to that approach.

That's a great insight. Thanks for that, Jeff. And of course, I guess the other thing, the other thing, Jared, is that we've got this issue where you don't necessarily own the IP rights if you've created it artificially. So you could end up with a photo shoot for a client that someone then sues you for.

Yes, yes, and that's. And thank you for bringing that up, Jim. That's why we created that matrix with our, with our legal counsel, because we wanted to understand the terms and use and rights of these images that we are creating or of this content that we are creating. And a lot of times, to your point, you don't own it in its Full, you know, context. Instead you own portions or you own a snippet of it. And the last thing we want to do is see the same, you know, say, for instance, image that we generated that's on a billboard advertising, you know, to come to Yosemite. And then all of a sudden we see that on a dentist office, you know, or something like that. And so we've got to, you know, just similar to the Istock photo days, right, or the Getty Images days. You got to be careful that you want a limited use of that and you don't want to sit there and maybe make that your hero image for your video because, you know, your brand is so important, it needs to stay original, it needs to connect with the audience. And so, yeah, so all those reasons are reasons to use the tool but not have the finished product be totally AI generated.

Jared, I'm going to, I'm going to try and see your surname correctly. Lupicolo.

Yes, you've got it perfect.

I apologize. I think I rather did an English trick on it earlier, which is sort.

Of, I'll answer to anything, by the way.

So, yeah, I like to try and do service. Jared, I, I also, you know, would like you to just take us through sort of a bit of a case study of what does work because many of us don't get a conversation with someone like you about, you know, what would be a successful marketing campaign. Obviously you've got so much experience, but for those people that want to see this on YouTube, you can see there's a, a great set of case studies@noblestudios.com and I've got in front of me one about. It's called the, well, it's the Grand Canyon helicopter tours.

Yes.

Jared, I wonder whether you could just give us some of the top line hallmarks of this campaign and why it works so that we can learn what are the hallmarks of a successful campaign?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it starts with the brand. And if you think the way I define a brand or see a brand is it's the first experience you have with the brand, the last experience you have with the brand, and the worst experience you have with the brand. And so if you start with that as a foundation that it's basically every time you have a touch point with the brand, it needs to be consistent and it needs to fulfill on your expectations. That leads you then into campaign work. And so the goal is like imagine you're in Las Vegas and this is where Papillon is. You're in Las Vegas, you've heard about these Grand Canyon tours because they fly, I think, 38,000 flights into the Grand Canyon every year. They're the largest helicopter tour company in the world. But you've heard about this. So you're in, so you're, imagine you land in Las Vegas. You're like, I'm interested in seeing, you're seeing them buzzing around like, you know, big mosquitoes in the sky, right? And you're like, I want to do this, this tour with the family. And you go to the concierge, you know, you know, at the front desk and they tell you that, hey, we have these Papillon tours. You know, you can go to the website here or you happen to be in the hotel room and you're searching online and you type in Papillon Tours or you type in Helicopter Grand Canyon Tours. You want to make sure no matter what entry point you're into that campaign or into that brand, that it has a consistent feel and touch point. And so when we create these campaigns, the calls to actions, the imagery that we're using, the messaging that we're using, all of that follows through from when you click on a banner in a social ad or being retargeted and you actually land onto the landing page. All the same imagery, all the same CTA is the same messaging. All of it has that consistent touch point so that we're fulfilling on the brand's promise of what you're expecting to see. And then, then it doesn't just stop there, right. Once the campaign is completed in that you've, you've subscribed, you're going tomorrow at 6 o' clock and you have to show up at the airport that is there now. It's their job to carry the brand promise all the way through to the experience as well. And then post your trip to the Grand Canyon. It's about, what is that follow up message, share your photos, tell your stories, refer a friend. All of those pieces need to be connected to the brand and that promise. And so this is why this campaign, we did a really great job for them. It outperformed the industry standard. We just won an E Tourism award for best paid advertisement campaign for these guys just, just about two months ago. So, yeah, really proud of the work that we did here.

Yeah, wonderful. And you even got a 46% increase in organic sessions from France. So there's a, there's a whole story there, I'm sure, on localization. And if you want to find out more, go to noblestudios. There is But Jared, so what I love your explanation there about the need for marketing to be before, during and after the customer journey, that it has to be consistent over time and across multiple touch points, which I think is really where the professional services of people like yourself come in, isn't it? Because often the entrepreneur is busy delivering and does the sales and kind of is worried about where the next customer is coming from. And it's after afterburn, the after experience that's so powerful for people.

Yeah, my Jim, I talked to you earlier. I think I mentioned that, you know, my background is in architecture and if you think about Disney, I always love Disney's brand. It really focuses on that user centric design and it's. And if think of any Disney experience you've had before, during and after, they do such a wonderful job of holding that user centric design, that brand promise, that brand experience. And so for me, I've been able to transfer that physical architectural approach to the digital architecture approach. And I think that's one of the reasons why we are so successful is that we just think about the user at every moment, every time, every, every interaction.

Jared, I'm going to switch gears slightly here because you're an entrepreneur 21 years credit to you. We, we know it's not easy. And running an agency myself for 25 years through the ups and downs of various markets and so on. Let's just talk about as an entrepreneur. I don't want to embarrass you here, but would you say there's some, let's call it learning something that happened? Maybe you call it a mistake, a learning opportunity could just explain what that might have been for my fellow unnoticed entrepreneur to learn from something that you've done in those years from maybe from a marketing and branding perspective that didn't quite work out that you'd suggest we don't try at home.

Well, I'll start with a philosophy very short and then I'll go into a story. So I believe that we learn when we make mistakes. Now it sucks when you make the same mistake over and over and over and over again because then you're effectively not learning. But we don't really learn when we win or when we're successful. You sort of, you assume this is why you won, but when you lose or when you make that mistake, you know right away, okay, and then, and that's one of the reasons why we created this tagline for noble. We call it let's be better every Day. It's an invitation to, you know, always optimize always looking tomorrow to say, what can I do a little bit different? How can I, when we carry this in with our clients and such. So, so first I would say that's a subscribed sort of mindset. And I, and I encourage all entrepreneurs to really adopt that, that mistakes are okay, but you just got to learn from them and build systems and processes and things like that. Now I, now I'll take you on a story that I think every entrepreneur does struggle with. And it's this concept of moving from a tradesperson to a business person. Right? Like, if you're a pizza maker, you were a great pizza maker, but now you want to own 10 restaurants, you can't be making and flipping pizzas anymore, you know, and, and so we're about five years in, and this is, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. This happens. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. It was December 5, 2008. It was a Friday at 5:00 clock at night. And we have, in the U.S. you know, we have what's called the tree lighting ceremony in the small town Carson City that I live in. And it's where Santa Claus comes down, and as he's coming down the street, the main drag, all the lights turn on and the whole town comes out at 5 o' clock and, and it's this big parade and everyone celebrates and it's the kickoff of the holiday season. Well, well, we were. This is. By the way, don't make this mistake. If you're an entrepreneur, do not set a deliverable at five o' clock on a Friday, because naturally it's Murphy's Law and it'll bite you in the butt. But we're sitting there with a big, really Large client, Fortune 100 client. We have a deliverable season. Who's my business partner, she's like, I'm gonna run real quick, grab the kids from daycare, come back, and then we're gonna go across the street and we're gonna enjoy the tree lighting ceremony. This is a family tradition. So she comes back and she, okay, let's get going. We gotta go before, you know, Santa comes down the street. My kids are 5 and 2. And I looked at her and I said, we're missing this deadline. I can't, I can't make it. You know, and she just kind of, her eyes welled up and she just turned around and walked out and. And at that moment, I was stuck there with my hands in my heart, you know, my heart and my hands. Excuse me. And I just thought, what the Hell am I doing? I'm choosing business over family. And every entrepreneur has these moments where you, where you remember those moments where you had to choose business over family. And you always regret that, but you'll never regret choosing family over business. And so, you know, my team swiveled their chairs and they looked at me and they said, what the hell, Jared, what are you doing? Get out of here. We've got this, you know, let it go. Like let it go, you know, let it go. And I thought, okay. So I left and I just arrived just in time. Lights went on. I'm crying, you know, season's crying. You know, we're there and it's just this, there was this pivotal moment to say, okay, we've got to create balance. We have to delegate. And in order to delegate, you have to, you know, really kind of create a matrix which is on the, on the Y axis you have like team readiness and on the X axis you have importance of task. And if their readiness is high, they can handle any level of importance of tax and you can delegate. If their readiness is low, well, then you can't. And you have to monitor it and walk them through. And so I think this is, this is aligns to mistakes because most entrepreneurs won't let go. They won't delegate, they won't build systems and processes, they won't transition from a trades person to a business person. And we would not be here 21 years if I was doing the same stuff being a designer or a project manager or an account manager or doing, or being a strategist. You know, not everybody wants to be the CEO. So you've got so, you know, or a business owner. So that's what I would encourage. Everyone is like, you know, you know, subscribe to mistakes is where we learn and then make sure you, you continue to develop new mindset skillset tool set to grow into that business person.

Thank you for that lovely story and I'm glad that you and Susan managed to go down and enjoy the lights. I'm sure your kid to love appreciated that as well. And I guess you're also leaning into that concept of the Gerber E Myth, right? That many of us start off as self employed practitioners.

Yeah.

And over time, the people that burn out of those that don't graduate to be true entrepreneurs with systems and employees and trustworthy people. And you've expanded, which is then as I know myself, you know, two offices is more than twice as complex. Right. Multiple offices multiplies the complexity sort of like to a power of 3. Or 4. So you've plainly made that leap from being a self employed to being a true entrepreneur. Jared, which is fantastic. Jared, if there is a book that I can ask you, or a blog or a podcast that you'd recommend, what would that be?

Yeah, you know, there's this great book, it's called the Alchemist by Paolo Colo. And I would say that, you know, as an entrepreneur, it's really about also the journey. Whereas I think a lot of us, you know, you put ourselves in this future state and we negotiate with ourselves as to where we want to be. And the reality is the journey is actually probably more important than the actual end state. And so it's okay to set a waypoint, you know, or a direction on the compass to go after, but I really think it's about enjoying the journey. And the Alchemist really talks about finding our own personal legend. And so it's really all this journey. And yes, at the end there's this reward for the journey, but it's really about the journey and the life lessons that we pick up along the way and stuff. So I highly encourage anyone. I read this book about every five years and I find I pick something else out of it because the journey continues to change for us, especially as entrepreneurs. And so that would be the one I'd recommend. It's a really great book, Jared, and.

I'd recommend people get in touch with you if they want to do that. Jared Lopicolo how can they find you?

Yeah, so, well, I always say go to our website, take a look at our case studies, read some of the thought leadership that we have on there, just so you get an idea of what we do and who we are. But I'm, and you can tell I love being in conversations. I think everyone has some level of wisdom to offer and advice to deliver and give. And so I just hit me up, direct message me on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Jared Lopiccolo J A R R O D L O P I C C O L L O Direct message me. Let's get into a conversation. Let's find something authentic that we can connect around and then we'll sell each other shit, you know, later. But don't do it off the bat. That's, that's the only thing I ask is don't do it right off the bat. Like, if you're interested, you're gonna wanna find a, you know, then have a real honest conversation. After that, you build a relationship and then we naturally sell to each other.

Jared that's one of I was kind of hoping you drop in sort of a free Papillon helicopter trip, because when I went to the Grand Canyon, we couldn't afford that. We walked all the way down and we slept under some of those picnic tables at the bottom of the river there. Those are, those are the days, I think almost sort of before really helicopters were flying around.

So great. Yeah.

Back in the 1970s, I was there. So. Jared, thank you so much for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur today with your great stories and insights.

Jim, thank you so much. Appreciate being here today. And hopefully everyone got a little something out of it.

So I'm absolutely sure that everyone would have done it. I know I did. And just to, you know, sum up, if I can, our conversation with Jared, a couple of points I think really for me, takeaways. One is that we really need to think about the brand experience in its totality. That marketing is not at just the beginning or just in the store or just after sales. It really all has to be joined up, but it also has to all be consistent.

Yeah.

And it's the hardest thing and the most obvious thing, but it takes discipline and consistency of vision to do that. And I think this other point about mindset, that there aren't mistakes, there are learning opportunities and that we've got to keep embracing those because as entrepreneurs, the only way to grow a business is, is to grow ourselves. So thank you for joining me, Jim James, based here in the west of England in Wiltshire. Jared was in Reno in Nevada. And if you've enjoyed this, do please share it with a fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. And if you can leave a review on the show site, that would also be wonderful. Until we meet you again, just encourage you to keep on communicating.