Navigating the Evolution of Digital Marketing: From Competition to Strategic Excellence

Hey, hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today, we have Scott Gardner, who is the partner and co-founder at New Media Advisors with us. Hey, Scott, how’s it going?

Doing great. Happy to be here. Nice to meet you and chat with you.

Great. Scott, you have had an impressive career spanning from banking to agency ownership now. But let’s go back a bit. Let’s talk about the journey that you have been through thus far. How are you growing up as a child and how you got into digital marketing as CEO, and a bit about your agency as well, what you guys do, what you guys specialize in, and then we take it off from there.

Yeah, that sounds good. You asked what Young Scott was like growing up. Looking back, it’s an interesting exercise to go through, and just mentally jump through one’s journey. But I’m a pretty competitive person. I think looking back, I grew up in a family of parents and a brother that we all competed in a good, healthy way, either in family games or with friends and family or any activities, either through our church or in our community. Always good, healthy competition. That drove me to who I am today. Very involved in team sports and love the progress you can make as you practice your craft and see the results of that practice. But I grew up in a family, too, that really was very active and wanted to try new things. So as a child and as a teenager, I had to become comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve heard that phrase a lot from a lot of business coaches and life coaches. But as a kid going through it, it really made you face a lot of your fears and uncertainties to get through situations, and it helped build confidence. Now, what we do with digital marketing and really rapidly changing models and big problems clients have.

It can create some uncertainty. I think that’s helped shape me to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Then one other thing I’ll mention, my dad was a bit of an inventor back in the ’80s and ’90s, and he also had a side hustle. We had a full a full-time job, but also side hustled 40 years ago. That taught me that you can have a job that you go to and then pursue your passion and make money pursuing your passion. Not all of those side hustles or inventions worked out. Some were failures. But I think I learned from both my father and mother how to dust yourself off and get back up from a failure and keep going. I think those are some examples of how it really shaped me to be now a business owner to start a business and take the risk and calculated risk and how to manage and navigate the ups and downs of the owner of the company.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Quite a journey. And what about your agency, about a new media advisor. When it actually triggered that decision to start this agency?

Yeah, I think… So I’ll tell you real quick. I’ve been in search now for 24 years. I locked into it candidly back in 2000. I did 10 years of startups and agencies, got a little burned out on that, candidly, and went in half. And so I worked at Bank of America for about 10 years, then a company called Choice Hotels for about three years. I met my current, my co founder and my business partner at Bank of America. While there, we had an embarrassment of resources in terms of the best agencies and the best teams and technologies. But we always found that a lot of our agencies were great partners, but inevitably, the talent would roll on and off the account. Folks would lead the agency, they would ascend up in the agency, and we were always training the agency for how to work with our company. And we felt like if we built more in-house know-how, we would have more control of the channels we managed, right? So we built centers of excellence, built it in-house. Fast forward, we did it again at Choice Hotels. All the while, my partner and I, Brent Bolden, we talked about during our travels, we’re like, I wonder how many other companies go through the same challenges we had And then we always felt like one day we could probably launch our own consulting firm to help other brands build centers of excellence and take more control back from the agency and still keep those critical partners.

But build better people, better talent, better processes, better systems to really integrate SEO and content throughout an organization. So that was the catalyst for how we got started. And then COVID hit, we were in the travel space. It shut down travel, and we were both furloughed at the time, candidly.

A lot of the industries which was worst hit.

Yeah. We’re like, Let’s go ahead and start it. We took a risk, carved out a niche. And four years later, we’re healthy, profitable company, growing and optimistic about where we’re going.

Lovely. And like you mentioned, 20 plus years now in the industry, additional marketing landscape has evolved like anything. You have been in summer, summer, winters. You have experienced that. I’m going to ask for you, what are the most significant changes that you have witnessed?

Wow. Okay. There are a lot. I’m sure I’ll forget a lot. But something that stood out to me, I think when I got into search in 2000, in those early years, 2000 to 2000, 2000, 2000 or ’03, search was really fragmented. Seo was very small, but there were so many different search engines in the market. This is before Google was who they are today, clearly. So you had Yahoo. Com and msm. Com, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AutoVista, all these fragmented search engines. It was pretty easy to get a website rate. You add some keywords to a meta super tag, put it in the title, and voila, you’re showing up. Then as Google got in the picture, the game began to change. Looking back now, it was still easy to get ranked in Google when you added keywords in your copy, did some basic directory links, wrote some third-party articles, and got links back. But it began to slowly evolve. Then this big shift happened that I recall, probably like 2005 to 2010-ish, where was this whole white hat, black hat tug-of-war. A lot of the spammer community began to really take advantage of gaps and algorithms and all types of trickery, from hidden text and cloaking the doorway pages to just buying links.

Google’s page rank was a pretty big deal, and it could be manipulated. I think back in the day, a lot of brands wanted to show top of the three for their main keywords, and so they would do these Black Hat tactics, and it can’t work. As Google evolved, clearly, the game of cat and mouse began to favor the cat. Google levied Panda updates and Penguin algorithms, and to shut down the spam space, which is good for us. Good for us is an SEO that’s serious about your craft. As the market shifted, it began to really favor SEOs that are understood businesses, understood how to meet customer needs, and how to really do it in an ethical way. I think that helped the boardroom fund more SEO. It was no longer black box magic. It was business-driven, customer-human-driven, and you could see tangible results from that. That’s how it’s going to be evolved. Then two more quick thoughts on that. When you think about just the explosion of AI, that’s just radically changing how we work, not just as a consulting firm or as an agency, your audience might be, or as an in-house brand leader.

It just has really allowed us to be more strategic and let some of the more rudimentary tactical things come to life with AI so we can do more with less. But when I think back to my earlier comment about search fragmentation, I think that what’s old could be new again. I do think in the search engine market share, Google has been 90% plus for more than a decade. I think with both the recent Department of Justice’s ruling that Google is a monopoly and that we have the emergence of the AI search engine, SearchGPT, Perplexity, others. I think it’s going to create some viable competition for Google. They can no longer buy their way into Apple devices, is my assumption with that ruling. It’s going to one day, I hope, force Apple’s hand to launch their own standalone competitive search engine. You have the AI engines. I think fragmentation could be good, not just for those companies, but other brands looking to compete, and then companies like ours that can help brands show up in other places. So I think we’re optimizing way beyond Google and optimizing to the customer journey and new platforms for discovering answers and information.

And yeah, I think that’s where it’s heading.

Absolutely. And you must be consulting quite a few business owners, right? From a strategy standpoint, from a CEO perspective. What are some of the common mistakes that you have come across that these businesses do when it comes to a CEO strategy or implementations for that matter?

Some of the biggest mistakes? I think that sometimes we work at mid-market and large enterprise brands, so that’s going to be who I’ll speak to. Oftentimes, you might have an SEO team or SEO person, but there’s not an SEO evangelist or someone in that team charged with getting folks or across the organization on board and as a champion for SEO. That is a problem because it then leads to a lack of integration. For SEO, it takes a village. We can’t do it in a silo. We need partners from products in very matrix organizations, at least, with lots of business units and LOBs, you’ve got product managers, product leaders, brand teams, UX, technology, legal risk compliance, PR and Comm, much less the digital marketing leaders and the CMO. There’s so many functions that can impact the success of an SEO team. You need that evangelist who can use data, use clear business cases, to get SEO prioritized, and get it integrated into the work that they do. I think if consultancy and in-house teams can do, that’s when SEO magic begins to happen because you have other people carrying your water, and it makes your job way more effective.

You did think another Other challenge, I would say, is that resource prioritization is a big deal in SEO. It’s one thing to have the recommendations and one thing to have the strategy and the tactics. But if you can’t get the work deployed, it’s not going to count. You can’t sprinkle Pixie dust and you’re going to rank. I think that really for SEO leader, being part of the tech grooming process with an Agile team or being embedded with a content center of excellence and making sure that you have a seat at the table, I think that helps with prioritization. It goes back to that integration point. But also the next step is when there are lots of projects at play and there’s limited capacity, how can you fight to make sure SEO is above the line? And not backlog with tech or content or thought leadership, et cetera.

Yeah. And Scott, you have worked both in-house and the agency models, right? So for you, what is the sweet spot for outside sourcing SEO tasks? When should a company should actually decide to bring it all in-house? What is your take on that?

I’m a believer. I don’t think it’s binary. I think the hybrid model is the most ideal. That’s the politically I’m not going to answer here. The risk of going all in-house is- Keep all of them on their toes, right? Yeah.

Yeah. There are definite benefits when it’s hybrid. Because if I’m in-house leading a big SEO team. I need to make sure that my team keeps their skills sharp, their tip of the spear. They know what’s changing, why it’s changing in the industry, and how to translate that in the company. That’s a risk, because if you work with an agency partner, they’re working on other brands, other industries. They can see what’s working outside of your vertical and bring some of those insights into your brand. So that’s the risk of going all in-house. On the flip side, if I’m a brand, if I’m a VP of marketing, if I outsource all my SEO, the risk for the agency and you, the client, they don’t understand the nuances of your business and the things I mentioned earlier. You lack that embedded evangelist. You lack that embedded integrator that really understands your company’s culture, how work really gets done, how decisions get made, how the business ticks, what matters most. That’s why fully outsourcing is also a risk. I’m big believer in keeping the scales balanced, having know-how on the client side and the agency side, healthy friction, but a healthy partnership is going to drive the best results.

And given your experience in large and complex organizations, Scott, what are the biggest challenges you have seen in managing SEO with more of a matrix structure?

The biggest challenges?

Yeah.

I think the speed at which you move, right? You get really matrix.

The decision-making part of it, legal compliance, getting into it, and all that stuff, right?

Oh, yeah. If you think about legal compliance, they’re a critical role to protect a marketer. But oftentimes, creative, unique, original content can get watered down. When it gets watered down, it might lose its differentiation, which today is really important with information gain and what engines are looking for. That’s It’s definitely one challenge. I think also smaller, more nimble brands, they can just adapt quicker. They can produce rapid response content. They can probably publish a new template much faster than an enterprise brand can. I think the challenge for an SEO leader in a large organization is to try to have the confidence to predict where SEO is going and get your partners on board. It’s the Wayne Gretszky cliché, right? Skate to where the fuck’s going. You have to anticipate where it’s going to go to get the brand to eventually catch up. Those two things intersect. That’s what I found worked really well for me as an SEO leader in house of a few big brands, was to take some calculated risk. Don’t do what’s working the day only. Anticipate what’s coming and help your brand catch up to it.

Right, Scott. And Scott, you have it in the space for quite some time now. For our young listeners now, you are trying to make a career in the business marketing space and trying to become an entrepreneur, what is a piece of advice you’d want to give to them?

I would give two bits of advice. One, I would say, make sure you develop your soft skills. It’s one thing to know the technical nature of SEO and the buy the book answer. That’s table stakes. Understand how to really communicate effectively with different people inside your organization, with different vendors you might work with. I think that’s really a missing component with a lot of young talent coming in. It just takes some time. Find a mentor in the organization that knows nothing about SEO, but you can tell that they can navigate the political game, if you will, of a big company. They know how to manage up, they can manage across, and they communicate with impact. That’d be one thing. The second one is vanity SEO metrics, top three and top 10 rankings, impressions and search console, even clicks. Are those important? They are. Are they means to an end? Sure. But SEOs who really understand what drives a business, what drives its growth, what drives its cost structures, what drives its profitability, if you can translate that into SEO and understand we’re after, we the company, we’re after quality traffic that has a need that we can solve, that’s what matters most, I think, when you do reporting.

If you can be a good communicator, understand how the company works, and connect that back to your SEO skills, that’s going to give you a pretty good path forward in-house at a brand.

Absolutely. Absolutely, Scott. Thank you so much for the insight, Scott. But before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Yeah, go for it.

All right. Your last Google search.

Last Google search was, wow, this morning. Cross-based… We’re meeting cross-based moisture companies. We put in some new hardwood floors at our house and have a little bit of cupping, so we think it could be moisture in the cross space, so I need to find a solution.

All right. Your celebrity crush?

I think JLo. That was from you many years ago.

Okay. All right. What did you do with your first paycheck, Scott? First paycheck of your life.

First paycheck of my life. Cashed it and bought some baseball cards and some gum and put gas in my car. I was 16.

Okay, all right. Your last vacation.

To an area in North Carolina Mountains called Lake Lour, where they filmed the movie Dirty Dancing. But we had a house on a We’re on a golf course in Lake Lour for about 14 people a couple of months ago.

Lovely. All right, the last one will not kill you anymore. Where do we find you on Friday evening, Scott? After office or after work?

Typically, relaxing either with a cocktail with my wife or watching a Netflix show Friday night because end of the week, we’re both mentally wiped out and ready to decompress.

Lovely. Great, Scott. Thank you so much for your time. It was a lovely conversation. I’m sure our audience would have loved it. Cheers, man.

Awesome. Thanks, Ranmay. Great to meet you.