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New father, husband, and Cavapoo dog dad. Also marketer, author, marketing conference…
Articles by Patrick
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisThis week’s “Never Always Newsletter” is titled “AI Video and Marketing’s Fermi Paradox.” There are two myths I hope to debunk with this article: 1. AI video is slop 2. AI is going to replace marketers AI is a transformative technology that will permanently change how the marketing world operates. But also… Marketing is still an extremely difficult practice that cannot be solved like an equation built into an algorithm. I describe one such example of how AI has transformed our business over the last year … with video production. Today, we are capable video that I never dreamed possible, at 10% of the cost, without sacrificing quality. AI is essential to the equation. But this has more to do with the people using the tech than the tech itself. In the newsletter, I describe some of the people doing this work for us, including Dave Spector and AG Dailey, and show some of their work. Once you see these videos, you’ll realize there’s a big difference between the slop that is sent around in fantasy football group chats, and art produced by storytellers. When you live inside this work every day, and see what talented people are now capable of with this technology, it all becomes so damn obvious. Link to the article in comments. Also, if you or anyone you know would benefit from some of this creative work, DM me. I’ll include a full “sizzle reel” in the comments as well.
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisHonored to sit on the AI expert panel at Wednesday's Middle Market Alliance of Long Island (MMALI) event at the Bethpage Heritage Club. Thanks to the MMA board and sponsors for having me, and to my fellow panelists, Frank Zinghini, E. Ross Weinstein, and Brett Marx, and to Maxwell Osborne for moderating the discussion and bringing some excellent data and insights to kick us off. With all the discussion on AI and the job market, it's rare to hear a discussion that cuts through the noise and gives practical insight about how small and medium-sized businesses are leveraging AI in a meaningful way. Max started off the event describing how electricity impacted the industrial revolution, and the GDP gains and other prosperity that followed that period. Here's what I'd add to that: The industrial revolution started BEFORE businesses had access to electricity. We had hundreds of manufacturers in the US already producing goods using steam power and candlelit factory floors. They knew about electricity and knew that, when it became widely available, it would transform business forever. But not a single person living in 1885 could have predicted what would actually happen over the next 30 years. When Edison invented the lightbulb, it was the first time many regular folks could use electricity ... it finally made sense to them. Most manufacturers jumped for joy, realizing they could install light bulbs into their factories and keep production running 24/7. This was, indeed, a net-gain for production. But most stopped there. They "checked the box" of electricity and kept most of their current business in tact. Then along came the innovators (including, ironically, a startup called "General Electric"). These were new manufacturers with electricity built into every component of the business plan. It wasn't something they "did" ... it was the central nervous system for their operation. Most businesses today are limping into AI ... "We use ChatGPT for things" or "We use Copilot because we already have access to it." This is the same as screwing a lightbulb into your factory floor and calling it a day. And that's missing the point. As I said during the discussion, we should all be looking to burn our businesses to the ground and rebuild them around AI. If we don't put ourselves out of business, someone else will. And thanks to this MMA event, many Long Island businesses are one step closer to practically achieving that.
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Patrick Gilbert reposted thisPatrick Gilbert reposted thisGrabbed a book on a whim last month, fully prepared to leave it a 1-star review. Ended up emailing the author to thank him. "Never Always, Never Never" looked like another CEO wrote a book to promote his business. Those books are usually platitudes and advice you can't do anything with unless you reach out to the company to do it for you. One of the worst categories of books out there. This book, however, has moved into the top 5 books I have read in the last few years. One of the most memorable parts of the book for me was when Patrick Gilbert compared a marketing strategist's role to that of an NFL GM. Each has to create the best combination of tactics/players to win but they have to fit inside of budgets/salary caps. In 2024, James Cook, the Bills running back cost 1.2% of the salary cap but three lineman, many people outside of Buffalo have never heard of, are equal to double Cook's salary. Why? Because these three linemen created the space for a 2 yard carry turned into 40 yard gains. The reason Cook was able to score 16 TDs in a single season. In advertising, the campaign that gets the final touch often gets the attribution, much like Cook scoring the touchdown. However, without the supporting upper funnel and brand campaigns (the linemen) that opportunity may have never existed. This analogy is something I will be using in future presentations at Unbound Collective. If you are a marketer or business owner looking for a book to change your view of marketing and advertising. Get this book. Excellent work Patrick.
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisHonored to be featured in an article by Agentic Marketing News by Search Atlas! The article is a terrific overview of some of my recent newsletter topics, including the rising costs of bottom-funnel traffic (Google and Meta), the 95:5 rule and why it's important to reach your entire target audience, and how AI allows us to embrace effective marketing strategies and tactics that have largely been ignored in the digital era. Link in comments.
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisI've had non-marketers in my life joke that they do not really shop for anything anymore. They wait for Instagram to figure out what they need and tell them what to buy. Every consumer recognizes this... The moment you start looking at something, your feed and your connected TV fill up with every brand in the category. And yet marketers act as if none of it were happening. We still build campaigns for a short, linear journey, and we ignore that the moment someone lands on your site, the ad platforms, and therefore all of your competitors, know there is a new person in market for what you sell. You are not just trying to win a customer over anymore. You have been dropped into a sea of noise, and staying noticed, remembered, and considered until the decision actually gets made is the job. To make it worse, Google CPCs and Meta CPMs keep climbing. I recently searched for patio furniture on one site and, within a few hours, received 13 ads from 9 different brands on Instagram. We need to adjust the way we think about strategy and media planning... The explanation behind this phenomenon is in this video. I went deep into this topic in a recent newsletter. Links in comments.
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Patrick Gilbert reposted thisPatrick Gilbert reposted thisI watched the Google podcast on Meridian last night (it was in my to-do list for days) and filled some pages with notes, because it was so value driven. Almost all the content on media mix modeling available on internet, leaves you more confused than when you started. But this discussion was so smooth and easy to understand and I couldn't resist myself to post. Ginny Marvin(Google Ads Liaison) sat down with Patrick Gilbert (CEO Adventure Media) and Nechama Teigman (Senior Data Analyst), who have been running Meridian on real client accounts for a full year. They didn't talk theories but Real mistakes in the journey with real numbers. Three things I am taking into my own accounts: 1. Variance matters more than spend. Nechama said large variance on a small dataset beats no variance on a big one. A client spending $1M the same way every month has no signal in the data. One spending $25K with real movement does. What I am doing: checking if the account actually has fluctuation in it before I suggest MMM to anyone. 2. The best control variables come from outside marketing. They had a Jewelry client whose single biggest performance driver turned out to be the price of gold. No one on the marketing team would have guessed that. What I am doing: adding one question to my onboarding calls with the CEO and the sales team. What moves your sales that has nothing to do with ads? 3. It is directional, not the final answer. They admitted they burned trust early by promising clients "true ROI." Now they position it as groundwork for testing. What I am doing: never again selling a measurement setup as an answer machine. The PMax vs Shopping story alone is worth your 35 minutes. Same reported ROAS, completely different real impact on the business. Thank you Patrick Gilbert for sharing this so openly. Most agencies keep this behind closed doors. Full video in the first comment. #PPC #googleads
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisFor the last century, marketers divided strategy into "brand" and "performance" because the funnel was a straight line. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom... and every channel got assigned to a stage. TV at the top, print in the middle, then direct mail, in-store displays, and eventually Google Search at the bottom. Nobody moves through a funnel that way anymore. Buyers don't descend, they meander. They pile up options, cut them back down, disappear for three weeks, come back, and change their mind about a brand they had already settled on. Once that's true, you can't assign a channel to a stage. The same ad is doing brand work or performance work depending on where somebody is when they see it, and you don't get to know where that is. It's also why judging a video campaign on last-click ROAS keeps producing an answer that feels wrong. You're measuring a loop with a ruler built for a line. Brand and performance were never two disciplines. They were two halves of a diagram that no longer describes anything. The whole story is in the video, including the appliance store I grew up working in and the study that made me stop drawing funnels.
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisIt was an honor to join the official Google Ads podcast, "Ads Decoded" and talk about marketing analytics and measurement solutions with my brilliant colleague, Nechama Teigman and Google's Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin. Attribution is not enough. Marketers seeking to measure ROI and use data to make informed budget decisions need more robust measurement systems that include incrementality and MMM. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) helps brands measure how various advertising channels influence sales and optimize future budget allocation. The methodology has been around for decades but has been extremely expensive and clunky, so it's only ever been used by the largest brands on the planet. In 2025, Google released Meridian, an open-source MMM platform that makes advanced measurement much more accessible for small and mid-sized advertisers. We've been using Meridian for a year—we built a robust measurement platform on top of the Meridian infrastructure. It has completely changed the way we manage client accounts. For context: In 2024, we hired an MMM vendor to run measurement for one of our largest accounts. They charged us 30K/month (which was a fee we passed on to the client) ... and the insights were flawed for reasons we discuss on the podcast. Today, thanks to Meridian, we now offer MMM solutions to our clients for free. Clients never wanted to pay an additional fee for reporting or analytics—but they do want their agency to making decisions with the best information. This is no longer an issue for us. Thanks to Ginny and the Google Ads team for inviting us on ... it's not often that they invite agency folks onto the podcast. And a huge shout out to Nechama for not only pioneering this entire effort for AdVenture Media, but also for building our new analytics platform and ultimately being the one who taught all of us how any of this stuff works. Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, etc. ... Look up "Ads Decoded" by Google https://lnkd.in/gJin6zzHOne year testing Meridian: Real agency results and takeawaysOne year testing Meridian: Real agency results and takeaways
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Patrick Gilbert shared thisThis is an exceptional (and short!) article outlining the opportunity all of us have today, at the dawn of the AI era. The conclusion, in particular, is brilliant: "The doomers and the utopians are both selling you the same thing: a future that happens to you. One version arrives as catastrophe, the other as salvation, and in both, you're a passenger just waiting for things to go south. I've spent forty years around the people building the future, and that's never how it works. The exponential technology many have long feared is here; the environment is changing faster than most institutions can adapt. Somewhere right now, a seventeen-year-old is teaching himself machine learning to catch a disease earlier. Somewhere, a laid-off customer service rep is building the tool her old company should have had. Somewhere, a researcher is watching a molecule that didn't exist eighteen months ago move into Phase III. Intelligence that never sleeps is now available to nearly anyone reading this. My only advice is to use it to build the future YOU want, not the one others predict it should be. " Thanks Stephan (Steve) Ramerini for passing this along!
Patrick Gilbert replied to a comment
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Mark Donnelly I think you'll like it! Zero chapters on quality score, I promise
Patrick Gilbert replied to a comment
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Dmitry Salatov but I’d say that’s an easier challenge than shaking the couch cushions for one 50K spot
Patrick Gilbert replied to a comment
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Anik Chandra Sen thank you. That’s exactly my point. I hope my message didn’t make it seem otherwise.
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Patrick Gilbert liked thisPatrick Gilbert liked thisYou can create the most targeted, best campaign in the world, talking specifically to a buyer's pain. You can go out and hit all the right channels. But if it takes you four months to do that every single time, you're not going to get any traction. #ContentStrategy #MarketingOperations #AI #B2BMarketing #ContentMarketing
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Patrick Gilbert reacted on thisPatrick Gilbert reacted on thisI am still thinking about the MMM conversation I had with an agency recently. Patrick Gilbert and Nechama Teigman from AdVenture Media pulled back the curtain on how they implemented Meridian without enterprise-level overhead and with the help of AI tools. (Update! Since this conversation, Meridian has introduced interactive Agentic Skills to help you prepare data, configure priors, fit models, analyze diagnostics, run budget optimizations, and plan scenarios.) If you want to upgrade your measurement strategy but have been intimidated by the perceived barriers to entry, give this a read. 👇 https://lnkd.in/ey-6ttAy
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Patrick Gilbert liked thisPatrick Gilbert liked thisSince the LinkedIn algo hates me now I’m going all-in on personal…. so these are some of the games that shaped me into the PPC person I am today! 😂 Hard to pick just 9… what about you?
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Patrick Gilbert liked thisPatrick Gilbert liked thisThe beauty of a properly set up Google Ad Grants account 😍 A big thank you to Jason King for sharing his expertise with me. He really is the GOAT of Ad Grants 🐐 And a giant kudos to my non-profit client for her TENACIOUS back-and-forth with Google to get this sorted. Getting Ad Grants up and running properly can be a giant pain in the 🍑 , but it's worth it for that sweet, sweet free money!
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Patrick Gilbert liked thisPatrick Gilbert liked thisI think ChatGPT is doing what Google's been accused of doing for years, and getting away with it We've been running ChatGPT ads for ourselves and several of our clients for the past few months now and the results are very, very sketchy In almost every circumstance we've seen that running ads has a BIG impact on how much "organic" traffic you get from ChatGPT. And the second you turn them off, that goes away Was talking with someone last week who saw a 5x increase in organic chatgpt traffic when running ads, and it dropped immediately the day he turned them off One of our clients has been running them with a few hundred $ as a test, and we hadn't seen any results. We were considering turning them off, but when we dug deeper in their CRM we saw their largest potential deal of the year had just come in through ChatGPT "organically" OpenAI says ads "do not influence" ChatGPT's answers. Maybe that's true, and people see an ad and ask about you by name a week later. But there's no real way to validate that from the data available in the platform If you're running ChatGPT ads, would be interested to hear if you've seen the same thing
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Family Relations Captain - Rules and Regulations Liaison
Penn State Dance Marathon
- 9 months
Children
The Penn State Panhellenic/IFC Dance Marathon (THON) is a year long philanthropic effort with a mission to conquer childhood cancer by providing outstanding emotional and financial support to the children, families, researchers and staff of the Four Diamonds at Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. It culminates every year with a 46 hour no sitting, no sleeping dance marathon and is the largest student run philanthropy in the world.
The Family Relations Committee provides year round…The Penn State Panhellenic/IFC Dance Marathon (THON) is a year long philanthropic effort with a mission to conquer childhood cancer by providing outstanding emotional and financial support to the children, families, researchers and staff of the Four Diamonds at Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. It culminates every year with a 46 hour no sitting, no sleeping dance marathon and is the largest student run philanthropy in the world.
The Family Relations Committee provides year round assistance and support to The Four Diamonds families, keeping students informed and inspired, and working alongside the rest of THON's committees to ensure that the families remain at the heart of THON.
My role as Rules and Regulations Liaison was to develop the "Family Pass System," a complex capacity program that is used to ensure the safety of special guests (Four Diamonds families) and to train 40 Committee Members to execute the pass system throughout THON Weekend. I also served as an inter-committee liaison, planned alternative fundraising events within the Family Relations committee, and managed all other projects related to special guest security.
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Executive Board Member - THON Chair
Penn State Men's Club Lacrosse
- 3 years 2 months
In addition to competing in the National Collegiate Lacrosse League (NCLL), The Penn State Men's Club Lacrosse Team is an active participant in the Penn State Dance Marathon's mission to conquer childhood cancer. The Club Lacrosse program saw an increase from $16K in 2010 to $36K, $57K in 2011 and 2012. In 2013, the program raised more than $64K for childhood cancer care and research, the 5th highest total by any general organization participating in the Penn State Dance Marathon.
As…In addition to competing in the National Collegiate Lacrosse League (NCLL), The Penn State Men's Club Lacrosse Team is an active participant in the Penn State Dance Marathon's mission to conquer childhood cancer. The Club Lacrosse program saw an increase from $16K in 2010 to $36K, $57K in 2011 and 2012. In 2013, the program raised more than $64K for childhood cancer care and research, the 5th highest total by any general organization participating in the Penn State Dance Marathon.
As THON Chairperson for the organization's philanthropic initiatives, I coordinated fundraising trips that would include approximately 55 students spread across five states to solicit donations. Other responsibilities included an annual direct mailing campaign, managing social media, maintaining the organization's website, tracking online donations, planning alternative fundraising events, and managing relationships with corporate donors and alumni.
In an effort to provide emotional support for our adopted Four Diamonds Family, I organized events that fostered meaningful relationships between the family members and our volunteers. Additionally, I filmed, edited and produced a Family Feature Video that provided inspiration to thousands of THON enthusiasts.
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