Welcome And The Big Miss

Chris Norton 0:00

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes . I'm Chris Norton and my guest today is Jenna Hannon , co-founder of Hatter , an agency in California , and the AI search platform I've been testing on our own website . She was also the first marketing hire at Uber Eats . And then there's the biggest miss of all . She spent hours in a car to the Sahara with Greg Brockman , the co-founder of OpenAI . She begged him to take her money and he said no . That was seven years ago . Imagine how much that would be worth now . This is one you're not gonna miss . This is one of my favourite shows ever . I guarantee you're gonna enjoy it . Let's get into it . Enjoy . Jenna Hannon , welcome to the show . Thanks for having me . Um , right . Well , this has been interesting because you're the one of the first guests that I've had on the show where I've actually gone off and before you've even come on the show , I was like , oh , this sounds really intriguing . Um the what you've done with Hatter . Like , because I meet so many fascinating people um and experts in their fields , but what you've done with Hatter really I was like , I've got to trust test this out for myself . So I've I have hands up on on this , I'm I am a test customer , I'd say , because I'm I'm gonna give it I've I've been working , I think I've been using your your your kit for about uh two and a half weeks , three weeks or something . And as a case study , live on the podcast , I can say that um yeah , in the the curve is we've got the we've got the uh the umbrella curve , what do you call that ? It's a bell curve . Where it goes up . Yeah , the hockey stick effect , that's it . Um and so , yeah , so and this show's all about mistakes , and actually the whole concepts

The Marketing Mistake Behind Hatter

Chris Norton 1:50

come out of a mistake , hasn't it , for Hatter ? So do you want to explain a little bit about Hatter and where the idea came from ?

Jenna Hannon 1:57

Yeah , absolutely . So we focus on what's now called AEO or GEO . Uh I think the non-technical term is AI search . So generative engine optimisation or answer engine optimisation is what the acronyms stand for . Uh , and we are an agentic platform that basically replaces an agency . So we we started as an agency just focused on organic search . And through that , we started building software to automate ourselves . We're tech backgrounds . So my co-founder is an engineer . He comes from Deliveroo and Microsoft , and I'm from the marketing side . Uh , I was at Uber for many years . Uh , but after Uber , I became a fractional CMO , and that's where the mistake happened . So I was working with several kind of mid-stage startups , Series B , Series C companies . Uh , and one of them was buzzing along . They were doing about 10 mil in revenue growing . And when I came in , most of that revenue was coming from ads . So we were spending a lot on ads . And the founder felt fairly confident that he'll just keep fundraising , there'll be more money , no problem . Uh , and I kept encouraging him , we should try to diversify our marketing channels . We should think about organic , which to me at the time was SEO . Uh , we should think about so at Uber , most of our business was actually organic . So we had so much demand for that business . Uh , we still ran ads , uh , but the majority of that business coming in was organic . People re people hearing about it , people finding it online . Uh , and so this is the pitch that I made to the founder . Uh no , no , no , kept trying . No , no , no . And then he went to go fundraise . It seemed like it was looking good . And at the last minute , investors pulled out . So we ended up with no cash for ads . And so we we basically turned off the ad machine and revenue just dried up overnight .

Chris Norton 4:01

Right.

Jenna Hannon 4:01

And I felt like I felt like this is as a CMO, this is my fault, you know? Like I'm in charge of building the growth machine, and I let this happen. And that's kind of what inspired Hatter. There was a spark of going down this rabbit hole of organic, what's happening organic. My my co-founder and I were fascinated by this shift from traditional SEO that had been the same for 20 years, uh, to now AI search coming online and what that was going to do to organic. And and that's what started it.

AI Search And Google’s Pivot

Chris Norton 4:36

Yeah, and the fascinating thing in or the fascinating thing in in AEO GEO, let's call it AI Search, is when it came out, like we're talking 2022. So we're talking four years ago since ChatGPT 3, I think it was, that launched. Weirdly, I don't think anybody ever saw ChatGPT one or two, but ChatGPT 3 came out, and it's it's sort of I remember when it came out and everyone was like, whoo, there was suddenly a lot of noise. Oh my god, this is actually quite useful. And I saw things like, is this the Google killer? Google it Google's done. Google's been caught with its pants down, and it was like, um, you know, because it come from nowhere, and people are now going, oh, I can just ask it, and it will give me um proper thought-through results that are that I feel and you're trusting it, obviously. We'll get into that in a minute. Um, but actually, I had an interview with the head of uh, I think actually head of marketing at um Google in the UK or in Dublin or wherever they're based in the Europe, and she was saying that actually AI um the search for Google, the usage of Google's gone up since um which is amazing for them. I know search has changed on their platform, the amounts of different search, and they've embraced AI search. Um, but it's been fascinating to me because I I genuinely thought, oh my god, Google's got all this money, they've they've got the they've got the map, they've got the mass um reach and everything, and suddenly this Sam Altman and his team have just absolutely blown it out of the water. So, how how has it been for you guys, your side? Is it is it still as exciting and and do you think Google is still playing catch-up? Or do you think Google's fine? And they're just like, you guys go off and fight with your frontier models, but we're just gonna keep leading the way.

Jenna Hannon 6:23

We think Google's fine . We so we started in this game in 2023 . So it right at the beginning . And at the beginning , it was hard to convince companies that this is where search was going . That the companies were like , why would I want to show up in ChatGPT ? That's only a small percentage of traffic . And our hypothesis , exactly , and when we started , I think it was like 1 % . Um , but our hypothesis was that Google was building models and that Google will start doing the AI summaries . If Google's getting beaten , they're a they're a giant machine . There's very smart people at Google , they will pivot quickly . And that that's what we've seen . So I think now it's been fun because we sometimes we'll talk to companies which are all bought in on SEO . No , my customer doesn't use AI . My customer's too old school . And we're like , your customer , if they're going to Google , is using AI . They're doing AI search on Google , whether they know it or not . The in the entire thing is shifted thanks to Google making that shift . Now , search still matters because when you go to Google , you're still seeing an AI summary and listings . But now you're you're kind of in this funny land of a combination of both , where we think probably the next stage is even more AI summaries . It's just so convenient . Getting an answer at the top for a lot of the questions that you're going to Google to answer is is just really nice .

Chris Norton 7:53

Yeah . I mean it's the set it's this because I did an event about four or five , maybe five or six years ago , and it was about the future of search . I don't do well , I'm a PR person , and um we do digital PR and all that , those sorts of things . But the future of search and the few they were talking about the fact that it was gonna be audio search , right ? Because of Alexa , Alexa's gonna take over the world , she was gonna be the next Terminator , and actually she's been improved slightly , but unless she's just tricking us all , she's not as clever as I thought she was gonna be . And they were saying exactly what you're saying , which is be the first result , because um she's gonna go , Alexa , she , I say she's she or he can have either way , but anyway , and Alexa in my house would go , yeah , it'll give you the first result , won't it ? And not the others , like Google used to always give you the 10 , and the the the mission of an SEO was to be one to nine , preferably one to three , but one to nine . Whereas now you're not sure if you're one to nine , it might be one of five in of an LLM , and each and it's like trying to choose which one do you want to beat ? Perplexity , uh , Gemini , ChatGPT , Claude , I mean , there's that many of them , and everybody's just going throwing their balls in the air and going , which one's gonna land ?

Jenna Hannon 9:10

And so , yeah , I mean , I don't know what the question is there , but the good news there is it's it's simpler than you think . So a lot most of the AI tools under the hood , even though they're slightly different models , are generally working in a similar way . So if you're if you're optimising for ChatGPT , the tactics aren't going to be that different to show up in Perplexity Claude or Google AI Overviews . I think that's the good news . Still in our data , I think this is quite interesting . 90 % of the traffic we're seeing in AI is happening in ChatGPT .

Chris Norton 10:38

I would say that's true as well. I can confirm that my I look at my HubSpot data and my HubSpot traffic, and um, yeah, we come from uh most of them are chat, most of the AI search. We've been tracking it since AI has been out, uh, is ChatGPT, you're right, you're correct. But then I suppose it's getting confused with what Google traffic is now. Because it will be Google, won't it? Because Google is, you know, it's still, you know, you might get 200, 300 visits from AI, whereas you might get 5,000 from Google. So and that's like you've just said there, they're all like most of them are AI search, I think, if it if it's changed its way of working.

Jenna Hannon 11:13

Could be. I think that's blending. So I'm with you. I think Google is still people's default. When they think I need to search something, they go to Google, and now Google is pushing you to get an AI answer. So I think that traffic is blended.

Chris Norton 11:25

So having used your product, right? You've got you've got you've got an agency, haven't you? And they you you can do managed in-house

Do Blog Posts Still Matter

Chris Norton 11:31

and they can obviously take your products, and there'll be people listening to this thinking that's great. Um, I've had I've had a few things where I'm like, how does this how is this working? So because your the the content of the content that your application does is is excellent. That's the that's the key thing. That's the reason why I started to use it because I looked at it, I thought, this is excellent. The articles, they're not, they're sort of like more like guides and things that and they they complement the stuff that we're already doing. But my question is this SEO, AEO, AI Search is there's so many content marketers out there, people that have got jobs in content marketing, right? Obviously, a lot I'm I I worry for the copywriters, but the con the content writers, you you're writing um blog posts. Are blog posts still as important as they were uh like five, six years ago? Because it's always been like write a really well executed and you get crap blog posts, you can get excellent blog posts, right? Really well listicles, for example, are a great use of um but yours are slightly they're like a hybrid of that. They're like they're not quite that, they're more resources and uh insightful reviews of sectors and stuff. So is the is the are these two meant to go together as part of a collective strategy, is what I'm trying to say.

Jenna Hannon 12:53

Yes. So the way the way that we look at it is that uh a blog post, whether it's good or bad, if no one sees it, then it's not useful. So you can write the best blog post or the there could be the best page on your website that you spent tons of time crafting it. But if it doesn't have distribution, meaning it's not showing up in search and people aren't finding it, it's not gonna actually be useful to your business. So I think people overweight the quality of content versus the distribution. Both both matter, I would say equally, because once first you got to get someone to hit that piece of content or that page on your website, and then you need that person to read that and convert. And it needs to be the right person. So there's quite a few jobs to do there. But I would say to answer your question more simply, at a concept level, it it's fairly easy to understand. Basically, now we have these AIs that are training on all of the information that is on the internet. And ever, exactly. Yeah, as you can imagine, you previously had a website. For many years, people weren't blogging, people weren't updating their website because it wasn't helping you in in Google search. And so what we often see is that these models actually don't have that much information about your company. And that that's all-encompassing. It's your industry, your market, your competitors, the pricing, all the things that your customer would look up when deciding whether or not to buy your product or service. So the simple solution from an AI perspective is to give it that information. So, what our tool is doing is it's basically spinning up an external marketing guide, which is trying to answer every single question your customer asks along that buying journey. That could be who do you compete with? Who should they compare it with? Um, why you were better or what the differentiators are, how are you priced versus your competitors? Uh, what particular use cases are you for? And that all needs to sit on your website. Otherwise, AI doesn't know any of that exists. And so I would say 99% of the time, even with very mature companies, we will go to their website and we will quickly find out that there's just so many gaps in content, which is why they are not showing up for particular searches. So, concept level is quite easy to understand. The way that we execute that is we basically spin up a marketing hub for you, and our tool identifies what those gaps are. So, where are your competitors showing up? Uh, is it are they talking about pricing or comparisons or are they answering questions that your customers might be asking that you're not asking? And then we start building essentially guides. And so what our tool is doing is essentially helping you draft those guides, but it's all grounded in what your business does, your industry, and pretty much as much context as you want to feed it, because the the context is what makes the content good.

Chris Norton 16:06

Okay. And then the so the content you so so say I was you um, so you've got you've got your agency side, you've

Why Hatter Hosts The Content

Chris Norton 16:13

got a minimum fee, a minimum retainer of six months. And when we spoke initially, I was like, oh my god, this sounds amazing. We're gonna try it out. So I can interview you, I've got a bit of a contextual of how it works because I find it interesting. Um and you said to me, Oh, it can take about six to eight weeks to see some sort of tangible difference. What so what happens if someone's with you for like uh on your app and they're with you for nine months? Then if they leave, do they keep the content or is it your content, or how does it work?

Jenna Hannon 16:44

Yeah , great question . Yeah , so we we essentially give them the content . So you can you can export your content and put it on your CMS . One of the reasons that our tool hosts it is because lots of people have not touched their website in a long time . So their website might be slow , it's not very optimised . And so if we just start putting content on a website that loads slowly , that's not easy for crawlers to read , then it's not gonna pick up that content right away . So what we do is we basically give you an SEO optimised hub , which is we know is gonna get picked up right away . And anytime we create a new guide , we actually submit that directly to Google for you . So we remove that manual step and we say , hey , Google , go crawl this .

Chris Norton 17:28

And so what's the first sort of misunderstanding ? What's the main misunderstanding you get with new customers ? How many customers have you got ? And what's

Results Driven Software Feels Scary

Chris Norton 17:34

the misunderstanding they have with with AI search ? Do you think ? Because is it quite hard ? Because you I think you said to me , you're one of the first people that I've just spoken to and you've gone off and done it . Like you you said like people are really careful and don't understand it . I like trialling everything . I test anything , anything that works . I'm always like to try something .

Jenna Hannon 17:53

As you can imagine , our agency side is much bigger . So I think the the market is still nervous about about just using AI agents to do something that where the quality really matters . But on the software side , this is where the market is going . Uh so we we had this hypothesis very early that with AI , you in the old world of SaaS software , you were buying a workflow . You were buying a tool that would make your workflow faster , easier , more productive . But at the end of the day , it was still a human running that workflow . Now you can buy software that's delivering results . And this is a very new concept because before only service businesses could deliver results because you need a human . Or you're using a software and you're bringing it internally and then you're hiring someone to use that software . Now agents can run a lot of different workflows . And if you build specialised agents , you can lead to the end results . So that was that was our initial hypothesis . Now you have to wait for the market to catch up because that's a scary concept . It's just never existed before , where automation was at the level that it could deliver results . It was always just productivity . So on the software side , oddly enough , that's a harder sell than on the agency side , where a human is in the loop on all of those steps walking you through how that works .

Chris Norton 19:19

Because people want to speak to people.

Jenna Hannon 19:22

Yes . Yeah . And that makes sense to me because that's this has never existed before , right ? You've never been able to trust agents . And I think now we're we're in an interesting place where everyone was like , oh , I can build my own AI agents . So we talked to a lot of companies where they're like , oh , why would we use you ? We can use our own AI agents . But it kind of goes right back to why you would hire a specialist agency like Chris , your PR firm . It's because you have spent many , many years perfecting that methodology . And without that , it actually doesn't work . And that's the same thing people are realising with these agents that are just empty shells that they can plug , plug in . If you don't , if you don't know the methodology , that agent is not going to be effective . So I think we're seeing this move to specialised agents where people are realising , oh , I can get results , but I do need to trust that these agents are running a process that is effective or a workflow that is effective . So they do need to be trained . Uh , and I think the market is just starting to get there . So , especially with some of our , we have clients who have been in business for 40 years who are wrapping their head around this . But it's interesting , we have some of those clients trying the agentic tool . Like we have a commercial linen service that just signed up last week . Uh , and it's it's magical to walk them through it and it's it just blows their mind because this is such a big piece of the growth of their business . And so they're putting their trust in us . Yeah . Uh , but I think the market is still catching up to that , which is why our agency is still the bigger part of the business .

Chris Norton 20:54

You could you just reminded me of when uh because I've been in PR for that long , 25 years , God . And um , when SEO came out , I remember we we I was in a meeting and we had we had a brand in the UK . It's used it was quite a big brand in the UK . It was called the SOC the Sock Shop , I guess what they did . And um I I remember meeting the head of SEO there , and they were talking about articles . They were like , Oh yeah , we have to do loads of articles about the different set , and they had all these different copywriters writing all these articles . And I was like , Are you so are you telling me that you write 17 articles a day on socks ? Because that to make sense , and I think that's probably where we've moved away from . We're probably moving away from humans writing articles about socks to better quality , well-researched articles . I think there's gonna be a I think there's gonna be a slight shift . We'll have we'll go automated , then there'll be the human-opinionated stuff . I think there's gonna be like the bit in the middle of the the diagram where people want like you just said there , people want to speak to people , they still trust people , they'd rather deal with , they'd rather pay a bit more and have a person on the end of a an email than I'll just click enter and let this rogue agent go , you know , hack Hugging Face or whatever . I know you won't do that , but you're not a vague .

Jenna Hannon 22:09

I I think the concept that's tough for people to grasp right now is that what you write about is more

Commercial Intent Beats Keyword Volume

Jenna Hannon 22:15

important than how you write it. So when we first started, everyone, the the biggest pushback we got, the biggest objection was is Google gonna accept AI writing? And and Google published, and we talked to Google, and they said, we don't care how you write. We care what you write about. And so that's that's the big sticking point in AI search that most people don't understand is that the precision of what you write about. Now, here's the change from SEO. In SEO, the tactic was oh, get as many keywords as you can. You can grab as much traffic as you can. A lot of those keywords were they didn't lead to a buyer coming to your website. They might lead to someone who's just looking for information. They might read a blog post, but they're just looking for that piece of information. They're not actually looking to buy something. And so the important difference now is in the what you write about, all of the content should have commercial intent. It's just like building sales materials where you are trying to walk a prospect through the decision to buy. Yeah. And that's the what you write about. It's all commercial, which means if that brings someone into your website, it's more likely the right target, which is much higher intent.

Chris Norton 23:29

But I've got a question here then. So it used to be like, okay, so the any platform, it's like LinkedIn posts three times a week, or you can post once a week. You should write blog posts that are well done three times a week to keep your blog refreshed. Now, with this sorts of content that I've read of your stuff, like I'll give you an example. Two of them are like 17-minute reads, they're like long, long pieces. How often, like I've been with it for three weeks, and I think I've I think I've got 15 15 articles at which is three weeks, five five a weeks, well one a day, really. Um but obviously there must come a point where I've run out of guides and stuff to write about what my business does and who it can help. And do you know what I mean? So what what sort of what sort of what's this sort of cadence and and amount that we should be doing, do you think? And or is there any guidance on that or not?

Jenna Hannon 24:23

Yeah , absolutely . So AI search is not a game of volume . Meaning , I think when it first started and people started realising that it

Cadence Recency And Content Refresh

Jenna Hannon 24:31

was content-based , people were just shipping all these programmatic pages on their website . Websites were getting huge . Uh , you're not going to be rewarded from the algorithms by having volume . The algorithms care about recency , which is basically consistency . So , just like you do with social media , the best practice is to post three to five times a week , not more , not less , because the algorithms are looking for how recent are they posting . So when we are building your guides , it's kind of a metered cadence . And what happens is older pieces of content get stale . And they get stale for two reasons . One is that they're actually just aged and the algorithms stop looking at it after a certain point in time . Google's kind of rule of thumb is a year and a half is stale . AI is is much quicker . We're saying it looks more like six months . Right. Uh so well the second reason that articles get stale is that your business changes. Businesses evolve. Uh, so your your value props evolve, what's happening in your market evolves, your product evolves, your service evolves. And so all of that content needs to be maintained. So part of what part of the way the tool works is that it's constantly updating content. So it's looking at content that's working, that's bringing in traffic and bringing in leads, and it's looking at content that's not working. And it's saying we're gonna do more of what's working, less of what's not working. And so it's kind of this self-reinforcing cycle, which is what we do as an agency. Same thing. Every two weeks we're looking at how things are performing, and then we're adjusting the strategy. So the tool is built the same way. So part of what makes AI search tough to commit to as a business is its consistency, is you just need to keep writing, keep updating your website. You need to make sure that content is fresh.

Chris Norton 26:24

So keep writing then as well. That's the moral of the story. Keep looking for ops and keep writing.

Jenna Hannon 26:29

Um, I mean, like it's like social media, right? Like it once you stop on your social media account, you're it's not going to be effective. Social media just wants you to continue to feed the algorithm. Same thing is happening in AI search.

Chris Norton 26:43

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Um and outside of the the the guides and the reports and things like that, what other things can you do to ensure that your visibility is, you know, what's the what's the hot tip for other marketers that don't that can't afford? Maybe the there'll be people in the UK who can't who've got little two one-man, two-man marketing teams. Maybe they can't afford to have a you know uh that amount of investment. What can they do outside of doing a guide on their sector or a a review of the sales type stuff? What other things can they do to be to be more visible, I suppose, on on AI? Should they keep doing their blog content? Or is that is that dead in the water? That's what I was trying to say earlier.

Jenna Hannon 27:28

Yeah, I think so. So so AI search is basically two big pieces. Piece number one is the content

Visibility Beyond Your Website

Jenna Hannon 27:35

that you're training AI on your business. 99% of businesses we see do not have fully fleshed out their content, meaning even their homepage doesn't answer it the customer questions that need to be answered to get someone to buy, which is very common. So that if you if you don't have a lot to invest, I would say step one, go to your existing website and make sure that there is enough information on there that your customer could make a buying decision without ever talking to you. So if you if if you don't have a lot of cash to invest, I would say make sure that content exists on your website. Because actually 99% of the time, the algorithms are pulling from first-party websites and there's just not enough content there for AI to understand your industry, how you compete, who you compete with. Number two is AI is trained on the entire internet. So where else your brand shows up will matter, although it won't matter if the AI doesn't even know you exist, meaning the content is not there in the first place, which is why we tell most companies start with your website. Because when we look at the data and we look at your market, most of the time we see that the algorithms are pulling from your website and your competitor websites. But in very competitive markets, so Chris, you're in a competitive market, PR is a competitive space. In these types of markets, you'll you'll sometimes see that AI is using other sources for credibility. Yeah. So other sources will be things like online reviews, showing up in press. So press is a piece of this, especially exactly. And I think that's exactly. So a lot of a lot of clients come to us through PR agencies or we work with PR agencies because that is the second key piece to winning AI search , is you want that credibility . The thing that I will say is that the AI is is more precise in analysing these third-party sources than Google is . Google would basically say a backlink is a backlink and we'll give some weighting . So if you have a backlink from a credible uh publication , we will weight that more , but overall volume of links that are coming to you matter more . The AI is saying , no , the context of that matters . So we notice that the type of press that's moving the needle tends to be more specific to the industry . So trade associations pull a lot of weight . Niche , exactly . That's the right word . So niche press matters more than press in itself . And the backlink game , I would say , is totally over . Meaning AI is very good at saying none of these backlinks are useful or they don't have the right context , and therefore I'm not bringing this in .

Chris Norton 30:23

I literally had link building written here . I was going to ask you about that . That was one of my questions . You've just said link building instead

Link Building Fades PR Gets Stronger

Chris Norton 30:30

. Because um I I had a chat yesterday with a guy , right ? Um it was quite timely for this conversation , and then uh we uh I used to work with a guy and and he he had run he runs an agency . There was about 40 of them , SEO agency , uh since 2006 , I think . Uh he's got a friend who ran one that had 300 staff , and he had 30 odd staff . They were global and they did they work mainly in the SaaS you can see where this is going in the SaaS uh space , and they had copywriters , and their their quality was they did quality link building and article writing and placement . Literally , ChatGPT's come out and just gone his mate who had 300 um staff shut his agency , and he said , I because I I spoke to him yesterday , and I was like , How is business like because of what your the stuff that we've been talking about here with tools and things ? Well , his staff did that like your team do manually . They did it manually first , didn't they ? And they were excellent at it . Well , he's got four staff now , and he was like , It's just decimated my business . And it I think the world of link building is is fascinating because it's not something that as a PR I've ever got into . I've got into content writing and helping clients write excellent blog posts and uh guest posts and press releases and get them featured and get them on TV , get them on broadcast . But link building , where we go out and we get links uh off the back of X an excellent campaign and we'll we'll have an excellent asset as part of the campaign , and it'll be about the campaign and about the brand . We weren't the sort of agency that would go out and buy a hundred links for 20 , 30 bucks or 50 bucks and then point them all to a page . Those companies that they're finished , aren't they ? Really ? Which is it's just it looks it looks to me like SEO has moved to AI , it has moved to , and I saw another thing that another thing for this context . I saw someone on LinkedIn yesterday say , I've now changed my job title to head of organic search . I was like , oh , look at this . SEO's gone , and it's and it's it's not the death of SEO , but it's it's the evolution , it's evolved again , hasn't it ?

Jenna Hannon 32:41

As a marketer , I love this because link building was kind of a hack . There was a lot of grey market there of people just going and buying links . There was a lot of garbage links on fake websites that were spun up just for links . And now what matters is more the not even the quality of the link , the quality of the content that is getting linked back to you . So we're we're back to an age where PR really matters and real PR . You're not just going and buying a placement , you're actually getting a real story that's talking about your business because what's getting written about you now actually matters . So I think this is great . We're back to good marketing or back to if you're working with a great PR agency that's getting you real placements , that's gonna matter in the algorithms . If you are creating content that's educating your buyer who's actually on the journey of doing research in AI search , then you're going to get rewarded . So for me , I think it's great . The other thing I notice in these algorithms that they are very good at detecting is differentiation . So I come from a product

Differentiation That AI Can Recommend

Jenna Hannon 33:51

marketing background . Uh , so this is the the core of what's now organic that I love , uh , which is that the algorithms , if if it's just same same amongst you and your competitors , they don't know who to recommend because they're all saying exactly the same thing . Versus if you we've seen businesses where they we saw a construction business that had a longer warranty than all of their competition . And so we built a bunch of content just around this warranty . And so AI started recommending them because they had this very strong point of differentiation that could make the that basically showed up in algorithms where like everything looks the same . Oh , there's an interesting point here . Let's bring it into a summary . So the game has , I think the game has changed to quality , even though there's more automation , which is hard to conceptualise .

Chris Norton 34:40

Yeah , it's basically it's it's a much more , what it's a more considered it's a more consider like you're right . The hacking SEOs will figure some sort of hack out though . I can't believe they're not gonna figure it out somewhere .

Jenna Hannon 34:52

I mean, but when this first started, especially I was doing podcasts, and the number the questions they were getting were like, what's the hack? What's the hack? Uh and people on LinkedIn, this drives me nuts because people on LinkedIn are like, this is the hack, this is the silver bullet. You're gonna you're gonna do Reddit for AEO as the silver bullet. We just see none of that in the data. We don't see any silver bullets. We basically see, oh, there's this consistency of training the algorithms, and that's what's working. And getting good press is is really moving the needle, but there's no like one hack that's gonna get you ahead of the competition, and people hate that.

Chris Norton 35:28

Yeah, they will do, they will hate that. I mean, I I like it being in the PR industry because people hopefully more people will be buying PR and come come to us for to get coverage. Um I mean the whole thing's fascinating. Can I just go back to we when you your previous role then? So you worked at Uber Eats. Um now you were you were in

Launching Uber Eats City By City

Chris Norton 35:47

Uber when it you you you were part of the launch of Uber Eats, is that correct?

Jenna Hannon 35:54

Yeah , so I was the first marketing hire on Uber Eats . It was actually kind of fun when I was interviewing because I was basically interviewing to join a team of experiments . And there was many experiments uh on that team being run . Uber Eats was was one of them , and nobody wanted this role . So basically , when I was being during the interview process , they were basically saying no one internally wanted to work on this because the the core rides business at Uber was so strong and growing so quickly that no one that was working on something that was going gangbusters and working wanted to go work on the side experiment . And so they were looking for someone that came from a startup background . So I came from a startup background . So at the time when I joined , Eats was one of the experiments that I was working on . And the hypothesis was basically we're we're getting these complaints from drivers that they're not making money during lunch because people are eating during lunch , and so they're not requesting rides . And so drivers wanted to figure out they were basically asking us , how can you help us make money during lunchtime ? So the idea was oh , all these drivers have trunks . And so we're gonna fill their trunks with sandwiches or burritos or basically one lunch item . And then during lunch in the Uber Rides app , we're gonna surface this for this two-hour period from noon to 2 p . m . , you can order the item of the day and a driver will deliver it to you . So that was our idea to get drivers driving during lunch . And that experiment kind of worked okay . People were ordering during lunch . We started it in San Francisco , which is a very dense downtown , so people at work could pick the item of the day . Uh , and a team in Toronto was also running the same experiment . The Toronto team came back to us and they said , People they like it okay , but the number one request that we get is they want to order from a restaurant they choose . So we are gonna try that . And the SF team was kind of like pooh-poohing that . They're like , oh , that sounds like a lot of logistics is gonna be difficult . And then the Toronto team launched that , and that just went gangbusters . It was basically it was so busy they could not find enough drivers during lunch to deliver the food . And that's where the team perked up and said , Okay , there's something here . They presented it at the time it was Travis Kalanick running the company , and Travis was very supportive of experiments . So he was kind of like , I hire smart people and I let them try stuff , and then I see what's working . And so the team presented to him , and he was like , team , like , go hard , go grow this , figure this out . So then we launched a city per week for probably a year and a half . It was wild .

Chris Norton 38:40

Crazy.

Jenna Hannon 38:42

Fun experience. So with launching a city for that business too, and Eats was even more complicated because on the rides business, it was step one was we need drivers. Step two was okay, cool. Now we have drivers on the road, people can start requesting a ride. In the Eats business, you had one more variable. It was step one, we need restaurants. And so we'd send someone to that city. That person would go door to door and sign up restaurants physically. Yep. They would literally walk around with their clipboard and sign up restaurants to this delivery service. Then they would they would ping me and they'd say, okay, we have the restaurants. Now we need more drivers during lunch hour. So in a lot of markets, we were getting specific couriers due to licensing, uh, because regular drivers at the time weren't able to deliver food. Uh so I would run campaigns to get couriers. So this was a lot of job board campaigns, a lot of Craigslist, posting to places, who's looking for a job to deliver food. And then once we had enough couriers, we'd say, okay, awesome. Turn on the eater marketing. Let's go tell people in exactly that location that they can order food in their city, essentially. And then we had to figure that out for every single market. So one week I'd be working with a team in London. The next week it was a team in Tokyo, uh, which was wild because every every city has a slightly different dynamic, different job boards, different places that you market. Uh but now it's fun because a lot of people who worked at Uber at that time know my name. They not not because they met me, but because they're like, oh, I saw your you were the person with the spreadsheet where I had to go to to fill out to get couriers, or that I was ready to turn on my eater marketing. So now even today I'll meet people who were at Uber at that time and they'll be like, oh, Jenna, the girl from the spreadsheet.

Chris Norton 40:37

No why? Crazy. And then then you got the So you were you there when they started with the, I suppose, and then the driverless cars, or is that and they're not doing that there yeah. Because there's a lot in Canada. That was a lot out that way, isn't there?

Jenna Hannon 40:50

Yeah, a little a little bit later. So I left in 2020, so I was there for for four years. Uh candidly a little burnt out. I did. Oh my gosh. So I at in 2020,

The Pandemic Trip And Buying Zoom

Jenna Hannon 41:04

this is like classic Silicon Valley. 2020, I was like fully vested, my four-year vest. It was like, okay, this has been a ton of work. I might want to think about what to do next. I left Uber and bought a one-way ticket to Asia.

Chris Norton 41:19

Wow.

Jenna Hannon 41:20

And I was like, I'm just gonna go to Asia and I'm gonna go travel and I'm gonna figure out what I want to work on next. And then I got to Asia in February 2020, and it very quickly dawned on me that it was empty, empty. I took a commercial flight from Indonesia to Singapore uh with two of us.

Chris Norton 41:42

So so whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a minute. I'm just thinking about the media at this point. The media at February 2020 in the UK, where when I was in the UK here in the UK, it was all about Spain. Was it well, there was a virus in China, and then there was a virus in and it was moving over to Spain, and it was across Europe, and it was in Italy, Spain. This was about February time, and I remember us all going, Oh, is this gonna come into UK? Or are they gonna lock down this now? That must have been happening in America, and you've gone, I know where I need to be, I need to be over there where it's all happening. So it was interesting.

Jenna Hannon 42:19

America was like, America was like, this is not happening, and it's not a thing, essentially. And so when I bought this ticket, America was like, it's only in China, like rest of the world is fine. And so I had a I had a close friend who was working in Japan. So I was like, I'm gonna go to Japan and then I'm gonna go to Indonesia and surf and and figure out what to do. When I got there, I was like, oh, I've seen the future. Uh this is a thing and it is coming. Uh and so I was I was gone for about a month. I bought some Zoom stock during that time because I was like, I've seen the future. Yeah, yeah. I was like, I've seen the future and this is coming. And I was like, what should we do? I was sitting in a sitting in Indonesia at a surf camp, and I was like, everyone's gonna be on Zoom, like this is the future. But that's because the surf camp was emptying out, like everyone is going home. By the time the Brits were going home, I was like, okay, this is it's time to leave. And so I flew back, and I think it was like the fur first of March or just before, and that was right before the the people got stuck at airports. So I I was about a week before that happened. And then I was kind of re that was probably I think the airport crowds was like the second week of March or first week of March.

Chris Norton 43:40

So you were away for three weeks or something then?

Jenna Hannon 43:43

Yeah, I was gone for about a month.

Chris Norton 43:45

Okay.

Jenna Hannon 43:46

I mean, it was great. Yeah, I was in I was in Asia when it was empty. Uh it was there's just never gonna be a time like that. But it got to the point where uh my friend in Japan who had lived in Asia for and lived and worked in Asia for a long time, was like, this is gonna be a thing, it's gonna be years. And if you're gonna stay here, you're gonna you're gonna wait here. So if you decide to stay in Asia, you might be here for three years because you can't fly back. Because we've had pandemics before, so we know what this looks like. So that's when I was like, okay, playing ticket home. And even my friends who were trying to get back to the UK were having trouble getting back to the UK, and I was like, okay, get out here immediately.

Chris Norton 44:24

Yeah, blinding. The fact that you bought stocks in Zoom, I remember that period was bizarre. Um, we we got and um ev luckily all my staff had laptops at that period. I'd literally just given the fact because we had desktops before, a few of them had desktops, but I'd rolled them all out a couple of before the pandemic had started, and literally I had the last one the week before the pandemic. Pandemic started, it was unusual. I mean, because then laptop you couldn't get a laptop anywhere. As soon as the pandemic started, they sold out everywhere. You couldn't get any laptop. Do you remember that? And then everybody was jumping on Teams and Zoom, and nobody knew what Teams was because Teams was Skype. But I remember Skype fell over. The UK's um broadband fell over it on the first day. Like it didn't work, it went down. It was really bad. Unusual. And we've just gone, oh yeah, that that happened. And and but the weirdest thing about that story is you've gone to Asia where it was coming from and got on planes when you the worst place you can play is on a plane.

Jenna Hannon 45:25

But remember, at the time that I was at the time I was going, the US was like, this is not a thing. And even even Europe was like, oh, it's in China, it's starting to appear in some places in Spain and Italy, but it was not a it was not like uh a thing yet. So in in fairness, when I flew to Asia, Asia was going through it, but they were like, oh, it's contained, we've had these things before, we'll figure it out. It took a while before it started to unfold. And before this started to become like when I when I left, I was like, okay, this this is something. But when I was telling my friends in the US, as I was in Asia that this was going on, they were like, no, no, no. It's fine, it's not coming to the US, nothing's happening, it's no big deal.

Chris Norton 46:13

Well, I was much in the US, because compared to the UK, I I had a friend in the I went to see him in New York, and he's because he we did a he did a job swap into London, so he stayed in my house with me. That's how we became friends with one of my housemates. And uh, I could never get my head round that the England in the UK is smaller than the state of New York and America. And so when I think of America, I suppose it is so big and it's so many states that you just think, oh, there's it's so spread out compared to the UK, where we're all densely populated, you know, densely populated in such a small and and so yeah, it was quite a scary, weird, weird time, wasn't it? I brought us all together though, I think, globally. I think the the Zoom, the gl like who's who's had a conference call since 2020? Do you know like an actual do you remember the spiderphones? That's true, yeah, yeah. They they got they got women killed off, didn't they? Zoom killed them off.

Jenna Hannon 47:05

So so I thought I had made the best decision because I was like, oh, I left Uber and Uber's like probably toast. And my Uber colleagues were freaking out. They're like, our business is gonna be gone because people can't get in a car and ride. Like, if people aren't out in the world doing things, this business is like gonna dry up overnight. And so I was like, oh, thank goodness I left. Like, this business is gonna go down in flames. And Uber Eats is what saved it. So during the pandemic, people started ordering delivery, and the Uber Eats business just went through the roof and saved the whole business because the rides business was making almost nothing uh for for almost a year, and the Eats business completely saved that company.

Chris Norton 47:45

So, what you're saying is you saved Uber.

Jenna Hannon 47:49

Absolutely. Yes. You know, this brings me to another story. So in Silicon Valley, everyone has a story of something they they made and something they missed. And this the

The OpenAI Investment That Never Happened

Jenna Hannon 48:01

misses are wild. Uh like I have a close friend who invested early, he's an investor, and he invested early in Tesla, but he passed on LinkedIn, he passed on GoPro. I have I have another friend who was uh interviewed to be the CTO of Uber very early and didn't get the role, and someone else got the role. And he like many years later, he was like, that was a hundred million dollar mistake. And so the misses in Silicon Valley are wild. So my miss, so may many people say my hit was Uber Eats. My my big miss was this is probably six years, maybe seven years ago now. I went to a wedding of a a good friend of mine. Uh, and he they had their wedding in Morocco. And I get to Morocco and I meet this person who is working on AI, which is at the time is seven years ago not really a thing. Uh, and he's like, it's gonna be a thing. AGI is coming. I need to be the one, it's gonna be so powerful that good people need to be working on this. This person ends up being Greg Brockman of OpenAI. I say to Greg, after spending time with him in Morocco, in the so at one part of the wedding, we decided the most of the wedding guests decided to go to the Sahara Desert. Most of us had not seen it, and many people decided, oh, we're gonna go with the bride and groom to the Sahara Desert. The bride and groom were like, we're gonna drive. Uh, and the the rest of the people had a commercial flight. A few of us did not buy a ticket on that commercial flight and decided last minute. So we decided to drive with the bride and groom. There were there was probably like six of us. One of those people was Greg Brockman. So I spent hours in a car driving with him. And he's telling me about here's the future, here's what we're gonna do. And at the end of that, I'm like, you know what? I I don't invest much, but I want to give you some money. I would like to angel invest. I just believe in what you're doing. This is super interesting. I love the mission. And he's like, no, no, no. Like, I'm only accepting for money from investors that wanna basically are gonna lose their money. And I don't want to take anyone's personal money.

Chris Norton 50:23

Yeah.

Jenna Hannon 50:23

And I followed up and I followed up and I sent him emails and I was like , no , I don't care if I lose my money . I believe in your mission , like I am inspired . And he was like , no , no , no . Now I'm like , oh my God , that is the world's biggest miss . Like , had I been the first investor in OpenAI , that would have been , I would have a wildly different life today . Well , but everyone in Silicon Valley has this story .

Chris Norton 50:45

I think the first investor in OpenAI was Elon Musk , wasn't it ? And um , he even he was , I mean , he's not been very happy about the whole situation . The whole thing , that whole story is fascinating . How what is happening with some four to six people in in that part of the world where you live is driving the American economy , it's driving the global economy . There's clearly a bubble , because everybody know everybody , you know , you know when the dot-com crash , the first one , I'm old enough to remember that , and you could see it , you were like , There's a bubble here , and it's gonna go apart . There's definitely a bubble here because there's these businesses are valued at such high rates , they're not making as much , but the s the the technology is so powerful , and we are only seeing you know version six , and they're probably using version nine at the moment , and they're the ones going . In fact , I think the head of safety resigned again , another head of safety at OpenAI resigned two weeks ago , or yes , uh very , very recently . It really is it's a really exciting time , but a really um worrying time as well . I think there's I don't I don't know where it's gonna go . It's fascinating because we're all trying to it's it is I I heard this analogy where they said it's like if you're a surfer , you can see a tsunami heading towards you , you're on your surfboard , and you're going , Well , I've got two choices here . I can just get totally taken out by the tsunami , or I can turn my surfboard around and try and catch it for as long as I can until it eats me up . And I think that's basically where I am with AI right now .

Jenna Hannon 52:21

So Greg was there seven years ago. Seven years ago, Greg was this is coming, it's happening, this is a powerful technology, it will be built. And why I'm working on it is because if it's not me, someone else will build it. And it will be China, it will be Russia, someone's gonna build this because the all of the groundwork is there for this technology to finally accelerate. We're finally at the the level of computing, electricity, all of the elements we need for this to happen. And he was like, the tsunami's coming, and I'm just gonna start paddling now. So he he was there.

Chris Norton 53:01

Uh as my dog's just gone crazy. Um you've been on the show now. Um if you were

Who To Invite Next And Why

Chris Norton 53:07

me, who's the next person you'd invite on this show and why?

Jenna Hannon 53:14

Ooh, this is a great question. Um the things the thing that I think is exciting in marketing right now um are the more traditional businesses. So I think the kind of how technology is getting applied to small business and traditional businesses that haven't changed in 50 years. I I think that stuff's interesting in marketing. So I have I have a few Uber colleagues that are working in this space trying to bring traditional businesses into basically how technology businesses run, which is kind of like the frontier. Um, I think that's an interesting thing in marketing. Um, I would love to see an episode on someone talking about advertising in AI. Um, so I'm on the organic side. I think seeing what's working in ads, because that's kind of the new frontier of ads. Uh I've chatted with a few CMOs in my CMO groups about um running ads in ChatGPT, but it's very new.

Chris Norton 54:21

Yeah.

Jenna Hannon 54:21

Uh there's very little tracking, there's little targeting built. So I'd be very curious about the code.

Chris Norton 54:25

We've seen a lot of people complaining about the fact that ChatGPT ads , you run them and you don't get a lot of conversions out of them , but you get loads of trap organic traffic out of them , and OpenAI is denied that's the thing . No , no , no . But I've seen multiple people talking about it . As soon as you turn the ads off , loads of traffic dries off . So it must be there's some sort of correlation between it . But it's obviously trying to figure out how they work . Okay . Um , Jenna , how can people get in touch with you if they want to , you know , they've loved what they've heard um and they want to get in touch with you and use

How To Reach Jenna And Hatter

Chris Norton 54:56

your services ? What's the best way to get hold of you ?

Jenna Hannon 54:59

Yeah, so the best way to find us is at our on our website, which is gethatter.ai. They can also find me on LinkedIn, so I'm Jenna Hannon. I love talking about AI search, so anyone can can ping or or DM me. Um, or they could email us at team at gethatter.ai.

Chris Norton 55:19

Excellent. Cool. Right, great, great, great. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jenna Hannon 55:23

Thanks so much for having me, Chris.