How to prepare the next generation of digital performance marketers

Tom Inniss • 00:08

Hello and welcome to another episode of Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Inniss and I'm the Content Marketing Manager here at Brew Digital and I'm joined today by Michele Raffaelli. Hello Michele. Hello everyone. So today I thought we would do a little bit of a deep dive on who is Michele because not only is he a senior paid media manager, but He is also a lecturer and he travels all across the world teaching marketing to the next generation of marketers. So let's get into it. Michele, thank you firstly for joining us today. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you Tom for inviting me. So as I said in the intro, this podcast is gonna be a little bit about who is Michelo? Why did you get into marketing? And then I wanna talk about your, what are we gonna call it? Your lecturing career perhaps? And why it is that you want to spread your knowledge to the next generation of marketers?

Michele Raffaelli • 01:24

I wouldn't call it a career. I think the way I live it is more than a hobby. You, for example, love going to the gym. I like going into a classroom and teach marketing.

Tom Inniss • 01:36

Okay, well, hopefully you're a little bit more diligent in going into a classroom than I am going to the gym because it's a once a week at most affair at the moment, but I appreciate the call out. Thank you. Right. So let's start with your career in marketing then because that is a career. How did you get into paid search originally?

Michele Raffaelli • 01:57

>> By mistake, I would say. So, originally, I have worked in retail for something like 10 years, and I was on the sales side, customer service, many different names. But even doing just sales, there was an aspect of marketing, in that case was offline at the beginning, where you need to understand your product, you need to understand your audience, and you need to match what the demand wants and what you can match them with the right product or service. So I started exploring the marketing side, but I couldn't find enough working full-time. So what I decided to do is to take a leap. So I resigned from my job and I joined a master in, that was specific for digital marketing and e-commerce with a touch of languages. In this master, I managed to develop the knowledge of what was at the time, digital marketing. And thanks to the internships, I could practice most of the marketing channels that were available. My initial dream was to do design. I loved Photoshop. I thought I was super creative, but when I had to practise it, I realised I was not that good. I then moved to the content side, mainly translations, and I realised that for me was so boring that I couldn't do it for the rest of my life. The other side of my background was languages and translation. So I thought it would be easy. I know a few languages, so I will just exploit those. But when you have to translate an instruction manual, you can't use most of the knowledge of the the literature or using the poetry into translating how a robot works, you have to literally just translate it. So that's when I moved into social media and community management, but I didn't have the patience to do that. So I was keeping going by exclusion. And the last channel that I tried was paid media. That actually crafted all the passion that I have for the things that I just mentioned, but with a touch of numbers and data, which I love. So the poetry in writing or translating that I applied to headlines in paid search, for example, the creative side that moved into the paid social campaigns, whether it was Facebook or Meta or any other platform, we needed creatives, you needed assets, but it wasn't like being a designer full-time. So I mixed all these passions that I had and I found the right solution into paid media specifically, but always staying in the marketing side.

Tom Inniss • 05:27

I mean, there's so much to unpick there. you've basically touched every element of marketing on your career path towards paid media. I want to just very quickly unpick your comment around not having the patience for social media because one, I think you're a relatively patient person, but secondly, surely paid media is one, other than maybe SEO, paid media is one of the ones where you have to have the most patience because you don't see a result immediately. It's something where you're constantly tweaking and refining. So what specifically about social media could you enough to make you move on?

Michele Raffaelli • 06:03

You need to consider my 10 plus years in, in a shop, being in contact with hundreds of people every day. And that's where my passion patients run out. So being in a community manager, dealing with all different type of people, and the growing community of trolls that we all see now every day, enhanced by AI, that's where my patient wasn't there anymore. I'm fine talking, discussing one by one, one to one. I can't deal with a full community. And I've just accepted my limits. And I move on the paid. The patients on paid is different because it's data driven. So I do have the numbers that are telling me constantly what is happening, if a campaign is working and where I can improve it. Or if there's a pattern that tells me actually something else is happening. All the strategies that we prepared was for this, but the people are proving you wrong. So you need to adapt it, change it. That's where I still find it exciting every day.

Tom Inniss • 07:13

I was going to say, is that what draws you in then? It's that constant feedback loop and the numerically, quantifiably driven performance of paid media?

Michele Raffaelli • 07:24

It's a mixture of it because you have the control over the number, the budget, and what you're actually doing. You have the best practices, so to keep everything tidied and up to date with everything that you're supposed to do. But every morning when I refresh my tables, I have the surprise effect. How many conversions I had? Did the CPC decrease? How many people we reached in with this audience. How did people react with this specific creative that we launched yesterday, last week? So a bit of all.

Tom Inniss • 07:55

And I don't want to obviously put a date to this, but I imagine that you did your masters in digital marketing a while ago. What have you seen change from when you did your masters to how you're operating now?

Michele Raffaelli • 08:17

That's a lesson that I've learned too late. So if you're listening to this podcast and you are thinking to become a marketing, digital marketing, especially lecturer, don't. Go back and become a history teacher. At least once you prepare the slides and your courses, you can always keep using them. What I realized is that elements that I'm talking about in my presentation, they expire, they get deprecated after six months. So every year I have to renew quite a lot of what I'm talking about. If you look at my slides five, six years ago, there is mention about AI, but not as we as we know it today. So we did have big strategies back then that were the first prototype of AI. but it's nothing compared to now. I mean, even the platform, I never had to talk about, I don't know, TikTok. It didn't exist, so it was easy. Now, we have platform growing, we have different type of tracking that is in place. We need to keep working on connected TV. These are solutions that we didn't have before. So yes, it's continually changing and it's continually challenging. But again, I think that's also a part of why I never get bored and there's always something new to learn.

Tom Inniss • 09:53

You've just reminded me back when I was doing my Masters in Journalism, one of the lecturers was like, "Within, I think she said five years, none of you will have jobs in journalism because AI will write all of it." And I mean, my first thought was, "Great, well, why am I spending all this bloody money learning to do it then?" But then secondly, I was like, I can't see how that's going to be true. But it's wild. It will take a little bit longer to become as disruptive as it was. But how disruptive AI has now been on the journalism industry is wild. So I must, I must confess, there is a little bit of concern, perhaps over how it is going to disrupt marketing.

Michele Raffaelli • 10:31

It is spreading. We do see it a lot. We are fairly early stages. We do have available already in almost, well, practically every platform, an AI support, whether it's in Google with the AI Max, whether it's in Meta with Advantage Plus, LinkedIn or something like that. The good thing for us at the moment is that the quality is very appalling. The way they write, the way they think the world works is still off. A practical example, if you let your AI Max campaign run in December, they will rewrite all your headlines with captions like "70% of everything" because the algorithm learned that two weeks before, Black Friday, that was the most converting headline, so they just think "if that works so well, let me keep it". don't have the intelligence yet to understand, like Friday was on a specific day. The peak of the cyber month was concluded with Cyber Monday. So a human can say, actually, wait, we don't have 70% off on the website now. We have the Christmas campaign live. So the message should be about Christmas or the holiday season. So that's one practical example where AI is not ready. If I could show in a podcast the quality of the images and creatives that Facebook is generating. I did a test in my class, I showed them and I said, you are, because the students are doing a few hours of design and infographics. And I said, what do you think of this? Everyone laughed. They couldn't believe that was actually a serious proposal from an AI.

Tom Inniss • 12:27

Yeah, we have seen it online. Some of the stuff that Facebook is churning out is just like shocking and they're turning it on automatically as well. So companies don't even know.

Michele Raffaelli • 12:36

It happened more than we like to admit. And it's dangerous because if you are not checking regularly you may have clients account going live with creatives that the client never so never approved and every single person in in the brand team would literally can I say heart

Tom Inniss • 12:58

attacking you can say how the heart attack I was going to say lose their shit so you can say what

Michele Raffaelli • 13:04

you like yeah I don't know what's the nice way of saying it yes no you have got to stay on top of it

Tom Inniss • 13:10

but let's not make this a fully AI podcast because I do want to talk about career progression because that's always something that interests me and you described it as a hobby but it is I think a very generous thing to do, my other half's a teacher as well. You are a lecturer at a number of different universities. Could you tell us firstly, how did you fall into that?

Michele Raffaelli • 13:30

This is actually something that I'm insisting a lot with all my students, but also with my colleagues at work. What you need to realize is that in Europe, digital marketing is a very niche job, sooner or later people that you meet, you will see them again. You can change companies, you can change channels, but I can assure you for first experience, you will meet someone at some point. You will need someone at some point to push your curriculum. You will need someone to give you help on some campaigns. So the networking aspect of it is what I push a lot. I'm not asking them to become friends with everyone. It's fine if you just want to keep it professional, but maintaining a good level of relationship is what then facilitates the contact. So in my case, I received an email from one of the teachers from the master right before COVID, one or two years before and they said, "We have one teacher that just dropped out. Do you have time? Could you help us with..." At that time it was just six hours or ten hours for paid social. And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm happy to come back." So I went back for just ten hours and it was 50 hours work to prepare all the slides and the exam, another few hours to note them, correct them and give them back. Um, but I really liked it. And then just keeping the relationship the year after, actually from 10 hours, I went to, to 15, there was another opening and then the world of marketing changed, so I was included in the discussion about the new content planner. Let's say, I don't know what to call it. The, the, the subjects that we should teach to, to give our students the opportunity to hit the ground and start working immediately at the end of the And because I had the first-hand experience, I said, when I started working in digital marketing, these, these, these, these are things that we didn't mention during the class, but they are very useful if you want to work in marketing. So they accepted my proposal and we added hours in the second semester where I'm just dedicated to do paid search in a very detailed way. so they can go into a company two weeks after and eventually just start creating audiences and campaigns. And then I mixed it with another class, which is related to data and data analysis, which is something that I keep saying, if you work in digital marketing and you don't track what you're doing, there's no point of doing it.

Tom Inniss • 16:22

Yeah, that's fair. So you're preempting some of of my next questions, but I am interested to know what changed in the world of marketing, in your opinion, that triggered this syllabus re-evaluation?

Michele Raffaelli • 16:35

Sunset and deprecation of certain elements, but also the human behaviour changed. Is this post-COVID? And I did see changing before and during and after. So the way people were using the internet was slightly different. When I say the internet, I mean all the social media platform, all the browsers. The more they used it, the more they spent time on it, the more they started changing the way they do. It's very difficult nowadays for someone- this is specific to the e-commerce, for example. It's very, very difficult for someone to go and buy something without doing some research before. Where once you could just walk into a shopping center, look at things and ask for help. What I see now across Europe is that you check online, you don't need to do this on the field research, and then you just go and buy something. The way you choose where to go to eat. There was a time where you would just walk into a street, look restaurants, look menu and decide where to go. Now you just go on Google and check the reviews, and see what's the menu and the prices. And if you like the picture of the deco of the restaurant. And that's something that I see a lot, people outside of a restaurant checking reviews before even entering and asking for space. The way we do things that now for us is very natural and normal, they didn't happen before. When we move into the B2B side, the presence of professionals online grew exponentially. When we talked, I think it was a couple of months ago, we were discussing how many active users are on LinkedIn. It's impressive compared to how many were five or six years ago. So the way people are using this platform to look for network, relationship, opportunities, services, products themselves, that's what changed. And the platforms changed in function of that, and now give you elements, type of targeting, with strategies opted to, I don't know, identify the right user for a webinar, identify the right account for an ebook, for a conversion, for

Tom Inniss • 19:03

everything evolved in function of this way of doing things now. [ROGER] Okay, that leads me very nicely onto my next question, which is, what is the biggest disconnect between what universities are teaching students and then what agencies expect from entry level performance hires?

Michele Raffaelli • 19:23

I have to be honest, there is no gap for my students. Of course. Because I had the experience of going into work, not being able to be autonomous, because I didn't know how to use Excel, for example. And when I say Excel, I mean properly using Excel, or how to check data on Google Analytics. These things are important. I see students when they come back after the first year or the second year of internship, and they, not all of them, but most of them are grateful, saying, I was the only intern that was able to do this, this and that. And I was able to provide my manager with data or report that not even the junior elements that are part of the team, not even intern, were able to do. because that was coming from my personal experience. There is another element, but that's something that you can't teach and it's something that I'm discovering with the new generations. I'm still trying to find a way. What I'd like them to do is to be more active, not in a way jumping up and down from a chair, but realizing that the exposure that they have on devices is under their control. We were talking the other day, we said, "Okay, in average, you spend 3, 4, 5 hours a day between TikTok, Facebook, Meta, Pinterest, whatever it is." And so I was asking them, "Can you tell me 3 ads that you liked? Because if you spend 5 hours on it, I can assure you you've been targeted 30% of the time with ads." And they weren't able to tell me. And I'm like, "You are doing marketing, you need to be able to discern, identify immediately what's an organic post and a paid post. And now we are doing these exercises. I probably ruined their experience on social media because now I want them to understand every ad that they receive. Is it an ad that should fit the awareness funnel, the consideration one, the conversion, is that a remarketing ad, why they are receiving these ads? I want them to be actively understanding how the machine is targeting them.

Tom Inniss • 21:40

We've touched on this already amazingly, but that's probably because AI consumes everything. But with automated tools like Performance Max and Advantage Plus, managing the tactical bidding and match types, do you think that classic strategic theory is going to matter more today to the upcoming generation? And I suppose those who are already working in marketing than before, and that sort of day-to-day managing and delivery is going to be just managed by AI?

Michele Raffaelli • 22:11

One positive thing that I've experienced in my 10 something years in digital marketing is that if something doesn't work, the platform is the first one to sunset it. So, God, it makes me feel old. Back in the day, Google, for example, they had this product called Shopping, where you have the carousel ads that come when you do a research for a product. they launched Smart Shopping. They tested it for a year or so, and then they realized that actually wasn't adding anything from the shopping standard. So they used this Smart Shopping to evolve it into what we know today is a performance max. So if Smart Shopping campaign was working, increasing sales for the customer and generating more revenue for Google, they would have kept it. But as one of the first attempt of using AI with the bid strategy behind it, it actually didn't work. So they closed that program. They stopped the possibility to create any more smart shopping campaign. And they just invest, probably invested in the performance max concept. So now performance max, as we knew two years ago and today completely changed. So if this campaign wasn't working for the advertiser, Google would have already closed it. So I understand at the beginning, the lack of visibility of everything that was happening was frustrating, but we need to understand that there is a degree of trust that we need to put in the platform. I'm not saying to accept everything they say, just test it if you're unsure, but They know what they are doing. So the product that they gave us need at least a try. We did try Advantage Plus from Meta, results were terrible. So we just paused it. We are waiting for a new release coming to improve them. And then maybe we'll use it again, but we don't say no by principle. We try. If we see that doesn't match our requirements because our objectives are maybe different. We just stop using it.

Tom Inniss • 24:35

So where does that leave your paid marketing manager then? What is their role in this moment? Is it to understand the data and the performance that you're getting out of AI?

Michele Raffaelli • 24:47

It's to understand what is the right balance of the usage of AI with the results that we're looking for. One example is writing headlines. That can be very time consuming job. So you could get help with the right prompt, sharing the content that you need, the content that you have on the landing page and try to ask AI to generate the most performing ads and then review them manually and then use them. If you really want to see and the brand team accept them, you can do an A/B test. We do have something in place, but I don't want to spoil anything about fully generated AI campaigns. So everything is taken in control from AI against what we can do as human. And we are checking who's performing better, but we are also making AI competing against different AI. So we are not just trusting one. We need to keep in the end, whatever we do doesn't matter if we don't have what the client asks us to do.

Tom Inniss • 25:57

Okay. So it always comes back to the client.

Michele Raffaelli • 26:01

Yes, because that's the main... They're paying. I didn't want to...

Tom Inniss • 26:08

You could say it. It's all right.

Michele Raffaelli • 26:09

Yeah. Yeah. But that's the reason. I mean, they are paying us for achieving their goal. we do AI or not, if we don't achieve those goals, there's no point of continuing a relationship with a client because no one of us would be happy.

Tom Inniss • 26:25

How much responsibility in a very AI and an algorithmic ecosystem, how much responsibility does a paid media manager actually have for the performance of their ads nowadays, when you can't control where the algorithm is putting things increasingly, it's being decided by a black box and you can't predict how users are going to react to anything.

Michele Raffaelli • 26:51

Sotiris No, no, that's still 80% in our control. We still are able to decide the audience, the frequency, we can manually make adjustments for the bids, we still have a lot of control. But what we have is the knowledge of what is good or bad. What is an acceptable CPC? Based on our personal experience, our industry experience, our platform experience, we can immediately see if a campaign is going crazy or if it is actually doing a great job. So those are all things that AI doesn't really care about. If a campaign is asking you to give them £10,000 a day to perform properly and the client gives you 10,000 pounds for a month, you see that you can't trust AI because you can't take the chance of spending 10,000 pounds because if it doesn't work, then it's not the AI that has to go to the client and say, "By the way, the 10,000 pounds you gave me, they went yesterday. Can I have more?" If AI took responsibilities, happy to do that. At the end of the day, it's me that has to go to the client and tell them what worked or not.

Tom Inniss • 28:08

Yes, you push the button for now. For now. For now. Yes. Well, we're starting to see court cases where companies that build the AI algorithms are being held liable for what they produce. So perhaps in the future, maybe there'll be indemnities in place, but equally, it's definitely easier to continue to blame the paid media manager that's overlooking it.

Michele Raffaelli • 28:29

I dare you to do that. The good ones have no problem. they will always have everything under control and they will be able to explain you why something is happening in their account and if not they will find your solution or they will find the answer to your question. If your PediaMedia Manager doesn't do that, call Brew Digital.

Tom Inniss • 28:53

We'll sort it out for you. You got the plug in there. So you said that this comes with experience in a lot of cases. But obviously, you can only have experience by being in the industry. So what do you think is the hardest reality check that students are going to face when they move from that classroom environment into the actual world of work? Like when when they come into the office, what it's going to make them go like, oh, shit, this is this is not what I expected.

Michele Raffaelli • 29:21

Okay, I'll tell you what I think. But you tell me for British culture, it's too much. Go on. If I'll try something. So the The biggest trauma for them is that if the office hour is 8 till 6, they will be in the office at 8. They can't use the excuse saying, "8 is too early, I can't work at 8." If you have a big project that you need to finish, you can't say, "Oh, but now it's my lunchtime. I don't want to work anymore. I want to go for lunch." And I'm like, "It happened the other day. We had four hours lesson and we had an exam to do. And it was between 10 and 2 p.m. And their main concern was, "But when are we going to have lunch?" I am like, it's 2026, you are in the richest part of the world. If you skip lunch one day, nothing will happen. You need to understand the priorities. I understand your well-being is important, but once in your life, I'm asking you, we need to get this done. You can't say, "When are we having lunch?" I don't know, but that's really what worries me the most when we go to work. So one of the things that could have some friction at the beginning or not be so natural is to be able to ask for help. What I feel is that they have so much pressure from Emily in Paris. It's a TV series of these American marketers coming into Europe. So they think that the marketing world is like that. And when they're arriving into an office, they will realize actually the world of marketing is nothing like that. The other element is to be able to just raise your hand and say to your manager, can you repeat it? I didn't get it. I don't know how to do this. So they need to understand that, especially at the beginning, they need to tell their managers when they have no idea what's going on. Because if they don't do immediately, the manager won't be able to help them. Time will pass and then you will have lost the beginning, which is trial time for a reason where you actually need to learn how to do things. If you don't ask, no one will come and explain you. So they need to say, I don't know how to do this. They need to say, I don't understand that. And if you are a manager out there and you reply to your junior, to your intern, to your new employee, look on YouTube while you are doing a terrible job then.

Tom Inniss • 31:57

Yeah, fully agree. And you'd never develop as people either because things are constantly changing. Just as a young new starter won't understand all of the minutia of an existing platform, I can 100% guarantee you that they will be at the forefront of the next and you will then have to lean on them to be able to understand how whatever TikTok success is going to be if we if we see another platform. I don't know whether or not we're going to have any more platforms, but I think the era of platform is over. But we oh you disagree? I disagree. I can't wait to find an advertise on McDonald's. Oh yes! I've seen this. I've seen this. We should bring back the episodes of Marketers of the Universe where we talk about marketing news because that's insane. Just like while you're waiting for your food, we're going to start advertising to you. What? Yeah. What a world we live in.

Michele Raffaelli • 32:56

And they will sell placements to everyone that wants to buy them.

Tom Inniss • 33:00

Yeah, but who? Who's going to want to buy them? Well, I... You would.

Michele Raffaelli • 33:06

I want to test it.

Tom Inniss • 33:08

I'm going to stop you there, Michele, because we're going to record a podcast a little bit later talking about new platforms and I am intrigued to know more about how you think McDonald's is going to be the start of this big advertising resurgence, the Maccy ads or something like that. So instead we will wrap this podcast up. You've touched on it already but I'm intrigued to know whether or not you've got a second answer in your pocket here. What is a fundamental skill or mindset you want every student to graduate with before stepping into the marketing industry? and ideally it won't just be they need to have a good work ethic.

Michele Raffaelli • 33:46

Oh that was my answer. No, I'm joking. So I need two things, and again they know it since day one, being data-driven, listen to their instinct but having data to prove their thoughts. I've been so many times in meetings with people that say things like, "Oh, I think this will perform very well." And I just boil, because "I think" and "well" are not data-driven terms. You can say, "Let's test this version against this one and see what has the best performances." You can say, "In my personal experience, I've seen user taking these actions. let's prove me wrong or let's try and see with a data-driven test what is the outcome. So being able to trust their instinct, try to do something that can be out of the normal, the standard, let's say, activities, but always being able to track it down and quantify the quality of what are doing. And the other element is to trust and be nice with their colleagues, because being in a work environment where you have trust and you actually enjoy being, always help improving performances of your campaigns. I can't explain why, but if you're happy, your Google Ads account is happy too.

Tom Inniss • 35:21

I love that. I love that. The world's just a little bit nicer. Right. So if you are planning on entering the world of marketing, be nice to people and work hard and trust the data. Those are the words of Professor Michele. Michele, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about this. It has been really interesting to get the insights on how the world of marketing is changing from somebody who is having to teach it.

Michele Raffaelli • 35:43

Thank you, Tom. It was really good to be back.

Tom Inniss • 35:53

So that is all we've got time for today. Thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please go and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever it is you do listen to podcasts. If you are lost on where to find such a podcast, you can go over to brewdigital.com/resources where we have years of podcast recordings just waiting for you, along with loads of resources and templates, everything you need basically to kick off a marketing campaign. Thank you to everybody at Brew Digital for all of their work and input on this episode. I couldn't do it without you and I absolutely love being able to do it. And thank you listener for continuing to join us on this journey as we navigate the world of marketing. I've been Tom Inniss, that was Michele Raffaelli and this has been Marketers of the Universe.