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Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Hank Green, the cofounder of Complexly, where we make SciShow, Crash Course, and a bunch of other educational YouTube channels. I’m back in the Decoder guest host chair for another couple of episodes while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi, who runs a major marketing and ad agency. You might remember Amy; Nilay interviewed her for Decoder live at an event in New York City almost a year ago. But Nilay, who runs what might be called the last website on Earth, has a very different perspective on the world of digital marketing than I do. So, as a career YouTuber, I had a lot of questions for someone in a position like Amy’s.
I’ve been making videos on the internet for close to two decades now, and all the while, I’ve relied on advertising for a healthy chunk of the revenue my channels take in. I also run an e-commerce site, Good.Shop, and then, of course, my big online education brand, Complexly.
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
One might think I’m a marketing and advertising expert. But this stuff is really, really complicated — almost like they’re trying to make it that way, and, frankly, there is a whole lot of it that I do not understand. For a lot of us, I suspect the world of digital marketing is a bit of a mystery. So, I was happy to have Amy really break down how some of this works and why her industry feels like it sits at the center of almost everything that happens on the internet today.
On the surface, this all sounds pretty simple. You build a brand, you try to create a story around that brand so people associate ideas and loyalties and all sorts of other warm fuzzy feelings with the brand, and then you show them some ads to sell products or experiences or subscriptions or whatever it is you sell. But I know from experience that that is far from the whole story. And as you’ll hear Amy say, that old-school Mad Men-style of advertising is really a relic of the past.
Today, marketing and advertising are increasingly digital and diversified, spread out across a lot of different channels and coming in all shapes and sizes. The ads you see are different from the ones I see, and the ways that brands market themselves online can involve everything from brand deals with creators like me, big TV and movie promotion tie-ins, and then really analytics-driven, algorithmic tech stuff that can feel almost impenetrable to the average person.
Yet, as you’ll hear Amy lay out, there is still a huge, expensive draw for what you might call a collective shared experience, something that resonates with a lot of different people all at once. Like, say, a Super Bowl commercial that plays on TV — even if more people might watch it after the fact on YouTube.
There’s also the AI of it all, which really seems like it’s on a collision course with both the creator economy and the entire economic structure of the open web. I know this because Nilay can’t stop talking about it on Decoder.
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