Funnel Reboot – A show for analytically-minded marketers

July 28, 2025July 28, 2025

Optimizing Marketing with Statistics, with Ateeq Ahmad

Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths.

In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane’s entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they’d taken enemy fire and either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel.

Wald’s team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed.

Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren’t examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn’t make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn’t sample could have been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they’d been lucky! the returning planes weren’t the rule, they were the exception.

Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that’s not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution.

This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today’s episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we’ll get a bit more comfortable using them.

Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning – and statistics – to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he’s learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs.

Let’s now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad.

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People, products and concepts mentioned in the show

Contact Ateeq via AlbanyAnalytics.com

Ateeq on LinkedIn

Albany Analytics on X

Ateeq on Instagram

Reactions to an Ad at each successive impression:

The 1st time people look at an ad, they don’t see it.

The 2nd time, they don’t notice it.

The 3rd time, they are aware that it is there.

The 4th time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it before.

The 5th time, they actually read the ad.

The 6th time, they thumb their nose at it.

The 7th time, they get a little irritated with it.

The 8th time, they think, “Here’s that confounded ad again.”

The 9th time, they wonder if they’re missing out on something.

The 10th time, they ask their friends or neighbors if they’ve tried it.

The 11th time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.

The 12th time, they start to think that it must be a good product.

The 13th time, they start to feel the product has value.

The 14th time, they start to feel like they’ve wanted a product like this for a long time.

The 15th time, they start to yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.

The 16th time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.

The 17th time, they make a commitment to buy the product.

The 18th time, they curse their poverty because they can’t buy this terrific product.

The 19th time, they count their money very carefully.

The 20th time prospects see the ad, they buy what it is offering.

Related Funnel Reboot Episode with Tim Wilson

Statistical tests:

Correlation – are two metrics related

T-tests – when and how to use them

Chi-Square Tests and their uses

RFM Modeling – best for email marketers

Market Basket Analysis – Products bought together

Yours truly with Ateeq, co-leading a MeasureCamp session

July 9, 2025July 9, 2025

Unorthodoxy, with Gil Gildner

We as consumers do a lot of things just because the people around us are doing them. For proof, look no further than some historical examples—from the 17th-century tulip bulb craze in Holland to doomsday cults and prepper movements in the lead-up to Y2K. Buying fads such as pet rocks, fidget spinners, Beanie Babies, and NFTs all show how easily prevailing thoughts influence individual behavior.

The science behind this is well understood. The evolutionary drive to fit in with our peers is very strong. When a group of people’s purchases are plotted as a histogram, we always see the majority of them clumped near the centre – we see it so often we came up with a term for it – the Bell curve.

So even when people think they are expressing themselves, showing individuality by their brand choices, they are only veering slightly away from the norm.

Hey, Glenn here—welcome to Funnel Reboot. Our guest today—who I really do think has positively impacted marketers’ careers—argues that marketers are just as susceptible to conformity as consumers are. We get caught up in prevailing marketing practices when doing our job, while ignoring better marketing options. That’s a recipe for mediocre results.

Our guest is the author of three marketing books and the co-founder of an eight year old digital agency that has attracted clients whose annual spend ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. What does he credit for this marketing success? The time he’s spent on the edges of the Bell curve – doing things that most of us view as too far outside of our comfort zone. And he says to be a better marketer, you too should reject the orthodoxy of conventional marketing.

Unorthodox is the name of his latest book, and I’m glad to welcome back for a second time, Gil Gildner.

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A Far Side cartoon that fits the thesis of Gil’s book

People, products and concepts mentioned in the episode:

Gil’s Agency Discosloth

Gil on X

The book Unorthodoxy

Chernobyl

LSAs (Local Services Ads)

Performance Max (Google Ads campaign using artificial intelligence)

Chris Anderson book “The Long Tail”

Gwyn Shotwell

David Thoreau’s time on Walden Pond

Peter Thiel

Galileo

Martin Luther

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

July 1, 2025July 1, 2025

Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales

Panel: Activating Generative AI in Marketing & Sales

Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives. In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want…Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.”

Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change”

This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?

Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?

I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada – please get the links to each of them in the shownotes.

The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.

I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends.

And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.

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People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Video of the panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0U9aJ_Mzug&t=1755s

Sam Altman – The Gentle Singularity

Effective Accelerationism

June 17, 2025June 20, 2025

From Armageddon to GA4 Alignment, with Neil Shapiro

Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you’re still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you’re not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the ‘Armageddon’ of digital measurement. You’ll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem

In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature.

Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn’t know we needed.

Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love – he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data.

Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro.

Shownotes:

CDP – Customer Data Platform

Neil on LinkedIn

Neil’s consultancy: Zen Digital Analytics

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November 4, 2024November 4, 2024

Deeper Clarity – Better Results, with Nilufer Erdebil

Episode 209

When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:

The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973.

Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.

A last example: In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.

These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”

I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions.

When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited.

Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest.

At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, ‘you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t.

All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due an injury.’ and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn’t say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van, carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we’d resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we’d never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset.

Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.

My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.

She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.