Neej Gore on GEO: How Generative Engine Optimization is Transforming Marketing in the Age of AI

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Text Drug tv. My next guest is NI Gore Nij is the Chief Data Officer at Zeta Global Zeta like Theta.

Um, hope you guys all got that. Nij, welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great to have you on here, Alan.

Thanks for having me. Really excited to do the show with you. Fantastic.

So, you know, before we talk about Zeta and all of the, what we want to discuss today, let's spend a second or two, or a minute or two talking about you niche. How, how exactly you know, did you wind up here as Chief Data Officer? It's a, uh, long and winding story, uh, my career as they usually are.

Yes, my career started about 25 years ago when I graduated from Cornell, and I had my first technology company in, in marketing. And between then and now I've had several marketing technology companies, some successful exits. Most recently we sold our last company, which was called Boom Train to Zeta about eight years ago.

And Boom Train became the foundation of the marketing solution that Zeta Global sells today. So I've been in the space for, uh, more years than I, than I can count at this point. And, uh, it's been an exciting journey and I've been in the role as Chief Data Officer at Zeta for a few years.

We've been with the company for about eight years. Fantastic. That's a really good story.

So, up Ithaca. Huh? Up Ithaca.

Ithaca's gorgeous. As you know, It is right about now, but in another month or so, it gets to, you know, I, oh, I migrated to Florida 23 years ago. Yes.

So it's, yeah, Little cold for me. That's, that's, that's the Cornell trick. Everyone visits in the summer and they're like, the Gorges and the rivers look amazing.

Come October till May, it's raining and snowing on you, and you're like, what am I doing here? But it was a great school. Uh oh, It's a great school.

Cornell Engineering program was very strong and, uh, set the path for the rest of my career. Good for you. Good for you.

Um, let's talk Zeta Global a little bit. So it was obviously around, it's been around a while as it bought your company eight years ago. Yes, Yes.

Zeta was, Give us, give us the story. Sure. Zeta was founded 17 years ago by David Steinberg and our more famous co-founder John Scully, you probably know the name John Scully of Pepsi.

I do. And Apple fame. Uh, John is, or Infamy.

Or infamy as well. But John is a master at marketing and marketing technology. Yes, he is.

And he is the, you know, he is a luminary in our space. Uh, Zeta's purpose is very simple. Uh, we exist to help consumer enterprises and more and more business enterprises to expand their marketing efforts and by providing them with a marketing technology that helps them acquire new customers, grow customer value, and retain their customers for longer.

So today we work with about 45% of the Fortune 100. Uh, you know, the biggest brands in the world choose us to help them again, acquire, grow, and retain. And we do two things exceptionally well.

The first is that we have brought all of the, uh, technologies that would be required to acquire, grow, and retain into one platform. And, and that's unique in the market. Uh, you don't need to work with multiple vendors.

You can just work with Zeta. We help you across the board. The second thing is that we have a data cloud that we have cultivated over the last many years.

Uh, the data cloud is a large consumer data asset that gives us intelligence on what people wanna do next, what's the next product they wanna buy, where do they shop, um, what channels do they like receiving, marketing on. And that helps inform a business and enterprise that we work with to see outside of their four walls to be much smarter with acquiring, growing, and retaining. And, and based on those two things coming together, we have really, uh, had a tremendous last few years in the market.

We went public in 2021, and we're seeing tremendous growth, uh, since that time. So we're very excited about the future, and again, uh, we are are really doing a nice job at Hel helping the world's biggest brands with their marketing today. I love it.

com. com. That's right.

Cool. So these, you know, you can't, you can't walk three steps without tripping over AI today. Right.

And when we look at AI and, you know, LLMs and generative and agent and all of the different form factors here of, of AI and all the possible disruptions and, and potential benefits up, you know, UPS as well as Downs Marketing is one area that AI is already particularly disrupting. Yep. I don't know if you agree with that, but I I do.

Seems so on my end. I do. Um, it's a, this may be the single biggest change in marketing, maybe I I would say, I don't even know if it's bigger than the internet itself, but certainly the internet, the internet made for a huge change in marketing.

Um, but this is equally as profound. Yep. In my mind.

Talk to me about how this is affecting not only Zeta Global, but your customers, your approach to market. Sure. The broad marketing, you know, marketing in general.

Yeah. The first email marketing message was sent in May of 1978 by a gentleman, a salesperson at Digital Equipment Corp, if you remember Deck. Uh, he sent Sure a single message to 400 Arnet users.

That message generated 13 million in sales, right? And so from that moment forward, marketing changed forever. Uh, that message didn't happen to have any opt out.

It wasn't a, uh, you know, personalized to this, to the individual. Uh, then about 1997, Amazon came around and said, you know what, we're gonna introduce this thing called collaborative filtering. If you purchase this, you might also like this other product.

Everyone has experienced that in Amazon, and they introduced single click checkout. So you didn't have to enter your details, you could just push a button and then receive your products. Uh, these are two big steps in the marketing revolution.

The next step is happening right now. AI is changing the entire game, whether you're on the marketer side and you're looking for things like productivity or more predictive intelligence, or just a better workflow to actually do what you need to do across your teams and organizations, or you're on the consumer side and you're looking for better experiences and more discoverability, uh, AI is having a ton of impact across the, across the board. Um, for SMBs, you're seeing solutions like Facebook come out and say things like, you know, we're gonna automate the entire marketing workflow through our platform.

Uh, you just tell us your outcome and you tell us your budget and let our AI do its thing. Uh, for enterprises it's a little bit more complicated because enterprises have governance. Uh, you need to have the right message delivered to the right consumers.

You might be using a variety of channels like CTV and email and display marketing, and even things like direct mail. So, uh, the AI methodologies have similar foundations, but need to be deployed in very different ways. But certainly one thing we've noticed is that, uh, the way that search works and discoverability has moved to the LLMI don't know how many times you find yourself on Google's main page typing a search versus going to the AI mode or chat GPT and asking a question.

But consumer behavioral patterns are changing. And even today, uh, you know, uh, chat, GPT announced their new genic merchant, uh, services, where now you can check out of a product purchased from chat GPT for Etsy and Shopify customers. So everything's changing.

AI is definitely, uh, disrupting marketing, and we can't wait to see where this all, all lands in the coming years. I don't disagree at all. You know, it's disrupting marketing and it's disrupting search, right?

Yes. I, I know here at Techron for instance, we're seeing, you know, as Google has decreased the amount of links that go to external sources on their search page. At the same time, we're seeing so much traffic being driven by, by GPT search, by AI searches, if you will, right?

People using, not using Google for search, but using the AI for, you know, the frontier models for search for search. It's, it's changing that. And like for us here at Techstrong, that's fundamental, right?

At one point, I think 80, 85% of our business was organic search engines. Well, it's been a big difference, right? That we've had to deal with, um, of course, niche.

No one wants to just sit here and let the, the bluebird of AI happiness fly over their head, right? And hope it lands on them or whatever have you. We wanna have, we want to think at least that we at least know where it's going, that we at least know where, where, what to do.

So for our, everyone out here, you know, everyone's a salesman, everyone's a marketer. I don't care what you do. In some ways, even if you're marketing yourself, your company or what have you, everyone's selling themselves or selling what, what, what's the smart person to do here?

Yep. Right? That's a question advice do you have for them?

So it's a great question. And just to lay some foundational information, so free LLMs, about 60% of Google traffic had no click out. Meaning you went to Google, you searched for the weather, they gave you the weather, you didn't make a click to go anywhere.

Um, post LLM, the number is still around 60% because there's just so much search traffic that Google can fulfill, right? So it's, it's not changing the dyna dynamics of Google immediately, but what we are seeing is that a couple trends, so more search is moving to LLMs. Uh, it's not changing zero click behavior, but for certain categories, users are going deeper into the LLM to extract more information.

There are still some things that are very important. When people do click out of the LLMs to a brand website, they tend to have a higher percentage of conversion than just organic traffic. So they have high intent users.

That's something important to know. Um, and the other thing is, there are certain categories like news and media that are seeing less click out. But for every brand, whether you're a news or media site or you're a retailer, it's really important to be positioned correctly in this new LLM world because you wanna have be front and center.

You wanna have your message be, be known, and you wanna get those click outs of high intent users back to your first party domain environments. So GEO is the emerging practice. It stands for Generative Engine optimization.

And this is the practice that combines technology with actual business practice to help you with a few things in LM context. The first is visibility to make sure that when someone types the question in your responses, show up first, right? You want to be able to be listed as a trusted resource by the LLM, uh, GEO will also help you fix inaccuracies.

Sometimes the information they present on your business or even as an answer to a question is wrong. You want to be able to respond to that. You wanna optimize your output and your websites for the LMS themselves.

You wanna see how you are benchmarking versus your Com competitors. But finally, what you're really trying to do is to drive as much of that traffic back to your own environment so you can make the most of that data that's GEO and the GEO solution at large. Uh, Zeta launched our own solution native to our platform about two weeks ago, where a brand can come in, they can track their visibility, they can fix inaccuracies, they can optimize the links that are shared for LMS so that people can actually click back out to the sites.

And it's important for every brand today to be thinking of this as more and more traffic moves into the world of the LLMs. Um, I think this is something that, you know, should be on the radar of every brand. It's, it's not so much as a replacement of SEO, it's just a new way that consumers are operating in market today.

And brands need to be aware and, and participate in this trend. I love it. GEO, generative engine optimization.

Is that it? Yeah, That, yep, that's correct. I'm doing it.

Um, and of course, you know, as you give the LLM your information, it, it's sucking it in and, and that's what's, you know, optimizing for it. I I just feel like I have to put the cautionary, you know, the surgeon general's warning, right? Everything you upload to the LLM, it kind of, you know, borgs assimilates, and you don't, you know, if it's not something you want to put out there in public, it's not a good idea to upload it to the LLM.

Yeah, there's a, a, a, basically a framework, it's called LM T xd, that brands can apply to decide what information gets shared and what doesn't get shared with the LLMs. But, but generally, if you want things like product discovery or article or content discovery, you, your content needs to be formatted in a way so the LLMs can accept it, understand how to use it, and then insert it into answers. Now, one of the big questions we get from brands today is, okay, um, I know I need to be positioned in LLMs, but what are the questions that I need to actually be an expert at, right?

Because a user can come in based on a location or based on a topic and ask so many different things of the LMS that you need to decide how you wanna respond and where you wanna be included in those responses. As a brand, uh, Zeta helps our brands with this because of our data asset, for example, we can go to a big brand and say, we know the, the, the psychographics and characteristics of your best customers. That helps us understand what types of questions they would ask in an LLM format.

And that helps us with the brand because we can tell them, these are the things you really wanna own from an L-M-L-L-M context. And that equation is something new and different, and it actually adds more focus to the way that a brand chooses to work with an lm. So I encourage you to think about, as a brand, what are the questions you wanna own and why?

And that should very much be data-driven in your approach. And to the extent you could work with us, you can work with others. Uh, to my knowledge, we're one of the only ones that are doing this today.

But by combining data on your customers to inform how you approach your LM strategy can really help you get the best customers to come back to your site. Great. Ni you're almost outta time.

One more area or question I wanted to, uh, ask you is, you know, look over the last 20, 25 or more years, SEO has become something of a cat and mouse game, right? Just when you think you got it mastered, Google changes the algorithms and, you know, we're always, that's that cat and mouse game that we play. Do you think we're gonna see a similar thing in GEO or is this maybe a little bit more, you know, very defined rules and, and we could all play by the same set of rules here.

So LMS are inherently looking for authenticity, and they're looking for truth. Uh, so, so long as you can present your information in a way that basically maintains authenticity and truth, you have the, the ability to rank for questions that are asked. Um, so it's gonna be less of the cat and mouse that you saw with SEO because this is very much driven by AI and the way AI methodologies will work.

But there will be ways so that you can actually elevate your brand and your brand content, your brand presence, using systematic approaches. And that's really the, the practice of GEO that we want brands to participate in. I love it.

Niche. We're about outta time. I want to thank you.

So I gotta tell you are our first, uh, guest on Textron TV to talk about GEL. Amazing. So Thank you for coming on and, and making us a little bit smarter about it, at least introducing the concept.

I think we're all seeing it, especially, I mean, we're publishers here, so we're living it, but it, it's good to see that there are smart people thinking about this, solving it, and, you know, putting solutions out there. So thank you and thank you to Zeta Global for all you guys are doing on it. Thanks, Alan.

Really enjoyed the conversation. Alrighty. Ni Gore, chief Data Officer at z Zeta, like Theta Global.

I hope I got that right. Um, well, we're gonna take a break here on Tech Drug tv. We'll be back in a moment.