Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast

$190M in legal ad spend. Every client account touched by hand, every single day. And a habit of spotting Google's changes before Google announces them.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Anthony Higman, CEO of ADSQUIRE, a Philadelphia agency and Google Premier Partner that runs Google Ads, Local Services Ads and ChatGPT Ads exclusively for law firms. Anthony has spent 15 years in paid search, and his five-person team deliberately works the opposite way to everything Google is pushing: manual bids, daily negatives, no automation platforms on top.

Anthony explains how Google's recommendations tab began as an internal churn-prevention tool for its sales reps, which control he has quietly stopped fighting for (and why it costs advertisers their creative insight), and why fragmentation across four ad platforms hurt his business more than automation ever did. He also shares what happened when ADSQUIRE spent $15,000 on ChatGPT Ads in the first week of self-serve, why results fell off a cliff the week after, and how he worked out that ChatGPT targets your conversation history more than the query you just typed.

🎯 Key Topics Covered:

00:00 - Meet Anthony Higman: $190M in legal ad spend, managed by hand
01:28 - Google's endgame: "give us your credit card and your URL"
04:07 - Recommendations started as a churn tool for Google's sales reps
06:02 - The control he gave up on: Google Business Profile assets
07:00 - Auto-apply assets: the setting most advertisers never find
11:10 - Why a law-firm agency still depends on Google
14:25 - ChatGPT Ads: $15K in week one, then results fell off a cliff
16:00 - Where ChatGPT Ads work: bankruptcy and truck accidents
17:51 - Ads that ignore your query, and the conversation-history weighting
20:10 - Spend 10 to 15% of your time outside the ad platform
20:46 - The legal channel mix: search, LSA, YouTube, ChatGPT, billboards
22:04 - Why 15-second non-skippables are still his favourite YouTube ad
22:32 - Five people, 35 clients, and still in every account every day
24:55 - The real problem isn't automation, it's fragmentation
25:31 - Google reps: 12 calls a day, and going around the agency
26:27 - What a media buyer's job actually is now
28:30 - What he hires for: creative problem solving, humility, hunger
29:27 - Why ADSQUIRE refuses automation platforms
31:27 - How five people run 35 accounts: a full-time lead-quality role
32:52 - What's next: social lead gen, Demand Gen and Google's branded search beta

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/

Meet Anthony Higman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-higman-a3656a46/

🔗 ADSQUIRE: https://adsquire.com/

About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo

🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

#GoogleAds #PPC #LegalMarketing #LawFirmMarketing #ChatGPTAds #LocalServicesAds #PerformanceMarketing #MarketingPodcast

Bootstrapped to $35 million ARR. Zero investors. Sixty-five percent of new revenue from referrals. And they grew by switching off a Google Ads channel that was profitable.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Michael Cole, CMO at Everflow, the partner marketing platform that last year tracked more than 1.3 billion events and attributed more than 700 million conversions for 1,200 plus brands. Michael was an early Everflow customer before he joined, and has spent eight years on the problem of paying partners for what actually happened rather than for the last click.

Michael's core argument is that most affiliate programs do not fail because of the affiliates. They fail because they launched before the funnel was ready, and affiliates carry all the risk in the deal. He explains why he puts the threshold at roughly $10 million in revenue, why your best affiliates are the ones already promoting your competitors, why they killed a profitable paid channel and grew, and why 22 percent of their demo requests self-report AI while their analytics can only see ten. He also makes the case that AI companies are the affiliate category nobody is running yet.

🎯 Key Topics Covered:

00:00 - Meet Michael Cole: a customer before he was the CMO

01:15 - Bootstrapped to $35M ARR with no outside investors

02:25 - 1,200 customers, and why the whole journey has to be tracked

04:03 - 65% of new revenue from referrals, and the two plays behind it

05:15 - The structure: $250, $500, $1,000, and how it filters itself

07:07 - Your best affiliates are already promoting your competitors

10:40 - Networks vs platform: marketplaces and super affiliates

12:47 - The profitable Google Ads channel they turned off

13:41 - Referrals that never produce a click, and how you track them anyway

15:41 - What AEO did to affiliate publishers

17:31 - 22% of demos self-report AI while analytics sees 10

20:02 - Who affiliate works for, and why AI companies are ideal

22:19 - Channels don't matter: find the affiliates who own your vertical

23:36 - Micro influencers, and why the channel needs a dedicated person

25:54 - When to start: referrals on day one, affiliates at $10M

27:30 - PLG vs SLG, long sales cycles, and where resellers come in

29:00 - Catching fraud with deterministic signals

31:32 - Optimise Google for company emails, not demo requests

33:01 - The marketing stack, and what to buy vs build

35:03 - HubSpot, Gong, Jira, Supabase, and Claude on top

38:31 - GTM engineers and an AI-transformed content workflow

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/ Meet Michael Cole: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcole6

🔗 Everflow: https://www.everflow.io/

About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo

🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

#PerformanceMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #PartnerMarketing #ReferralMarketing #B2BSaaS #Attribution #AEO #MarketingPodcast

Most brands don't have a creative strategy. They have an ad factory. Sarah Levinger can tell the difference in about thirty seconds of scrolling an asset folder. In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Sarah Levinger, consumer psychologist and founder of Tether Insights, one of the most-cited voices in creative strategy for DTC. Sarah works the psychology layer under ad creative: what the customer is really saying beneath the pain point, and why the ads a team labours over are rarely the ones that scale.

Her case is that volume is the wrong goal, and that the category's loudest advice, ship more ads, is what quietly caps performance. She rebuilds creative strategy from scratch three times on the show, at $5K, $60K and $600K a month, and the answer is never "more".

🎯 Key Topics Covered:

00:00 - Meet Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether Insights

01:20 - "You don't have a creative strategy. You have an ad factory."

04:26 - The four steps before you pick an ad format

07:04 - What creative strategy actually is

08:14 - Why the job exists now: iOS 14, TikTok and the algorithm shift

10:36 - The one metric she judges creative on, read by cohort

12:13 - $5K a month: three to five ads a week, and why ten reads as noise

15:08 - The only research worth doing yet: reviews, surveys, support tickets

16:23 - Why she won't look at competitor ads until you're bigger

17:33 - When a brand earns its first designer ($30K–$50K a month)

18:28 - AI vs human creative: why all-AI accounts struggle to hold performance

19:21 - Trigger, Exploration, Evaluation, Purchase: her model, not TOFU/MOFU/BOFU

23:04 - Her cadence: quarterly goal, monthly culture, weekly account

24:34 - $60K a month: format diversity vs story diversity, and the one-angle account

28:35 - One campaign per journey stage, built for the human

30:15 - $600K a month: segment by product category first, then expand

32:15 - Brief creators like a film director: character first, one ingredient

36:07 - Creative fatigue: frequency isn't the signal; the ad is starved, not tired

38:56 - How she scores a creative: valence, self-discrepancy, story depth

40:40 - Spend an ad needs before you can call it: 2–3x CPA, ~$100 an ad

41:42 - Where AI stops: objective on data, useless on context

43:48 - Andromeda: a purchase is a symptom of a good movie

46:41 - The post-mortem on a flopped ad: account, psychology, culture

48:26 - Stop and start: run half your ads, ask customers what they want

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/

Meet Sarah Levinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlevinger

🔗 Tether Insights: https://tetherinsights.io

About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo

🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

#PerformanceMarketing #CreativeStrategy #MetaAds #AdCreative #UGC #SarahLevinger #MarketingPodcast

Fifteen years in data. He created the Activity Schema. He still can't fact-check what an AI tells him. Here's why that should worry every marketer running numbers through an agent.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Ahmed Elsamadisi, Founder of Polyform and creator of the Activity Schema, the open-source event model that other companies now consult on. Ahmed has spent his career on the layer between raw data and the questions people ask of it, and he built Polyform because that layer is where AI answers quietly go wrong.

Ahmed makes the case that AI is optimised to be helpful, not to be right, and that most teams have no way to tell the difference. He unpacks why the best models still get most data questions wrong, why he forbids his own AI from writing SQL, why pointing an agent at GA4 returns confident answers instead of correct ones, and where 10 to 20 percent of ad budgets quietly disappear. He also tells most brands not to fix any of it: under 5,000 dollars a month in spend, his advice is to accept that you are guessing.

🎯 Key Topics Covered: 00:00 - Meet Ahmed Elsamadisi: fifteen years in data and the Activity Schema 01:09 - Why you can't fact-check an AI's answer, and the accuracy numbers nobody quotes 04:57 - How to engineer an agent that gets it right, and why his AI never writes SQL 08:56 - Stop putting everyone in a room to define a metric: build seven instead 11:34 - Where this actually gets deployed, from go-to-market to product analytics 13:54 - How Poly works, and the moment it escalates to a human 17:45 - Kodak, Blockbuster, and why bolting AI onto legacy doesn't work 20:37 - Salesforce, MCP servers, and the CRM shift already underway 22:58 - Why he pays 5x more to leave HubSpot 24:35 - Where chat stops and the UI has to take over 27:01 - Performance marketing: attribution, junk clicks, and where budget dies 31:31 - What to actually connect, starting with raw GA4 rather than reports 32:30 - Why GA4 breaks AI agents in two different ways 33:46 - Don't fix your data under 5,000 dollars a month 34:40 - The linearity test: double the spend, do the sales double? 35:51 - What "AI native" actually means for a product 38:42 - Dashboards, daily digests, and what belongs in an email

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/ Meet Ahmed Elsamadisi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elsamadisi/

🔗 Polyform: https://www.polyform.to/ 🔗 Activity Schema (open source): https://activityschema.com/

About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo

🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

#PerformanceMarketing #GA4 #MarketingAnalytics #Attribution #AIAgents #MarketingData #DataStack #MarketingPodcast

$1.5 billion in ad spend. Two books. A section in Google's own Ads certification. Here's what Patrick Gilbert says actually wins in the AI era, and why most of the old rulebook no longer applies.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Patrick Gilbert, CEO of AdVenture Media Group and author of two books, Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the Age of Automation and Never Always, Never Never: Strategic Marketing in an AI World. Patrick has overseen more than $1.5 billion in ad spend, and his work on AI-driven campaigns is featured inside Google's official Ads certification.

Patrick makes the case that the era of "best practices" is over — marketing is poker now, not blackjack. He unpacks why the decade-long arbitrage of buying underpriced attention has completely dried up, why he won't put a single dollar into ChatGPT ads yet (and why Google is still the best ad platform on the planet), why ROAS is quietly pushing marketers toward the wrong decisions, and how an AI-first agency decides what to build versus what to keep buying. It's a first-principles tour of what really drives growth once the algorithm advantage is gone.

🎯 Key Topics Covered:
00:00 - Meet Patrick Gilbert: $1.5B in ad spend, two books, and a seat in Google's certification
00:53 - From living inside the Google Ads UI to full-funnel, first-principles marketing
04:13 - "Join or Die": the 2017 bet on AI, the resistance, and how Google featured his work
11:21 - Marketing is poker, not blackjack — why "best practices" are over
13:54 - Always vs. never: where the playbook still holds, and the first dollar — Google or Meta?
15:17 - Why he won't spend on ChatGPT ads (and why Google still wins)
18:10 - Digital arbitrage is dead: the 10-year run that just closed, and where marketers add value now
24:03 - Channel specialists vs. the full-funnel operator: Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean
30:17 - Why ROAS is lying to you: how he halved it and tripled profit (+ the 4 numbers to watch)
36:01 - Build vs. buy in an AI-first world: the SaaS purge, keeping HubSpot, and why the back end is the moat
44:12 - The takeaway: an AI coach trained on his books

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/
Meet Patrick Gilbert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesgilbert/

📘 Patrick's new book & newsletter: https://neveralwaysbook.com

About AdVenture Media Group: A digital advertising and education company founded by Isaac Rudansky, specializing in Google and Meta ads — pairing hands-on campaign management with training that's reached students worldwide.

About Hawky: A creative intelligence platform that transforms marketing guesswork into data-driven success. From Ad Creative Analysis to AI-powered optimization, we help B2C brands and agencies achieve higher ROAS and predictable campaign performance.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo
More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

#GoogleAds #PerformanceMarketing #DigitalAdvertising #AIMarketing #MarketingStrategy #PPC #AdVentureMedia #VelocityPodcast #Hawky

$200M+ in LinkedIn ad spend. 14 years on one channel. Here's the playbook AJ Wilcox swears by.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we spoke to AJ Wilcox - Founder of B2Linked, host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, and author of LinkedIn Ads Demystified. AJ is widely regarded as the world's most concentrated authority on LinkedIn Ads, having managed over $200M in spend across some of LinkedIn's largest accounts globally, including 5 of LinkedIn's top 10 spending advertisers.

In this masterclass, AJ unpacks his complete LinkedIn Ads playbook - from the 3 default settings silently killing your budget, to why he's pulling clients off Conversation Ads, to the 3-stage retargeting funnel that actually converts B2B buyers. If you run LinkedIn ads, this is the deepest tactical hour you'll spend this year.

🎯 Key Topics Covered:

00:00 – 02:35 — AJ's journey: From SEO to founding the world's first LinkedIn-only ad agency

02:35 – 07:54 — Conversation Ads vs Message Ads + when Thought Leader Ads actually win

07:54 – 10:33 — Why AJ bet his entire agency on ONE channel (and how AI is reshaping it)

10:33 – 17:06 — 3 default LinkedIn settings killing your budget + the 3-stage retargeting funnel

17:06 – 24:08 — The most expensive mistakes from $200M+ in LinkedIn ad spend

24:08 – 33:16 — The creative playbook: founder-led, witty B2B, and format stack rank by funnel stage

33:16 – 47:00 — AI in agency workflows, lead magnet posts, and LinkedIn vs Google Ads

47:00 – End — Future of LinkedIn Ads + rapid fire: overrated metrics, CTV, advice to his 2014 self

Meet Surender (host and co-founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/

Meet AJ Wilcox: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilcoxaj/

🎧 Listen to The LinkedIn Ads Show by AJ Wilcox: https://b2linked.com/podcast

🌐 Learn more about B2Linked: https://b2linked.com

About Hawky: A creative intelligence platform that transforms marketing guesswork into data-driven success. From Ad Creative Analysis to AI-powered optimization, we help B2C brands and agencies achieve higher ROAS and predictable campaign performance.

👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo

#LinkedInAds #B2BMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #AJWilcox #B2Linked #DigitalMarketing #PaidSocial #LinkedInAdvertising #CreativeIntelligence #MarketingPodcast

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Nishith Srivastava (Nish), Founder of Agentics (the "Anti-Consultancy") and a 26-year veteran of global giants like Ogilvy, JWT, and Tech Mahindra. Nishith breaks down the structural shift required to survive the next decade: moving away from "strategy on slides" toward multi-agent orchestration where 100+ AI agents work in sync to solve complex business problems.

🎯 KEY TOPICS COVERED:
00:00 - From Digital to Intelligence: Nishith’s 23-year evolution through the world's biggest agencies.
05:47 - The "Anti-Consultancy" Philosophy: Why strategy without execution is just a deck.
08:19 - The Multi-Agent Opportunity: Scaling beyond one chatbot to 100+ autonomous agents.
13:34 - The "Validation First" Framework: How to scale AI across 100 stores without breaking the system.
18:43 - AI Transformation vs. AI Native: Moving from "Rule Engines" to "Reasoning Engines".
23:29 - The 10x Productivity Leap: Why AI shouldn't replace humans, but make them superhuman.
34:35 - Rapid Fire: Why Claude is for research, and why Grok has "advertising flair".
35:45 - Build vs. Buy: The CMO’s roadmap for custom AI implementation.

MEET THE SPEAKERS:
Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky):https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/
Nishith Srivastava (Founder, Agentics):https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishith/

Ready to scale your creative production like the pros?
https://hawky.ai/

How Topmate Turns Creators into ₹4L+/Month Earners | Creator Economy Sales Playbook

Followers don't pay bills. Sales systems do. In this debut episode, Anuj Niranjan reveals how Topmate built a sales-assisted engine that takes creators from inconsistent revenue to ₹4L+/month — without needing a single new follower. From cold-calling 200 people to land his first cohort, to building a 25-person sales floor that closes for creators across AI, product management, and tech — this is the BOFU playbook no one talks about.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we spoke to Anuj Niranjan, VP of Creator Growth at Topmate and an IIT Bombay alum who's gone from Citibank risk modelling to trading floors to running creator monetization at one of India's fastest-growing creator economy platforms.

KEY TOPICS COVERED:

00:00 - Introduction: Meet Anuj Niranjan & the Velocity Podcast

04:30 - From Citibank to Manali: The unconventional path to Topmate

11:00 - The pilot that proved it: 9 creator sales in 12 days

18:30 - Pull vs Push: The sales philosophy behind ₹50K cohort closes
29:30 - Followers ≠ Revenue: Why trust beats follower count every time

37:00 - How performance marketers can start selling courses as a side stream

40:30 - Hiring freshers at speed: 3-day onboarding vs 30-day campus cycles

47:30 - AI's real impact on creators: What it replaces and what it never will

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/

Meet Anuj Niranjan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujniranjan/

About Hawky

A creative intelligence platform that transforms marketing guesswork into data-driven success. From Ad Creative Analysis to AI-powered optimization, we help B2C brands and agencies achieve higher ROAS and predictable campaign performance.

Ready to scale your creative production like the pros? https://hawky.ai/get-demo

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we dive into the complex world of real estate marketing with Kapil Arora, Assistant Vice President of Business Strategy & Marketing at ANAROCK. With over a decade of experience across leading firms like Shriram Properties and Xanadu , Kapil reveals how marketing in the "realty" space is shifting from selling mere specifications to selling a lifestyle.

Discover how ANAROCK operates as an end-to-end "mandate firm" for developers , the role of Anarock.ai in optimizing the buyer journey , and why "trust" remains the most valuable currency in an industry with increasingly long decision cycles. Kapil also breaks down the evolving persona of millennial and Gen Z home buyers and why influencer marketing is becoming a dominant force in property sales.

0:00 - Journey to the C-Suite: From Direct Sales to Marketing Strategy

3:51 - The ANAROCK Blueprint: Scaling Real Estate via the Mandate Model

6:59 - Decoding the Modern Buyer: Content Strategy for Millennials & Gen Z

15:03 - Performance Over Hype: The Site Visit Metric & Pricing Psychology

21:11 - The Digital Shift: Anarock.ai, Influencers, and the Future of AI

31:57 - Closing Thoughts & Industry Recommendations

Meet Surender (Host & Co-founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/

Meet Kapil Arora: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kapil-arora-598072101/

About Hawky: A Creative Intelligence Platform that transforms marketing guesswork into data-driven success. From Ad Creative Analysis to AI-Powered Optimization, we help B2C brands and agencies achieve higher ROAS and predictable campaign performance.

More Episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast

How Insurance Marketing Actually Works: 10+ Years of Industry Insights with PolicyBoss CMO

Building trust in a skeptical market takes more than flashy ads. In this deep-dive episode, Varun Kaushik shares how he's transformed insurance marketing at PolicyBoss over the past decade, moving from pure B2C to B2B2C, scaling a 40,000+ agent network across 800+ PIN codes, and discovering why traditional marketing channels still outperform the latest trends.

In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we spoke to Varun Kaushik, Chief Marketing Officer at PolicyBoss and a marketing veteran with 18+ years across IT, B2B SaaS, and InsurTech. Varun leads marketing for one of India's largest insurance broking platforms, managing the critical bridge between business, technology, and customer experience.

• 00:05 - Introduction: Varun's versatile marketing journey across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C
• 01:45 - From IT to Insurance: Why Varun made the contrarian career move 10 years ago
• 05:04 - PolicyBoss's unique positioning: Comparison, convenience, and trusted advisory
• 09:12 - The POSP model explained: How sub-broking transformed insurance distribution
• 12:40 - Trust as the defining factor in insurance vs other financial services
• 18:25 - Brand vs Performance Marketing: When PolicyBoss chose performance-first
• 22:30 - Multi-channel vs Omni-channel: Why insurance needs different personas per channel
• 28:15 - The creative bottleneck: Why 200+ creatives/month aren't enough
• 32:40 - Attribution challenges in insurance's long buying cycle (6-12 months)
• 38:20 - Why celebrity endorsements don't work as well as customer testimonials
• 43:15 - Regional marketing strategy: Scaling across 800+ PIN codes
• 47:30 - The brand awareness mistake most insurance companies make
• 52:45 - Why SMS and email are resurging as marketing channels in 2025
• 57:22 - Rapid Fire: Customer testimonials vs celebrity endorsements

Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/
Meet Varun Kaushik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varunkaushik82/
PolicyBoss: https://www.policyboss.com/

About Hawky

A creative intelligence platform that transforms marketing guesswork into data-driven success. From Ad Creative Analysis to AI-powered optimization, we help B2C brands and agencies achieve higher ROAS and predictable campaign performance.

Ready to scale your creative production like the pros? Book a Demo

#PerformanceMarketing #InsuranceMarketing #B2B2C #MarketingStrategy #CreativeOptimization #DigitalMarketing #InsurTech #AgencyLife #MarketingPodcast #PolicyBoss #Hawky