The Mindset Era: Building Authentic Connections In Digital Marketing

Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of “Leader Generation” brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I am joined by Phil Schraeder, the CEO of GumGum. We are going to dive into why human connection is critical to the future of advertising and marketing. Phil, thank you so much for being here.

Phil Schraeder: Ah, thanks so much, Tessa. So excited to be here with you today.

Tessa Burg: We were talking before this recording and I’m so excited to learn more about what GumGum is doing and how it’s gonna help us address some of the challenges that, you know, and pressures that marketers are feeling to deliver. We have now been using AI for a year and a lot of marketers have struggled with going from the use of an app to scaling it to really showing measurable results. And so I love taking just a step back from all that pressure, from all of, you know, we have to show increase in efficiency, we have to show increase in conversion and revenue and looking at what are the core problems in advertising and why is human connection so important. So as we get into this, first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in digital marketing and advertising.

Phil Schraeder: Yeah, so, so excited to be here and this is a topic near and dear to my heart. So I think we’re gonna have some fun today. Yeah, so my name is Phil Schraeder. I’m the CEO of GumGum. A little bit of background on me, I actually started out in my career in finance and accounting and I’m from a small town outside of Chicago. And you know, I quickly realized as young in my career, it’s like, okay, I wasn’t really happy with what I was doing. I was trying to figure out who I was. So fast forward, I pretty much left everything I knew. My family, my job, and just kind of drove out to LA with really not a plan because I still 22 years old figuring out who am I, what do I want to be when I grow up, even though I still sometimes think, what do I wanna be when I grow up even now. And I remember just listening to the song “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks freaking out around, I’m going to LA, I know no money. I have no money, I have no job, what am I gonna do? And I quickly discovered that for me, what I really fell in love with, which builds into where we’re at, is just working at places where I felt I was connected and where I really had a passion and how could I use my talents there. And so I joined GumGum going on almost 14 years ago as employee number 10 and I love that small field because they were really setting a new path forward for how digital advertising was gonna evolve. And so fast forward to where GumGum is today, from 10 employees to around 550, and global in 20 countries, working with some of the greatest brands and agencies in the world, our whole vision is all about how we can help shape meaningful connections for people everywhere and everyone. And we do that by really empowering our advertisers to understand how they can tap into the mindset of someone giving them what they need without them needing to leverage any personal or identity data and really try to be there for them. And so at the end of the day, what we’ve built is a contextual first technology that is actually transforming the digital advertising ecosystem through the use of our AI machine learning technology and creative solutions so that we can help brands look at a perfect way to match to what their consumer needs. What are they experiencing when they’re in a digital environment, reading a page, watching a video? What’s the right way to put a creative in front of them that gives them aspects of your brand that they need, want, or inspired by? And then how do we translate that back to the brand by capturing that attention and sharpening that tool so that at the end of the day, that brand knows if they are making that connection. So, we believe, and we’ve been driving the industry to really move towards this new era. So, thank you, Taylor Swift. We think we are moving into what we have defined as the mindset era. It’s the era of where brands really spend time leveraging the best of technologies to truly match with the consumer in the moments that matter.

Tessa Burg: I love that as a vision and structuring tech around human connection. One thing that I’ve seen be a challenge though is, when you’re in a marketing department and when you’re faced with all of these, you have to deliver this now, we have a new product coming out, we have a new feature coming out, here’s our roadmap. How are we going to tell everybody about this? And it feels like a lot of the internal pressures and the high expectations for performance, you see a lot of marketers start to just push and say, like, “We have to tell people about this, we have to tell people about this,” while still being, like, “Let’s be customer-centric.” How do you help navigate to show the strength of what focusing first on needs can be and positioning those products or positioning what marketers have to get done to truly connect?

Phil Schraeder:  Yeah, I think to build off that question and I’ll pull up just a little bit off that is, I think that to your point, those challenges right now are, like, we’ve become very addicted to that immediate outcome and that immediate result. And I think if we take a step back, I think there are just more macro systemic challenges as an industry we need that I think marketers are really faced with. One is obviously the identity era, which we look to and say that’s the past, right? Which is what we have built a lot of the construct of what you’re referring to is on identity. And we all know globally, like what we’ve seen in Europe, with GDPR or what we’re seeing in various states all over the US, the regulation, the hurdles, the are cookies going away, are they not going away, the privacy concerns that consumers rightfully have around how their data is being exploited is all unraveling before our eyes. And that has been what a lot of brands have been reliant on to drive to that success. So, one, how and what are we gonna do to help shape the future with dealing with that? The other challenge is, you know, I think I read it’s, you know, people are spending around seven hours a day in digital environments. And we’re not just a digital industry that’s a mobile device in a TV, right? We’re now, you know, we have our desktop, of course, we have our mobile, we have our smart TV, we have CTV now, we have gaming, we have, right, digital environments are massively coming at us and we’re spending a lot of time in all of these different environments. And the level of which technology or strategies to reach consumers in those moments within those environments are at various stages of maturity. So when you take a step back, what we’re really focusing on is, before we worry about what the outcome is, you need to worry about understanding what someone is experiencing and in what environment. So that when you are ready to, to your point, understand what aspect of your brand’s value is makes the most sense to bring to the forefront at that moment. So, I use an example, like we get briefs all the time from brands. They write a creative brief and they say, “Hey, help us deliver this result.” All of these brands still do the same thing. I wanna reach males 18 to 49 who make this income level, who have 1.25 kids who might be eco, right? And I always say to them, I think you understand maybe who your customer is, I understand that, but you’ve really self-discriminated against potential other audiences. You’ve opted out of connecting with additional audiences. And even the parameters around that don’t define your customer. And there is way more to them than that. So what we’re setting out to address your question is, working with those brands, leveraging our AI technologies that can use all of the data inputs in a video, in an image to say, okay, what is someone experiencing or feeling? And in that now, what is it about your brand that makes the most sense to highlight for that consumer, right? So, I think that’s where there’s, right, there’s that future opportunity. People used to think, oh, contextual. It’s a car, serve it into a auto site. Well, okay, but there’s a lot of other things that are way deeper and customized to where you’re building true offering and community, right? That car might have really great pet safety features and you’re on traveling sites with pets. And what a great way to highlight that aspect when someone’s reading about caring for their pet and traveling that that’s what you have to offer them. And building that because that’s where we’re gonna start to deepen that connection of understanding, you know what I need as a consumer.

Tessa Burg: I love that. So, if we’re setting aside targeting based on identity and really just some superficial qualities of a person and we’re moving into really thinking about who they are more holistically, how does the AI work? ‘Cause one thing when I think about contextual advertising that springs to the top of mind for me, when we were first testing this, oh my gosh, this has to be like 15 years ago, I remember it felt very spammy, you know, like, it was all, like, keyword-based, as long as it says this word, then we’ll be there and your brand say these words and this says this word. And we didn’t know what kinds of results it was driving. So how has contextual or really GumGum’s advertising evolved to be beyond just text or keywords on a page?

Phil Schraeder: Yes. So internally at GumGum, and what makes us unique is we’ve always looked at the understanding that you can’t just rest on one word to determine kind of what an environment is. You have to look at the signals that are offered to you and string those together. So internally at GumGum, we have a computer vision team that is a trained AI team that looks at what is happening in imagery and the models being able to understand in photos or in frames what is happening in that photo or frame, right? Understanding the string of words together and the context of those words and whether that’s positive, negative, neutral based on the emotion that we are determining through the way that those work together. So now when you can say, “Wow, did you see that shooter?” And there’s a basketball, right, you’re understanding what’s happening. or if you’re in video, you’re able to look and hear what people are saying in combination with that video frame so you can understand what’s happening. And that now is what’s creating this opportunity to find, more than ever, really unique opportunities for an advertiser. But you have to know that this then feeds in so many new ways. GumGum just launched a new creative format, right, that leverages, right, the attention we’re getting on a creative, right? So then when we do find that moment, is this creative’s attention actually resonating to the outcome, for example? Because now you start to influence creative based on that. You start to look at how this can influence things like dynamic creative optimizations, right? So it knows what to pull in where for that moment. And then of course for us, that brand also is able to stay culturally relevant to maximize that engagement. Because as we know, no matter, whether you know my demo, my age, or anything about me, my interests evolve day over day, quarter over quarter. So why is this creative that you have working in this environment, right? What do we know about that to influence the creative and why how that happened four months ago might be very different, right, in that environment? I’m sure there was a lot of brands targeting sports, right? But then Taylor Swift starts dating Travis Kelce and a lot of different types of content start to come out is that now an opportunity where a brand that was looking more as a Taylor Swift type of energy around where they want their brand and content to be now feeding more and thinking about how it ties into the sports element with the dating of Travis Kelce. These things continue to evolve. So, you know, these trends, these cultural moments, this real-time understanding of why certain placements work in different environments and how those moments are interconnected. That’s where we see it’s elevated to levels that I think we are realizing still a lot of marketers are needing to be educated because I don’t think they realize the power of what it can do these days.

Tessa Burg: No, I agree. And in that example, maybe people are now curious about what’s going on in Cleveland because that is such a cool hotspot if Travis Kelce’s from there.

Phil Schraeder:  Yes. Yes.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, but like, and I love football so, and he’s on my fantasy team so he needs to start stepping up. So come on, come on Travis, we need you to, you know, come on, you’ve got this.

Phil Schraeder: Playing it safe.

Tessa Burg: But you know, you brought up something that I think is so important to our clients, which is brand safety. It is something that has blocked clients from really looking at contextual advertising and I think with the threat of cookies going away, people started revisiting it. So the computer vision has really given you this opportunity to go from just one keyword or just single attributes about a person and so we’ll be here to, we’re going to be in this moment value-based because we understand better what’s happening in your life and how your interests have evolved. But I find it interesting you have been kind of outspoken on-

Phil Schraeder: Very much.

Tessa Burg: concerns with brand safety. Tell us a little bit about that and where are these practices at today and where do they need to go?

Phil Schraeder:  Yeah, so I can speak for us and I know, you know, right now when we think of safety, I think there’s two things we have to think about with where the market has historically played, which is, and you nailed it, right? Whether it’s a keyword list or a blocking list, and I understand, brands wanna keep their brand safe, right? I get that. But I think the dullness of the antiquated solutions on just using a word, right, is causing I think more systemic issues that we need to make sure we first as an industry acknowledge, one, that in and of itself is discriminating from content creators to create content within their authentic voice. Because as a openly gay man, as how I speak with my friends, maybe some of the language I use, the context of what I’m saying, I know if I use that in maybe something I’m reading or something I’m creating, I might be blocked because it doesn’t understand the intent of what I’m saying. So things within the creation of content now have gotten to a point where creators are having to edit their own voices so they can make sure that they have access to monetize. That’s wrong. That’s wrong, right? So first we need to recognize we need to do better for our content creators, for the voices of everyone to be able to create in that. And then the second piece to this is that it does have a ripple down effect, trickle down effect into the success of campaigns because now you are missing as brands opportunities based on that that would be very suitable for your brand, right? So of course there are aspects of safety that are inherent. Human trafficking, that is not safe for anyone anywhere all over the world, right? But when you get into other elements of what’s safe and not safe, brands have different gauges and different types of brands might be suitable in different areas. So it’s now helping them to stay safe, of course, but not letting them miss out on what might make sense from their brand ’cause we can string all of it together to know is this truly appropriate for you or not. All the while, while creating equity and authenticity in digital creation. So it’s a win-win and I think that’s really powerful and that’s what I’m excited about us moving forward more and going beyond safety and fear more into suitability and empowerment.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I think that what is really beautiful about the internet and communities online and offline are the niches. And some of these guidelines prevents content creators from having a voice in a niche. And it’s not even that the niche has to be huge to be relevant to your brand, but it’s the collection of all of them. And so it’s not, you know, just a pie chart with like the biggest slice is where we wanna be, it should be a bunch of like itty bitty little slices. And we have to make sure that we are allowing for that because that’s what people truly are too, is a unique collection of a bunch of little niches.

Phil Schraeder:  Yes, exactly. And I think that ties in, a good example to represent that, you know, when the atrocities happened with George Floyd. And that happened, and so many advertisers, you know, supporting George Floyd, but then behind the scenes blocking all of that content because they didn’t deem it safe, when we found with our technology over 60% of it was positive or neutral. So to us, you’re saying you are supportive but then the tools you’re using are blocking it. And so without even realizing it, you’re muting the voice of something you say you support because those creators now aren’t able to monetize even if it’s neutral or positive because someone’s not letting them make money. So now they shift to another topic in order to keep their lights on. And that’s not the intention and that was never an intention of a brand, but those are the things we need to chip away at.

Tessa Burg: Yes, and highlight them, ’cause they might not even, in a lot of cases they don’t even totally realize it.

Phil Schraeder:  Exactly, exactly.

Tessa Burg: Because they’re optimizing towards strictly performance and so they don’t-

Phil Schraeder: Exactly.

Tessa Burg:  Yeah.

Phil Schraeder: And that was my earlier point. There’s so much going on in this industry moving so quickly. There’s CTV here, there’s gaming, there’s contextual technologies, there’s AI, how can a brand, right? There’s so much so it’s our job to keep making sure we’re doing our best to educate and that’s, you know, really big focus for me.

Tessa Burg: Yes. So we talked about, we’ve hit on it a couple of times now, but authenticity and how can, and you said that GumGum is bringing more dynamic solutions. How do you bring in dynamic solutions without losing your authenticity as a brand? ’cause I think one thing our clients get concerned about is, okay, we created this great core creative, we know exactly who we are, what we represent, here’s our values. But then when it gets into the wild and we’re matching in a more matching a more dynamic way, how do you not lose sort of where you started when you’re in real time in a moment with a consumer?

Phil Schraeder: Yes. I think it all starts first, which I’m really excited about, I was gonna maybe talk about this later, but we’re really excited. We are launching something very new into the market. So we’ll be talking about this with a lot of our clients. And within that, we call it the Mindset Graph. And the Mindset Graph is meant to understand what are those moments, first and foremost, across, you know, various levels of context, various understandings of your brand that one, would play a part in kind of helping to shape what your strategy would be first and foremost around first setting that creative out there, right? Because we think that’s important to be able to feed what the creative and how the creative and the right creative is going to help to capture that moment. And so imagine then when you’re able to do that and you see those creatives go out and they’re running in the wild, you’re understanding based on, for us, attention, right? And how much time that’s getting engaged with it. Wow, we are connecting. We are connecting in this context in this specific area with this creative, it’s working, and this is working. Why is this versus something else? Why is this not working? What needs to be tweaked? And how can we then feed that back so that as close to real time, you’re able to stay very true to the authenticity of the brand’s objective and who they are, but you’re able to tweak that message so that the consumer hears it or sees it, experiences it in a way that’s special to them. Like anything, we can sit in a room and we can have extroverts all talk, the introverts we know have amazing things to say, but we’ve gotta find an alternative to how the introvert can get that voice heard. It’s no different as consumers that we need to realize that how we individually in a moment might be receiving information, we need to do our best to stay in lockstep with the signals to determine if the message, the way that it is makes sense in that moment and how we can keep iterating against it if that’s helpful. So it’s really goes back to that feedback loop around why is this brand’s message stinging so loudly amazing in fine art, but not in, you know, like motor vehicle, you know, eco-friendly cars, right, or whatever it might be. There might be value to being in both places for that brand, but something is not resonating or we’re not highlighting the value in that moment. So what can we do to help the brand tweak that, change that, and do that while still being authentic to themselves? And so when I use the brief example, my dream is that brands will start to write briefs without demo. They’ll spend the time giving us the deepest brief with the deepest understanding of what the brand stands for, its values, what they want people to feel, all the aspects of what it can do for someone, right? All of that, and let’s leverage that. Start there, and I think that’s where you start to then see how you’re connecting and you still optimize towards the outcomes, but you’re starting from a place of intent to connect. And I think that is the key for us, right? And I think that’s where the future is. And I think the brands that move quickly into that and explore that are the ones that win and will start to then hopefully see their brand loyalty metrics increase. Because 60% of Gen Z, Gen Alpha, post-pandemic are not brand loyal. They’re just not because we’ve just got addicted. They’re onto us. They’re onto the, oh you’re following me, this is, I don’t know if you have family members, people that are in that category, they already know. So if you’re not finding a way to make it feel unique, special and authentic, you’ve lost them already and they’re just gonna go one and done, one and done, one and done. And it’s gonna be a constant rat race in that hamster wheel to chase, chase, chase, chase, chase, not sustainable. And the brands that find a way to start to crack the code in building connections and moments as these generations go through their stages of life and bringing in highlighting the value of that brand and why it makes sense in the presence of it, that’s who’s gonna win. And I’ll use an example. I think it’s awesome for me to start to see how much nostalgia has come back into how many brands are leaning in today, right? McDonald’s just launched Happy Meals with little Crocs. Well, I remember growing up and going with my family to get a Happy Meal and the toys and the, right, and bringing, here’s a great way that you’re bringing a nostalgia feel to maybe me as someone who would take my nephews and them be interested or my nephews love Crocs and so they wanna go and I can share that moment with them, right? And so you can already start to see constructs of what I’m saying in the broader marketing strategies that are happening right now with many brands.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, when you were describing the type of brief, we see the marketer of the future writing, it feels way less creepy. Like you have talked about transparency in advertising, like, is this something brands can lean into? Like we want to evolve, be there for you as opposed to stalk you?

Phil Schraeder: Yes, I love that you brought that up because that’s also something we talk a lot about is transparency. And I think that’s important because for us, I can sit here on this podcast with you, Tessa, all day and talk about all of the amazing things we’re doing, right? We need to be able to back that up. And so let’s look at contextual as an example. I’m talking about our contextual technology. And I know our advertisers and brands here, I’m contextual, we have contextual, we have contextual. And how do they source through all of this? So for us, we think transparency just overall for brands to help with the noise is building into their questionnaires around partners. What accreditations do you have? Can I see your documented audited methodologies, right? Can I see the case studies? I think that’s really important. So for us, we’re Media Rating Council-accredited, right, for our brand safety, suitability and contextual. We’ve been audited by Ernst & Young and the MRC for years and years in areas like CTV, right? I could send you that methodology. I could get on the call with a brands compliance officer and walk through it with our product team. So I think all of this is great, but in the wake of AI and that, it’s really sensitive, which is a right, and I think just in general, we need to then make sure brands and their agencies are held to a standard of some way to make sure the partners they’re using really have done their diligence. ‘Cause that at the forefront of any of the actual safety in the environment is how is the technology even actually, you know, validated. So I think you bring up a great point and I think that’s something really important brands should hold onto is why you say you have this, how can you show me that that’s valid?

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I feel like there was this big sigh of relief when we learned that cookies weren’t going away and people were like, “Oh my god, thank god. Now my media buy won’t totally fall apart.”

Phil Schraeder:  Yeah.

Tessa Burg: What you are sharing is marketers who still need to show results, who still are going to be outcome-driven by necessity can start rethinking about their advertising and marketing as human connection and emotional connection and how do I reach someone in the right space at the right time with the right message, which is the promise of marketing. But really it’s about the content and that targeting based on space, that’s going to give you brand safety. That’s going to give you more trust with your consumers. And if we start on this journey now, then when cookies do go away, it won’t be such a big deal. And ultimately right now. you almost have the chance to test against it and, you know, like, this helps build confidence with your board, with your CEO, and checks the box of using AI. But in this case, you’re not saying, like, what we’re stuck in this cycle right now of like, I wanna use this AI app to do this. I wanna use this AI app to do this. You’re taking a step back and saying, where can our brand serve and what’s a great platform to deliver that service to our consumers in a way that we’re doing human connection, not, oh we’re using computer vision.

Phil Schraeder:  Correct. Right. Well, and that’s exactly right. It’s building that construct. I think when you even look at the way in which we’ve got addicted to cookies and the data like we were talking about, it’s like, oh, and I understand it’s like, you see something, I look at it as like any addictive thing, right? Like you get addicted, it gives you that hit of what you need, you show the result, it’s a win. Your CFO’s happy, you’re seeing a sale of something immediately you can tangibly see. And so you keep chasing and you keep chasing and understand that, you know. And you know, when you have identity type data and that’s what your priority is, I think you’re in just in an inevitable losing battle. Just like any addiction, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse. You want more efficiency, more efficiency, more efficiency, more efficiency, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes just to get efficient. And then at the end of the day, you look back and be like, oops, we’ve lost our customers completely, right? And I think what people need to realize is when we talk about mindset, when we talk about leveraging like in this mindset era, the data that’s available, it’s, why don’t we stop trying to predict what this person from this new mom or identity is going to do? Why don’t we predict what is going to be happening with newborns and families in life in the next three months based on moments and culture and be able to guide a brand to say, “Hey, in the next three to six months, here are the moments that we see are coming into our culture. Here’s what’s actually going to happen.” “Oh good, how can we be ready to give our consumer in that category something they need?” Right? I’ll use another example. We, GumGum, own a company called Relo Metrics that does sports sponsorship measurements for brands, Tessa, right? So how big is sports? People are driving hundreds of millions of dollars in brands sponsoring a sport. We can value that for them. But imagine being able to value that for them, leveraging our mindset technology of understanding what other moments surround someone who engages in that sport and being there before, during, and after. So that now media is able to run in building up of awareness to the sport where your brand is everywhere and then where do they go after. So you’re connecting and extracting way more value and you’re actually in the moments within that journey. And so there’s so many cultural moments right now that are coming or growing or trends or things shifting that if a brand can get ahead of that and know what’s happening, they can easily provide more value in the moments, right? Right, and I think that’s what we need to do. Less predicting what someone might do, more predict what’s going to happen in these cultural moments that are relevant and make sense and how do we feed that so they can get ahead of it and ultimately be the first brand to provide you support, inspiration, or value in that moment.

Tessa Burg: I love that approach. It is very centering. It helps brands be authentic to themselves and really live their own visions and mission. And I cannot wait to see dashboards from GumGum in five ’cause it’s gotta be just, it’s so rich.

Phil Schraeder: Yeah. Once you see the, you know, and you’ll be able to check out our landing page, it’s called the Mindset Graph. You start to see how we’re planning and activating and doing it. The whole construct is, you look at Facebook or Meta back in the day. I mean, let’s really be real, like, Facebook and Meta, what they did, which was amazing, is they built this social graph, right? How is Tessa connected to Phil who’s connected, right? That’s great how people are connected. Let’s connect moments. And those moments in real time change. Why is this moment and this moment and this moment showing engagement and driving an outcome? And let’s keep feeding that graph through this. Because that’s how you can stay connected in a future proof way, strategy wise, not tied to IDs or regulation, and can be applied regardless into the different channels in which your consumers are experiencing your brand digitally. CTV, mobile gaming, because you’re staying current around all of that zeitgeist of culture and having that be fundamentally built into your strategy.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, and your technology is allowing people to do it at scale.

Phil Schraeder: That’s right.

Tessa Burg: You use the word moments and predicting cultural moments internally all the time. But right now, even when we use tools to scrape media sites to try and look at it and run it through agents we’ve built internally to analyze it, it’s still manual and it’s still not tied directly the outcomes where your platform is bringing it all together. So you are able to scale going from creative to being there in the moment across many brands, not-

Phil Schraeder: That’s right. That’s right, and I think when we talk about GumGum’s, you know, platform, what we’ve built as a company is the contextual tech that we’ve spoke about. We’ve done that in partnership with creative, with AI technology to measure and optimize against attention. Those three pieces together as we continue to shape that, feed that back to the brand is what makes that bite, that hamburger of those pieces together so mouthwatering good.

Tessa Burg: Yeah.

Phil Schraeder: The industry has been challenged with people doing one-off things and trying to bring them all together, right? So we can help you plan a contextual strategy for everything. We can help you marry that with creative. We can help make you recommendations on why and where it’s working and what creative, right? Based on attention is driving different outcomes across different environments. And so I think that what makes us very unique, because our platform has provided true omnichannel access for a marketer and provides multiple optionality in the best way to leverage the whole thing or aspects for whatever your goals are. And those things have been coming together in unison and I think that’s what ties the thread between all of it together, right, if that makes sense.

Tessa Burg: Oh, it does. I can see, I also lead our innovation team at Mod Op and I can see where your platform, and it is because we’re so aligned on values, like we always talk about how we never stop exploring how creative and tech together can amplify expertise, amplify human experience. And I think that you have built something that can help accelerate that. You know, not just for our company but for our clients and our clients’ brands, and a lot of our clients have multiple brands. So this is extremely powerful. We are at time. I mean, this conversation has gone so fast. I was like, whoa. But I encourage everyone to visit GumGum’s website and learn about this-

Phil Schraeder: Yes, please do.

Tessa Burg: what’s coming in 2025. And Phil, where can people find you if they wanna reach out to you directly?

Phil Schraeder: Yeah, so just reach out to gumgum.com. You can fill out a form there. You can stalk me on LinkedIn. I’m just Phil Schraeder there. It probably is an easy way to check me out there. And yeah, I think that’s probably the best way to connect with me or just reach out to someone at GumGum. We have people all over, so we’re happy to chat and we’re happy to explore and what we wanna be as a thought partner with all of you. And we wanna help shape what we’re doing. I think you, one thing, Tess, that you said, Tessa, that you said is that I wanna call out is like, our values at GumGum are thoughtfulness, agility, and grit. And we represent ourselves, although we are B2B, we think of ourselves as B2C. And we think any brand needs to be thoughtful, they need to be agile, and they need to get it done in front, right? You need to do those things. So it aligns with what we think a brand, if they’re thoughtful and they’re agile to give their consumer what they need and they make that happen and they do that work, the brand wins. So yes, please reach out. You can go to our website, there’s tons of great information. Check out the Mindset Graph, you can get insights, which are super cool. And yeah, thank you so much, Tessa, this is amazing and we really appreciate the opportunity to chat, share what we do.

Tessa Burg: Thank you so much for being a guest and I will just say for everyone listening, follow Phil on LinkedIn because grit is what jumps off the page in your post. I love it. The commitment to values, the authenticity in your delivery and it’s like, it’s perfect, so it inspired me this morning, but-

Phil Schraeder: Oh, thanks.

Tessa Burg: all Phil.

Phil Schraeder: Awesome, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Tessa.

Tessa Burg: Yes, and we’ll speak again soon. If you are interested in hearing more episodes from “Leader Generation,” you can find them at modop.com. That’s M-O-D-O-P.com, click Podcast, and all of our past episodes are there. And Phil, until next time, have a great weekend and we’ll be following you closely.

Phil Schraeder: You as well. Sending you all my best, thank you.