Jonathan Becker
Founder & CEO, Thrive Digital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@jzbecker ↗LinkedIn ↗thrivedigital.com ↗
Jonathan Becker is the founder and CEO of Thrive Digital, a performance marketing agency established in 2011. He has managed paid media acquisition campaigns for companies such as Uber, Asana, Square, and MasterClass.
1shows
1appearances
28statements
1resolved
0supported
1contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Jonathan Becker said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Someone will unlock TikTok B2B SaaS advertising and build a $1B business
“And just because the innovation hasn't happened for B to B SaaS yet on TikTok doesn't mean it won't. TikTok wants that to happen. And so the question becomes how, and so someone will unlock that and they'll make, you know, a billion dollars because of it.”
AI shifted agency roles toward strategy without reducing overall headcount
“And so the effect ultimately that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. So we're actually, we have more people now than we've ever had. But the nature of the work that they do is more strategic.”
Companies pursuing performance marketing should hire in-house expertise before engaging an agency
“The reality is you're going to need expertise and you probably should start in-house and then hire an agency.”
Becker siphoned tens of thousands from Uber's referral loop via paid search
“Essentially I was using paid search to camp out on their branded keywords. And as people would sign up with my confusingly similar snippet to Uber's organic snippet, I was essentially siphoning off, you know referral credits. So I would get 20 dollars every si…”
Startups relying solely on platform loopholes will fail when conditions change
“What they fail to see is that those loopholes come and go. And so if they scale massively and their entire, you know, businesses predicated on the performance of this one loophole that they found, or like, you know, investing everything in a single channel, an…”
Lifetime value is a misnomer for early-stage companies lacking operating history
“These abstract concepts like lifetime value, which is difficult because like that's, you know, most businesses are relatively new that we work with. And so the idea of lifetime value is kind of a misnomer. Like they don't know what that is yet, but we have to …”
Paid acquisition is highly likely to succeed if other marketing channels work
“If other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work.”
Paid channel data has never provided full end-to-end attribution understanding
“The issue for most companies is in this incorrect assumption that The data that is provided through paid channels allows you to have full end to end understanding of like attribution, which is wrong. It's never been that way.”
Every unicorn from the 2010s era scaled using performance marketing
“Every unicorn from like the, you know, 20 tens era that that scale did performance marketing, but not everyone during that time who did performance marketing scaled.”
Grammarly scaled to massive success almost exclusively through paid acquisition
“And I think there's some really great examples Of companies that have scaled, you know, in relatively recent times, almost exclusively through paid, like Grammarly is a really good example of this.”
Google's search algorithm uses 200 signals but only 20-30 are public
“Google still has to crawl it. They run it through their analysis algorithm, which is comprised of 200 different signals of which maybe like 20 to 30 have been publicly disclosed.”
Google and Facebook automated most technical performance marketing levers over a decade
“So a lot of the levers, so to speak, around performance have been automated by Google and Facebook over the last, you know, seven to 10 years.”
Use ratio metrics like click-through rate when algorithms serve unequal ad impressions
“Sometimes like the ad serving algorithms, even when we set up a test structurally in that way, we'll serve one ad, you know, a different number of impressions than the other ad, in which case we then have to say, What is a leveling factor that allows us to loo…”
Unpolished mobile user-generated video ads massively outperform highly produced brand creatives
“What we found is that they would always underperform next to user generated assets. So a brand that essentially, you know, has an influencer in front of it that says, I tried this product. I love it. I'm filming this ad for my iPhone. Like, look, check it out.…”
Becker predicts WhatsApp will likely launch advertisements later in 2023
“Instagram and probably eventually WhatsApp, which I think will probably launch ads later this year.”
TikTok's ad platform resembles Facebook six years ago, offering cheap CPCs
“Their ads platform kind of reminds me of where Facebook ads was like six, seven years ago. It's not super sophisticated and attribution is not great yet, but you can get cheap CPCs. Because there's just fewer, you know, organizations advertising there.”
Scaling TikTok ad spend to $1M monthly requires massive ongoing creative volume
“You can't really get to like a million dollars a month on TikTok without having like a huge amount of creative being pushed to that channel.”
Over-optimizing for cost per lead ruins downstream B2B and B2C acquisition ROI
“The common mistake that we see as people build out a funnel, so to speak, for, you know, B to B lead gen projects or B to C lead gen projects is they'll be overly reliant on the first of a sequence of metrics that ultimately yields a sale.”
Marketing attribution remains a subjective art rather than a permanently solved science
“Attribution as it stands in our industry is still an incredibly subjective art and somewhat of a science. It doesn't mean that it's impossible and it doesn't mean that there aren't varying degrees of sophistication as it relates to attribution, but we're still…”
The choice of marketing attribution model directly dictates growth versus profitability outcomes
“It's important to determine whether an organization, a company, a client is focused on profitability or growth. Whether I use one attribution lens or another, Will drive those outcomes.”
ChatGPT cuts agency RFP drafting time from one week to ten hours
“So we can feed, you know, ChatGPT a hundred, you know, previous RFP responses that we've done and have it spit out, you know, net new responses to net new questions in a net new RFP. And it's like 80% good and still requires like 10 hours of work to, like, mas…”
Generative AI cuts campaign mockup time from a week to an afternoon
“On our creative group, we can come up with, like, mockups in, in, like, literally, like, one percent of the time that it took, so you no longer have to, like, draw the initial mockups for art. Suddenly, you know, what might have taken one person a week of work…”
Verbally describing visual concepts is inefficient and hinders effective creative leadership
“These concepts often live inside of someone's head, and we do this thing as humans where we verbally discuss it, and I try and put the image in my mind's eye, in your mind's eye, which is an inherently inefficient process and actually hurts our ability to be c…”
Technical and math backgrounds strongly indicate aptitude for performance marketing roles
“So if you're making your first hire, you probably want them to be, to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jonathan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Thrive Digital | 1 | 28 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |