Episode 185: Nikhil Lai of Forrester on the State of AEO and Performance Marketing

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Introducing Meta Glasses.

Nikhil Lai (0:32)

You have questions, they've got answers.

SPEAKER_3 (0:35)

Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru? Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish?

Ari Paparo (0:42)

Dónde está el baño?

Nikhil Lai (0:44)

Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?

Ari Paparo (0:47)

Technically, no.

SPEAKER_1 (0:48)

Spiritually, yes.

Eric Franchi (0:50)

Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

Ari Paparo (0:52)

That's one of life's biggest questions.

SPEAKER_1 (0:55)

What do you think? Ask anything with the new Meta glasses.

Ari Paparo (1:09)

Welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi, and we have our guest today is Nikhil Lai, who is the principal analyst at Forrester, who covers performance marketing and advertising. He's a very interesting person, very insightful about our industry. It should be an interesting conversation. Eric, how's the summer training? You were halfway done.

You relaxed, ready to go to work, get back to work, no sleep. What's going on?

Eric Franchi (1:38)

I've been working my ass off all summer. I have barely taken any time, and the summer seems like it's over. I mean, kids are going back to college in a couple of weeks, like, what the hell happened? I'm going to need an extension on this one. Who do I put the request in?

Ari Paparo (1:55)

It's true. It's always front-loaded, like June turns into summer, and then there's a heat wave, and then July, you do stuff, and then suddenly August is just garbage time.

Yeah.

Eric Franchi (2:04)

We're planning Q4 events. Like, it's just, I mean, stop, pause. Like, superpowers, do something.

Ari Paparo (2:12)

Don't get surprised by Q4. It comes sooner than you think.

Eric Franchi (2:15)

It starts in September. Q4 starts in September, people. We all know that.

Ari Paparo (2:19)

All right. That sounds good. Did you get, I got a lot of notice about my ex tweet. So I had a very scary phishing attack where it was a email to me that said, here's a free ticket to Advertising Week. And you click through it. It looked like a real thing. It went to an invite page, Luma invite page where it wasn't really Luma.

Luma, the events company, not Luma, the bankers. And then, you know, confirm your, confirm your registration with the Google SSO.

That was a fake Google SSO and friend of the pod, Rob Leathern, analyzed it. And he, he posted the scary details that the Google SSO, I've never heard of this before. It wasn't just a fake Google SSO. It was a two way, like a mirror that went to Telegram. The, and so what would happen is there'd be some guy listening to whatever I typed in on Telegram. Like let's say I actually put in my password, which I did not do. They would get my password. Then they would log in to Google as me, right? And then when they got the, the, hey, you need to authenticate, they would pass, they would then update my screen with whatever they were seeing. So that I would then authenticate and they would get my SMS code or whatever I typed in, and they would just type it in on their end.

So it was like, it was like a mirror image of what was happening in a way that could defeat almost any two-factor authentication.

Eric Franchi (3:42)

Yeah. I mean, once, once they get the, the text, it's over.

Ari Paparo (3:46)

Like, yeah, they didn't have to get the text. I would get the text and type it in because they would pass and they would see it.

Eric Franchi (3:52)

Oh man.

Ari Paparo (3:54)

It's devious.

Eric Franchi (3:55)

I was so nervous when you, when you posted that on X, I didn't even click on the tweet. I was like, I was like, I'm pretending to see it here.

Ari Paparo (4:07)

Let's just pretend it's la, la, la, la, la. I'm not listening to your phishing. Oh my God.

Eric Franchi (4:12)

I get so nervous about this stuff. Like I have a visceral reaction. I didn't even like click on it.

Ari Paparo (4:18)

Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. I, I, I wasn't fooled. But the thing that got me was that I could just tell that the Google login wasn't right. I got to the Google login screen. Um, but, um, yeah, that's scary. Um, so be careful out there. Um, you know, don't give anyone your info unless you are a 100% sure. Uh, and if anyone else got it, I haven't heard from anyone else who got it. If anyone else got it, let me know.