Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)

**Jonathan Becker** (0:00)
There's a lot of different ways that we are beginning to use AI to do more with less, basically.
The effect, ultimately, that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. We have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's more about modeling, validation, asking the right questions, being focused around creative levers, and less so the trench work of implementation and bid modifiers at the keyword level on Google Search and some of the really hardcore manual analysis we had to do.
On our creative group, we can come up with mock-ups in literally 1% of the time that it took. And so you still have to understand what questions to ask of the AI and be capable of iterating, but these rough drafts that you might show the artwork of to a client to say, like, do we like this more? Do we like this more? That's AI-generated. It's really interesting.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Jonathan Becker. Jonathan is a legend and an OG in the world of performance marketing. On this podcast, we've done deep dives into the many aspects of growth, including SEO, sales, conversion optimization, retention, product-led growth, product-led sales, but this is the first episode where we get super deep on paid growth. For the past decade plus, Jonathan and his team have planned, built, and executed more than $3.5 billion in paid acquisition budgets for companies like Uber, Asana, Square, MasterClass, Tempur-Pedic, and many more, and they've built their agency Thrive Digital into one of the preeminent independent digital marketing agencies. In our conversation, we get real deep into all things paid growth, including what's changed with recent privacy shifts, why focusing on creatives is the new biggest opportunity within paid growth, how to think about attribution and what's changed there, what to look for in people you hire to run paid growth for you, how AI is already changing how paid growth teams operate, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Jonathan Becker after a short word from our sponsors.
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