SMX West 2018: Interview with Marc Poirier

This interview is part of our SMX West expert interview series taking place between March 12 and 16th, 2018.

SMX West kicks off another great year in sunny San Jose, California and Acquisio is thrilled to be back at the event covering all the action. All week long we’ll be there doing interviews with expert presenters, covering key breakthrough concepts in PPC (stay tuned for our end-of-week roundup post) and of course representing at our booth #421.

This year we really wanted to showcase our machine learning capability to the search community, so we’re presenting new machine learning data and giving everyone a chance to win a robot! In fact we’ll even have a robot there with us at the booth.

But fun and fancy gadgets aside, marketers head to SMX to get real hands-on training and to get ahead of the latest industry trends and changes. We wanted to transmit as much of those insights and value to our readers as possible with our event coverage on the blog.

The first of our SMX West interview series is with Marc Poirier, the Co-Founder of Acquisio. Let’s hear what he had to say about the event and machine learning trends:

Transcript:

Chandal: Hi, I’m Chandal Nolasco Da Silva, here on behalf of Acquisio at SMX West 2018. I’m here with our co-founder Marc Poirier. Thanks for joining us today. So Marc, tell us – what keeps you coming back to SMX, year after year?

Marc: Ya, I’ve been coming here for years and I built a network of friends from the industry – some of the people who speak here and those who visit, the exhibitors.. For me, that’s a highly motivating reason to come. But also from a business standpoint, it’s a great place to meet all the people who are active in paid search and hear what’s going on, what are their needs, where are their businesses going, and how we may be able to continue to serve them well.

Chandal: What trends are you hoping or expect to see this year out of SMX 2018?

Marc: That’s a good question. I think AI, obviously. It’s a big topic. How will marketers leverage that today and in the coming years? A lot of the time, these solutions come from Google and Facebook, it’s how we can take advantage of them as marketers? Also, third party solutions will continue to innovate with AI, for sure. I know we will! So, that’s a big one.

Also the rise of mobile and voice search continue to be disruptive and drive the changes, which we need to be aware of, so we’re paying close attention. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of talk about that at the event.

The dominant position that Google and Facebook occupy is a little preoccupying. I think maybe 85% of all digital advertising growth is controlled by those two – that’s a lot. When you think about how to respond to the market, how to position yourself as an agency or as a vendor, how do you work with this (and who else may come out as a significant player)?

Chandal: Definitely all big trends. We’ve already heard about AI from our Keynote Speaker this morning. How do you think AI and machine learning is shaping paid search?

Marc: On the providers side, there’s a lot of information that’s being used by Google and Bing so that they can change the business models, potentially how they rank ads versus one another. Allows them to see trends in time by geo, and provide better tools for advertisers so they can be more effective. That’s an obvious trend of AI. But where’s the big data? Who has the most data? These guys definitely are the ones.

Chandal: Agreed. Thanks for taking a few minutes with us today. Thanks for joining us here at SMX 2018!

Stay tuned for more coverage of SMX West to come!

Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Samule Sun

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