Blog

John Jantsch (00:00.968)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Keith Lover. He’s a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist who has founded six companies, raised over 34 million in product launches. He’s the founder and CEO of Atomic Elevator, the company behind Ella, an AI powered marketing platform designed to bring clarity and structure to modern marketing through what he calls high definition marketing. So Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Lauver (00:29.998)

Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:31.93)

So let’s jump to high definition marketing. How would you, how do you define that? mean, I think it sounds like kind of a fun term, but you know, how do you make that real?

Keith Lauver (00:43.672)

You know, marketing has historically been fuzzy. There are different people touching different parts of that proverbial elephant. So some people, like a branding person, looks at the marketing problem through their set of lens and the digital ads person looks at it through their lens. And each person through the system basically is touching a different part. And what we said, first of all, is

Let’s clear that up and let’s define that. So point number one is we need to say what’s in there. And that’s essentially these interconnected frameworks that say, here’s who customers are. Here’s what a brand is. Here’s what value looks like. Here’s what a customer journey is. These are all frameworks that have existed. For goodness sake, John, you invented some of the classic ones that have been a big proponent of putting them all together. What we did was simply codify that. So step one is to say, these are the frameworks.

And then step two is to, within each of those documents, define them with precision. So we think that’s what gives you the high definition. It’s more pixels, but it’s also more colors. So it’s more vibrant.

John Jantsch (01:52.762)

So as I listened to you explain that, mean that 20 years ago, I would have said that’s the definition of marketing strategy. So, so, so how have we changed? you know, is it really just technology has changed how we’re able to view that?

Keith Lauver (01:59.82)

Yeah, right.

Keith Lauver (02:09.208)

I think there were proponents of this idea 20 years ago, like yourself, there were practitioners of it 20 years ago who said, yes, we need to do this. But what’s happening in this moment is now it can become even more accessible and even more defined. And so at least speaking for myself, I didn’t even understand the importance of all of these different frameworks and title about a decade ago. And keeping all of them in my mind,

while I was doing work on behalf of a client, even as I was starting to get training in them, even as I began to apply them, it’s just an extraordinarily heavy lift. I’m a limited human, right? And so one of the things that’s radically changed this is AI’s ability to come alongside and help us keep all of those frameworks in mind at all times and help us define this at a much higher degree of precision than what we could have done at least without teams of people and months of time.

John Jantsch (03:07.646)

So it’s really easy. lot of people are doing this today to lump a lot of these AI tools together. know, chat GPT, I like it better than Claude, but they do the same thing. You know, that, that kind of conversation you’re hearing all the time right now, or worse in my mind, the 50 AI tools that every agency needs to use. How do you, when somebody, when you start explaining Ella as an AI tool to somebody, how do you.

get out of that characterization of, it’s just another chat GPT. I know you’ve talked about it as marketing team in a box or, you know, a complete marketing system, a team member. mean, what, what, how do you differentiate, you know, how, how dramatically different Ella is than say the blank screen of chat GPT.

Keith Lauver (03:54.412)

Yeah.

Well, let’s first start with what our objective was when we designed Ella. Most AI tools have an objective of trying to automate. And we said automation just produces more, and more is often more noise, more junk. And we don’t think the world needs more. We started with an objective of producing better. We said, let’s build a tool that augments, that doesn’t automate.

So the first point is we want to honor and elevate those that are doing this work, whether they’re a career marketer or somebody on a marketing team at a business, we want to help them do better work, not just more stuff. And that really provides kind of a fundamental difference, Within, yeah, go ahead. Well, I should say within the world of more, there are things that are also, you know, chat GPT, because it doesn’t have any context about marketing, it’s just trying to take

John Jantsch (04:38.632)

And now I’ve also, okay, good enough, go ahead and finish that.

Keith Lauver (04:52.002)

the center point, it’s the average of everything. So the biggest design flaw, know, after you recognize, gosh, this thing’s just trying to produce more, now it’s going to produce more average stuff. And we think that’s really where the big opportunity is. So we came in and said, you deserve to be exceptional, not average. We came in and tuned an AI system to the craft of marketing. We trained it on these specific frameworks and the business rules that supported it.

And then we let marketers actually teach Ella about each individual brand with thousands of pages of instructions for goodness sake, so that the work product that gets out of there really does let people be different and better and shine.

John Jantsch (05:37.0)

put you on the spot a little bit. Do you, do you, there a real world, kind of use case that you like to submit as here’s what they did and you know, here’s how much better life is for them.

Keith Lauver (05:44.45)

Yeah.

I love telling this story of one of my favorite brands that I first encountered as a customer. It’s a company called Red Ox and they make these beautiful bags in Montana, handmade here. They’re durable. Former military parachute rigger got the idea for this some 30 years ago and he’s been making this high quality product. His brand had languished for the last decade. Sales had been flat for much of that time. It never really broken through a barrier.

And he signed up for Ella. Ella and a chief marketing officer of Fractional CMO came in and together looked at his entire data, looked at his website, helped him think about his business differently, defined this out in high definition. kind of the punchline is rewrote his entire copy, rebuilt all of his brand assets, rewrote his emails, his social posts. And now we’re getting about 20 % growth.

on the business. Every visitor that’s coming to that landing page is converting at a 40 % greater rate. Shopping cart value is significantly higher. This wouldn’t have happened if we know it because for 10 years he’d been stuck if it hadn’t been for Ella. So it works.

John Jantsch (07:03.506)

Yeah. And I love that too, for a lot of reasons. First off, it’s not a startup. I mean, this is somebody that’s been around. And I think that in some ways having those assets, you know, allows you to analyze those assets and analyze sales and analyze customer data. But the other thing I like about it is, you know, I’ve taken a look at, you shared that with me before and I’ve taken a look at their website. There’s not cheap. I mean, that’s a premium product, you know, premium brand. And sometimes those are harder to sell.

from a website without like that perfect messaging, aren’t they?

Keith Lauver (07:37.716)

Absolutely true. We’ve got to gather attention or grab that attention and then we’ve got to convert that into action. And those are two different things. know, Google can get us in front of somebody if we’re willing to pay the right amount of money, but ultimately people understanding why am going to pay more for this bag and how is this brand going to show up? Frankly, I think what had happened in a way is their company had almost become like a chat GPT.

They had been the average of everything. They took all their ideas over the last 20 years and were just blending them into this muted gray brand that wasn’t engaging. And so this reactivated, re-energized, and has now set them on a totally different path.

John Jantsch (08:20.616)

So as you know, have said, I don’t know, I’ve lost track. I’m going to go with 1,274 times. I have said, strategy before tactics, you know, trying to explain the idea that you don’t just go out and start doing stuff, you know, without like, who are we doing it for? What do we want them to believe about us? You know, all those things. so we have my entire body of work or life’s work has been about helping people understand strategy. with the shifts going on in AI, I find myself saying,

Keith Lauver (08:27.95)

Thank

John Jantsch (08:50.386)

Same idea, but now people are just grabbing the technology tools as tactics. so strategy before technology, certainly as something that, that is an evolution, I guess, of that same idea, with that in mind. and I don’t know that you’ve announced this to a whole lot of people, but duct tape marketing and atomic elevator Ella, have formed a partnership to, to be kind of that one to punch of.

No matter what this tool is, if it’s not developed strategically, it’s bound or it’s likely, I should say, to fail. So you want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on the collaboration between Ella’s capabilities and the Duct Tape marketing community.

Keith Lauver (09:33.196)

Yeah, I mean, first, I could not be more excited about the fact that we can take this body of work, this OG status, as my teenage kid would probably call it, that you hold in the world of kind of marketing operating systems. That could be, and we could ask Gala for the very latest rendition of that. But you really define system. You really taught.

John Jantsch (09:46.546)

No, I’m sure he’d probably tell you OG is so old school. Nobody says that anymore,

Keith Lauver (10:01.342)

so many generations of marketers how to actually do this at a higher level. And now we can leverage and really supercharge Ella with that knowledge in there. So first of all, thank you. We cannot be more excited to take your knowledge and add that to the corpus in here so that Ella can continue to set people apart.

John Jantsch (10:21.236)

Well, our initial conversations, you know, with the market out there, there’s a lot of hunger for this idea because there’s definitely a lot of people hyping AI tools as the savior and, you know, fire your whole team and, and just run your business with this. I do, you know, my MO has always been, you know, is, it practical? How can it actually help me do what I was already doing better? And so, you know, for us, I think that the time has really come that

You know, this idea of, of, of bringing a team member, think, I think every business in, I don’t know, a year or two years is going to, to, to really mainstream this idea of AI team members. It’s going to be a part of how the world works and how we function today. So we’re obviously very excited to bring a very practical solution. That’s word I always love to use, you know, to people that, cuts through the hype and isn’t based on, you know,

science fiction is just based on where the world is really going and how companies can actually get the right message out, which allows them to do more good in the world. Quite frankly, that’s the way I’ve always felt about helping small businesses is that’s the backbone of the world. And if this is a way that we can bring a platform that makes sense in a framework that still allows us as marketers to

do what we’ve always fundamentally done for good in the world, then we’re obviously very excited about it as well.

Keith Lauver (11:53.006)

I love the fact that we share that mission and as I think about what you just described there, you strategy first There’s a story that comes to my mind about five years ago There was a business that I had done a full strategy workup for I thought through all those things that you taught about the importance of getting this clear and defined and Last year I called that CEO and said how’s it going? Are you using that that we put together?

And he said, oh, to be honest, I forgot you even had it. And so I think that gap, right, between strategy and execution, between knowing and doing, is still large for many organizations. And one of the things that I’m most excited about in this partnership is with your knowledge in there, we can build the very best strategic framework, and we can actually support the tactical planning and execution, the downstream work. When you ask Ella to write

John Jantsch (12:23.796)

I

John Jantsch (12:27.593)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (12:50.49)

a script for a podcast or to write a page for a landing page or to craft a social media strategy. She’s going to do that always and consistently aligned with that strategy that duct tape taught us is so important.

John Jantsch (13:04.945)

Yeah. One of the things that we’re already seeing, I think it’s going to be a selling point, quite frankly, for folks is that this is, we develop strategy same way for a lot of times. And we’ve always had kind of a teaching mentality about it. So we’re trying to teach the owners and their teams about marketing strategy as much as just develop it for them. And I’m very excited because I think this tool will be…

Keith Lauver (13:06.062)

Thank

John Jantsch (13:30.408)

like installing a very trained team member in the organization that’s actually going to up level, whoever’s there today, as well. I think that, that from a business owner standpoint, they’re not just getting a technology or a software, they’re actually getting training, for their entire team. And that, that’s really a, an aspect that, you know, one, one of the challenges with most business owners is they really, they hire some marketers, but they don’t really know.

Keith Lauver (13:33.517)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:59.484)

what to tell them to do, how to do it necessarily. So they’re kind of left to their own devices. I think this gives, guardrails is the wrong term. It’s really more, this gives them a very informed advisor that’s going to help them do their job.

Keith Lauver (14:14.318)

You know, we tried to take the brains of 100 of the very best marketers that we knew and that wanted to build the same system, get those mapped in there so that anybody could at a moment’s notice and in an unlimited way, tap in and ask them, how should I think about SEO in today’s zero click world? How can I think about creating a message that breaks through in today’s tariff heavy environment?

John Jantsch (14:34.377)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (14:40.706)

those kind of things. And I love the way you just described that. We had an agency that shared back with us the fact that their very favorite feature in Ella is actually nothing that we promote, but it’s what you just identified. The fact that we are up-skilling on a daily basis, everybody on their team. And they said their team is doing twice as good of marketing in six months after using Ella than before. And that’s really due to…

the brains and the generosity of others who said, let’s come behind and contribute this knowledge into a system.

John Jantsch (15:12.274)

Yeah. I mean, you think, sad to say, but it’s very, very typical. know, a lot of times marketing is, is an afterthought for a lot of businesses. And so consequently the qualification for hiring their first marketer was age. They were young. They understand all this social media stuff. And so, you know, to be able to actually now equip them, just as you said, with basically.

Keith Lauver (15:25.397)

Yes, that’s right.

John Jantsch (15:35.538)

the brains without having to read all the books, you know, all of these frameworks, you know, is an amazing, you know, training tool. again, I know that we are going to certainly position it very much as that because I, again, I think there is a real temptation for it to get lumped in as software. And I think it’s so much more.

Keith Lauver (15:56.824)

You know, I love the implication of that in two respects. One is the fact that we have experienced marketers and I don’t want this message to be misunderstood out there. Experienced marketers can actually operate so much better if they can quickly tap into the brains of these other folks that are inside Ella, largely because they know the question to ask. And that’s where wisdom and experience comes from.

The rookie, if you will, that person that’s new in his or her career may not have done marketing before, can also quickly get in and begin to deliver value. So there’s actually benefit to both the very experienced and the very new. The people to whom we’ll never accrue benefits for are those that sit on the sideline and are afraid. And we also talk to those. This is disruptive.

John Jantsch (16:41.832)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s interesting. mean, I, I use it every day, some form of tool and, know, I, but I think of it more as a thought partner. just as you, you know, kind of it’s about the questions and it’s about challenging it to say, well, why is that a good answer? You know, as opposed to, as opposed to say, write me this thing. Yeah. No. So we’ve been talking about practical today. but as you know, this landscape is changing dramatically.

Keith Lauver (17:03.362)

Yes. Love that.

John Jantsch (17:11.716)

where do you see AI tools like LL evolving to support marketers and businesses, you know, a year from now? I don’t know. I’m afraid to look past that.

Keith Lauver (17:20.686)

Yeah, no, I know it’s so hard to predict what is happening, but I can tell you that the things that we’re working on on our roadmap are things like continuously training Ella to do more and better things. And so an example would be as tactics change on social media in 2025 or tactics change in SEO because of AI and what’s happening with zero click, there are implications and new training and system and

essentially frameworks that we can be building into Ella. So the first point is we want Ella to continue to be smarter. But the second thing is I think we’re going to see a lot more and we’re committed to investing in the integration of these tools. Ella also can’t exist as a silo. Ella is part of a system, but maybe a business uses HubSpot or maybe they use MailChimp. Either way, they still need to get emails out there. So we see connectivity. The final thing I’ll mention is sales is also connected.

John Jantsch (17:56.956)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:06.014)

Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Lauver (18:20.056)

to this world of marketing, right? It’s a gray area where that line is. And as we start to think about that.

John Jantsch (18:21.81)

Yeah. Well, in a correct scenario, that’s true. It’s often not the reality, but yes.

Keith Lauver (18:28.45)

Yeah, okay. Well, fair enough. So what we want to do is try to find ways to support both sales and marketing to automate the attention gathering to maybe support salespeople. But essentially you’ll see more from Ella in terms of sales enablement and sales support as well coming forward.

John Jantsch (18:49.414)

Awesome. Awesome. Beautiful. Well, you know, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of fun doing is, taking sales, transcripts, recording, sales calls. and, really using that, to help with messaging to certainly to help with training, you know, but also it’s like, here, here’s, you know, out of 40 sales calls, you know, 23 people mentioned these three things. Maybe we ought to be talking about those more. And so I, I definitely see a world where, you know, that sales enablement,

Keith Lauver (19:11.362)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:18.241)

can really be impacted by AI tools.

Keith Lauver (19:21.144)

for sure and being able to then like I do take every call that I have with somebody put it into Ella and have Ella recast back the value that she heard and not just have the knowledge of what that problem was but talk about how she solves that problem for somebody. Boy, that’s given me a lot of scale so I can have two or three more calls and make sure I do my follow-up every day as well.

John Jantsch (19:42.802)

Yeah, great. Great for training that next person that needs to come along and do business development as well. Yeah. Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast again. We will have, you can see this as being an ongoing conversation with our partnership and listeners out there. will definitely have more information about ways that.

Keith Lauver (19:47.086)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (19:54.786)

Gosh.

John Jantsch (20:08.914)

that we can expose you to, this, whether you’re an agency that wants this for your clients, or if you’re a business owner out there saying an AI team member training with duct tape marketing strategy and this, this robust tool sounds like the way of the future for my business marketing. We’d love to talk with you as well. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you, Keith?

Keith Lauver (20:33.87)

For sure. Just please visit www.atomegelevator.com and we have free trials that are available. Mention that you found us on this podcast and we’ll also be sure that you have first access to this duct tape marketing edition that we could not be more excited about. So John, thanks for leading the way. Thanks for partnering with us to make marketing better and faster and more impactful for these amazing businesses that we get the privilege of serving out there.

John Jantsch (21:01.62)

Well, appreciate you spending some time and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road again.

Keith Lauver (21:07.114)

Excellent. Look forward to it. Take care.