In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Jillian White, one of the sharpest ad ops minds in media, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: premium inventory plus personalization. Jillian's team stopped treating cheap CPMs and big-name premium partnerships as the two extremes and found a middle ground: direct deals across multiple partnerships that let them target custom personas, choose the inventory they run on, and actually measure what works. The payoff is cost-efficiency metrics down about 40%. The second lever is a DCO. Instead of waiting six months to produce a video asset, their dynamic content optimization tool shows them which imagery and CTAs a persona engages with, how long it takes someone to convert, and lets them adjust creative in a few weeks. Premium placement earns brand association and recall. DCO layers on personalization at scale, messaging shaped by the behaviors a user has shown, not a guess about who they are.

Cooling off: looking at channels in silos, and using CPM as your efficiency metric. When you judge Google against Meta against the open internet, one channel at a time, you miss how they work together to get someone to convert, and search ends up taking credit for everything upstream. And CPM is a vanity number. Jillian's team built pixels that optimize for cost per site engagement instead, finding more users who spend real time on site and convert down the line. The shift is from efficiency to effectiveness, from a cheap impression to a measurable one that ties back to ROAS.

To close, Jillian shares what's making her smarter lately: a journal called Dig Deeper that asks her each night what she could have done better and where she's challenged. A daily mirror that makes the hard questions a habit.

In this episode:

- Why premium inventory plus personalization beats chasing the cheapest CPM

- How a direct-deal middle ground cut cost efficiency metrics by 40%

- Using DCO to test imagery and CTAs and refresh creative in weeks, not months

- What you miss when you judge Google, Meta, and the open internet in silos

- Why cost per site engagement is a better north star than CPM

- The shift from efficiency metrics to effectiveness and return on ad spend

About the guest: Jillian White has spent 14 years in media for companies including Subway, Panasonic, Mountain America, and Costa Vida. She has worked across traditional and digital channels for both D2C and B2B, handling everything from implementation to optimization and managing DCO operations across multiple internal teams. She is one of the top ad ops experts in the field.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Greg Edwards, Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: AI-accelerated content and outbound... done with a point of view. Greg's team used to spend months crafting "evergreen" pieces with subject-matter experts, then stretch them for years. Now AI gets them 70% of the way there, and the SME adds the angle only they can. Instead of a single master guide, they ship content tailored to the buyer's exact stage in the funnel. The result: higher-quality MQLs, better conversion to SQLs, and more closed-won. On the outbound side, AI-based SDR tooling scrapes for fit, reads LinkedIn activity, and writes personalized messages that "look honestly more human" than the marketing-speak of old.

The catch Greg keeps coming back to: AI is the average. "If we don't have a specific point of view as a service company, then we are the average of everyone else out there. We're not actually providing any value." The job now is to move at the pace AI makes possible while staying above-average and authentic — avoiding the AI slop that makes every brand sound the same.

Cooling off: traditional SEO and the mass email. Greg has watched organic search traffic fall as AI results eat the clicks, with referral traffic from AI engines rising to fill the gap. His advice for marketers who built a career on Google: restructure your back-end content for AI optimization, and lean harder into conversion rate optimization.

To close, Greg shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: prepping for a two-week family vacation, and finishing an AI-for-marketing course.

In this episode:

• Why AI gets you ~70% of the content, and why your point of view has to do the rest
• How "timely and specific" beats "evergreen" — and lifts MQL-to-closed-won
• Using AI SDR tooling for personalized outbound that reads as human
• What AI Overviews and zero-click search are doing to organic traffic
• Why conversion rate optimization is the new home for SEO talent
• Why the mass email blast is dying and what replaces it

About the guest: Greg Edwards is Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint. He spent 15+ years in digital marketing, cutting his teeth at Orange Soda, then Inside Out Development, is master-certified in account-based marketing, and holds an MBA from UVU. Early in his career, he spent time in Shanghai and speaks Mandarin.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Bryan Phelps, founder and CEO of Big Leap, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in modern marketing.

Heating up: audience-first, not channel-first. Bryan makes the case for what some call "search everywhere optimization" — the idea that being found is no longer about ranking on Google, but about showing up everywhere your ideal customer already spends time. For some brands, that's Pinterest and Reddit more than Google. As Bryan puts it, the goal is to "contribute to those communities versus try to take from those communities."

Cooling off: single-channel attribution. The old model, where your brand is found on search, click, convert, "rarely happens anymore." Bryan walks through why zero-click behavior and AI-mode search results are blurring the clean line between spend and outcome: a conversion that looks like paid search might actually have started in an AI chat. His fix is to focus on the cause and effect of marketing. "We almost need to go back a little farther now," he says, "to the cause and effect, the correlations, the incrementality testing."

The throughline: marketers who look at channels in silos keep making the same mistake. "When you cut that spend because it's not directly performing, it removes performance elsewhere." The teams winning right now are the ones open-minded enough to see how brand advertising lifts branded search, how branded search lifts paid search, and how all pieces move together.

The conversation also gets into what AI means for marketing careers, like why deep single-channel specialists may need to go broader, and why the real skill is increasingly about pulling the whole mix together.

To close, Bryan shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: getting off LinkedIn, out of the AI hype cycle, and onto a Utah golf course. "It's easy to feel like everyone else has it figured out and you're behind," he says. "That's not always the case."

In this episode:

• Why "SEO" has become "search everywhere optimization"
• How to find your audience beyond Google, Meta, and the usual channels
• What zero-click search and AI overviews are doing to attribution
• Why incrementality testing is making a comeback — and why your CFO belongs in the conversation
• The hidden cost of cutting spend in a single channel
• How AI is reshaping marketing roles and career paths

About the guest: Bryan Phelps is the founder and CEO of Big Leap, a brand-led performance marketing agency he started in 2008. He's grown the company onto the Inc. 5000 and Utah's Best Companies to Work For lists, now scales that playbook across Setfire Creative and Leadgenics, and is a Forbes Agency Council contributor and Utah 40 Under 40 honoree.

🎧 Subscribe to the Advertising Heat Check for more conversations on what's heating up and cooling off in advertising.

Welcome to the Advertising Heat Check, your real-time pulse on what's heating up and cooling off in advertising, coming directly from leading enterprise marketers.

The first episode drops May 6th, 2026, and new episodes will come every Tuesday and Thursday thereafter.

Learn more at advertisingheatcheck.com