For over two decades now, many marketers have built their careers on mastering Google and paid search. What if the playbook you spent your entire career perfecting is about to become obsolete?
Agility requires not just adapting to new technologies, but a willingness to fundamentally question and reimagine the foundational channels you’ve built your business on. It demands that we look beyond incremental improvements and prepare for architectural shifts in customer behavior.
For years, the search landscape has been relatively stable, but generative AI is rewriting the rules of how consumers find information and how brands can connect with them at the moment of intent. Today, we’re going to explore what this means for the future of advertising, the new commercial opportunities emerging, and how brands can find customers on new surfaces beyond the traditional search engine results page.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, John Nitti, Global Chief Business Officer at adMarketplace.
About John Nitti
John Nitti is a versatile and proactive change agent with 25+ years of experience working in the technology, telecom, financial services, media, sports, and entertainment industries. With a specialization in customer-centric marketing, asset monetization and business development strategies, he excels in boosting growth and enhancing brand equity. John is known for pioneering transformative marketing and tech models, driving competitive advantages, revenue growth, and organizational efficiency. His impressive track record includes managing relationships with top-tier executives in sports, entertainment, and technology sectors, including NFL, NBA, and NHL commissioners, as well as the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company, Amazon, and Live Nation.
Nitti has joined adMarketplace leadership team as their Global Chief Business Officer and recently pent time at xAi/ X Corp as their Global Head of Revenue Operations and Ad Innovation for the X media platform. In these roles, he has/will developed, drive and executed a comprehensive commercial and advertising innovation strategy to deliver business outcomes. Focusing on go-to-market strategy and monetization for ad/ search monitization, programmatic, data licensing , Ai implementation and new product offerings.
John Nitti on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnitti/
Resources
adMarketplace: https://www.admarketplace.com/
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Transcript
[Greg Kihlstrom]: For over two decades now, many marketers have built their careers on mastering SEO on Google and paid search. But what if the playbook you spent your entire career perfecting is about to become obsolete. Agility requires not just adapting to new technologies, but a willingness to fundamentally question and reimagine the foundational channels you’ve built your business on. It demands that we look beyond incremental improvements and prepare for architectural shifts in customer behavior. For years, the search landscape has been relatively stable, but generative AI is rewriting the rules of how consumers find information and how brands can connect with them at the moment of intent. Today we’re going to explore what this means for the future of advertising, the new commercial opportunities emerging, and how brands can find customers on new surfaces beyond the traditional search engine results page.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome John Nitti, Global Chief Business Officer at adMarketplace. John, welcome to the show.
[John Nitti]: Thanks Greg. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Absolutely. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this. Definitely a topic top of mind for many, many brands and many, many people within those brands. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at adMarketplace?
[John Nitti]: Yeah, sure. Thank you, thank you. Uh so I’ve, uh Global Chief Business Officer here at adMarketplace. Uh started at the beginning of the year, so I’m on week five. Uh overall.
Overseeing the uh demand side of our business and and and that approach to clients and agencies, supply side and working with our publishing partners to help uh monetize many of those services that you had mentioned in your intro, and then marketing as well as how we’re talking overall to our customers, marketplace and and and how we can keep uh keep those folks educated on the ever evolving uh consumer journey, right? And that that’s, yeah, that’s the exciting part of why I came to adMarketplace. Uh before that I was at X, uh you know, X or for Twitter uh for for 10 months and before that, yeah, Verizon for 10 years on the client side, uh and then, yeah, I won’t go through my my laundry list of LinkedIn or or or my my resume, but many agency and and and client side opportunities uh as well as publisher opportunities as well throughout my career.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Great, great. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in and and start with the the big picture here from the, from the strategic lens. How is generative AI search uh not just an evolution of what’s been before, but really more a fundamental re-architecture of how consumers discover products and services and what what are you seeing as the biggest uh strategic blind spot for brands right now?
[John Nitti]: I think a lot of things with AI have accelerated um accelerated things that were already sort of in motion, right? And so distributed intent um had already started to happen, right? It just now with AI that has accelerated the need to address it. The same way that, yeah, data uh data hierarchy and and did, you know, did data hygiene and structured data was always a need within organizations, but until AI and that that need to have structured data in order to utilize AI, that advanced a lot of things that were being like being worked on or would have been been put off for another year because things worked well enough, right? And so I think AI AI chat and LLM entering into the intent area, right? In which had historically been you search engine results driven, um is only an acceleration of that, right? But we started seeing that distribution of intent, yeah, even years in advance, right? If you think about things like buy now pay laters or you Fintech apps that had started as payments that became shopping experiences, right? That inherently have intent and search built into them. The consumer itself has already started to be distributed in that fashion across multiple platforms and I think AI has only accelerated that yet again further.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Yeah. And so you’ve pointed to competitive remedies as a, as a key factor here, which might feel abstract to marketers that are and have been traditionally focused on performance and performance marketing. Can you maybe uh explain that a little bit and explain how regulatory changes are creating a strategic opening for brands to diversify their search spend away from those traditional wall gardens.
[John Nitti]: I think it’s a couple of different things, right? So the regulatory um and specifically Google, right? People have felt locked in, right? On on what they had to do. Now there’s an openness, right? Starting on February 3rd, there’s an openness of you’re not locked in uh to that, right? And so that only will help stoke, I think further change and evolution and that’s a good thing. I think the the evolution again, like I had mentioned earlier of what the consumer has already shifted to. Yeah. And then also if you think about just even the marketplace approach of things that have started to become uh blurred together, right? To your point, yeah, search SEO and SEM had been separate and then you need to look at them, you know, obviously you know, together, right? Uh social had been a separate strategy, programmatic a separate strategy. All of those things I think are starting to come together, right? And have connected tissue and you need to look at it in one whole aspect of performance marketing, right? And so I think that again, that is all evolving and more quickly in in a quicker you know, pace than than had been expected, but I think it’s a good thing, right? It enables choice and again, the consumer is always gonna move first, right? I in the beginning of my career as an American Express where uh the CMO at that point in time, John Hayes drilled into me customer centric marketing and be where the customer is, right? And I think that’s that’s an important part of as any performance marketer. If you want to convert and and capitalize on tent, you need to be in those different environments and where the consumer is signaling that intent.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Yeah. Well, and and to that end, let’s talk a little bit more about those, you know, emerging surfaces. I know you touched on this a little bit earlier, but you know, everything from the buy now pay later app or other, you know, a lot of when marketers hear search, they think of the traditional search bar and what we’ve been doing again for for a few decades now and and things like that. But you know, what what are some examples uh to kinda build on on what you’ve already shared that marketers should really be keeping in mind to kinda expand the definition of search?
[John Nitti]: Yeah, no, definitely. I I think marketers need to keep in mind the the totality of the ecosystem too, right? I think a lot of marketers are very concerned from an AI standpoint, which they should be with more of geo, right? Like like what do I need to do to make sure that I’m creating the right content, that I’m allowing for discovery, that I’m indexing properly within all these LLM’s, which is part of it, right? But let’s not ignore again how what that user journey is, right? And how do you make sure that you take as much friction out of that process as possible? If you go into a lot of those journeys currently, they’re broken lengths or there’s not an easy way. You may get the result, but you may not be easily able to get to where you want to go to make a purchase. Even though you’re signaling, I want to make that purchase, what is the best price or where can I buy? I’m not actually getting there, right? You talk about intent and low low hanging fruit of a conversion, right? And so that that’s what we’re focused on is, yes, worry about geo and how you’re preparing yourself, but don’t forget about how you’re taking friction out of that user experience, right? And so we launched um back in October with uh Opera.
We’re not influencing, you know, the search result or the result from the the LLM, but if you hover over, we’ll give you a link to then go purchase and even just this week we’ve launched it’ll show you a picture of the product, give you the price point and let you know exactly where you’re going from a transparency and trust standpoint, right? And that’s just meant to enable it and so and make the user experience better, but then help help people monetize, right? Help there is the monetization flow for both the client and the publisher uh that you need to do in a transparent way, you need to do it in a in a in a responsible way and I think, you know, looking at how you enable and improve that experience and not just try to make it a a sponsored like or something that they feel is not not genuine. So we’re not never gonna influence the actual LLM result, right? That needs to be true, right? And you need to trust that, but you should make it easier uh to both, you know, as the user navigate and then for the publisher and or retailer to convert that that intent, right? And that’s that’s the journey that we’re on. Similarly within the the buy now pay laters that have evolved and become, yeah, shopping apps, right? If you go into those experiences that was first way for you to finance or a way for you to utilize a a credit card or even if you think about, you know, the evolution of where PayPal and Venmo from a peer to peer payment perspective has gone, those have become marketplaces of their own, right? And so how do you capitalize on that if you were a retailer, right? How do you capitalize that if you’re a partner? And you know, we’re working with those folks to also make those experiences better and to get people to that success event in a quicker um and more efficient fashion.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: So for those AI-driven search experiences, what does that look like from that from the advertiser end? I mean, for those that are used to bidding on keywords and, you know, they they know Google Ads inside and out and and stuff like that. These are conversational experiences, these are curated experiences. What what’s different? I guess what’s the same and and what’s different from the advertiser’s perspective?
[John Nitti]: So, from from an adMarketplace standpoint, we’re trying to keep it to similar success metrics, right? Our our overall success metric for for our clients is driving ROAS, right? Yeah. And ultimately buy a cost per click, right? And so that’s very much search like and very much familiar, right? however, to your point, what what is your keyword strategy, right? How do you look at category? How do you look at vertical? You to your point, you need to open it up a little bit more and and look at things a bit differently, right? And and and understand what conversations you want to be a part of and where you want to send them from a a product uh a product perspective at that point versus sending them to a general landing experience, right? You want to be able to take that as much as intent and semantics as possible and have that be what you’re serving up in that those instances. And so our technology uh is doing that and making it more relevant, right? Driving relevancy by scoring, but it does, it it takes the the tactics from a CPP a CPC perspective that you’ve been used to, but you do need to expand and look at a different, you know, keyword and and category strategy to make sure that you’re capturing the full intent, right? You can start with the same exact. You have us your your your Google list, right? And and yeah, we can execute the against that, but you may not be capturing the the full extent of the uh intent and opportunity that’s out there.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: To follow onto the, the ROAS comment, so when we talk about measurement here, I mean attribution, right? This is uh these are more surfaces, these are, you know, as as marketers love to have yet another place to try to attribute from, how does what does this look like from a, from an attribution standpoint and and yeah, I mean, are are marketers should they still be thinking about incrementality and all of all of those things that they’re currently doing or are there other or additional ways of thinking?
[John Nitti]: I think we many conversations now around incrementality, right? Because everybody’s trying to prove it out. And I think it in in in a in a good way, right? You know, largely search has been last touch, right? Yeah. you know, for the for the most part. And so or last click I should say. and you know, that attribution is only a partial view of what you’re really contributing to the conversion or the success event. And so as you start to look at um incrementality, you’ll get a up for a broader view, right? Of like, all right, perhaps I’m, you know, adMarketplace is not just contributing to my my digital uh sales, but it’s also having an impact to in store, right? When you when you start to do true incrementality testing and know what you have on, what you have off, uh it should help us get to better you know, attribution overall. And so that that’s exciting and and it’s it’s a big part of a lot of the conversations because again, this all comes down to is from a marketer perspective is you’re fighting for attention, right? You’re fighting to you’re fighting to get in front of in a bigger, fragmented, more competitive place, right? Where in in traditional, you know, video format types and things like that, I may not be watching ads anymore, right? And so and then when I go into other experiences, I’m being bombarded via multiple different angles. And so that the more that A, you know, we we pride ourselves on our publisher relationships to have either exclusive or preferred type of placements that you can’t just buy everywhere else, right? Because we don’t wanna be commoditized into an ad network like model, right? Yeah. and then B, that you can can break through and really identify the true uh intent, right? And then those moments and what are those signals that somebody’s sending of of a conversion, right? And how do you inform that eventually with data, right? If if a if a customer um or a client is gonna bring us data and say, well, here are the signals that that we see via the research that we’ve done that identify somebody that’s going to convert at a higher level, how do we also start to take that into account, um as we work with our partners?
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Do you think the because of the conversational nature of of AI-based search, is there it would seem like there’s just richer intent data. I mean, we’re, you know, consumers are having conversations, even even the most detailed search query in Google is not the same as a, you know, 10-minute conversation with, you know, ChatGPT or or whatever.
[John Nitti]: Well, and you can string several query points together, right? Into into one, right? And and that’s to your point, that’s that’s a lot of the work when you get into semantic modeling and and the work that we’re doing to ensure the right match as well, right? Because you don’t wanna mismatch from from that perspective. And so that’s extremely important and why we’ve been in in beta for so long or sorry, alpha for so long and and are gonna be moving to beta is to get that right because you don’t wanna you don’t wanna lose you know, that that trust and that efficacy. but it’s definitely something that, you know, is is you need to again, broaden from where you had been on here are the specific terms that convert to there are other steps within this process that are happening in the same query string now that you need to also be aware of, right? And and how and how you’re gonna render what’s gonna show up.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: So taking this forward, you know, a year or two even, what are what skills or or even team structures, how does this change? I mean, I would imagine some things may not change, but, you know, what what does change about marketing teams to be able to compete in this new search paradigm?
[John Nitti]: Look, I I I think I mentioned or hinted at it a little bit earlier. There I think there’s gonna be, you know, an evolution, right? Of an emerging of of disciplines, right? So things that had been siloed and disciplined departments of the past, right? Of how you looked at SEO, SEM, social, programmatic, right? And even direct buys, yeah, will start to merge more together, right? And and you’ll have more you should have more audience and segmentation that is pulled throughout, right? And knowing, yeah, when I when I was at uh when I was at Verizon, my my one of my biggest pain points was telling an existing customer to switch, right? Yeah. That should never happen. Right. Right, right. Simplistic level, right? But it still happens in a lot for a lot of marketers, right? And so I I think there’s just gonna be a a upskilling of understanding what is the impact, right? To your point, of AI and and and the different ways that a consumer is able to interact and show intent and where they are. So then you need to be upskilling, up-training that from that perspective, but then emerging of things that had been sitting separate before was what are the connective tissues and how do those teams come together, right? Because that’s all performance driven, right? And so instead of having different performance channels competing against each other, I think you’re gonna see that merge together, overall. Yeah. So if you were to make a prediction about the relationship or maybe changing relationship between brands, consumers and AI search that will become mainstream soon enough, you know, what would it be?
Look, I think that everyone should be testing, right? And and that that that’s what every your your common theme that you hear back from folks when you mention anything AI related is that it’s super early or whatever, but everybody everybody should be testing because you need to know where where it can improve or where maybe the the issues, right? You need to expose those things earlier on. And so I think that’s, you know, if from a prediction of 2026 is that everybody should be testing and preparing, right? And getting yourself prepared because it it is it’s coming. But I think the and the other thing that is the themes I would say from a prediction standpoint is that and shouldn’t be a surprise, but trust, transparency and ethics, right? Is also going to be large, right? I think there’s a huge in all parts of AI, a huge consumer distrust in the back of the minds of like, is this real or is this AI, right? Those are two different things inherently versus how is AI and how are these tools helping me do something more quickly, helping me get to where I want to get to more more quickly and helping me sort and and rank things in a more efficient way that help me get to that that end that end success event, but in a in a trustworthy and transparent way where I’m not being fooled or mistaken, right? And I and I hope we learn as an industry, you know, if you think about the past, right? Content farms, not 100% transparency or trust. Right, right. That that’s what drove a lot of results, right? And so I hope we don’t we learn from sort of, you know, past you know, past faults that we’ve made with the the consumer overall and really focus on how you can actually drive relevance and and be be useful because that, yeah, all businesses win, right? If if it if it’s useful and you’re gonna put at me at an earlier point in time and make it easier for me, you know, all day long, right? We’re gonna we’re gonna point.
[Greg Kihlstrom]: Yeah, love it. Well, John, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[John Nitti]: Yeah, no, great, great question. And I I always joke. I have a younger brother that’s two years younger than me and he is a a an engineer, right? That that and a certified engineer that has to constantly get um re-certified, right? And I I always use that as an example of, hey, he’s way smarter than me. but but just that you you you need to continually push yourself to learn, right? And you need to be comfortable, be uncomfortable because change is the only consistent. And so if you’re not educated in these areas, right? If you don’t know what what are the nuances and and again, really get into, like I said, you need to be testing, right? Because you need to understand what will work and what won’t work, right? Or how I need to be how I better need to structure what I’m doing to be prepared for, you know, what AI is gonna bring even if I’m not gonna execute it in in 2026. And so, you know, I I continually try to push myself to be uncomfortable, right? To be in those conversations and to try different things that are, you know, may not be in in my my comfort zone, right? you you have subject matter for a reason, but you need to continually do, like I said, be re-certified uh in these areas as the consumer changes and as technology changes and as the opportunities change, right? And so I think that’s, you know, and and pushing into these new areas of of testing and both both for me on the partner side, right? What different publishers and and platforms should we be working with that maybe didn’t exist six months ago, but we should be working with now. And then on the on the customer side is like how how am I helping them solve for their solutions and challenges, right? And how do we need to evolve what our product offering is to basically meet those needs, right? To to your earlier point of it’s the evolution of all these things that had been separated that may now be triangulating together. How do you change what that is to, you know, help solve for your your clients uh in the future?
