Harnessing AI to Super Boost Marketing: Exploring Full Throttle AI

Chris (00:01.52)

Welcome back to another episode of The Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and I am joined today by Frank Paterno who is the VP of Strategic Partnerships at Full Throttle AI. It's a super, super cool company, but I met Frank back at a industry event about a month or so ago and I was like, I love what you guys are doing at AI or at Full Throttle AI and it fits right in line with.

the different niche tech that I try and stay abreast of and knowledgeable. And so first of all, Frank, thank you so much for coming on to do this.

Frank Patierno (00:35.506)

Chris, thanks for having me.

Chris (00:37.328)

So diving into this conversation today, tell me, I feel like we might not, we're not gonna talk about AI all the time or the whole time, but I would be really curious to give us the rundown of what full throttle AI is and who it's relevant for.

Frank Patierno (00:58.13)

Sure, what we do at Full Throttle AI, predominantly a B to C use case. We are a marketing technology. We're going to help folks to know who their website visitors are. And our patent is the ability to resolve website visitors into an addressable household. So you think about the people coming to your website. Unfortunately, it's usually not a very high percentage of people that go forward and make those conversions we want, like fill out the contact me form, et cetera.

Most industries, it's way less than 10%. So where full throttle gives a value is we let you know who those people are that are on your website that are actually interested in your product or service. And then we're able to create that audience and instantly remarket to them through multiple tactics, both online as well as offline. And you're able to measure that audience you just created with what the results are via sales, appointments, demos.

signups, whatever you want your KPIs to be. So it's, we kind of make it fully functional to identify, market and measure that audience.

Chris (02:07.056)

Yeah, I remember when you said this before, I've heard of other companies that do the, you know, they're using the location, services on iPhones or Androids, for example, to identify the address. And then you send postcards or whatever, but was really unique about what you guys are, what you guys are doing is the, like the, like how you're, if I'm understanding correctly, like if I have a smart TV or an Amazon fire TV or other devices in my house,

you can show ads specifically to devices that are also at that address, correct?

Frank Patierno (02:41.81)

No, you're absolutely right. So big differentiator for us is the ability to, you know, not just retarget, we like to say we remarket and we actually immerse the household. That's a phrase we came up with. And with this immersion, we are sending messaging into multiple devices in that household. And a big differentiator for us, Chris, is the fact we don't use third -party cookies, that mobile ad identifier, or that reliance on the IP address.

Chris (03:09.776)

and so the, one of the things that I remember you, we were talking about was, when we're in order to leverage this, you have to create an audience. Right. And so, and that was one of the things that you wanted to talk about. So talk to me about audience creation or how do you define audience and, and then how do you, how do you create one?

Frank Patierno (03:34.834)

And I think as marketers, that's what we're always trying to do. Whether it's you put together a television schedule, you're trying to put it in front of the audience you think is going to be most receptive to your brand. Right? So you say, I need people that are 35 to 54. You go after a certain demographic, or if you do cable, you're going after a certain geography. Same thing with radio, same thing with billboards. You're trying to say who would be the people most interested in us. You're creating that audience in hopes they're going to.

reach out to you in some way. The website, of course, has become everyone's second front door to their office. What we do at Full Throttle is we're going to let you know who those people are that are actually right on the doorstep of that second office that you have. And we're creating an audience of those folks actively shopping for you. And then we're immediately going out and tapping them on the shoulder, the people that are already interested in your product or service to help.

give them more information and pull them through the buyer funnel to overall improve conversion rates. And really what we do a great job of is improving your overall return on ad spend because you spent money and time to touch this audience in the first place to get them interested and bring them to the website. But the fall off rate is incredibly high. You know, it's over 90 % just about every scenario we can think of. So.

What if we stayed in front of those folks a little bit longer and stayed in front of them in a more innovative way to help you get a better return from the dollars you've already invested?

Chris (05:08.912)

Hmm. So the one thing you said there that I think is key is if you're buying full throttle for your business, you need to be spending ad dollars on the front end to drive traffic to your website. I mean, I guess if you're just crushing organic and you have so much organic traffic, maybe you could still do that. But more often than not, businesses are in a place where they're trying to drive more traffic. So they're spending the ad dollars.

and using full throttle increases that return on ad spend.

Frank Patierno (05:41.522)

That's precisely right. However, whatever you do to get people to your website, I like to use this analogy. Let's think of the people on your website as fruit at the top of a juicer. Full throttle is going to help you squeeze more into your cup at the bottom. So you need to get them there in the first place. And then we're going to help you guys to get a better yield from the people that have shown up.

Chris (05:55.632)

Hmm.

Chris (06:03.152)

Got it. So the other thing that I'm really interested to hear you talk about is you said finding partners that benefit mutual clients. So tell me that's obviously your strategic partnership VP. What does that look like or what's your approach to doing that?

Frank Patierno (06:24.754)

So by going to the shows that we've been hitting, this is how you and I met just a couple months ago. We kind of went on tour about 15 months ago is when we first started going to these shows. And we see the same people at each of the shows. So we really made a conscious effort to go around and talk to the vendors while the participants are actually listening to the content that's up on stage. We went around and started talking to each of the vendors and we found out.

We're all at the same show because we're trying to help the same people. And some people do have competitors. Fortunately for us, there's not a ton of competitors in the space. So most of the people we were talking to, they're telling me how they're going to help the same client I'm trying to help out here, but they do something a little bit different. So just the understanding of where they fit in the tech stack and how we can kind of work hand in glove with them, as opposed to being adversarial has been incredibly helpful.

several folks in the past few weeks, I'll call up and tell them, hey, here are four clients I'm working with. This is why I think you're a good fit. They reciprocate for me. And we're helping to create overall better marketing strategies for our mutual clients because they may not have known about either my product or their product, but by us understanding how we all fit together, it is actually helping the end user to be more efficient in their market.

Chris (07:47.28)

Totally, I was gonna say, my view of the direction technology is going is just more and more, what's the word, niche. Everything is becoming very niche. So it's like, if you, regardless of what software you're using today, if I had to bet, every business is going to be using three to five new softwares in the next two years than what they're using right now.

And that doesn't mean that it's going to be more cumbersome or chaotic if they have the right tech stack and it's integrated well and everything's talking to each other. But AI in general is creating the opportunity for software companies to really hone in and solve very niche things. And one of my favorite sayings of late is there was a time where it was like, you need, like just software was big and there was.

you know, the usability and the functionality was top priority. And then we went through this mobile first era of like, okay, now you have an app, but is it mobile first? Does it, you know, there was mobile friendly and then it's like, no, mobile is all we care about. Now I think that the priority is integration first. Like any, any app that I come across, I'm like, all right, what are your integrations? How easy is it to work with your software and what are you allowing me to?

read, edit, write to, trigger events from, how can I update things? That is the secret sauce of the future of tech in my opinion, because anytime that a company is trying to do more than one thing, or worst case, they're trying to be an all -in -one, I just don't think that you're ever going to, I know for a fact you cannot compete with the niche.

companies that are solving something as specific as what full throttle solves. For example,

Frank Patierno (09:43.09)

No, you're totally right in that. It's tough to be an expert in every single facet of marketing. Otherwise, it would be just one marketing company. So I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Chris (09:50.832)

Right. Yeah, and then it expands to the number of things that I've seen with estimating tools and image recognition tools, photo management, estimating project management. There's all these things and I just feel like there's just only going to be more and more technology that's built to solve that specific niche thing that...

wasn't necessary or even capable or possible because in the past you didn't have the ability. Now that softwares are kind of all agreeing on APIs and HTTP requests and things like that. Now we've kind of, it's like someone gave me an analogy that it's kind of like what's happening in the software world is, is that we've all kind of agreed on what the standard outlets are for electricity. And so now you've got all these companies making devices.

that require electricity that I can plug in to do something really cool with electricity that, but if, if every company was just making their own like integration port into electricity, it would be an absolute disaster. Right. But now we're all like, Hey, this is, this is like the standards of apps that we're going to build. So if you want to read or push data in and out, we have web hooks now and things like that, that I just think make a lot of sense.

Frank Patierno (11:13.33)

You're absolutely right in that. And one of the things we have at Full Throttle, at the enterprise level, we have it where you can take the data we're creating for you and pull that audience in through the API, just as you're talking about. You'll have to have someone who can write that and pull it in. But at an enterprise level, it's very, very easy for someone to, if you have an engineering team, that's functionality you'll have.

Chris (11:35.856)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, what else is on your mind as far as the audience creation, full throttle? What is the things that you feel like people listening need to know about?

Frank Patierno (11:53.042)

in general, or just about our company.

Chris (11:55.632)

I'm curious, what's on Frank's mind? Obviously, you can go deeper into full throttle, but also, what is the thing that is either really exciting that you're seeing a lot of these days or however you want to take that?

Frank Patierno (12:10.514)

Well, what I'm really excited about and from going to these shows is the ability to have these partnerships that make a ton of sense and the ability to become kind of that trusted advisor for the people we're already working with. And, you know, the fact that people are very willing to share information and share what they bring for value, I'm finding to be incredibly exhilarating in this space right now. Whereas when we first started 15 months ago,

Nobody really knew who we were and they held everything close to the vest, which is understandable by us being out in front of more and more people at the shows and credit to our management team for allowing us to be there in front of all these other, not just possible prospects, but the vendors themselves. It's opening up doors and then this communication that we're having as far as we're demoing for other companies, they're doing the same thing with our product. The word of mouth, of course, is helping us.

to expand and be more successful. So that's something I'm very appreciative of that's been happening, especially in the past, since the beginning of the year. It's kind of like we have to earn our spread.

Chris (13:20.752)

And that's basically your, would you say what percentage of your marketing or lead gen strategy for full throttle is focused on strategic partnerships with mutually, like with clients serving the mutual customer or software companies or agencies or whatever it is, vendors serving the same clients that you guys have versus doing like direct ad spend or list building and things like that on your own.

Frank Patierno (13:47.698)

So one of the reports I actually had to pull last week, so good timing on this question, was how much of our client base, and I'll speak in home improvement and solar, which is the vertical that I specialize in, over 85 % of our clients come from word of mouth from either other prospects who have utilized us, or again, other people we have partnerships with who are just kind enough to say,

hey, we're doing this really well with you, but have you checked out full throttle? Because this is what they add that would be an enhancement to what you guys are already doing. So when we went through the numbers and saw that 85 % help us with the word of mouth referral, I took that as a great endorsement for what we're doing and what we're trying to do for the community in general. Because when you're in the tech space, I think there's a couple different schools of thought here. There's the person who tells you they know everything.

And that's hard to believe, but there are a few people who may. But generally, if you don't have that PhD from MIT, that's probably not going to be the case. There's the person who tells you they know absolutely nothing. And I don't think that's the case either. And so when you find those two people in the middle, the person who has a little bit of information and is shy about it, and then the person who has a little bit of information and is just so thirsty to get more, those are the people that we're helping out quite a bit. It's like, you're doing a good job.

Let's continue to do this. Here's how we can help you out. And then the person who seeks us out as saying, Hey, I know I'm not where I want to be. Can you help me? And then we give our advice on that. And if we can help them terrific, if we can't, we're also able to point them in the direction of someone who can help them or who can help them in conjunction with us. So I think.

And not only is that just general information, I think that's kind of how I break down AI. Some people tell you, I know everything about it. Some people are scared to death of it. And then there's those in the middle who are, all right, I want to be better at this. How can I be? Because AI in general is such a broad topic, it's impossible to be an expert on all of it.

Chris (15:47.152)

Right.

Chris (15:52.08)

How much with full throttle, so your domain is obviously full throttle AI or .AI, but my question is, and I don't look at this as a bad thing, but what percentage of your actual software or like the secret sauce of the software is actually leveraging AI? Or how much does it need to? Because to me it's like, my assumption is that, it seems like a lot of this could be done without AI.

And is AI being used mostly for like speeding up development processes and stuff? Or is there actually like on every single transaction, so to speak, with the client's address, is there AI that's like looking something up, processing a bunch of data, cross -referencing multiple indexes, and then making a decision? Or is that like, you know what I'm saying? Like, cause I feel like there's a lot of apps that are like, even for us, like I'll tell you with our review software that we have.

We have an AI component, which is like, well, draft a review for you, but I would say truthfully, that's probably five to 10 % of the thing that we do, but it's still cool. It adds a little bit, you know what I mean? Are you guys in that place, or is it actually absolutely critical and foundational to what you guys do?

Frank Patierno (17:11.218)

So it's more a percentage of it. Like, so the identification that we have the patent on, that's not utilizing the AI, you know, that's just latitude, longitude, cross -reference with the postal service. But where the AI does come into play is we're scoring each household while they're on our website and our algorithms looking at 23 different data points on the site, time on site, pages, are we detecting another device in the household? Things like that are all brought into the equation. So that is being used.

instantly when it comes to deploying some of the tactics. We do online as well as offline. For the offline, we send out mailers. Now, if you're identifying 1 ,000 households in a month, you could have chosen to only send out 500 mailers if budget only allowed for that, in which case the AI is scoring it and only sending mailers to people who are lower in the funnel.

that's who would receive the mailer. So it is being used to stretch your marketing dollar. And then it also continues to score those households in perpetuity as they come back to the website at any point, because you have the ability to not only do the instant remarketing I've been speaking about, but you could say, hey, what about all the people who are on my website in third quarter that didn't convert? But I want to go after people who are just middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel.

you can reutilize that AI because it scores people. If someone hasn't been there in a while, maybe you're no longer middle of the funnel, you're probably more top of the funnel and vice versa. If you continue to come back, you could be moving down to closer to ready to buy. So I'm not sure what percentage that is, maybe 25, 33 % of our tech, but it's part of it, but not the entire thing.

Chris (18:58.416)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah. And then the I had another question.

Chris (19:14.8)

Dang it, lost my train of thought. It was a follow up to the software piece.

Chris (19:23.344)

Well, happy you can edit this out and I'll just jump into a couple of closing questions. So far as books, I always ask everybody book recommendations. What are your three book recommendations for us?

Frank Patierno (19:39.954)

So three books and I'm joking about this with my brother. My brother's actually a big reader and he tells me all the time the books he's read. One year he read 50 books between audio and actual picking up a book and reading it. And I was like, I don't know that I've read 50 books in my life but I've become a bigger reader as I've gotten older. So the three books that I've enjoyed in the past couple of years are The One Thing by Gary Keller.

Chris (20:05.392)

Kerry Keller, yep.

Frank Patierno (20:07.25)

That has helped me so much. So I actually changed professions a couple of years ago. I had sold television advertising for over 20 years. And as I moved into the tech space, I found myself trying to jump around like, I need to learn this. I need to learn that. But by reading that book, it really helped me to hone in on what do I actually need to do each day to be successful? And for me, it's talking to people about my product and how I can help them with any issues they may be having. So.

When I focused down into, if I just do that one thing, I'm going to have a successful day. And any activity that stems from that is good activity. It also helped me to parse off anything that was kind of a waste of my time. So I thought that was great. And then unreasonable hospitality, I thought was terrific just because it teaches you, you know, there is no limit to how well you can treat someone or what you can do for someone. And I thought that was great because I think if you work really hard,

and you make life easier for people, they're gonna understand that and they're gonna wanna give back to you. And I think it's, you can never give too much. So I thought that was a great book to bring that lesson out. And then, I mean, you would ask me, what are some good movies? And actually this is kind of cheating, but I've read The Boys in the Boat a couple of years ago and I only bring this up because it's one movie I can walk out of and say, the book was better because I don't read enough, but it was truly an outstanding book. And that's.

I could also be my double up for what would be the movie that I would recommend.

Chris (21:36.496)

your movie recommendation. So you do think the book is better, but you do like the movie?

Frank Patierno (21:43.986)

The movie was definitely good enough and worth your money to go and sit there for a couple hours with popcorn. It was well worth it. It was outstanding, of course, because in a book he can get into the character development. You and I were talking before about that greatest generation. And that's what this is. It's these guys who were in their early 20s, putting themselves through school. And then these are the gentlemen who go off to war and the lives that they lived. They're talking about them as young men. Just really inspirational how tough these guys were.

Chris (22:12.816)

That's awesome. I was gonna say, I don't get to do this often, but when I ask for movie recommendations, I always tell people, I love movies, but I don't have a ton of time to watch movies. So when I watch a movie, I always wanna make sure that it's a good movie, right? And what I have come up with with a college buddy of mine is an IMDB score of 7 .3 or higher is what is the benchmark of like, if it's above a 7 .3, I'll watch it.

It's below a 7 .3. It depends on the person's recommendation. And what matters is everybody in the world gets a mulligan that they can use. So you have a mulligan right now because the boys in the boat is a 6 .9. I haven't seen it yet, but what happens is you can say, no, Chris, this is worth it. It's worth your time. It doesn't need to be the best movie ever. It just needs to be a good movie that I'm glad I spent two hours of my life watching. Right. So.

Frank Patierno (22:54.226)

Okay.

Chris (23:10.544)

You say, I'm using my Molligan, Chris, add this to your watch list, and then I watch it, and if it's a great movie, I give you your Molligan back, and you can give me another sub 7 .3 recommendation. But if it's not, then you don't get your Molligan back, and I only take above 7 .3 recommendations from you. Does that make sense?

Frank Patierno (23:28.018)

That's totally fair. I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna put my chips on the table.

Chris (23:31.664)

There we go, all right, cool. I'm gonna add this to the list. I've heard a couple other people talk about it, but I hadn't had it in top of mind, but I've never looked it up before. And what is your preferred method of contact for people to reach out to you?

Frank Patierno (23:46.802)

I think LinkedIn would probably be the easiest. I can be DM'd on there. My last name is P -A -T -I -E -R -N -O. So yeah, if you want to hit me on LinkedIn, again, Frank Paterno, or you can always go to fullthrottle .ai and search for me in that regard. I'm probably the only Frank that we have.

Chris (24:06.16)

Awesome, well I just sent you a request myself and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today.

Frank Patierno (24:13.554)

Chris, thanks for having me. I do have a quick question. How do we come up with 7 .3? That's a rather random number.

Chris (24:18.512)

Yeah. So honestly, the way that it happened was we were talking about just movies and whatnot. And both my friend and I, they came up with this name, Cody. We're like general, just like we appreciate movies, right? Just like good movie. And so we were, we just started watching movies and we started paying attention to the ratings. And it's not, there's not a ton of movies that are between like seven or even like 6 .9 and 7 .3. There's like,

there's kind of a gap there. And it seems like more or less, you have a lot of movies that are above a 7 .3, eights, 8 .5, like those are unbelievable films. Anyone would love those. So that's why if it's above, it's a 7 .5, go watch that, you're gonna enjoy that. If it's below, it's not saying it's a bad movie, it's just saying statistically, because IMDB is just like, you know, crowd ratings.

So if it's below 7 .3 and we settled, we like played around with it over the course of the couple of years in college. We're like, is it a 7 .1? Is it a seven? Where do we go? You're like, no, it's 7 .3. And so, and that's the thing is that I love finding movies that are under 7 .3 rating, but still good. And so I'll tell people this and they're like, you know, I don't know about that. That seems like, I don't know if it would work for me. Like I'm pretty particular about my movies or whatever. And I say like,

Like, I mean, try, like the way to try to disprove this is you think of a movie that was actually good that you think would be lower than a 7 .3 and tell me when you find one of those. Cause that's very hard to do. That makes sense. Like it's, and, and when people recommend them, I'm like, Ooh, I love adding the list of like, here's the sleeper hits that you don't know about that are under, cause every, the most of the movies above a 7 .3 are movies that we've all heard of.

Frank Patierno (26:03.378)

Yeah.

Chris (26:16.752)

They're popular, but the ones that are really cool are the ones under 7 .3 that's like, Ooh, that's never haven't heard of that one. I'm going to have to add that to my list. So anyways, that's the, that's how it came to be.

Frank Patierno (26:28.986)

good, I'm gonna follow up with you here. I'll give you about 60 days and I'll check back and see how my request is. Did I lose my mulligan forever or do I get a new one?

Chris (26:33.904)

That's right. Exactly. All right. Well, thanks again, Frank. This is fun.

Frank Patierno (26:40.242)

Thanks a lot, Chris, appreciate it. Have a great day.