From Strategy to Scale: George Musi on What Actually Drives Growth Inside Agencies

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Everyone says they want growth. Very few organizations are actually built to deliver it.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with George Musi—former executive across Publicis, WPP, IPG, and Horizon, now an advisor to Fortune 500 and high-growth companies—to unpack why growth consistently breaks inside large organizations.

This is not a conversation about frameworks or slideware. It’s about what actually happens when strategy hits reality.

George brings an operator’s lens to one of the biggest disconnects in the industry right now: companies are overflowing with ideas, AI roadmaps, and transformation narratives—but still struggle to execute consistently. 

Why growth is structurally hard Growth doesn’t fail because of a lack of strategy—it fails because of how organizations are wired. Incentives, silos, and decision-making systems break execution long before ideas do.

The HoldCo → Operating System shift (and what’s real vs narrative) Every agency claims to be building an “operating system.” George explains why most of these are still fragmented point solutions—and what a true system actually requires.

Why agencies are colliding with consultancies and platforms As agencies move into data, tech, and integration, they’re stepping directly into the territory of firms like Accenture and Deloitte—while also competing with platforms like Google and The Trade Desk.

AI is not a tool problem—it’s an operating model problem Most companies are layering AI on top of broken systems. The result: more noise, not more output. Real impact requires rebuilding how knowledge, workflows, and decisions actually operate.

The real future of the agency model The FTE-based, labor-driven model is under pressure. What replaces it? Outcome-based partnerships, deeper expertise, and a shift toward “growth architects” over execution vendors.

Why institutional knowledge is the ultimate advantage Data is commoditized. Models are commoditized. The real differentiator is the ability to capture, retain, and compound organizational knowledge over time—and most companies are terrible at it.

• Strategy isn’t the problem. Execution systems are.

• AI amplifies what already exists—it doesn’t fix it.

• The agency model is being reshaped from labor → leverage.

• The winners will be those who build systems of intelligence, not just tools.

• Growth will be owned by those who can connect strategy, operations, and execution into a single system.

George also joins Signal & Noise as part of our Exec Voices platform—bringing a no-BS perspective on growth, go-to-market, and what actually works inside complex organizations.

If you care about where agencies, consultancies, and platforms are heading—and what it really takes to scale—this is a must-listen.

Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube | Read more at signalandnoise.ai

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Read the full transcript bellow: Brett House (00:01)

Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal and Noise. I'm Brett House joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. We've got a great guest today, George Musi. We're talking about something every company says that they want, but few actually achieve it consistently. ⁓ Growth, right? And we've decided to broaden that topic ⁓ to all companies, although agency holdcos are certainly a focus considering George's experience. George, you've spent decades in big agency holdcos from publicists to WPP, IPG, and then most recently Horizon, right, as an EVP, one of the largest independent agencies. You you've seen it from every angle. You've seen it from indie challengers to global sort of complex, you know, organizations. And now you're an advisor working directly with executive teams that are trying to scale and trying to grow, whether it's agency holdcos or tech or vendor companies as well. One, welcome to the show.

Great to have you. Also welcome as an executive contributor for those ⁓ listening. We've just added George as an executive contributor ⁓ to Signal and Noise, where he's going to be bringing up content, writing articles, joining podcasts. And one thing I thought so refreshing when we first spoke was George brings kind of a no bullshit mentality to his conversations.

Rio (01:10)

Welcome, George.

George Musi (01:11)

Thank you.

Rio (01:23)

That's the New York attitude, right? Love it.

Brett House (01:26)

Whether you've seen them on panels or speaking and you made it really clear when we first talked that you're like, I just hate the surface level stuff. And I like to dig down and really ask the hard questions, which oftentimes at events especially are sort of ignored or avoided. ⁓ But yeah, so introduce yourself to the audience. We'd love to hear a little bit more about you and your story, George.

George Musi (01:27)

That's right. Yes. I appreciate it guys. It's a pleasure both for the podcast as well as the ability to kind of partner on signal and noise. It's definitely a time venture. Definitely need more straight no-nonsense insights in the marketplace. God knows our industry is notorious for bullshit. So you definitely need a lot less of it in this day and age, particularly with this advert of AI. ⁓ So my background is ⁓ unique, would say, in many ways. I started as a data scientist, advanced on a local person. ⁓ And then I've evolved as the need showed me the evolution was warranted. So instead of ⁓ having 75 different conversations where an agency person goes, with a CMO or CFO, or even if they get in front of the CFO.

I told myself is I'm going to hedge my bet that data analytics and technology are going to be key into the future. I could have been wrong, but I wasn't. But this notion of translating what that means to the speak of a CMO, to the speak of a CFO, to the speak of a chief data officer, chief digital officer, chief information, whatever version of chief. But more importantly is this notion of systemic. How do you get those people to speak the same language? Because they're all being asked to do the same exact thing from different vantage points. So they hide in that ambiguity versus bringing that transparency to the table and saying, gentlemen and ladies, growth is the agenda. How do we architect that? So what I then said is, how do I become the best solutions person that exists? It doesn't matter where, agencies, consultancies, technology, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. It's how do you bring that repertoire of solutions, technologies, an architect, a growth. And that could mean something different from every angle of an organization that it typically does. If you're talking about US and global, if you're talking about CPG, whatever the case may be. So that's kind of where I started from and where I've evolved.

Brett House (03:49)

Yeah.

Yeah, and it says it.

Rio (04:03)

Well, George, we're thrilled to have you on here. I remember when you reached out a couple of weeks ago, had that, and we ended up speaking for over an hour to three of us. thought, okay, we got something here, we got make this happen. So I'm glad we could do it. it was, yep, yep. And then, yeah, in terms of thesis for this episode, we signal a noise, we try to make every episode have a thesis, right, that will resonate out there. There's a good one, growth is hard.

Brett House (04:16)

It was a late Friday afternoon if I remember correctly.

George Musi (04:17)

That's right. That's right.

Rio (04:31)

It's very hard. Every company has a new AI product, a roadmap, software they're rolling out. But the reality is where the rubber meets the road, it's really tough and you really need a vision. And when you look under the hood, even below the vision, a lot of companies, they really struggle to execute or at least consistently execute. Generally growth doesn't break because of lack of ideas. We see a lot of those now, right? It breaks because the system itself, how it's structured and how the incentives are structured and how they impact really who makes decisions and why they make decisions. And that controls how things go to market. All those things need to interlock and they need to work together and very often they don't. So you spent your career in the middle of this. You've got to have like, as Brett mentioned, you've worked in a bunch of agencies, hold co's, including most recently Horizon, who's a former client of mine. So we're really wondering, Deegan, why is growth so structurally hard inside these organizations, inside agencies and holocaust, but think generally inside of professional services organizations everywhere. They're all going through some of the same challenges. Why are we seeing these shifts?

Like the whole old hold code operating system thesis we talked about on this web's website a couple weeks ago. that real? What's actually happening? How is AI fit into all of this? Everyone's asking these same questions. So we're thrilled to get you on here. Excited to talk about, I know there's tons we can dig into. Brett, first questions over to you.

Brett House (05:55)

Yeah, what are these environments? in your intro, George, you kind of mentioned, you said systemic, and I think you were referencing sort of systems thinking, right, across technology, data analytics, and then the language that different departmental heads, different leaders speak in, right, so that everybody can be thinking around the same kind of operating. Operating system is kind of an overused term nowadays. It seems like everyone has an operating system, an OS of some sort, right?

Rio (06:18)

That means everything but nothing, right? Yeah.

George Musi (06:19)

That's right. ⁓I would argue that nobody really has one. Everybody says they do, but nobody really.

Brett House (06:23)

Yeah, no one really asked what let's let's deconstruct that. So what did you learn in it working at these big agency hold cause horizon most recently? ⁓ What it really teach you about growth and about ⁓ what's real and what's not.

George Musi (06:29)

Yeah. Yeah, if you look at the agency world generally and where it came from, where it is and ultimately where it's going. ⁓ It evolved as much as the agencies say they set the tone or the pace of the industry. They're very reactive to it. They're not very prescriptive about it. They will say that, but that's farthest from the truth.

Brett House (07:02)

Yeah, not first movers, more laggards in sort of adapting and reacting.

George Musi (07:06)

Yeah, and what's changed is their partners have become competitors and the consultancies have come in. ⁓ And some of them didn't realize that that was happening until it too late. Some of them bet the Accenture, yeah, Accenture, yeah, yeah, Tata is going to come, coming, Slalom. There's a bunch of, everybody sees the opportunity. ⁓

Rio (07:21)

So many like Accenture song to like digital. See you soon.

George Musi (07:34)

And they come from a position of strength because they hold, I would argue, higher order relationships in true business defining decisions. And so that's right. Well, I would even be CEO, any person that is selling anybody else in marketing what to do at the end of the day. Right? So if you're going in doing massive, massive growth architecture within a Fortune 100 company, right?

Brett House (07:43)

Yeah.

Rio (07:44)

Certainly with IT.

George Musi (08:03)

Marketing will be a component of that, a component of that. It's not the whole conversation. And a component of that. So you have audience.

Brett House (08:05)

Yeah. Yeah. And media will be a component of that, right? And agencies will come to the table with that media play, some tech, a little bit of tech behind, but you're saying that the consulting firms come in with a much more systemic business growth sort of playbook and strategy. Yeah.

George Musi (08:15)

That's right. Correct, their job is growth and now what they look at it is, like this component, this add-on of media marketing, that's easy for us. mean, we won't build it ourselves, we're just going to go buy and that's like the Center Song did. They won't put drug and they said, we have this or let's go buy this because God knows they have the coffers to do it, right? And they have the money sitting on the side to do so. across these agencies, You know, it's always to agencies has always been the pure precipice of it has always been the agents on behalf of and that has changed dramatically over the years, right? Where you're seeing independent agencies try to position themselves as neutral, right? Stewards of a brand. But the end of the state, they're still pitching services and solutions. Some of them they've built a lot of PMG or tenuity. Some of them they've partnered with.

Brett House (08:56)

Yeah.

George Musi (09:19)

But at end of the day, they're still trying to do the same exact thing, which is how do I make the most money for the work that I'm providing a client? Holdcos are interesting because they've taken a position, not all of them, but most of them have taken a position on the thing that they said that they would never do, which is media. So now by definition, they really can't be agents anymore because they're buying and selling. And so their positioning should change.

Now what they've also done is it's hard. how do you tell somebody that I own the media, I'm gonna sell you the media and then I'm gonna judge how I'm doing against buying and selling. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it's very, very, very hard for somebody to look at and say, how do I know? How do I know behind the shadow of a doubt that you are actually doing what you are telling me that you are doing?

Brett House (09:49)

They lose their sense of independence because because yeah, you end up falling back in it. Yeah

Yeah.

Rio (10:09)

What the...Well, question that. So I'm a former systems integrator consultant employee, and I've also worked agency. So like, I remember when I was at the systems integrator and a consultancy, like we, had great relationships with it, great relations with the execs generally, but weakest with the CMO and agencies typically held those. And I remember the Gartner had that thesis about the CMO would outspent the CIO, which never actually happened. Right. But that was that thesis. And then there was this big, this big,

George Musi (10:30)

Hmm? Hmm? Yep. Yep, yep.

Brett House (10:40)

Yeah, yeah.

Rio (10:44)

This is around the time Accenture Song started making all those acquisitions. They even bought a meet in a programmatic company, even tried getting into media. I know the guy who built that. It didn't go well for them. I was just saw them. even tried buying media for a while, we would like they refused us. They'd be saw them refused to set up a line of credit. So it's probably problematic playing the platforms net 30. We actually got had campaigns, so we decided not to do it. So

George Musi (10:50)

That's right. That's right. Mm-hmm.

Rio (11:11)

Where do see that, that playing out? Right. Because like they've tried, like you see this, the consultancies are trying to get in, like they, they own the other relationships. They've been trying to get in and in the hold co is you're kind of trying to go the other way and add systems integration and engineering. do you think like eccentric song comes to media company or what's your opinion on that?

George Musi (11:30)

I look at where all the agencies, Old Coast specifically, and maybe some of the largest, include Horizon. And you look at them and you start saying, they don't look like media, they don't look like agencies anymore. Right? They don't look like a media agency or.

Rio (11:48)

Horizon Man, Horizon Man is just what? Nine billion a media, if I remember right.

George Musi (11:52)

Probably a little less than that now. They lost a couple of accounts, but they made it up with Spectrum. let's call it, yeah, probably about seven. But ⁓ if you look at them, they're not really, or at least they're positioning themselves. Horizon OS, Omni, People Cloud, Interact, you have ⁓ Converge AI, you have a bunch of different, Open.

Brett House (12:08)

interact. Poor AI. Yeah.

WPPO.

Rio (12:16)

WPP open, they all have their own, yep.

George Musi (12:19)

So you look at this and you're like, wait, ⁓ you're no longer an agency. You're not creative, you're not experienced, you're not media. What you are selling is technology data and system integration. That's what they want. They want the solutions architect and then they want the implementation. That's interesting because that's exactly what the consultancies do. So now you go exactly...

Rio (12:42)

Yes, exactly what they do.

George Musi (12:45)

So I will argue is you're to go have a fight against the guys that have been doing this for a very long time successfully that have deeper pockets and deeper relationships with the most important stakeholders in the organization. Not to marginalize what the CMO does, but you're talking about the people that control the purse strings at the end of the day. But you're also then competing against the platform companies the trade desks of the world, the Microsofts of the world, the Googles of the world, which by themselves also start looking at saying, hold up a second, in this world of AI, do brands really need an agency? Not really.

Brett House (13:25)

Yeah. I mean, you still run into the grading your own homework problem with the platforms when you go direct to those guys.

George Musi (13:29)

You do, but then you make that same argument for the hold codes, right? Creating your own homework.

Brett House (13:35)

Yeah. I mean, do you think, do you think these operating systems are like a service Raptor wrapper? Or do you think that depending on the agency, old co and the operating system that they're claiming to have in the platform, because they're all moving that sort of tech forward. Yeah. Do you think it's a services wrap or do think it's changed enough to where they can change their sort of FTE heavy business models?

Rio (13:46)

They're all trying to build their own, yeah.

George Musi (13:47)

I there are It's no, in order for that to happen, truly happen, that means it is the operating system of the whole code. And I don't see that yet. I don't, honestly, I don't see that.

Brett House (14:09)

Yeah.

Rio (14:10)

So you mean a complete break from the FTE model going to something different.

George Musi (14:15)

Correct. You still need dedicated people to a brand. think you have to in order to immerse yourself into that brand DNA. You have to. You can't have partial people. But you need somebody to live and breathe. And that's why think consultants did a really good job. They just immersed themselves into an organization and they learned everything. And that's what made them even better. Even if they were mediocre, they had so much institutional knowledge.

Brett House (14:26)

Yeah, people walking the halls. Yeah.

Yeah.

George Musi (14:42)

that it made it really impactful.

Brett House (14:43)

Yeah.

Rio (14:46)

You even look at the most successful AI companies that they're offering forward deployed engineers, which is really consultants. You're having work embedded in client teams. It's a consultancy model.

Brett House (14:54)

Yeah, yeah, it's easy to say that you've got this capability, this tech, but it's much harder to get the organization that you're supporting to change and to orient themselves around the tech, right? Effectively.

George Musi (15:05)

Correct.

I would argue that ⁓ historically the agencies never really had company, people that were designed, trained to act like that. So what they did is they tried to go by and some of them bought, some of them bought successfully, some of them bought without really realizing what they were supposed to do, right? And how to do it. And that created a lot of friction and disorientation.

At the same time, try to to brands, prospects or current and say, we have a new way to service you. Right. So don't judge us by don't judge us by this judges by this and the brands look at them and saying, it looks great on the PowerPoint slide, but I don't see that. I don't see that.

Brett House (15:47)

yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Rio, your article, your agency Holdco article on signal noise kind of referenced this is you're still seeing, it sounds to me like you're still seeing a collection of tools that came through acquisition that came through either it was organically built, but it's not really a unified system in the true sort of way of thinking about

George Musi (16:06)

I have yet to see true systems thinking, true ⁓ connection of purposely built, created entities that can individually contribute, but collectively, they really guide the organization through a growth agenda, right?

It's not that. I don't think it's anywhere close to that in my opinion, no matter what anybody says on slides or pictures or anybody else. And I think if you look at, put aside the mandated three-year reviews or whatever the case may be with brands, I will argue if you're actually delivering what you're saying, growth, true, true growth, there is no brand in their right mind that's going to make a switch.

If they truly see you as a systems integrator, as a systems thinking that understands their business, understands the mechanisms, the levers, that if you do this in marketing, you do this in product, you do this in pricing, you do this here and you do that there, the collective things, because it's an interdependent ecosystem at the end of the day, things will move. It's not that.

Brett House (17:17)

Yeah. Yeah. And the switching costs

Rio (17:21)

Well, it's just a, well, systems integrators. mean, one thing I always admired like working, like you see at Accenture or Deloitte, right? know, suddenly they sell a project with four or five people. You turn around, you close your eyes, clients are complaining about this. Like, so know, there's 150 people all billing there and they'll be there for years. They'll be locked in and they'll have, we'll have a seat at the table, like with the CEO, which is typically, in fact, I remember when I was working at Big Pharma.

Brett House (17:22)

would be huge if that actually worked. Right.

George Musi (17:36)

That's right. That's right. That's right.

Rio (17:45)

We had to change all our SOWs to say they didn't have strategy in them because McKinsey signed some exclusive deal with the CEO because he was former McKinsey. having that level of access and be able to land and expand, systems renegade are really, really good at that. would argue that some of the agencies definitely, if they want to get into this business, they need to learn it. But I guess the other thing too is that both businesses, because of AI, are starting to run into some pressure because the base of the pyramid is being, clients are starting to push back against, do you really need three BAs to take notes. AI is probably better than that. So I think systems integration model and the agency model both go into similar things and it's kind of been a push towards more value-based or performance-based contracts. What are your thoughts on that, George? Love to hear what you're seeing.

Brett House (18:17)

Yeah.

George Musi (18:28)

Yeah, I think everybody is going out and saying ⁓ AI is changing the paradigm. And that is true. But you mentioned something earlier, which is also very much true, which I think is the current reality. No matter how much money has been spent in AI, the vast majority of it has failed. Right? you're trying to...You're trying to put a square peg in a round hole in the agency world and it's not working. Right. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We have AI, right? We're doing AI. And what they're really, really doing is basically wrapping AI. So you're wrapping, you know, you're wrapping your agency. We just, we just say, I, yeah, which is conversational AI chat, chat bot or workflow integrated. It's not true applied AI.

Brett House (19:12)

around work streams, around workflows or work streams, right?

Rio (19:15)

You're automating things.

Brett House (19:23)

Yeah.

George Musi (19:27)

What I mean by that is you've built something from the foundational core of your organization, moving up. That is the only way, the true application of AI. Now, what they're saying is they have that, sure, whatever, most of the time it's not being built internally. I don't see that. So they're partnering with what exists out in the open world, which...Then they start realizing that those things cannot really deliver what they're asking them to deliver because those world models or those horizontal models or those off the shelf models, whatever you want to call them, they're not built to understand the entities of any organization. That's not their job, right? That's what they call world models. So they're promising, we're going to be AI native organizations, which It's impossible because that's not where they came from. And number two is because of that, we are going to recalibrate the relationships that we have and the things that we do. So relationships that we have is this is how we will service you moving forward. This is how you should value us moving forward, a la compensation. And these are types of the services solutions that we can not now also provide. So what they're saying is, yeah, we want to shift the value based pricing. But by the way, we also want to want you to give us more services and solutions, right? That historically you have not given to us. So what they're doing is, well, give us more, give us, give us the ability to, because now we are an AI agency, give us the ability to actually.

Brett House (21:04)

Give us more with more risk on your behalf, right? Which is...

Rio (21:12)

Well, the things you're saying you

have,

Brett House (21:15)

Yeah. So, so George, but so you said they're not really truly, it's not a core competency, let's say being an AI person, you've got a long history in sort of machine learning back when it was, you know, before all of the AI hype that's affected us over the last probably 20 years, but especially in the last five years. ⁓ is it, does it require an agency to be, you have to have that centralized unified data source, all of the semantic kind of middleware logic built on top of that to interpret the data?

George Musi (21:25)

Yep. Yep.

Brett House (21:45)

⁓ in order to get to a point where you're sort of a, as a core competency, you're an AI first agency. Is that what we're looking at?

George Musi (21:50)

Yeah.

So I think all models are commoditized. That's always been the case. ⁓ Everybody assumes who's going to win is going to be who has the best models. It's all good commodity, right? So at the end of the day, so is the data. I would argue that you have a big enough check you can acquire any data source that you want. I don't see that as a... Because even if...

Brett House (22:15)

And one brand's audience data starts looking a lot like another brand's audience data.

George Musi (22:18)

You go to publicists and say, hey, look, I want to buy Epsilon. They're not going to sell you Epsilon. Of course they're going to sell you Epsilon. You write another big enough check, they're going to give it to you, right? Because that's the structure of how they put those deals because they have to be compliant and they can't create non-competes in a marketplace like that because it's important data source. What I would argue is the most important thing, which every organization does a really, really bad job is, is institutional knowledge retention.

Brett House (22:47)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (22:48)

That is the most important thing in any business. Agencies know different. And I will tell you, agencies are probably the worst at it, right? Because they have a hard time keeping people. So where is the knowledge coming from? It's not data sources. Data without context is meaningless. Where's the context?

Brett House (23:03)

Yep. Yeah, the play for context is critical and that's the people within the organization. Yeah.

George Musi (23:07)

in heads of subject matter experts implicit explicit tactical information that most employees cannot figure out a way how to institutionalize that into an organization because there's never really been the mechanism. So when people say, well, I'm going to dial, I have AI, so I'm just going to upload stuff into AI. Okay. So, but, but, and we're going to go, we're going to put some props against it. And that's going to give us all this magic that's going to all of sudden pop out. And the reality is, well, okay, but you're giving it data. You're not giving it context. Although you might think you're giving your prompts a context, that's not the way it works.

Brett House (23:46)

Yeah.

Rio (23:50)

You still need the right people writing the prompts. That's a big limitation. mean, you need a subject matter experts.

George Musi (23:52)

That's it. But here's, that's right. So you need to be able to encode the true expertise of an organization, the true DNA of an organization into a machine, not just once, but you need to do that on a continual basis. Now go back to the sit.

Brett House (24:05)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. And continuously optimize it. It almost make it specific. It's based to like sort of tasks that you're setting up for specific agents and agentic teams is they all have to have very specific guidelines and approaches and then a memory system built on that. So if I'm an expert and creative, right, how do you keep that thing going and optimizing over time within an agency environment?

George Musi (24:19)

for it. But here's also the other component parts. It's doing that constant encoding every single time you're working. Every single time you're working. That's how you build a system of intelligence. You don't build a point solution. And right now most agencies, I still fundamentally have just bunch of point solutions. Even with AI as an underpinning, they still point solutions. Nobody really truly has a system of intelligence that

Rio (25:02)

Point Solutions, George, and a nice presentation. A nice pitch deck, right?

George Musi (25:06)

Yeah, well, mean, that's that's you got it. You got to give it to them. They if agencies are good at one thing, they are really good at pitching. The reality is quite different of delivery, right? So I would argue the other other aspect of it all, which I think is critical, is this notion of creating a neural network system in a different way, but a neural network, right? This notion of connecting individuals in the collective, right? That's really the power of what AI, true knowledge, right? True knowledge graphs.

Brett House (25:38)

Knowledge capture, yeah, capture and development and growth. Yeah, knowledge graph for the organization.

George Musi (25:44)

Well, I would argue it's even more than just knowledge graphs. I would argue it's this thing called temporal intelligence graphs, which is knowledge, context, and time. Over the history of an organization, you got to be able to look at all that stuff and then tell yourself, if I ever wanted to understand how that came to be over a course of time,

Brett House (25:53)

Yep.

George Musi (26:08)

what why and the what conditions, who did it, what did it, how did they trade it off, right? Because this notion of knowledge, I can't access the way Rio thinks, but not just what he said and when he said it under what conditions, but I can trace it back, I can audit it, I can explain it, and by the way, I can override it should I want to decide to do that. But then Rio could do the same exact thing to me and to you. That's a system because then the AI then truly learns your DNA.

Brett House (26:38)

Yeah, that's a closer approximation to an actual human being in the way that we operate and think.

George Musi (26:38)

Right. Correct. Correct. Which is what AI is supposed to be doing, right? Which is augmenting the human being. It's not replacing the human being, it's supposed to augment us.

Brett House (26:51)

Yeah.

Rio (26:52)

Like, sure, but, George, looking at the, okay, let's say the AI native or AI enabled agency, which were very compelling. No one's there yet. I don't think any one of us would argue, but even let's say turning the clock back a couple of years. Remember, Hublis made the acquisition of Epsilon that you called out before. They have Sapient, which is like kind of their services org. There was a perception as recently as a couple of years ago that they had kind of not only created a model, but also had a pitch to go along with it that was

George Musi (27:10)

Yep.

Rio (27:25)

there was winning them a lot of deals, right? That was leading the way. And then, know, we've seen Omnicom, you we've made a lot of moves here that are, I think are very similar, somewhat different, but very similar. And then there was the perception that that was the model. then, but I mean, what I've heard is a lot of the deals, even the publicists was winning, they did it, you know, for very low cost and they're even struggling to support them, right? I don't know how true that is, but you know, those are whispers we hear, right? And then the question is, okay, so,

What is the model going to be? mean, is AI, does AI shake it all out? Is that the right model? But then you put an AI wrap around it, Brett, to your point, or does the whole thing really like, does the FTE model crumble quicker than people are thinking? And the whole thing has to be rethought. And I think that's kind of where we are as an industry. Love your thoughts on that, George.

George Musi (28:12)

Yeah, I think this notion of selling people is going to definitely go away. ⁓ I've always argued that ⁓ you should be judged based on the ultimate impact to the business, both top line and bottom line. I don't really care what version of it because marketing has, will and should always be about incrementality. Why the hell would you be spending any money if you can get that doing without spending?

So if that is the pure fundamental goal of marketing, you should be judged by that. So the relationship that you have with a brand, the brand has to understand, here's my growth plan to you, architect. Here's what I'm gonna give you. Forget about the people, this is what I'm gonna give you. These are the things that will give you that. Do you agree to that? Yes. And that's what you're being held against. That should not come with an FTE.

Here's how I'm packaging this up. To answer your question, like who was it? Well, yeah, because you, the brand should not, the brand should understand who a core group of people that they can pick up the phone, whoever the case may be, group, they should never care about how you're ultimately enabling them to do whatever they're doing, right? Now they might want to understand.

Brett House (29:13)

There's a P &L behind it, right?

George Musi (29:38)

what technology are you using, what AI are you using, what data are you using, it's their right because if you're using those component parts and particularly if you're charging them, however you want, disclosed or undisclosed, they should understand the ⁓ architecture of how you're going to drive that growth. I believe that 100%. Every branch...

Rio (29:57)

But what does that mean? Does that mean value-based contracts, outcome-based? Like, what does that mean in practice?

Brett House (30:05)

Media buying transparency, there's all these things that we've put into that,

George Musi (30:05)

think, yeah, I am not a big fan of principal-based buying. I understand it. I've never been a big fan of it. Yeah.

Brett House (30:15)

Yeah. And we just saw the WPP Richard Foster news around just, just, there's all this undisclosed sort of stuff that if you're getting rebates from principalities buying and then you don't pass on those benefits to the client. Questionable.

George Musi (30:25)

I just think, I think there are many different ways for agencies to ensure that they're making ⁓ ample enough margin where they can make sure that they're investing in the most important asset that they have, which is their people. Right? No agency and I would argue no services business, even with the advert of AI and this doesn't really matter how much AI-ified you do anything end of the day, any services business is a people-based business. I think there's many... Correct.

Brett House (31:01)

Yeah. And you're saying people versus tech, right? Because you say tech is probably in the core competency of the consultancies that are offering something.

George Musi (31:09)

I think eventually, think the agencies are starting to, again, through acquisition mainly, through hiring and then to partnerships, they're starting to become more...tech company, not tech enabled because you can buy an organization doesn't make doesn't make you an expert at the end of the day. Right? God knows agencies have had a long history of buying stuff and failing. Right? And they're writing it off. Right? You can name a bunch of them the last 10 years that have done that. too. Yeah. But but

Brett House (31:29)

Yeah.

Rio (31:40)

Well, tech companies too.

Brett House (31:41)

Yeah, not only agencies, right? lot of failed integrations and failed acquisitions. Yeah.

George Musi (31:46)

But I would would. Yeah, the FTE model will will go away. I'm saying it's going to go away tomorrow. But it And it should ultimately turn into true outcome based, right, true outcome based. And so whatever whatever you sign up to now, I will say that in order for that to be successful, the brands have to be cognizant that they can't change the goalposts every single day. Right. They have to say this is what this is what we agree to.

Right? Understanding there's some nuances in there. A war happens, supply chain logistics go, whatever the case may be, I get it. Black Swan events, I get that bit. But then you recalibrate, right? But if nothing happens and then the brand keeps shifting for whatever reason, shifts things, then the agency should not be held accountable, right? It should be compensated because at the end of the day, if a brand, which they always say, and now I will always be critic of a brand as well. They always want growth. want the best people. They want the best tech. They want the best everything. And then they say, we don't think it's worth that much.

Rio (32:54)

We don't want to pay for it. Yeah. But,

Brett House (32:55)

Yeah.

Rio (32:56)

but George, it's funny you say that about outcome based contracts, because I've had that experience multiple times. Let's say over the past 10 years where clients have approached me and said, we want to negotiate some kind of outcome or value based contract. And then let's say you approach them. say, we'll do it at cost. You know, know, normal consulting, you services, your margins on projects are anywhere from like 48 to like 52, 55%. Right. So let's say, okay, we'll do it at cost, which is a fraction of that. And then if we, if we If we hit these milestones, the upside for us is we don't make any money. The upside for us is if we hit these milestones, it's got to be an upside. Otherwise not worth it for the services org. So if we hit these, whether it's accelerators based on time or quality or whatever, right? You're going to pay us extra every single time I've showed that to a client, they've balked and said, we don't want to sign up for something if we don't know how much we're actually going to pay someone in the org. Probably usually procurement says no to that. I found that really fascinating. Actually, you one guy,

George Musi (33:30)

That's right. That's right.

Brett House (33:49)

Yeah, even if it's tied to growth, right? It's tied specifically to numbers should justify the costs.

Rio (33:54)

Regardless. Brett, even know, George, I mentioned this earlier. I know one guy, he sold a project. They crushed all of their targets. The client owed them a lot of money, backed out of the contract one year in before this balloon payments came. I mean, the outcome based contracts sound great, but like, think it's not only consultancies and services orgs need to get better. And I think brands need to understand how to buy them.

George Musi (34:21)

I think ⁓ we talked a lot about agencies and their need to kind of rethink or re-evolve. But you're right, because you would argue, increasingly so, probably over the last five to six to seven years, most of the people that work in brands are ex-agency people, right or wrong. what the brand's procurement is a different beast, but The people that have kind of in procurement that have worked in the media world, work in the marketing world versus not just a buying widget world, I would argue that they have a much more innate understanding of kind of the commercial mechanisms that affect. Brand needs to also change, right? They can't say, want performance based and then the agencies delivers and exceeds the performance as well. No, we want to be in the go. It can't work that right.

Brett House (35:19)

Yeah.

George Musi (35:20)

So what I, and yeah, the brand also has a logical point is if it becomes so economically infeasible for a brand to pay something, then what you have to go in there is do something like, look, if our performance exceeds X, right, then it triggers a conversation, right? If it, right.

Brett House (35:44)

Yeah. But some of this is dependent on your ability to attribute performance, which in and of itself, MMM, MTA, and all of the related solutions, incrementality measurement, it's tough to do, especially as you start to move across channels into offline worlds. So yeah, your data analytics team, you're a data science guy, right? Come back and just say, I'm not a hundred percent confident that this is an actual attribution fact, right?

Rio (35:58)

You're calculating it. Yeah.

George Musi (36:03)

Yep. And I think that's where a lot more thoughtful conversation, ⁓ which said a different way, a lot more educational conversations need to happen on both sides of the fence, where you can sit down and say, okay, it's not perfect. We agreed to a commercial construct. Here's how we're to judge that. Everybody's clear about it. That's it. That's right.

Brett House (36:35)

And here are the assumptions that go into this math and everybody's got to accept that these assumptions are.

George Musi (36:40)

That's right.

Rio (36:40)

You know, ironically, it may actually be easier to do this in technology than with media because technology you can deliver, can deliver and ship something before a timeframe. Right. And with media, I mean, you know, there's so many dependencies in terms of creative campaign, a lot of things. So, sorry, George, cut you off. going.

George Musi (36:53)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett House (36:54)

Yeah.

George Musi (36:55)

Yeah, no, no. So that's why I think that's why you're seeing. ⁓Some of the foundational models for them becomes easy because they're not really being judged by outcome. They're just being judged by utility in and out, right? The number of prompts and the number of responses, right? It's very mathematical to them, easy, right? Scale, right? Ask questions, we'll give you answers. Great. Agencies are now AI specific, but I say that just because that is now being introduced into the agencies world.

Brett House (37:22)

You're talking about AI specifically from a, yeah.

George Musi (37:32)

And so now they're saying, well, you have questions, we'll give you answers. And that's a mathematical, that's very, very simple. You ask questions, we'll give you answers. Now, the value of those answers, ultimately, well, that's a different story. So I think it's gonna be, I think you're definitely seeing a lot of ⁓ tension and friction.

Brett House (37:47)

As long as those answers are the same every time they come out, every time they're delivered.

George Musi (38:02)

And even with quote unquote the most ⁓ happy on the surface level relationships between the agency and the brand. And I've been on both sides of that table, right? Where I've been inside immersed in brands as a consultant and I've been conversations, agencies and everything in between. And I will tell you what brands say when there's nobody listening versus what they say when it is completely different.

Brett House (38:26)

Behind closed doors. Yeah.

George Musi (38:30)

Right, they are very

Brett House (38:31)

And is it is negative? mean, is it does it tend to be like?

George Musi (38:34)

I think you got to always strip it down to kind of what that negative in that context is. But I will tell you that it's always skeptical. That's the one thing I've always come out to. It's always very skeptical. No matter what, I really like this person. Do I really trust this person? Not really. But I do like the person, but I don't trust the person. I don't believe that that person has my best interest.

Brett House (38:48)

Yeah. I'm not

Rio (39:01)

Yeah, trust is you have to know like and trust. have to have all three of those through those boxes checked. Yeah, I agree with you that stuff.

George Musi (39:06)

Right. So, so, and they're also, and they also said, do I believe that the, that whoever I'm partnering with truly has my best interest at heart, truly has my best interest at heart, right? Truly is, is unbiasedly bringing to me the best combination of people, product, right? Are they bringing that irrespective of where it comes from, irrespective of where it sits, do I believe that? And I would argue that the answer is most of the time is no, they don't believe that because they believe everybody is trying to put their interest above and beyond the interest of the brand. now.

Rio (39:48)

Well, is a consulting side, George. I think this is one thing that's happening that's interesting too, is that like, with a large English model, you can get really smart answers. So I think the value of just bringing smart people has been diminished and clients know this, right? So they're expecting deep, deep expertise, really specific subject matter knowledge that you can bring to things. And they're expecting proactive thought leadership.

George Musi (39:58)

answer.

Rio (40:13)

I mean, I think that's where the consulting model is changing quite a bit. think the big guys are, starting to feel this and they're all bringing in McKinsey doing this work. They're bringing like, they'll hire like MD, PhDs, even if it's just part-time on retainer, just to bring them to calls and to support them projects. So think we're seeing this as a general trend.

George Musi (40:29)

Yeah, would say, I think a lot of the things that ultimately once you can charge for premium have been commoditized. That's what AI, I mean, AI is both an enabler and a detractor. Right? And I think everybody's feeling the blunt of both of those cuts on our blade. Right? So it can definitely reduce the latency between steps. It can definitely make you much

Brett House (40:50)

Yep. Yep.

George Musi (40:59)

more efficient across steps. For real, you mentioned has always been the case. I will argue it doesn't really matter if AI came or didn't come. At the end of the day, you can have all the data in the world, can put all the machine learning behind it, you can put all the models behind it, it's going to present something to you. It doesn't mean that that presentation is right or wrong, it just means it's presenting something to you. What ultimately creates impact is somebody that understands the world of that business understands the entity of that business understands how that business makes money understands how that business competes on right that's that's it or or because everybody assumes that's the end point to me it just reduced the latency between data to what potential and possibility exists somebody still has to take that and says here's the reality somebody has to refract that

Brett House (41:35)

Yeah. Well, cause then they can interrogate that output. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

George Musi (41:57)

through the reality of what a strategist truly does. I will argue that the world or the value of a strategist is going to ultimately become much more impactful than anybody else that has lived in a tactical world. Correct.

Brett House (42:13)

Well, a high level strategist, because that's also another overused term, but it's what you're saying. You're basically saying the iteration that sort of drafting process for lack of a better way of saying it, right. Which could take a ton of market research. could take a ton of client, ⁓ Intel and research and analytics. That time has been compressed exponentially. Now you need a strategist, a high level strategist to be able to say, I'm going to run this. And if it's wrong, they might go through 10 or 10 iterations of that output before they come up with something that they would be proud to.

George Musi (42:27)

That's right. Yep. very much, very much.

Rio (42:42)

I'm already seeing that happen. I'm already seeing a premium and more value like shift towards that type of role.

Brett House (42:48)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (42:48)

Yeah, and so I would argue, even in the agency world, I would argue it's not your typical strategist, right? I would argue it is this notion of ⁓ combining the component parts of what makes a true strategist impactful. So yeah, marketing strategist, but I'll also argue is a business strategist. I will argue as a product, right? So you have, and this is why I think

Brett House (43:10)

yeah, you can't have one without the other. Yeah.

George Musi (43:17)

building a core AI system, right? Because how many, look, how many times, how many times you're going to find the unicorn that has done market strategy, has done economic theory strategy, has done behavioral strategy, has done marketing strategy. Maybe there's one person in the entire world that actually fits that bill, right? Versus if you have an AI system that can capture behavioral strategists, that can capture marketing strategists, that can capture

Brett House (43:21)

Back to that core competency of like what you're building from the ground up. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. And can synthesize that and you're acting as the curator orchestrator conductor.

George Musi (43:47)

and connect that and saying, by the way, these are how these strategies ultimately come together. And now on the build, oh my God, I didn't realize that, because no human being ever, I don't care how smart we ever become, is gonna be able to work under that multi-dimensional frame. It's never gonna work.

Brett House (44:07)

Yeah. Not without FTE teams of hundreds, even thousands of people, right? That's what's actually being sort of compressed and eliminated. it's kind of all of our, the three people on this podcast, it's all of our futures of being able to do that sort of conducting and orchestrating, but you don't have to hire, you know, the oboe section and the violin section and the drummers. You can actually have a lot of that stuff done, but you have to have the Intel.

George Musi (44:11)

Yeah, that's right. That's right Yep. That's right.

Brett House (44:33)

in smarts to be able to conduct and separate good from bad. ⁓

Rio (44:37)

Well, George, part of the reason why I think this is more important than ever is that like you look at like, think the agency model, right? The media business is under, I think, increased pressure due to demands for transparency, right? mean, sure, you have things like principle-based media where you're probably never going to get the transparency, but I would argue maybe principle-based media, I don't know if in 10 years it's around, right? Maybe it will be, maybe it won't. mean, I think agencies need it now because it's

Brett House (44:51)

Yep.

Rio (45:07)

It's a way to keep the gears turning, But generally there's need for more transparency. AI is making it easier to bring certain tools and processes in-house. Brands are doing that. Even if agencies continue buying media, which I think for large global organizations, probably will for the foreseeable future, I think the margins on that are falling. And I think this creates a problem for agencies, right? Because brands are demanding lower, like, I mean, you're picking your agency, when you put it in counter for review, just based on your CPMs with the major pubs, It's a race to the bottom and it's to your point earlier, it's hard for agencies to make money without principle-based media and other ways to do that. So if the media side's under a lot of pressure, you almost have to invest in these other things that you can, that add value, you can charge brands for. Keene, get your thoughts on that.

George Musi (45:53)

Yeah, I think ⁓ I fundamentally still believe that media is probably the most component part ⁓ of marketing because it is the closest thing to ultimately creating the necessary impact to the consumers. I speaking about like it becomes increasingly important in this world of massive fragmentation, massive attention attrition Massive over saturation. Effective media, true effective media to me is...

Brett House (46:28)

yeah, to be able to cut through and find people where they are in a thousand one balcony spots is hard.

George Musi (46:32)

So, so, so to answer your question. It's the wrong vantage point on the media. If you believe that that is the most important aspect, the closest thing to where a consumer is susceptible, receptive, then it doesn't really matter if you pay a dollar for this thing you're selling for 50 cents. That shouldn't matter at the end of the day. It should matter is how are you getting that specific media in front of the most receptive consumers. And so don't judge somebody's component part on a CPM.

Right? Or that's it. That's it. So that's right. That's right. That's a whole that's a whole that's that's and that's a choice. Right. People gaming the system is a choice. Right. You have a choice not to game the system but there is a choice to game the system. Right. And most unfortunately decide to game the system because there's money to be made. I would I would say is if an agency fundamentally believes

Brett House (47:07)

No, because that race to the bottom ends up, you you're paying cheap CPMs and guess what? You may not even be reaching a human, right? There people gaming the system on the platform side, right?

George Musi (47:36)

that their investment in data and technology and AI, right, can ultimately increase the contribution value of a media activation. Then they should have no issues being transparent. And I mean by that is all transparency, right? This is the data, this is how much it costs you. This is the tech, this is how much it costs you.

Brett House (47:47)

Yep. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and you- Yeah.

Rio (48:02)

Well, maybe that needs the brands even go platform direct with contracts, right? And the agency is just, you know, I mean, you could even say that if you really want full transparency.

George Musi (48:10)

Yeah, well...

Brett House (48:12)

But do you deal with overwhelming complexity? I isn't that why principle-based buying is attractive to big brands? Because you have hundreds, well, granted, a lot of the media spend is in Google and in Meta and a handful on Amazon, but still there's massive fragmentation across CTV and all these other walled garden type channels. How do you manage that?

George Musi (48:20)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rio (48:29)

Yeah, it's not just to Opeli anymore. Yeah, there's a lot of channels now. Yeah, agreed.

George Musi (48:31)

It's not. So, but here's the argument of that. And I think you're starting to see some of that play out, particularly with the publicist and the trade desk. ⁓ Healthy conversation that's happening in the industry. So, you know.

Brett House (48:42)

Yeah, yeah, conversations in the ecosystem. Yeah. yeah, Dr. Blue.

Rio (48:43)

Yeah, we have food coming on next week to talk about that George, by the way.

George Musi (48:50)

You can argue ⁓ the introduction of AI, right? You can make a compelling argument that is going to disintermediate an agency. Right? Because if AI can do what everybody says it can do, it can handle almost, not yet, but it can handle almost anything inside ⁓ a campaign life cycle. Everything, right? You can assume that.

Rio (49:08)

but it's not doing yet.

George Musi (49:19)

And if the trade desk or Google or Criteo, whoever the hell decides to say, like, we can handle that. Right. If this notion of is creating a system that creates the best match between what a brand wants and the consumers that want that brand. Right. Then you are, you are collapsing all the complexity into a single environment. Now. Yeah, you might, you might have to give up a little transparency, right? But are you getting significantly more in return because you don't have to deal with all the intermediaries anymore. You're just dealing with a central platform, right? And you have more control. You would argue you have more transparency into what's going in, how it's being done, the cost structures, right? Assuming that the Google and trade desks of the world will open up their environment.

Brett House (50:16)

Yeah, need visibility into where those impressions are going within the, yeah.

Rio (50:19)

Well, yeah. And then if like, agentic trading ever really becomes a thing, right. And then, then you could argue maybe the DSPs get, you know, they really get turned into dumb pipes, right? Because if all the decisioning and all, and all the allocation happens upstream of them, what are they really doing then at that point? Right. Their role changes quite a bit.

George Musi (50:31)

It could be. Yeah, but

Brett House (50:38)

Yeah.

George Musi (50:38)

here's the argument, right? think, think, agentic will become a thing. I mean, we had this argument 15 years ago when programmatic came out and nobody's going to do it. Nobody's going to allow algorithms to make a decision. And here we are, algorithms make a decision, ⁓ So, agentic, I think it's a question of not if, it's just when. I go back to the fundamental thing, right? Who is telling the agents what to do? Right? If you don't have a

Brett House (50:52)

Yeah.

George Musi (51:05)

core DNA of your organization built into this AI infrastructure, AI system that is telling an agent, this is what you should be doing, or a series of agents, or a system of agents that is doing that. Guess what's going to happen? So the current environments in the trade desks of the world, the Googles of the world, they have built their own version of their internal

Brett House (51:21)

You're just gonna amplify a lot of crap.

George Musi (51:36)

Because that's why they're never going to unleash it because they don't want anybody to how they built it and what goes into it. And so that's why they can say, well, algorithms in our environment are better than anybody else's because we have built this collective memory of context over the course of 25 years. Unfortunately, they don't want to share with anybody, which is the whole notion of why not.

Brett House (51:59)

Yeah, collective memory of context is critical. That's the core DNA.

George Musi (52:02)

Correct. So, eventually I do believe that that will happen. And then if that happens, truly in marketing, that you have a series of agents that understand how to work in a system that is being empowered by a core, let's call it hive mind.

Rio (52:25)

Well, and they would be

Brett House (52:25)

Yeah.

Rio (52:26)

negotiating back and forth, buy side agents and sell side agents. They would be talking together and negotiating, structuring deals in different ways, right?

George Musi (52:32)

Yeah.

Brett House (52:33)

Yeah. I liked it. I liked it. You just said hive mind. That reminds me of the Borg and we're, we're, moving more and more towards the Borg, right? Of collective memory, temporal over time, right? Which gives some of these, these core tech companies that have been around like Google that have, you know, huge volumes of data gives them just a natural advantage over any independent startup that's tech forward. I mean, do you think those guys love me?

George Musi (52:36)

this notion. ⁓

Rio (52:40)

care to be assimilated.

George Musi (52:45)

That's right. I think so. I think the only difference, and this is where ⁓ brands, I think, will have to ⁓ take ownership of that and the agencies ultimately, if they want to compete, truly compete, will have to take ownership of that. Data is a commodity, but when you have enough of it, it really defines who you are. And I mean data as in ⁓ just ones and zeros.

Brett House (53:22)

Yeah.

George Musi (53:28)

but also data as expertise that sits in people's heads once you put it inside a machine, right? That's true IP. The moment you put that into Google or trade desk, open AI, complexity, whoever it is, you are giving up your differentiation. That's it, right? So once brands realize that, once agencies realize that, then what they're going to do is never do that, right? They're going to say, we're going to keep it inside our walls.

Brett House (53:46)

Yeah.

George Musi (53:58)

and we're just going to build this hive mind inside our walls. So any organization you're seeing some of them and one of the companies that I consult with is company called MadSense is exactly that. That's why I consult with them because ⁓ when we started this conversation, said, know, my bullshit meter is extremely high. So when I look at companies and say, okay, that sounds great on a piece of paper, can you actually do what you say you do? Once I dig into it, either quickly yes or no.

Brett House (54:23)

Yeah.

George Musi (54:26)

And these guys are actually legit. And they've built this notion of what it described to you, which is the true AI system by taking what is the most important thing, which is knowledge inside an organization, right? And encoding that into an AI system that compounds over time. So true memory, true context, true understanding, right? True traceability, true explainability, true auditability.

Brett House (54:46)

Yep.

George Musi (54:54)

right? And somebody can say, get it, I understand. And which is to me was probably, if not one of the most important things is the most important thing is transferability, which basically says if a brand says I want it, right? Can I take all of it? Can I take all

Brett House (55:10)

Yeah, yeah. That was my next question. Yeah, because

a brand's not going to outsource that or have any sort of limitations to access that going forward. So is it in brands better interest to bring that in-house, or do you think they don't have the core capabilities to do that?

George Musi (55:18)

Yeah. Yeah. So. I think eventually, think what you're starting to see and this is, you guys have seen WFA, have seen McKinsey, you have seen all the consultancies, you have seen, everybody says the same exact thing, right? So massive amounts of money invested in AI, very, very, very, very few, under 5%, right? Our audience probably even under 4% have seen true production ready AI that has given any value into the margin business. Why? Because everybody assumes you bring in AI and you do nothing. It's magic. It's going to move your business from A to Z. That's not going to happen. It's exactly right.

Brett House (56:05)

The easy button.

George Musi (56:10)

And then when they start putting a level of work into it, they start dealing with the realities of, wait, wait, wait, wait, it's telling me stuff that's not real. Because they're using foundational world models. They're using these open source models that are predicated on the aggravation of the world data, not your data, the world data.

Rio (56:32)

Well, this is part of the reason why I don't see all these predictions of AI displacing all these jobs. I I don't see that happening at all. I mean, it's creating jobs. I just don't see it eliminating jobs at any scale at all.

George Musi (56:36)

No. No. It is recoding ⁓ what people will do and how they do it. That's ultimate. And I think that's probably the other big reason why you see massive failure. Organizations don't understand that they need the change management component part that goes with it.

Brett House (56:43)

that doesn't have that IP. Yeah, it's a skill shift and they're not prepared for that until they get this capability and they don't know how to harness it.

George Musi (57:04)

So here's the AI, make it work the way I work. It's going to fail. I can tell you that from day one. It's going to make...

Brett House (57:11)

Easier said than done.

Rio (57:13)

or have it automate this existing process, which maybe you don't need with, know, like say, think that's where we're gonna where we are.

George Musi (57:20)

Yeah, So companies like Madsense that have basically come out and says, look, we will build an AI system inside your walls. Right? It's yours. You can do whatever you want with it. Right? It's our proprietary architecture, but it's yours to begin with. And any given time you can pull it out.

Brett House (57:21)

Yeah, skills, skills orientation.

George Musi (57:42)

You can push it somewhere else. It doesn't really matter. It's never yours. It's yours from the get go. Those types of companies that understand true application of AI, irrespective of or said differently, not bound by time, place and space. Those are the companies that will ultimately enable brands, agencies or anybody else to truly have native AI capabilities that will be force factors or force multipliers for people.

Brett House (58:11)

Yeah, and what is MadSense? What are the outcomes, not to shill MadSense, but what are they pushing from an outcomes perspective in terms of once you build that IP?

George Musi (58:18)

So it's exactly what I told you before. In the marketing world, it's true incremental output. Said differently, it's true marginal gains to the business. You can say it's top line revenue, yes. But it's also down to understanding the component parts of a business. Because once you help the organization build that level of understanding, MattSense types companies have an understanding of the business, component parts of what a business works.

Brett House (58:26)

Yeah.

George Musi (58:48)

Because what Mad Science is not just marketing intelligence, it's true business intelligence. Because again, I said this in beginning, you cannot have marketing without an understanding of a business. There's no way you can have marketing be a demand driver of a business if you have no context of a business. It's impossible. That's why a lot of these companies get it wrong. Because they're saying why it's not working. Because marketing was not the problem. That's why it's not working.

Brett House (58:48)

Yep. Yep.

George Musi (59:17)

Right. It was never about marketing. It was always about this notion of a bit. So once they do that, then they have this natural understanding as the interrelationship between those component parts. So they're in a much better position, much better position based on what I've seen so far.

Brett House (59:32)

to actually make strategic recommendations and output, right?

George Musi (59:36)

Well, it's not even strategic. It's yes, but it's very practical, executional, operational that you can always tie it back to a net incremental outcome, which is sales and margin. But you can reverse engineer that back to exactly where it came from. Like how many times can any organization trace decision making chain of thought through the entire organization back to a specific aspect, right?

Brett House (59:42)

Yeah.

George Musi (1:00:05)

It never happens. agencies, it's because that's not how people work, right? You campaign specific, point solution specific, and you're like, well, does anyone remember what we did a year ago? No, nobody even remembers what we did a week ago, right? So you've lost all that intelligence, all that intelligence.

Rio (1:00:06)

You never, yeah.

Brett House (1:00:22)

Yeah, and then you're like, what's the source of this bad decision or this bad outcome? Like, nobody can trace it back. And so, yeah, you don't know how to solve it.

George Musi (1:00:26)

Right? So, companies like that, think, are going to be the true catalysts of ⁓ anybody that wants to own, I would argue, the most important thing in any business, which is knowledge. Right? That is the most compounding intelligence, compound knowledge.

Brett House (1:00:44)

Yeah. give your clients the ability to build their IP and to compound it over time, right? Regardless of who leaves the organization or who comes, you still have the essential source of truth.

George Musi (1:00:50)

That's it. That's it. And that's the thing. It doesn't really matter how many times you switch an agency, how many times people come and go. You have never broken that system. That system, the more you give it. Now, well, but here's the thing. AI is the...

Brett House (1:01:07)

Yeah.

Rio (1:01:09)

In fact, it gets better.

Brett House (1:01:11)

And this is for brands as well, right? Just so I know.

George Musi (1:01:15)

This is for brands and agencies. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because they're all trying to do the same exact thing, right? They're all trying to build IP. They're all trying to win in a competitive marketplace. They're all trying to grow. So the objectives are the same. The way they do it is different, but...

Brett House (1:01:20)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:01:32)

All AI is stupid in the beginning. It's called machine learning for a reason. It's got to learn off of something. So it's all stupid. What people don't realize is this notion of ⁓ you have to give it something and constantly give it something. The AI is not going to know. The more you interact with the AI, the more you give it context, the more you give it memory, the more you give it logic, the more you give it

Brett House (1:01:34)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:02:00)

decision traces, the more you give it, right? It is going to learn and eventually it will learn enough about the way your organization thinks and works. Right? And then AI truly becomes, I don't want to say it because I don't think it's anything about artificial intelligence, right? I would argue it becomes this notion of augmented intelligence. It now knows how to move the things better than anybody does because

Brett House (1:02:10)

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Rio (1:02:28)

Well, I think up becomes true intelligence. can really harness and use in your day to day. I think, I think that's the thing. And I guess, speaking of knowledge, mean, like George, mean, you know, we're see, we're over an hour here, like looking at, like, like, like say moving forward, signal and noise. What types of topics are you excited to share? Are you, do you want to write and talk about, like love to give the viewers a little preview of that.

George Musi (1:02:30)

That's right. That's right.

So I would say, given how much noise that exists in the marketplace today about AI, nobody, because I don't think they know how to speak about it, nobody really talks about the true application of AI. How do you really apply AI? Right? Everybody, and all you're seeing right now is most companies, we have an agent for this, we have an agent for that, we have this for our agent. okay, but who's telling the agent what to do?

Brett House (1:03:21)

Yeah. Yeah. And that's such a critical theme. I mean, I think your point is that this is, let's dispel the myth that this is easy. This is not easy. And Mike Vicenzino, who is one of our contributors as well, wrote an article about that on signal and noise, that it is extremely like a builder that's in there building and testing and eliminating bugs and doing bug testing and just the trial and error behind building this correctly, especially for IP purposes within a company. It's extremely difficult.

George Musi (1:03:22)

What do It's not. It... It... Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Brett House (1:03:51)

and otherwise everybody would be doing it. So.

George Musi (1:03:54)

everybody would be doing it correctly at scale. so I say, which is not where we should quite the opposite of that actually. ⁓ Like all the agencies and even all the tech they call operating system, right? We have an OS for this, we have an OS. So you say, okay, so what's your definition of an operating system then? Because what you have is not that they're like, no, I have an operating.

Brett House (1:03:58)

Yeah, which is not what we're saying. Yeah, yeah.

George Musi (1:04:20)

How is that possible when 98 % of the organization has failed to apply AI into organization? How do you make this bold claim that you have an operating system that is ultimately at the core of an AI? they're like, well, know, it's, well, and they stride it, and you're like, well, then you're not really applying AI, you? Right? Right? If your definition of AI is you built an agent, well, that's commodity. I can go to Claude right now and give it a bunch of prompts. It's going to come out.

Rio (1:04:47)

You build an Asia and you have an LLM wrapper, right?

Brett House (1:04:50)

Yeah, yeah.

George Musi (1:04:50)

And that's And thank you. That is exactly what, when you pull back the layers, is exactly what probably 98 % of the organizations have out there. So to me, and they try to hide it into all these words and phrases and we have this and architects and at the end of the day, if they truly had that, truly had that, right, they would be, it would be like such a no brainer.

Brett House (1:05:00)

Yeah, it's product marketing. It's not operating system.

George Musi (1:05:19)

of an organization. Now, the other aspect of it all, which is the true application of AI, the true application of AI has to have the component parts of has to have the component parts of true understanding of what AI is or isn't, and then has the applications of what it means to truly operationalize it and have production ready. Part of that is change.

Brett House (1:05:42)

Yeah, that's a critical point. That's a critical point. There's a lot of MVPs.

George Musi (1:05:47)

Part of that is change management in people and processes. I'm not saying firing people, I'm just saying change management in the way you think and the way you work and the way your workflows happen. Everybody assumes you take the most sophisticated AI, it doesn't really matter, and you just say, I like this, I'm just going to take this and put it inside my agency. And you're like, well, it hasn't been working. My people are frustrated. Yeah, because you've set the wrong conditions of why you've done this, right? ⁓ I think our industry generally marketing communications, which is ironic to me because the whole fundamental precipice of why communications was developed was to communicate. So people make informed decisions. Our industry is notoriously bad at doing that. So I think like ⁓ a true, and maybe this is something for you guys, a true

Brett House (1:06:17)

Yeah. So AI education and organizational alignment is critical. Yeah.

George Musi (1:06:46)

entity that can give true education for the masses, like strip all the nonsense out. Like you really want you really want to do AI correctly. This is the way you should be doing it. Right. Everybody else is trying to say when somebody is trying to sell you something and they're telling you that their version of AI is better than anybody else's, but it really doesn't say why it's better than anybody else's. Right. And they use all these. It's that there's probably some truth to it, but most of it is not They try to hide. So think there's massive, massive, massive need for true transparency about ⁓ how to apply AI in any organization, what it really takes. It's not a single thing. It is going to be, like all things, is going to be a continually investment and recalibration, what you said Brent, a recalibration of thinking, talent, ⁓ understanding.

Brett House (1:07:28)

Yep.

George Musi (1:07:47)

adaptability, right? And knowing that not everything right now is clear. Most of it is still very opaque right now. You don't know what you don't know yet. But you do know that there is some power and truth to what AI can bring to organizations. Some, I would argue, some core companies, like a MadSense, that have come from a different way of thinking, not necessarily from the marketing world but understand how to behavior and on a really aggregate true institutional knowledge and intelligence and apply that to organizations. I think those are the ones that are going to really help any business understand. Okay. So this is not about a widget. This is not about an agent. This is not about pulling down a workflow.

Because you go to many sites right now and say, I have a workflow for that. I have an agent for this. And the reality is, you kind of missed the boat on what it's going to take to actually do this. I don't blame them for doing that because what they're doing is being reactive to what the agencies are asking them for or any organization is asking them. I just need something to work in my workflow. I just need to show progress that I'm AI-ifying something.

Brett House (1:09:09)

Yeah.

George Musi (1:09:10)

versus saying, wait, you're thinking about this wrong. You really want to be an AI agency or you want to be AI business? This is the way you should be doing it.

Brett House (1:09:18)

Yeah.

Rio (1:09:18)

Well, question about the adoption of AI and how it impacts, let's say, like looking at the media space. I mean, you see the platforms like the Google meta, they're all building their own kind of AI layer on top or re-architecting, right? They already have a lot, know, like Google's probably the furthest along, but everyone's doing it. Meta's pretty far along too. The agencies are doing something similar, especially the holdcos are trying to build, let's say, an interface across all the different DSPs. So lot of what's now done by 25 year old humans could then be done by some different AI tools, whether the agents stitch together or some kind of layer, right? And then, well, then you have the argument, brands should be doing this, right? They should be doing this for themselves because maybe the tools make it easier. Everyone seems to be trying to build the same thing, right? Like who do you think wins this or does it not really matter? Does everyone or no one?

Brett House (1:10:01)

Yep.

George Musi (1:10:15)

I think...It's funny because I think it's like back to the future. Why the brand choose an agency? If you go back forward, why did the brand truly value an agency? It had unique thinking. That's what it was. It had unique thinking. Didn't we get, which data source do you use? What technology? It's just because they believed that they had the best thinking in the industry.

Brett House (1:10:33)

Yeah.

George Musi (1:10:46)

As much as we've talked about AI, eventually that will become a commodity. And you look at it right now, it's probably starting to look like that right now. Right. It's commoditized. Data is commoditized. AI will be commoditized. The only thing that truly differentiates one over the other will be the true institutional knowledge. I am better or I am the best what it is because I have true IP in thinking. Nobody can steal that away from me. Nobody can take what I have over the 50 years and take that and transpose them into something else. It does not work that way.

Rio (1:11:24)

So, George, it sounds like you're saying like the decision to split out media from like, let's say brand strategy and create all those other things that happened decades ago. It almost sounds like that that reverses. has to. if if if it's just if if it's just buying media for the sake of buying media, then it's race to the bottom of what we talked about. And AI and AI becomes a commodity. So you but you still need you're right. Like if you're like, why would you work with an agency, a good one you want for the sharpest minds who are who know who know the

Brett House (1:11:36)

Yeah.

George Musi (1:11:37)

I believe so.

Brett House (1:11:47)

The good, the good.

Rio (1:11:53)

who could present and propose the most interesting things and have great experiences,

Brett House (1:11:58)

Yeah, it's the business knowledge, it's the creative knowledge that's going to, know, in the audience knowledge of who brands are trying to reach. That is the IP. And that lives oftentimes in creative agencies at this point.

George Musi (1:12:05)

That's right. That is it. And I think you will start seeing the morph of...creative agency or brand strategy, you will start seeing the new version of what I would think an agency would look like, which is just, which agency do I go by to be my growth architect? Not execution, not activation, but true growth architect of my organization because they have the smartest thinkers that have been enabled and empowered to truly think, right? Think, right because they have this core on depending on them. It has not diluted them.

Rio (1:12:54)

I think the same thing's happening, systems integration, same thing George is happening, right? Cause like, you're not going to go with a systems integrator because they have like a hundred thousand people who can code for cheap in India. Like AI can code for much cheaper and much faster, right? What you're going to do is you're to go with the one that brings the best thinking, the best ideas, know, that brings the 10 X engineers, that brings the 100 X strategists, the ones who can do that. That's a good point.

George Musi (1:13:00)

Yes, That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny. look at I look at I don't know why it's not happening, but I think eventually it needs to because every time you see a pitch, I don't care which version of this pitch. Oh, we decided to go with XYZ because they came out with the best data strategy technology. And you sit there going, wait, wait. I can't be right. Right. Unless what they showed you, nobody else can do. Nobody else has, which is

Brett House (1:13:19)

That's the architecture.

George Musi (1:13:45)

very very hard for me to believe very hard for me to believe right that that like publicist wins because they got they have epsilon you're like okay but but what makes that fun different than what axiom is at the end of it's the same goddamn company they do the same exact thing literally have same access to the same exact data right and then now people will say there that's not true but we're it's it's If you go back far enough, if you've been in this business long enough, you will know where those companies came from. They're all database marketing companies at the end of the day. You know this, that's where you came from as well. So why not say, look, the reason we chose this company, really, really chose this company because they gave us access to the smartest people that they have in the organization that will be working on our business. That's what you should tell somebody. I chose, and I would do it even better, I would call people out.

Brett House (1:14:15)

From Easter, Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:14:35)

And say, the reason we went with this agency is because Brett, Rio and George, they wowed us with how much knowledge that they brought to our company, to these meetings, right? Assuming everything else is the same. Like I would argue, oh, we can buy, yeah, we'll give you preferential rates. That's transactional because everybody you talk to, I want a true growth partner. And then everything that comes after that has everything to do with tactical

Brett House (1:14:42)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:15:05)

transactional, vendor-based conversation. you're like, how about that? Those two things makes no sense to me. You said you wanted this and yet this is the things that keep coming out of your mouth versus going to anybody and say Yes, they came to us with a bunch of things, but what really, really, really made our decisions clear are these people that were really smart, calling them out by name. think once you do that, once you do that, that will then recalibrate what it always should have been about. And I will argue with which will always be about, which is, this agency or this service provider have access to really, really, really smart people?

Brett House (1:15:50)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:15:51)

I'm going to give you the best, and I tell this all the time to people, the best comparable that I have. When you go to investment banking, right, and you look at all of them and you say, well, Apollo is better because they have all these algorithms. I argue that doesn't really matter. Somebody can build those algorithms again. Why do they give somebody a $40 million package?

Why do they go after people? They don't go after people because that person can code better than any other person. They went after that person because that person has so much institutional knowledge and so many relationships. And why does that person have a leverage? Because those people follow that person. don't care what trading platform technology, AI, quantum physics, whatever the hell they have sitting in the organization.

Brett House (1:16:45)

you

Rio (1:16:45)

which I banked the rat, right? They follow the person.

George Musi (1:16:48)

So, and you're like, so you went after because that person is the one that is telling you thinking, taking all these component parts and saying, here's what you should do it and here's what you should do. Why? Right. If our industry, which is increasingly, and this is where all trading and algorithmic and all came from, it came from that side of the world. People don't want to admit that, but we, we, we, we steal these words coming from that side of the business. Right. If you just take that same construct and say, okay, What differentiates one over the other? Why should somebody follow one over the other? It has to always go back to these people. So once you have that, but here's the thing, if anybody, anybody, this is a brand too, because brand shifts through CMOs as agencies shifts through leaders these days, right? But if any one of those two entities can systemize that internal knowledge, right?

Brett House (1:17:25)

Yeah, to the architect.

George Musi (1:17:48)

they will have created something that transcends anything else. So if an agency can do that, if a brand can do that and capture the last 10 CMOs that they've had in an organization, access to that, truly access to that, or WPP, which they've tried to do, and I grant them at least trying to do it, which is aggregating at least what they said, aggregating 80 years worth of knowledge into a system.

It sounds great connecting all that data sources. Eventually, I don't know how they encode the context of people inside the organization. I think that will happen over time, but at least they understood this notion of systemic power. So I applaud them for that. Who figures that out first, or agency? I will tell you that that will be the inflection point where the entire relationship conversation shifts.

Brett House (1:18:49)

Yep.

George Musi (1:18:50)

completely because you don't if a brand has that and has that true understanding of what's worked what's not worked why it's worked under what conditions has it not worked what why make why did this CMO with

Rio (1:19:05)

I don't see brands be

Brett House (1:19:06)

That's

Rio (1:19:06)

able

Brett House (1:19:06)

a true competitive advantage. That's truly defensible.

Rio (1:19:06)

to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that's why that's, mean, there's more of a demand for like technology advisory and specialized services. I see, I see this stuff is so hard to your point earlier, George, that I think there's going to be more demand for, for, for, for good partners.

George Musi (1:19:17)

it Yes, but I think at some point brands, some of them are already starting to do this, start realizing that ⁓ they need to control more of that.

Brett House (1:19:34)

We need to collect a mass and manage this over the history of our business. And it makes us less dependent on vendors, on external parties, on tech, on media, and less dependent on even the people within our organization, which are transient, right? Come and go, right? But you've got that institutional knowledge that continues to grow.

George Musi (1:19:38)

But... rea- Correct.

Rio,I agree with you. It does not mean that there's no need for outside. It just means that they will have a much better, to go back to where we started, they will have a much better understanding of why they need them and how they compensate that need. Because I think that's what will be the ultimate recalibration of what value looks like. Once I know, because here's why I would argue, brands just don't, because they just...don't have everything that they need, right, which I would go back to is, is they've lost, right? And it probably makes them more susceptible to anything. The most important thing is, that institutional knowledge. They don't have it and they keep losing it constantly time over time, right? CMO leaves that that's massive, massive, massive intelligence that goes out with that person. Massive it is, right? So that's what once they have that and they can really understand that, they can be very purposeful when they engage any services and solutions provided. Okay, here's what I need from you. And this is why I need it from you. And this is how I'm going to value that need from you. And then I think you can clearly come out with an outcome based. Okay, I got it. So this, this, and this, and this. Great. Awesome. Both sides of the fence have to change. I would argue that brands are in a better position to probably be more of the catalyst of internal change than somebody from the outside forcing them to change.

Rio (1:21:33)

Yeah, that's true. They have access to all of the, the access, the assets, artifacts, the things they would use to train it. You know, I'd say they probably do a better, better job keeping those things than their partners do. You'd hope anyway. So.

George Musi (1:21:38)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett House (1:21:46)

Yeah. So this has been a tremendous conversation. Should we go to quick hits or are we good at concluding where we are? think a little quick hit would be.

Rio (1:21:50)

Yeah, great discussion. Yeah, let's do it.

George Musi (1:21:55)

We are good.

Brett House (1:21:59)

Yeah, do you want to do quick hits or are we good with this? Yeah, let's do some quick hits. So Ria, you start.

George Musi (1:22:01)

Yeah, sure.

Rio (1:22:05)

So biggest myth about, let's say, growth in general or agency growth, if you want to get more specific.

George Musi (1:22:15)

Agency growth has been a wait to get. So growth in the agency world historically has meant new businesses waiting for RFPs to come in. With the world that we live in today, it's about a hunter mentality, which is completely different than new business. So I think a lot of agencies are painfully realizing that they're no longer in a position to wait for somebody to send them an RFP.

Brett House (1:22:44)

Yep. So strategy or execution, what kills more companies?

Rio (1:22:45)

Let's try it. Which, and what's harder?

Brett House (1:22:51)

And what's harder?

George Musi (1:22:52)

Strategy definitely. I think that's been ⁓ modularized quite a bit based on it and for the reasons that we've talked about. I that's going to be the biggest catalyst differentiator for agencies. I'm not modularizing execution. I think execution is critical. You could mess up a great strategy by not doing it correctly. ⁓ But I would argue that

Brett House (1:23:14)

Hahaha

George Musi (1:23:18)

impact as in what can have more positive or negative impact into a business margin strategy will always and I've seen that play out many many times in my career.

Brett House (1:23:28)

Yep.

Rio (1:23:29)

AI will create more winners than losers ⁓ or more jobs than job losses, true or false.

George Musi (1:23:36)

I think that AI will create more jobs. I think you're going to need, you're going to recalibrate a bunch of people. That's why you haven't seen, people don't realize this, that in a normal given healthy economy, about 1.4 million people ⁓ get laid off for whatever reason. Awesome. Great. So that's normal. So if you look at where we are, anytime like this, have massive

Brett House (1:23:41)

Yeah. Yeah.

George Musi (1:24:05)

is going to be a recalibration. Some people will make some ill short time decisions. But what you start realizing, and we had this one in the technology revolution came out with the internet, right? Oh my God. So people let go of a bunch of people. And then what they realized was, oh, I did that in ERP. And I realized I need more, actually need more people to actually service the demand. Because here's the thing, it's going to create a whole bunch of demand. And as far as I know right now, AI is not going to be able to fulfill demand.

Rio (1:24:39)

Yeah, think a lot of things it's creating. OK, it's easier to code now. You can use a codex and Claude code to code. But the thing is, I think it's showing there was a huge demand for code that was always unmet. So I think that's what's.

George Musi (1:24:49)

That's right. That's right.

Brett House (1:24:50)

Yeah. It's democratizing the building process for sure. So fill in the blank, and this will be our last one. then we'll like, this has been a marathon. This is like our Joe Rogan episode. We're going to go for two and a half, three hours, right? Like George, we can talk to you forever. We should have a part two, so fill in the blank. The modern agency is less a blank and more a blank.

Rio (1:25:01)

We could have.

George Musi (1:25:11)

the modern agency is ⁓ less opaque and more transparent.

Brett House (1:25:17)

Well, George, so where can people get in touch with you?

George Musi (1:25:21)

So on LinkedIn, it's always a great place to try to keep that the central hub. You can reach out at george.mucyatoutwork.com. ⁓ If you want to get in touch with me, come on LinkedIn. ⁓ If people want to see in person, that goes for you guys as well. I'm actually going to be at Possible representing Mad Sense. ⁓ were fortunate enough, they were one of ⁓ six that were selected for the Innovation Stage.

Brett House (1:25:43)

Nice, we will see you there.

Rio (1:25:50)

That was awesome, congrats.

George Musi (1:25:50)

⁓And so you guys will see, hopefully you'll see some of why I think they're an interesting well positioned company ⁓ out of a hundred companies to be one of six. I think is just a testament.

Brett House (1:25:58)

Let's get those guys⁓ on where we're going to be broadcasting signal and noise ⁓ from possible.

George Musi (1:26:04)

Yeah, I will reach out to you to get that on the books. I think you'll be impressed with what they have.

Brett House (1:26:13)

Well, hey, well, thanks, George. And, you know, this has been a terrific call, terrific podcast. And for everybody that's listening, you know, subscribe, share it with your colleagues and friends on YouTube, Apple podcasts, Spotify, et cetera. You can visit us at debdebdeb.signalandnoise.ai as well. And we are new content all the time, and we're going to start pushing out ⁓ newsletters with all of the content in case you've missed some or you're not going to the website. So thanks everybody.

George Musi (1:26:17)

Nah, thank you guys.

Rio (1:26:19)

of a conversation. Yeah. Get new content all the time.

Brett House (1:26:42)

and we'll see you next time.

George Musi (1:26:43)

Thank you.

Thank you guys. Take care. Cheers.

Rio (1:26:45)

Thanks a lot.