DRVN Media LLC

How has consumer behavior shifted in the digital age?People don’t just buy, they research, scroll, lurk, compare, ask Reddit or a facebook group or someone offline first. By the time users hit a customer’s site, they’re probably pretty far down the funnel. The worst part, attribution is nearly impossible to figure out, and report.

What strategies are you using to create more authentic brand connections?Ditch the polish. Embrace the human. The stuff that feels a little raw and unfiltered is what people trust and engage with. And brands MUST make audiences feel like they belong instead of a business they buy stuff from.

Can you share a recent campaign that exceeded expectations?We ran a raw, UGC-style campaign for a local service client that outperformed their polished studio content by over 3x in lead volume. No ad spend increase. Just better creative that felt real. Authenticity converts faster than aesthetics. (I don’t have the clients permission yet to refer to them by name)

How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives?If it doesn’t move revenue, loyalty, or branded-search demand, I don’t care. Traffic without impact is just vanity. Would you rather have 100,000 clicks that makes you $10,000, or 10,000 clicks that makes you $100,000. At some point you gotta focus on what’s important. Especially in a day in age when platforms aren’t sending sites clicks as easily.

What trends are shaping the future of advertising?Aside from AI… Raw/authentic beats high-production/polished nearly every time. Brands that feel human are winning over brands that feel like a perfect-facade. The future looks more like TikTok than Super Bowl commercials.

How are you integrating AI or automation into your campaigns?We trained our AI platforms to sound like us so my team, and I move faster; we did this by feeding it example after example and correcting bad AI behavior. But nothing goes live without human eyes. AI is just the intern, but not the decision-maker.

What advice would you give to aspiring marketers today?Learn the fundamentals but don’t worship them. Question > Test > Analyze > Take What Works, Trash the Rest > Repeat. And don’t build your career chasing trends, or being a one-trick pony because you never know when everything in marketing is going to shift. Never stop learning, and build skills that make you unbeatable. Why? The other high demand thing we’re getting is video/photo content creation, and even though I have a team for that guess what I’m studying – everything there is to know about pre; production; and post production so I can sell it better, and know what makes us better than the rest.