Marketing is changing faster than ever—and the old playbook no longer works. Lou Cohen of EY shares the real strategies he's using to lead through the rise of AI, “geo” SEO, and decentralized platforms like Reddit. If you want to stay relevant, this episode is your blueprint.
https://page2pod.com - In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark welcomes Lou Cohen, Chief Digital Officer at EY Americas, for a candid and deeply insightful conversation. From his roots as a comic book store founder to leading digital strategy at one of the world’s largest consulting firms, Lou shares hard-earned wisdom on staying ahead in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape.
They dive deep into how EY is tackling the rise of generative AI, why “geo” (Generative Engine Optimization) is reshaping SEO as we know it, and how platforms like Reddit and Snapchat are influencing content strategies. With his dual role as an educator and executive, Lou offers unique perspective on the skills marketers need in today’s world—and why understanding consumer behavior still trumps any algorithm.
Don’t miss this powerful blend of mentorship, strategy, and foresight from one of digital marketing’s sharpest minds.
📚 In This Episode
• How Lou transitioned from comic book entrepreneur to Chief Digital Officer at EY
• EY's approach to AI discoverability and content sourcing for LLMs
• The new era of SEO: what “geo” really means and why it matters
• Why Reddit is critical to EY’s future marketing strategies
• How teaching keeps Lou ahead of industry trends
• Balancing brand compliance with authentic engagement on niche platforms
• Strategies behind award-winning content partnerships with Reuters and CNBC
• Career advice for marketers in a post-AI world
• Whether college still matters in the age of AI
• Lessons from EY’s global website migration effort
Lou brings a refreshing honesty to leadership, marketing, and mentorship. This episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the future of digital.
📢 Subscribe to get expert insights from top marketing leaders: https://open.spotify.com/show/4mMTmBqGA8VpGGL7ItUtGk?si=5f839019f61b40e7
💬 Comment below: What platforms or strategies are you using to stay ahead of the AI curve?
Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media (https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com)
🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned
• EY: https://www.ey.com/
• Lou Cohen on Linkedin
[00:00:00] Jon: Today's guest is Lou Cohen. He's the Chief Digital Officer for EY Americas, but he's also been my manager, my client, and my friend. Across those roles, Lou's worn a lot of hats from comic shop founder to Microsoft leader to adjunct professor. That combo gives him a rare view into where digital marketing is heading and where it's already broken.
This episode isn't just a reunion, though. We dig into how EY is navigating the high stakes challenge of generative ai, not just from a tech standpoint. Start from where our content compliance and discoverability lens. We talk about how Lou thinks about platforms like Reddit and Snapchat as a marketer and a teacher, and why the old playbook doesn't work anymore.
And of course we get into geo. That's generative engine optimization and where it means to build content that lives outside your website, but still influences the algorithm shaping business visibility. Lou's at a tricky spot. He needs to future proof EYs digital presence in an AI first world while admitting that no one, not even the experts really know the rules yet.
His job is to lead with authority in a space that's rewriting itself in real time. I'll be honest, I [00:01:00] was a little nervous recording this. Lou isn't just a guest, he's someone who's shaped how I think about my career. There's a certain pressure when you're talking to someone you deeply respect, not just to ask smart questions, but to hold your own.
So this episode was personal for me. It's hard conversation, part reflection with a mentor who once told me I didn't need an MBA. We get into what it really takes to lead in marketing when the ground is constantly shifting. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.
Welcome to episode 86 of the page two podcast. As always, I'm joined with, uh, joined by Joe Devita, my, uh, partner in Crime Moving Traffic Media, and today we're excited to welcome Lou Cohen to the show. Welcome. Thanks. And so Lou and I just as maybe set the stage a little bit. Lou and I have known each other for more years than I'm willing to admit.
He was both my manager at Microsoft client while he was at Citibank, and Joe and I were at Razorfish. Um, and [00:02:00] ultimately our first client under the Moving Traffic Media brand. Walter Kluwer is still with us as a client as well. Luke Cohen has since moved on to Ernst and Young. Needless to say, I've known you for many years in a lot of different roles, manager, client, friend, and you wear so many hats both across.
Corporate marketing Ching, right? Adjunct professor at a couple of different universities and comic shop owner, uh, or I guess former comic folk owner, which I'd love to dig into a little. How do you explain like who you are and what you do to someone who may not know about you?
[00:02:33] Lou: Yeah, it's interesting. I struggle a little bit with like, what's my actual job title, because when I say I am director of Digital marketing demand generation COE Leader for the Americas at ey, people are like, you what?
Uh, a couple years ago I said to my boss, I'm like, it's hard to explain what my job is. People would understand it if I said, I'm Chief Digital Marketer, chief Digital Officer. 'cause that generally people can understand what that's about. And then she introduced me to somebody as that and I'm like, okay, clearly I have [00:03:00] the green light to use that titling.
Uh, these days I just go, chief Digital Officer for EY Americas and. Cover brand media ui.com, r Tech Marketing Analytics, ai. It's a whole bunch of hats I wear at at work. Um, and then I teach at three universities, NYU u Yeshiva University and Brew College. Various different courses. I coach softball, and as you mentioned, I had this comic story that I was a partner in for.
Good. Long time. It's, it was an interesting thing. It was a business plan that I wrote when I was in college, an undergrad, uh, that a friend of mine took on and it was a passion project when we started it, but, uh, hindsight's 2020.
[00:03:35] Jon: Yeah, as always, I remember we were on a business trip for Microsoft and we were in the train station.
You were like, Hey, let's stop by my comic book store real quick. And I was thinking. Oh, like, this must be one he goes to all the time or something. Then I actually realized you were part owner and I was like, that is so cool. Like, like a, a moonlighting that you would never expect. Yeah. Tell us that story about how that came to be.
I always like hearing it. I'm sure the audience will as well.
[00:03:59] Lou: In, in undergrad, like [00:04:00] I was saying, I wrote a business plan for two different versions of a comic book store. I actually started my career in the comic book world, um, when I was in sixth grade. Sixth grade I started my first like actual business that I got a license to do, uh, buying and selling sports cards from Bilion comic books.
And uh, when I got to eighth grade, I found a distributor who gave me a good discount on comics and I basically put my two local comic book stores out of business by selling comic books to my friends at school and, uh, just delivering. Every Wednesday I had new comics to distribute to whoever wanted them, uh, and it was all a pre-order business and this is pre-internet.
Pre e-commerce, I've got enough gray hairs, uh, that I was able to pull that off. And then my first internship was at Marvel Comics and I actually set up Marvel's very first e-commerce efforts with a OL shopping and got exposed to like all sorts of creators and writers and actually met Stan Lee. There's a great story about them.
I had this idea for a couple of different businesses. One was my first ecommerce.com, which was [00:05:00] Collectors Exchange in the mid nineties. Ran that as a side business with a friend, uh, for about eight years. And then I had two different ideas for a comic book store model. One was my ultimate retirement plan, which would be to just like.
Build a local store, uh, where I could just buy, sell and put my collection into a store and sell off everything and more of a hobby, a retirement kind of plan. The other was to build a franchisable chain of collectible hobby shops, uh, for like the modern era with a mix of e-commerce and resale and a different kind of vibe.
It was meant to be more like the Applebee's of, uh, comic books. And so you'd have this like local vibe in the place, but it would still be a business model that could be replicated over and over again because, you know, it's the same comic books, sports cards, trading cards, gaming cards, like all that stuff.
Um, so if you can build a sustainable model that scales and can be replicated and then you localize it to wherever they are, I thought that could work. And a [00:06:00] friend of mine who I took classes with at Carney Mellon, uh, liked my idea and I was like, listen, why don't we rethink the business plan a little bit for the DC market?
And, and so we. Me and a couple of guys we got together, we came up with a plan. Uh, he went and ran it, started with a location out in Tenleytown near York and University. And that one did okay. It didn't do as well as we would've hoped, but their initial inventory was my collection. And then they ultimately moved over to, uh, where the Amtrak station was, which was when John, you and I got to go visit it.
Uh, these days I'm no longer involved, but they still have a shop. The managing partner that I started it with, he's no longer involved in the day-to-day either. Uh, they're over in DuPont Circle and, and it is that more local flavor of a model. They're a very DC Ted place with a lot of more independent comic books and writers and authors.
And I'd say like a mix of, uh, political satire even comes through there. It, they've got a really interesting vibe and culture. It's so, if anybody ever goes through [00:07:00] Washington DC go by DuPont Circle, check out Phantom Comics. It was a great spot. Yeah.
[00:07:04] Jon: You sold your stake around the time you started at ey.
I always like dabbling in, you know, things as well. Was that purely coincidental timing or did scaling those corporate responsibility lead to that decision around stepping away? I found that I've had to cut down on some of the random things I'm involved in just as we've grown as well. So how did that play into it?
[00:07:26] Lou: Yeah, it was definitely, it, it was timing. The, my situation with Y when I joined the firm was I had to revisit everything that was going on. And so I, I felt like it was time. I had been involved for quite a while. My interest in it had been diluted over time. Uh, the managing partner was on his way out himself and I'm like, look, UI is gonna force me to rethink all of my time and investments.
And so it, it was just the right time to, to exit and it worked out mutually on all ends. Uh, in [00:08:00] hindsight. I probably would have preferred to hold onto my collection. I think it would've appreciated significantly more than the value I got back out of the store. As for me personally, it was a net loss, but it was, you know, it was an experience.
So I'm happy I did it in many ways, but missed some parts of my old collection too. Um, yeah, I can
[00:08:16] Jon: imagine.
[00:08:17] Lou: When I joined ey, I had to rethink a lot of things and I had a consulting gig with Meta for a hot minute before joining ey. And of course EY is META'S auditor, so I could not continue doing that. I helped build their, I was one of the academics that was helping build their blueprint certification when they first rolled that out, and so much of their first level of the blueprint certification is similar to my social media course that I teach.
So I, I had to end that. But the teaching side of it, EY was cool with they, they were like, yeah, you can still be an adjunct. That's okay.
[00:08:49] Jon: Yeah. I definitely wanna talk a little bit about the teaching because I think that gives you a really unique perspective into both the industry, right? Because you're have students coming in.
Who are [00:09:00] younger using some of the different platforms. And you've been doing it for a long time. So you're sort of seeing these shifts. In addition to being a marketing leader at different organizations, experiencing these shifts in real time as well, is there anything that you've experienced in that sort of academic structure that sort of have influenced, or I dunno, shifted maybe how you're approaching things at the, at your real job?
[00:09:21] Lou: Yeah. I often say I learn almost as much as my students learn from me. Like I, I learn from them. Um, and it's a big part of why I stay teaching. 'cause believe me, I'm senior enough where if I wanted my nights back, I probably deserve them at some level, but it's. It is rewarding to see that I'm impacting the careers of all these students.
And there, there are several, usually there's a couple every semester that'll send me a note and be like, professor, I was actually really impacted my career because, um, or this thing that you talked about, this is how it's playing out for me at work. And sometimes it's years later too, which, that's what keeps me doing it.[00:10:00]
What I get out of it is a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at these media and digital channels that we work with. They've, I've run campaigns where maybe I, I had a clue as to what we're doing and maybe I didn't. Things like we've done on Snapchat, for example. I don't use Snapchat. My kids do and my daughters do.
But what is the right approach to doing Snapchat? The best brands, they are building native channels in the platform. They're understanding that their audience operates differently there and. It's a unique channel compared to everything else in the social landscape because it's more of a way in which young people, it's not just young people, but a lot of young people communicate with each other.
They appreciate that their messages are not stored historically, that they have an expiration. And one of my daughters, at the very least, she wants to keep the, like, the relationship open with people for as long as possibly can so that she gets that streak, uh, with her friends. And that's like a competitive thing to keep that streak alive.
In many ways, [00:11:00] if I think about Snapchat other than a social media channel, it's, it's the way in which younger people are staying in touch with and communicating with the people in their lives. And as a marketer, I probably wouldn't have understood that given my age if it weren't for the way I hear my students talk about it, or even my kids.
And that tells me something very different because when we run a campaign to promote the career path in accounting at ey, we do use Snapchat as a channel for our ads. Now I understand that channel a little differently. I understand it's not just I'm placing a video type ad into this channel targeting people of a certain age and demographic.
Audience target, but I'm actually trying to engage with them in a moment where they're not thinking about advertisers, they're thinking about their friends and how they communicate with their friends. And I can be a little more personal in that moment because I understand the consumer behavior of the channel a little bit better.
Even how I think about Reddit, I think Reddit has so many possibilities, uh, in terms of what you could do with [00:12:00] that channel. But I asked my students periodically, I'm like, how are you guys using Reddit these days? And. I always find it interesting. I've got a bunch of students that are like, what's Reddit?
And that surprises me. But then I've got students that are like, oh, I live on Reddit. I'm on Reddit every day. And I'm like, great. So what are you doing on Reddit? And they're like, oh, I'm a really big fan of this particular like hobby that I'm interested in. And there's a community that that I talk to all the time about it.
And I found some of those communities, like I'm still into baseball cards and sports bilion. Big, huge New York Mets fan. Um, the Mets community there is great, and they're planning about how they're winning or not winning when things go on, you know, things going on at the ballpark. Uh, David Wright just had his number retired this weekend, and so there was a whole big threat on that.
So it's nice to have digital communities like it, but that's, that is what Reddit is. It's the modern digital community. It's what GeoCities wish they were back in the nineties. Reddit is now,
[00:12:53] Jon: I think it's, I think you emphasize a super important point, which is you have to figure out where your audience [00:13:00] is across these platforms because they are becoming so niche like PurePoint about Reddit.
Like I signed up for Reddit back in 2000, like 17 or maybe even earlier, but rarely went on it until. It became like an SEO channel essentially. Yeah. When Google started ranking it everywhere and I was like, wow, I need to pay attention here. And now I probably spend more time on Reddit than any other social platform.
So even my interest and, and user behavior has shifted over time as well for EY being a pretty, you know, compliance heavy brand. Like how do you manage hosting across all these social networks where compliance can be a challenge, both in terms of coming up with the creative, but also um, being able to respond to comments and things like that.
I'm sure there would've a defined process, but take us through like a, a brand like yours. Like how do you even play in those spaces? Be nimble enough to be able to engage.
[00:13:56] Lou: Yeah, Reddit's been a tough one for us because we know we [00:14:00] have partners and employees that are active on the channel, so great that they're there and participating.
But Reddit is an anonymized community for the most part. So that anonymity leads, it puts it in the world of like fishbowl and GitHub. And so it's in this world of anonymous users, like even Twitter X is, is in that part of the social landscape where it's like you can hide versus Facebook and Instagram.
You have to be a little more legit and real and certainly on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is probably the social channel EY cares the most about, um, because we can engage our audiences there. It's a business social network, but Reddit is increasingly important to me on multiple fronts. From an SEO perspective, we know that it.
Influences SEO from a geo perspective with the generative AI discoverability thing. Clearly Reddit is gonna play a big role in how we move forward there, and I've been working on a strategy with my partners on the social media team to try and figure out like how do we [00:15:00] as ey show up properly in a way that's not going to be net negative for the brand.
Um, because if you look at, uh, subreddit Big Four or Subreddit Deloitte, you'll see it's a lot of employees and the big four consultant consulting firms like complaining, and that's not what we want. We don't need fishbowl to be out in the public. So. What I'm toying with the idea of is do we create non anonymized ey personas, actual people and seed them into specific communities?
So for example, if we have a senior consultant, uh, that works on Azure, could we go into the Azure community, which is a very small subreddit, um, but it's largely Azure DevOps type people. And if we say this is Steve from EY Azure, and have them publicly acknowledge like who they are, but not. In a promotional way.
Like they're not there to publish our thought leadership or um, share links to our articles. They're there to respond to people's questions [00:16:00] about things related to Azure, and I think they could do that very well. And wouldn't it be great if they show up as a thought leader who's a legitimate person from a legitimate company that can actually respond to those things?
I also think it would work for business development and connection and community in a different way. I don't see Reddit as a channel where we should be pushing our content there. As much as I would love to do that from an SEO and geo discoverability. Perspective, I see it as a way for us to show value back to the communities that live there in areas where we have expertise.
[00:16:33] Jon: I love that because you see everyone posting on LinkedIn and elsewhere, like, oh, you gotta get involved with Reddit. Oh, you gotta be posting there. But the, they never talk about like, who is doing the posting? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges for brands is, okay, do we make up a fake person?
Do we post as the brand? Definitely don't wanna do that. Do we get an influencer? But then we gotta pay them basically in perpetuity to continue posting on our behalf. So the idea of seeding a thought leader in [00:17:00] the community, um, makes a ton of sense, uh, that, that approach is a good one. Have you got, we had a guest on Nick Laroi who talked about actually acquiring a subreddit where you basically find a subreddit related to your niche or whatever that may, you know, hasn't been posted on or, or monitored in some time.
And you can basically solicit. Reddit to take ownership of that. Are you guys thinking about owning your own channels at all, or subreddits at all? Actually, we've
[00:17:23] Lou: completely steered away from that idea, and we specifically don't want like subreddit ey because it would turn into another fishbowl kind of thing, so it's just not.
What we wanna be doing, and I'm cool with that. To me, it's realistically we don't need to have our own EY subreddit or like, I wouldn't even venture into like EY accounting, uh, or consulting or like any of those practice areas because it's, it becomes where you have to moderate it. You have to go be careful who's saying what, like it, the management of that [00:18:00] to be compliant with the regulations in our space, I think would be too much for us.
Um, I also don't think it's the right thing for that type of community. Don't think it's the best thing for bigger brands to come in there and be like, we're gonna own a topic. It. You have to let the community figure out what topics matter to them, what do they want to discuss, and it'll feel a little too big like that.
So that's
[00:18:21] Joe: why the Facebook groups and the LinkedIn groups have largely failed. They just, they seem too spammy or it's like everyone's just trying to push some professional opinion or the conversations are best. In Reddit, and I don't know if that's because everyone is anonymous or not. If I, if I follow the same kind of groups across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit, the conversations are so much better.
In Reddit. You have, like, as a brand, you wanna be a part of it, but you don't wanna own it, right?
[00:18:48] Lou: Yeah, exactly. Right. And. It is that Big Brother thing. Like we, we have to tread lightly if we disrupt it too much. Like could you imagine if in SEO you had Bright Edge Conductor [00:19:00] and SEM, rush and FIC and like all these different companies showing up in the SEO threads on Reddit?
Talking about their solutions and their stuff and everybody would walk away from it and go somewhere else.
[00:19:14] Jon: I, I think honestly on Reddit, the moderation is significantly more advanced than Facebook groups and things like that. And so while you may get a lot of spam in some of these, I think the moderators do an excellent job there compared to other platforms.
At least that's my opinion. I'm curious about the, so LinkedIn obviously ideal form for you guys being B2B, we've started to see some, uh, performance and Joe might be able to speak to this, a little of B2B targeting on Facebook has been improving a little bit. Are you guys seeing anything similar to that or is LinkedIn still the primary channel for you guys?
[00:19:47] Lou: I, LinkedIn is still where B2B lives in social media, and it's largely because people are giving their real credentials on LinkedIn for sure. Not everybody fills in their job stuff on [00:20:00] Facebook, but Facebook, at least for EY, is a reasonable channel for us. We, we don't do a ton there because we're their auditor, so we only buy advertising like the general person can buy advertising.
Um, so we're not doing anything customer unique there. Uh, and that's just more our own limitations and regulations that we have to follow. But, you know, the targeting capabilities are getting better. I feel like with Facebook and Instagram, they are adding more things that you can target, but they're also restricting others.
And so, like in my social media courses, I talk about like paid social in a meaningful way and I actually bring up, uh, the ad systems for these different channels like X and TikTok. Meta and I show 'em, here are some of the differences in targeting that you can do. And one of the things I call out, and I frankly, I give meta a lot of credit for how they approach, this was years ago, uh, meta made an announcement that you would no longer be able to target based on race, religion, or political view.
And that's a real, that's a real thing. And frankly, [00:21:00] I think it's a safety measure that. Everybody should just put into their targeting systems because there, there is less benefit than risk when you target in those areas. And even going back to my days at Citi that those were like very sensitive areas that we really would try to avoid doing any sort of targeting around because of the potential compliance risk and, and frankly it was just the wrong thing to do.
So that sensitivity that they've brought in, I understand why it's been a little harder to target people based on job and company and, but given how successful LinkedIn has been with it, I think meta would be naive not to consider letting people target that way. And it's starting to show up. It is more cost efficient to target on Facebook and Instagram against those types of details.
But when you're in that consumer mindset of, I'm going on Facebook to see what my friends and family are up to, you're presented with a wall full of. Sponsored content and the share of advertising [00:22:00] to organic content, I feel like has tipped way too far into the paid side of things. And they're trying to be like TikTok for general content where they're just giving you stuff that they think is gonna be relevant to your interests, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you read one piece of content, you start seeing a lot more stuff like that piece of content takes you down a rabbit hole of sponsored content. That frankly is a little bit annoying. Instagram, they haven't quite gotten that far. When you're on Instagram, you're there to look at pictures of your friends and family and, and not really see the advertising that.
That is there and that's different than LinkedIn. On LinkedIn. As long as the sponsored content and the advertising is relevant to you, it doesn't feel so advertising. It's more contextually right in, in the advertising side of things because it's highly targeted and of expected with the type of content you're consuming.
So I do think there is a balance that has to be met there, and for B2B, while meta can get the targeting better, these days, the con, [00:23:00] the context isn't quite there.
[00:23:01] Joe: You make a great point about expectation when, when you log into link and you, you, you have a. Easier times plowing through 50% ads in your feed as you do on Facebook.
'cause you log into Facebook for something different. J John made a point about seeing some success with B2B advertising on LinkedIn. Most of that success has been with the customer li the the contactless customer match. So I think people actually. Use a different email with LinkedIn than they do when they sign up for Facebook.
So we see completely different match rates when we upload a list to Facebook versus LinkedIn. I think people create a whole different, you know, it's a different profile on LinkedIn. We think they're also using a completely different email with LinkedIn too, so the match rates are so much different. So you can find those people on LinkedIn, but they're not really there to think about work.
So you gotta be careful about that.
[00:23:51] Lou: Yeah, a hundred percent. My LinkedIn profile, I think I have like 20 plus email addresses tied to my LinkedIn profile because of all of my historical [00:24:00] jobs. And just for NYU, I have two email addresses for Yeshiva. I have one for Baruch, I have two for ey, I have two, like I've got.
So many email addresses. LinkedIn has all of 'em because it's not just that like, okay, I'm okay that advertisers target me on LinkedIn, but it's the network of people I do business with. My students want them to be able to find me when they're looking for me. So if you put my personal email in, great. But if you put one of my teaching emails in, you should be able to find me still.
If you put my EY email in, you should be able to find me. So to me, I, I'm okay as an individual. Putting that information on LinkedIn, whereas Facebook has one and it's an old Hotmail address that I haven't really been using very much. You finally retired the Hotmail
[00:24:44] Jon: address. Yeah, I've moved on to Gmail. I wanted to talk about the content partnership with routers and you won some awards, uh, with that partnership and wanted to talk about if, for a couple of different reasons.
One is SEO, obviously a big focus at ey, so [00:25:00] I'm sure that sort of fed that engine, but also the approach to the content was maybe a little bit different than what you would think historically come coming out of ey. Right? A little bit less corporate focused, if you will. Did that also help feed some of the social channels?
Is that sort of how you were thinking about that ecosystem working?
[00:25:16] Lou: Yeah, there, there's definitely a part of what we were doing, uh, with, we have two of these content partnerships and we've done a few others, but actively right now we have one with CNBC and another with Reuters. And we've done similar stuff with Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg in the past.
It's really, we're trying to tell stories about how EY plays into the business world, and that shows up in a variety of different things. When COVID happened, we, our reaction to that from a marketing perspective was business interrupted, um, and we did this video series with CNBC, uh, and it was really successful trying to get.
Like a partner from EY and a customer of ours talking about the things they were dealing with as it was [00:26:00] happening in 2020. And that led us to this path of understanding that executives, they're not really reading articles the way like you think they are. Like there, there is no executive today like C-Suite executive that is sitting down and reading the Wall Street Journal like they did 40 years ago.
Like that just doesn't happen. Anyone. We know that if they are reading news on a daily basis, which most of them I believe are, it's probably like Apple News or like their Google alerts. They are getting a digest in the morning of like, what are the topics that are most relevant to them? And they're perusing through and clicking on things that they think are most interesting.
So in a world where they are not sitting down and watching the news, they're not sitting down and reading a newspaper, how do you get to be. Part of their media consumption habits on a daily basis. And that's where this whole inspiration about video content, short and long form the mix of it all came to be.
And that business interrupted that we did in [00:27:00] 2020 was the first of those with Reuters. We've done a mix of things. Uh, the most recent that we got that award for from the a NA was, uh, like our on the road series where we were showing business in action and real world situations, real time things. The series we did with CNBC was, uh, realtime Insights, and we actually had A-C-N-B-C host, one of their regular contributors.
Come into our CNBC design studio, which now lives in our office. And, uh, we would bring, uh, one of our leaders in to be interviewed by them. And we'd film for however long it took, could be half hour, could be an hour, and they would do an interview and then we'd cut that down, get our thirties, our fifteens, our social content would B roll.
And we'd have all of this editable in, in such a way that we could tell those stories about like, what's happening, what, where should people be thinking? And it became advertorial for CNBC with Reuters. It became digital content that we could distribute through multiple [00:28:00] channels, plus Reuters own distribution network.
And we were able to show, like where we were talking about ai, when AI was like really first breaking, we were already in there, but we were already talking about it. And these were the channels which we were able to do that
[00:28:13] Joe: you've been very vocal about. Um, testing, getting involved with AI for marketing and a lot of it's been public.
You are very good about publishing on LinkedIn. Is there anything kind of news breaking you could share with us on ways in which you're activating with AI that maybe haven't shared
[00:28:29] Lou: yet? Sure. Well, I'll start with like the table stakes and I've told my students this and I tell my colleagues this all the time.
If you're not playing with it, if you're not learning how AI is gonna work for you, you'll be working for it. And the, just the reality of our marketplace is we are back in 1997 where if you couldn't work on a PC with Windows and Office, you were not gonna get a job in a year or so. We are gonna be in this place where if you can't work with AI tools, you are not gonna be able to get a job.
And that's just reality. It's the newest wave [00:29:00] of software and technology that we're all working in. The prompt hacking and all of that stuff. I think the majority of people understand how to write a prompt and maybe not a good one, but they understand like, okay, I'm asking a query, uh, in a different way.
The average consumer does not truly understand the difference between how an LLM works versus a search engine and AI discoverability. The term I keep hearing is geo generative engine optimization. That is where every SEO should be thinking about right now. Like that is, it's a whole new bastion of discoverability of content.
And I recently was sitting down with ETIs Menick from a conductor, and, and we were talking about this, and I'm like, if SEO is about how do I make my content discoverable to a search engine, geo is how do I ba, how do I make my business known to the internet? And it's 'cause it's not just my website, it's where my content lives everywhere, where my thought leadership lives everywhere where.
And so suddenly syndicated content [00:30:00] matters and sponsored content matters. And social media has a whole new importance in that landscape, uh, for distribution and contribution to this. It is, it's this different. Wave of where things are going and brands that are not prioritizing Geo will be behind just like they were when SEO became part of the day-to-day of everybody in, in digital.
But ag agentic AI is where I think a lot of companies have been focusing 2024 to 25, and that's, how do I build repeatable tasks into a virtual agent? And everybody's been talking about that from Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple. Like everybody wants to have these solutions, but really what is is point automation, um, which that's been possible for a long time too.
It's just it wasn't so known that you could do those kind of things. So where we're going next is. How to make these agents and saved prompts and skills do [00:31:00] more than just repetitive tasks. How do we actually give them the ability to be intelligent decision makers on tasks in the moment that they're dealing with it?
And it could be as simple as, I have a piece of content that I think is ready to go, but I want another set of eyes on it. Can I put it into an agent that's going to give me recommendations about how to make it better, not just rewrite it? 'cause today you can write a prompt that's like, make this better, but wouldn't it be better for the person to understand how to make it better and learn how to make their own writing better the next time?
So the AI. Can teach us things that we don't necessarily think about when we're going through it. But we as humans have to recognize that we have intelligence that these tools do not. We can think they, it's an algorithm doing things right, it's deriving an answer based on formulas and equation and information.
And I will tell people, often surgeons still have a very important purpose, right? When you want a [00:32:00] deterministic answer to your query, like one plus one equals two, it will always equal two. But if you ask an LLM, um, if one plus one equals two and you ask it over and over again, eventually it's gonna think it's giving you the wrong answer and it will give you three or four or some random number because why are you still asking me?
And it will also give you like 11 as an answer. 'cause one and one. And I, I've tested this. I've seen it happen. It is not good for math, simple math, because math is deterministic. One plus one always equals two. But if I want to interpret something, if I want to analyze a set of data for like, tell me the trends out of this set of data, why might this spike be happening in my traffic, uh, during this period of time will give you ideas that you may not have otherwise come up with.
Because it is not thinking, it is interpreting and analyzing and trying to give you the probabilistic answer. It is likely that this could be causing that or not. And so it is a little more prescriptive in that regard. So we have to, [00:33:00] as we start to understand more about how these AI tools work, we have to remember, okay, probabilistic responses are great for ai.
And if we have repetitive tasks where probability would've made decisions, that's where you can really start to make more out of these things. Versus deterministic, I need one plus one to equal two every single time. That's not what these are for, and that's this next generation of AI applications coming through.
It's how do we take everything we've seen the last few years from Gen AI to agentive AI to functional. AI and that functional AI is where it really starts to be used in the proper ways for impact to businesses. And this is where it's like, it's cool to work at a firm like EY because I can see the consultants doing this type of work for companies that are making the early investments.
You want to be first in market on ai. You're paying to be the first in market on these things. But Moore's Law, we know personal computers got super cheap for a reason, [00:34:00] right? Processing power gets cheaper over time and the technology gets cheaper over time and you get to do more with it. That's gonna be the same for ai.
It's gonna, Moore's law will apply, but we are in the earliest days of, this AI's been around for 70 years, but this flavor of AI has been around for like five.
[00:34:15] Jon: I think it, I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding that it's. AI is essentially really complex math. Yeah. So it's all all about probability.
I know you're a big fan of Conductor. Conductor has AI tool built into the platform, content creator, other things. Can you tell us, or share with us how you're applying AI to maybe some of that content optimization or, you know, some of the tweaks that you might doing might be doing to actually get that content optimized?
Are, let me ask this first. Are you even measuring, like what you're showing up for in statue, BT perplexity, all those sorts of things yet, are you reporting against any of that?
[00:34:50] Lou: We're,
[00:34:50] Jon: we're starting
[00:34:50] Lou: to, and like we're trying to get in on the early versions of what Conductor is building for AI solutions and so far [00:35:00] I've been fairly impressed with what they're coming up with.
And I, that conductor will be leading the pack quite a bit on what they're doing. The, there is. It's hard, right? And it's hard for multiple reasons. One, it's the Wild West. Nobody really knows the answer right now. You can go on search engine land, you can go all over the internet and try and scour the world for how do I make my content more discoverable on ai?
And you will find a million different responses, many of which are flat, wrong. And there are some things we know don't work. Like we know that creating. A lot of AI created content to flood your site with content that's not gonna work, right? So keyword stuffing back in the day was not the right answer.
So is AI stuffing so great? We know some things don't work and we shouldn't do those, but the test and learn approach we've had to take it. It's tedious because if I prompt, let's say I want to influence how to improve supply chain given the tariffs, uh, coming to the US for manufacturers, which is something many of [00:36:00] EYs customers care about.
And we have content on ey.com that is optimized for those types of topics. Um, and we show up well in SEO, but we haven't really shown up as well as I would like in different LLMs. Here's the problem. If I create a short list of keywords and prompts that I want to track, I then have to go to llama, GPT, Gemini, and all the different major LLMs, 'cause there's several of them, and track the responses over time that they're giving.
But if I ask the same prompt. Of these engines 20 times, I will get different responses every single time. And one of the ways that we're tracking that is by, where is it sourcing the response from? Because that's how I know my content gets into the feed. Now, whether or not it gives the same response, as long as my links are starting to show up in the source material, that means I'm improving.
But it will still give a different answer every time you ask it. And you could even force it to change. So you could say like, [00:37:00] now answer me as if I'm a business executive. Now answer me as if I'm Jamie Diamond. Now answer me as if I'm Warren Buffett. And it will give you different responses. And sometimes you fall out of the source material, which I find.
Really interesting that it does that because it's really trying to tailor the response to who's asking. So for example, like a private equity executive who we would wanna reach to talk about something in their business, they might be prompting around investment strategies in in small to mid-size businesses in whatever space they're in.
Okay. If I can get something. That feeds into a response to a query that they might prompt an AI with. Wonderful. But then if I change that prompt to say, as if you're a PE executive, do this and that from New York City, and then I fall out the set of data it's sourcing from that's worrisome and it's like good luck figuring out why that happened.
And it only happened on two LLMs but not the other four. And. So it's, we need scalable tools that can assess this all together. And there are [00:38:00] startups building that type of solution. There are companies that are trying to build the better sandbox for how to do this, but it's the wild West and, and frankly, I think a lot of these startups, they're not gonna make it because there's too much skepticism about what does it take to actually invest to do this well versus some of the bigger players like SEMrush, Moz, conductor, and BrightEdge, that frankly have a leg up and an advantage because they were already set up for us.
They, they already can handle that side of things. If they can apply AI to their world and understand this different view outside of things, uh, that are owned on your website, okay, they're probably gonna be better off and more likely to succeed in solving this problem. But the tracking of it, man, it's.
It's a beast.
[00:38:47] Jon: Yeah. I think the best way that I've heard it talk about, I think Lily Ray posted something about it, which is because the prompt, the prompts are almost infinite, right? Like no one is really gonna prompt the scene exact way. You [00:39:00] almost have to land on, okay, here's my core set of prompts and this is what I'm gonna measure against.
And to your point of tracking, like if you're a source or not, just measuring that over time, like it just like rankings, it'll ebb and flow, but as long as you're part of the source set, more often than not, or you start to become part of that source set, seems like the easiest way sort of measure this.
Today, I don't know how or if it'll get better over time just because of those numbers. I mean, think about
[00:39:27] Lou: how many years it took for SEO to mature, right? SEO, whether anybody recognized it or not, from the birth of the domain name is when SEO started to matter. So you're talking like early nineties and.
In those days of the early nineties in SEO, it was the white hats and the black hat and there were little communities forming online and people were trying to figure it out. And it was like if I put white text on a white background and that was a black hat tactic, but it worked and you could force your content into the search engines for periods of time because [00:40:00] that was a white hat tactic where you pay to get access.
Now that's all evolved tremendously in the last like 30 plus years. Um, where now it's a business and it's a repeatable function where you can have tools and measurement. We are nowhere near that yet for ai and it's far more complicated. So this won't be as simple as navigating just to keywords. This is going to be prompts and there's, there are infinite prompts 'cause everybody could say things in a slightly different way and get a slightly different outcome.
So I believe being a source link is that measurable asset that we can track based on the prompt, because how it interprets. My source material, that's content. Like I should be able to influence that a little bit based on the content itself that feels like SEO, but having that asset to point to and say, okay, rank, we don't have rank, but you could say, if I'm listed third on the source material, that's the rank.
But that's not actually how the LLM see it. It's no, here's this bucket of source material that I looked at all the same, whether [00:41:00] you're first, third, fifth, whatever. You're just part of it. And if you want to influence it more, it's more about what's in your content than where you sit on that list. So just existing there right now to me is the, the key piece and figuring out ways to make sure that our content shows up there.
But again, it's SEO only gets me a certain part of the way. It's sourcing from Reddit, it's sourcing from Wikipedia, it's sourcing from social media, it's it's sourcing from all these different places that the SEOs weren't really concerned with in the past as much. That now are super important.
[00:41:32] Joe: There's no black hat defined yet, right?
We ha something in SEO became black hat when Google said this is no longer acceptable. Um, but all that experimentation that happened in the late nineties, in the early two thousands, there were some people, some years who built business on something that they figured out and they kept to themselves, or maybe they shared in a small community.
That's where we're, that's where we're at right now. That's why this is the, I think, the most exciting time to [00:42:00] be in this business in over a decade.
[00:42:02] Lou: No, I agree. I think it's, it's amazing that. We have a brand new field to play in for, for the world of SEO. And I talked with my guy, Steve Bush. Uh, we were just talking about this earlier actually.
'cause he and I have been researching this space for months and months. Trying to figure out like, what are, what are we gonna do with this? How are we going to navigate geo and make sure that our content rises in ai? And we've taken some more technical approaches like messing with the robots XT file on the site and some of the, the architecture.
But we're really focused now on outside of ey.com, how do we seed our content into other places such that it becomes discoverable on the whole of the internet? Because like I said before, it is a very different world that we are sourcing information from for ai. And timing also matters there. There's all these factors that are starting to pop up as like, okay, this is part of the algorithm, this is part of how they source this.
And my hope is, frankly, that we can be leading the industry [00:43:00] on it. I'd love to be able to come back and be like, well, we figured it out. And don't necessarily wanna keep that to ourselves because we're a consultation type of business. And if EY has an answer, whether it's from a team that supports EYs own content and marketing, um, believe me, I'll go educate the consultants on it and let them go to town.
But it's so, it's the right thing to do. Like the industry likes to share information. I think we've all learned the hard way that tos that go it alone don't tend to be very successful. And communities from search engine land and uh, and others over the years have really made a difference because all ships rise together.
And this way quality becomes what matters more. Not just, oh, I can do a little SEO hack. I would love to see the industry focus on how do we get the right answers in the hands of the users rather than, you know my answer because I learned how to do this better than you.
[00:43:52] Jon: Yeah. I think that's why your content partnerships were so interesting to me because you ahead of the curve in terms of like seeding some of that content and [00:44:00] potentially even links as, and being the source for, for the LLMs to discover.
I was thinking if you guys have played around with LLMs txt at all and how you're thinking about allowing or not crawlability of your content from. All of these AI crawler. Yeah. Pounding the server. You own the content, you want them to have it big corporate level questions that often come up.
[00:44:21] Lou: So my perspective and what we've gone forward with, we updated the robots txt file to allow the LLMs to go through intentionally because I want my content, I want my firm's content to, to get there.
I want it to be consumed. For us, it's putting thought leadership and knowledge out into the ecosystem. And if that comes through, somebody doing a prompt or somebody visiting our website, I don't particularly care. I would love it if they came to visit ey ey.com, but as I often tell partners around ey, we are not the hero of everyone else's story.
They're not seeking us out on a daily basis. If we happen to have the right answer when they're looking for it and they find us where they are looking for it, whether that's on Google and [00:45:00] Bing or through an LLM or somewhere else, wonderful. Let them find our content where they are looking for the answers rather than forcing them to come to us to get the answer.
And so with that approach in mind, we did put the access. The robots txt for LLMs to consume our content. I do have the concern around like banging on our server too much and we monitor that. We've had maybe a couple issues months ago and we're able to deal with it, but it hasn't been a problem since.
And the, I understand why some businesses would be hesitant if you're the Wall Street Journal, you are selling your content, right? And you want people to go to wall streete journal.com, like wsj.com to consume that content. I a hundred percent understand and respect that. And so if the LLM wants to be able to source that authority content from a news source where they are monetizing that on their site, yeah, there should be an arrangement, some royalty that that allows for that.
And that mechanism doesn't feel like it exists at this point in time. [00:46:00] But if you want to open up the world of news and authoritative content that's monetized, there should be some royalty in there for sourcing that material equivalent to. What they would've made by getting the person either to subscribe or pay for ad supported content.
I'm just not in that business. I don't need to monetize my content in that way. I need people to consider ey when they have a business need, uh, whether it's consulting, tax or strategy.
[00:46:25] Jon: Yeah. We had John Shahada on a couple episodes ago talking much more about news, and I think you're exactly right. The, the business model in some way sort of defines whether or not you want to allow those crawlers in and access to the content.
Yeah. As we wrap up, as someone who's been in this space for so long, and also uh, an educator in this space as well, are there any fundamental principles of, let's just call it digital marketing, that you think will remain unchanged? I think we've talked over the last 15 minutes about everything that is changing.
Do you think there's anything that you know is still foundational [00:47:00] over this time period that makes sense for someone coming into this space to know and learn
[00:47:05] Lou: at the core of. Every business is you have to make a profit. And I, I think the world learned that the hard way in the late nineties, right? You can't just invest to make a fun business and not make money, right?
So if you are a goal oriented business person, marketer ever, and you understand what makes your business successful is not doing the thing you want to do, it's about growing and driving growth and profitability, then you have a chance. But as an individual, you have to find ways to contribute to that bigger goal and understand how the mechanics of a business, I've been quoted as saying I, I could sell ICE to Eskimos.
But the reality is like I've been in so many different industry and worked in so many different companies over my career, it doesn't really matter to me what the product is as long as the product works, as long as the product adds value to the consumer, whether it's a business or an individual.
Wonderful. [00:48:00] Tell me about their consumer behavior. Help me understand what makes that transaction come to be, and can we define who that target audience is, our ideal customer, and what the value is associated with? Like, those are the types of things that I think any business person or marketer really needs to understand is what are my goals?
How does my business continue to grow and stay profitable over time? Who is my buyer and how do they ultimately think that consumer behavior? I point back to consumer behavior. It was one of my favorite courses in undergrad, but I think it's been like one of the silver bullets in my career is like, yeah, I can unpack that and if I can unpack consumer behavior, I can find the right audiences, I can target them through media.
I can do all the things. AI is only gonna make this faster. It's not gonna make it harder. It's different, right? We're learning new skills, new tools. Consumer behavior is evolving, that's harder. Consumer behavior is rapidly changing. That's harder to keep tabs on, and we have to follow where that's going.
You can never lead it because. It's always the customer that's changing over time and so there [00:49:00] is no getting ahead of that. I can't predict what the next consumer trend is gonna be. If I could do that well, I'd be a billionaire. And we just have to understand there is change is the constant. We will always have a market that's changing.
We will always have behaviors that are changing and being okay with change is another thing that I think people have to just get comfortable with. I look back on the six years I've been at EY and it's been full of change and I started in 2019 and you know, COVID, we, we went through a potential splitting of the firm and then we didn't.
And so we've gone through so many changes over the years. We replatformed our website like last year. That was a big change and. It is always about how do we make our business better? How do we make ourselves more capable for our clients? How do we do the things that make our clients successful? And that's the name of the game.
My, my oldest daughter is thinking about a career in marketing and I've told her, I'm like, learn everything you can. Get your hands dirty. Play with the tools. Like she's very talented artist. I'm like, go play with Canva. Like go learn the [00:50:00] stuff. My, my middle daughter is really in softball. I'm like, find things that you're passionate about and like learn how to do business things around it.
I'm like, go design a t-shirt for your softball team, like go do a thing and. It just gives them different tools in their toolbox that they may not be realizing is what I'm doing with them. But it is trying to give them a little bit of like, okay, when they get a little old, they'll see
[00:50:22] Joe: Lou. How do you adjust that advice to a senior who just graduated in May of 2025?
Do you try to point them into a specific roles they should seek out for their first job?
[00:50:34] Lou: I would ask them like, what's your dream job? My older brother asked that of me when I was a freshman in college and he is like, where would you wanna work? I'm like, Marvel comics, DC comics, tops, baseball cards. And I had job offers from Marvel in DC for my first summer.
I took the job at Marvel. So I was very luck. That worked out for me. Um, but I put myself in that situation 'cause he asked me that question. And so I always ask that question first. It's like, okay, what's your dream job? Where would you like to work? And that starts to give you an idea of the [00:51:00] industry somebody wants to work in.
But then you start getting into and what would you like to do for them? And I can't tell you how many high school kids and undergrads will say, I wanna do their social media. I wanna do their content creation. Like what value does that add to the business? How can you do that better than they're doing it today?
And some of them don't really have a good answer for that. And they're like, oh, I just think it would be fun to do it. I'm like, I'm sure it would be. That doesn't necessarily add value to them above and beyond what they're currently doing. So what do you enjoy doing the most? And sometimes you get very different answers.
Like, I really like, you know, working with numbers. I'm really good with data and some of 'em are really good at math. I'm like, okay, have you thought about a career with analytics? Could you do like stats in college and learn how to show a business where their opportunities are based on numbers and math?
Have you thought about a career in accounting where you could do that as well? They all younger people tend to lean into content creation and social media more because they haven't been exposed to other ways to apply their knowledge and skills to different types of work. And I look at people [00:52:00] that are very social interpersonal skills, right?
I'm like, have you thought about a career in sales? It's a relationship business. And you know what? Not everybody's good at that. If you're introverted, that's not a career for you. If you're extroverted, maybe it is, and look, you could have a fantastic career in sales doing all sorts of stuff. You just have to get onto a thing that you're really good at selling and building relationships with.
I, I look at realtors. Realtors, the best realtors are great relationship people because you know what? You really only need a realtor if you're buying or selling a home, which people don't do that so often in their lives. If you have good relationships with the people you do business with, they refer you to the next person and the next person.
It's like, I've referred you guys for people and it's because we have a relationship based on the history, me and John and Joe working with you when I was at Walters Kluwer, and I'm not surprised that you guys have held onto that business, but it's, the relationship opens the door, then there's the proof, right?
And there, I would argue the reason you guys have held onto that business years, I'm now six years [00:53:00] removed from Walters Kluwer. So six years later you're still on that business because you're proving the value to them. It's both and, right? So you're able to impact their business and have a relationship.
The soft skills are so important. Um, technical skills can be taught more easily than soft skills.
[00:53:14] Jon: I was reminded of a conversation you and I had during a one-on-one. Back in the Microsoft days and Microsoft great benefits, one of them was a stipend for, um, continuing education. And I was talking to you about whether or not I should go get my master.
And I dunno if you remember what you told me, but you said, look around, you're already doing the job that all these folks who have a master's degree has. So what is the value add if you go and invest that time and effort? And I think about my daughter who's seven, eventually she'll get to the age where you would traditionally go to college.
And this may be a an odd question to ask, given that you teach like master's classes, do you look ahead 10 years? Do you see college as a, or [00:54:00] maybe a master's program as important in the age of ai? It just seems that the ability to do so much more. Without necessarily that extra education, which seem feasible, that sort of goes away.
That's kind of scary for me as someone who's grown up with that. That Yep. Hierarchy of you to do this. Are you guys thinking about that? Are you getting questions like that at school or,
[00:54:22] Lou: my, my daughters are now 11, 13, and 15 colleges on the horizon, and I'm looking at the price of undergrad and Wow school.
College has gotten so expensive and that, that concerns me a lot. So it, it's. You have to consider the ROI, but it's also the person, everybody learns differently. I, I got criticized years ago when I was at Citi. I was sitting next to a leader in the marketing organization and we were at Google and Avinash, uh, was ripping apart, uh, things that we were doing.
And she's looking at me and she's like, why aren't you taking notes? I'm like, because if I take notes, I won't hear a word he is saying. And because when I [00:55:00] consume information, if I'm sitting there jotting notes, I'm not paying attention to what's being said as I'm doing it, I'm focusing on writing the notes.
And for me, AI has been fantastic for that. 'cause it could take my notes for me and I'm right. So that's a huge help for me because when I consume information, I have to pay attention to what I'm hearing. I can't be busy taking notes. There are other people who are so self-driven and motivated where they can go on YouTube and onto websites and like e-learning and just get all the information they need and go and those types of people.
I think you're gonna see more and more of them in the workforce because it is so accessible now. People don't need the formal four year degree or master's to be able to function in the workforce. You still need some level of academic value to be a work. And the high school degree where more consistent nationally.
I would feel like a four year degree is something you really don't have to consider, but because it's so inconsistent nationally, [00:56:00] I do think you have to consider college for each person, but it may not be the right aunt. I have a relative who really is into woodworking and he's in high school and I've said would he ever consider being a carpenter?
The trades are frankly dying. Like we, we have a generation of tradesmen that are retiring and there is not enough in the workforce to replace them. So you want to go be a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. Frankly, you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing that in major markets and have a very nice career where you control your schedule and you do all the things and it's relationships with the your neighborhood, and it could be a great career for a lot of people.
Good friend of mine from growing up, Andrew Brown, he's been advocating for the trades for years and doing a phenomenal job. He publishes content every day on LinkedIn promoting. That the trades could be the path for people in a way that's nobody thinks about. And he's done a phenomenal job explaining why that's right.
And I believe what he's saying, he's right [00:57:00] there. There's an underappreciated opportunity in the trades for people where you don't need a four year degree. You need to be an apprentice and learn from these people that are about to retire. How to do that work and then go do that work for your career and have a great career.
Accounting, I think is an undervalued trade, uh, in many ways. But you need a four year degree. You need a CPA. You need to be minimum level educated to be able to do that job properly. And so it is a higher education path to be an accountant. But the career path, it's rough. The first year for first, nah, the first few years it's hard, but you're learning a lot.
Then you can have a very lucrative career beyond that. So every career path is gonna look a little different. What I think in the US is we haven't appreciated that. Maybe the four year degree isn't right for everybody. Some people can accomplish and learn the equivalent of a four year degree on their own and should be able to contribute in the workforce in their own right.
And doing those types of jobs, the master's gets even more complicated because there are [00:58:00] two people that go for a master's. You have the job switchers, people that are changing careers. It's like, I've been working, uh, in this one path all this time, and now I wanna switch to a different one. So I need different credentials.
I think the Master's is great for those people because it opens a path that may not have otherwise been open to them. But then there's the, I just wanna check the box in my career path. And I went and did my MBA because I was hiring people with MBAs at Microsoft and I'm like, oh my God, if I don't do this.
I'm at some point gonna get left behind. And so I went and did the degree, and it's how I fell into teaching as my, like secondary career. But it was because what I found at Baruch was that they actually weren't teaching about digital marketing. They weren't talking about where marketing was going back in 2007.
And I helped Baruch get modernized and talk about digital marketing. I helped them develop the undergrad curriculum for digital marketing and then the graduate program and have been there ever since for the last 15 years. And NYU did the same a couple years later and Yeshiva is [00:59:00] doing it now. And so I, I'm proud of what I've been able to do to enable those learning opportunities.
Uh, I'll be the first to admit it's not for everybody and it is. It's a major financial investment to go back to school professionally and financially outta your pocket. 'cause you're taking time away and putting it into developing yourself in a different way. If that is not going to level up your skillset or capability or change that path for you to a different trajectory and career path.
I don't know that it's right for everybody. And you want to go learn something. Absolutely. There's content out there. Um, there is information out there, there's courses out there that anybody can take. There's virtual learning. Um, it's gotten better and better, but there are also companies that care about their credentials and, you know, for me to have been a chief marketing officer, now, chief Digital at ey, you know what if I didn't have the MBA in hand?
I don't know that I. Be where I am today in my career. I think when I was hired at Citi, having that credential certainly helped Citi values and MBA, um, getting to [01:00:00] CMO Walters Kluwer, I think the MBA didn't hurt it. It was a good credential to have to get to a C-level job. So for me, I think it was worth it.
You know, I'd stand by the recommendation. John, I gave you way back when for what you wanted to do and the path you wanted to go down. It probably didn't make sense for you. You already knew what you needed to know, and there was better time to be spent doing other things.
[01:00:20] Jon: I did wanna quickly a ask about the migration.
Um, I actually didn't know that you migrated recently, but any learnings from that? We had, we've had a lot of great conversations about both the pitfalls and the strategies to accomplish a successful one. Anything that you learned during that process across such a large site?
[01:00:37] Lou: Yeah, I wish there was an easy button for migration.
Oh my God. Like, can somebody build an AI solution for Adobe to migrate? Like I, I've said that to Adobe, so I don't feel bad about saying that here because it was not easy. Uh, we had to do a content audit, eliminate old content. Uh, we did an SEO audit on the whole thing as well. For ey, we migrated, it's like 180 [01:01:00] different country sites over the period of two years.
And so it's one holistic website of ey.com with tons of sub folders for individual countries, and there are subdomains as well, and it is a whole thing, but we were going from Adobe to Adobe. So in theory that there should have been an easy button going from one Adobe CMS to another Adobe CMS, and there wasn't.
Um, so we had to rebuild every single page, and I really do credit my team. They were phenomenal. The US team, uh, the America's team@eyforey.com, this is a machine, and my, my leader for that team, Jen Cosenza, she's phenomenal. She really led not just the US and the Americas organization, through that migration, we also drove a lot of how globally that should have been done out of our team.
Uh, we did trainings for everybody on how to do the, the page migrations, and we found issues and we raised them, got them fixed, but. This was like a massive global effort [01:02:00] and we, a lot of partnership around the world to get this done. Our global counterparts, they resourced out like an extra a hundred roles to help with the migration and, um, really did a phenomenal job, uh, working their way through it systematically globally, country by country.
And just very fortunate that I have a significant team in large resources, uh, and such a phenomenal group of people to drive that here in the US and, and for the America's region. Um, but it was td it, it was a rough year and our approach was, we defined success by nobody noticing, like that was success.
So when the migration finally landed, I'm like, if nobody notices. We did our job, and that was a hard pill to swallow because to my boss, I'm like, I'm telling you, we're putting a ton of effort, work, labor, resources, time into this thing so that nobody notices it ever happened. And she was like, okay. Like I'm so glad my boss trusts me, but.
That was the goal. And sure enough, we, we get to migration day. There were a couple little [01:03:00] things, but for the most part nobody noticed. This is the come before the storm. Something's gonna break, something's gonna happen. Nope. We made it through, we didn't lose any traction on SEO 'cause we had a plan for that.
We didn't lose any issue traction on UX because we addressed it. We, we really were able to come out net positive post migration and, and I credit the fact that like my team, they were hyper organized. We, we use Zendesk for tracking, uh, our workflow. And then we have Azure boards for management of process and, and time.
My page builders for web pages, they were building pages. In under six minutes with qa and I still like tout that I'm like, my page folder can do six minutes or less. And it, it's good sense of pride. It's like, but it wasn't just build the page, it was build the page and qa it, uh, and make sure that it was the right quality.
Um, now we tiered our content, our top tier stuff that we used, flourish and s we had to make sure that those were done well, that the links were not broken, that everything connected. This was such an effort, as they say [01:04:00] in carpentry measure twice cut. Once we did that and all the planning and oversight and tracking, this team was so well organized to do it, but it was hard.
And we had some people working like double shift and, and extra time. But we got it done and, and I hope my team feels like we recognize them for that year of work and, uh, celebrated what they were able to accomplish. But man, migrating n not easy. And there's a real opportunity like go find a way to make website migration.
Easier. I can only imagine, and I've done it before in past companies, going from one entirely different CMS to an entirely different one. And EY itself went through this back in like 18, 19, uh, going from Lotus to a EM, and yeah, I, I went from Lotus to something else, uh, when I was at Walters Kluwer. Um, it shocks me that companies still have that around, but it's uh, it's never easy.
It's never easy.
[01:04:51] Jon: Yeah. To use another Microsoft term, it sounds like that cross collaboration was, was next level to accomplish that so seamlessly. Well, Lou, before we let you go, I [01:05:00] wanted to get your prediction about what google.com will look like or what that experience might be. If you look 12 months, 18 months ahead.
If you go to google.com, what do you expect that experience to be like?
[01:05:10] Lou: I hope Google folks are listening on this one and, and I'll disclose, EY is Google's auditor, so I in no way have anything to do with that side of it, but as a consumer of, and user of google.com, I, I hope they find a way to educate the consumer.
That search is different than LLM, right? Gemini is its own thing, and I hope that google.com gives them more of a choice. It shouldn't just be the bar anymore. It should be like a little more task accomplishment oriented or give the choice of here's the search, here's the prompt, and get people to learn the behavioral difference and the experience difference.
I'm searching because I need an answer or I'm prompting because I'm curious to learn or explore, and the behavior of shopping I think will move to the LLM because. It's not necessarily a [01:06:00] deterministic answer when you're shopping for things. So I do think we'll see a shift from search to LLM in some verticals and behaviors.
We also need to reinforce the search behavior for other types of use cases and, and Ilea, I, I think it's Google and Bing's job to educate people about the purpose of these different things. Microsoft has their partnership with Open AI and chat, GPT wonderful. Google has Gemini, no, meta has their version.
Apple has their ver, everybody's got these things. It's on them to educate people as to like for, here's what you use this for. Like we could thank a OL for keywords. 'cause they really were like, you go to keyword this, go to keyword that. And we understand keywords now as a consumer, everybody understands keyword.
We need to understand the difference. And so I hope that Google finds a way to differentiate google.com to help people understand the difference in what they should be using, not just embedding Gemini into the serp. To me, that's a mistake. You're changing the expectation of what search purpose [01:07:00] is and giving an AI response to what is probably a more deterministic query, right?
They're not coming to google.com and prompting it. They're searching on it like they always have been. But Gemini provides a different type of answer and it should be a different type of behavior. And so separating those two, I think is a better path forward. I don't think they're gonna do it. I think they're gonna continue to keep Gemini in there.
But I, I really hope. That the surgeons realize it is a different experience and they should be for different purposes.
[01:07:27] Jon: Listen, Lou, this has been really special. I'll admit, I don't normally get nervous for these, but I have so much respect for you that I definitely was nervous as we've kicked things off.
So thanks for, uh, thanks for joining and sharing your wisdom with us. And if you wanna let people know how they can find you, uh, yeah, feel free to let them. So,
[01:07:44] Lou: so I'm on LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/in/ Louis Cohen. Uh, or generally you can find me as Prof Cohen on various social media. Uh, yeah, always happy to chat with you John, and Joe like could see and chat with you as well.
To me, this is fun, like getting to talk [01:08:00] about how things are going. I always enjoy doing that and it's always good to see you guys. Thanks
[01:08:04] Jon: so much and if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate, and review. We'll see you next time.