Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.348)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we'll be diving in headfirst into how a digital marketing company called Moburst is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we talk more about that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company? Or maybe you're just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer.
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scheduled consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Today I have with me on the show, Gilad Bichar, who is the CEO and founder of Moburst. In the past 11 years, Gilad was working with industry leaders such as Google, YouTube, Uber, Discovery, Robinhood, Platica, Dropbox, and Samsung to unlock growth marketing, retention, and digital innovation.
Really excited to have him on the show today. Hey, welcome, Mengele. How are you doing?
Gilad Bechar (01:34.562)
Wonderful and great to be here.
Kyle James (01:36.306)
Yeah, yeah, man. So tell us like how did how did mobers come to be like you got you all been having so much growth these past couple years in the marketing space like give us a little bit of background of like how you founded the company.
Gilad Bechar (01:48.878)
Of course. So basically mobile started as kind of a consultancy trying to help companies do mobile right. We started with the mobile marketing side where a lot of apps came to market. And at the end of the day, most of the digital agencies out there said, yes, we can do mobile as well. But they didn't think that they kind of fully understand the differences and the nuances. And that was kind of the niche that we started. We started back in 2013.
and once we became kind of the Google's growth agency in 2015 for Google maps, YouTube, Chrome search, Gmail, know, those types of beasts, it opened us the door to a much broader type of service than just the mobile marketing side. and kind of helped us to evolve from there into the full digital space and kind of taking ownership of so many different issues, whether it's the media, creative strategy, organic and, and development itself.
so it kind of broadened our services and it brought us to become kind of working with category leaders and helping them to really thrive on the, on the growth trajectory. and during those years we made five acquisitions, and it kind of added more and more sets of capabilities, whether it was creative, and video production, whether it was more development PR, podcasting, and many other kind of, of, of, of additions that be added into the team. so we became kind of one stop shop for growth and,
and digital marketing and everything related with that.
Kyle James (03:15.75)
Yeah, so some of those names out like I mentioned in like your intro is like the Google YouTube, Uber. I mean, these are these are really big names like not many people can have gotten the opportunity to work with such large corporations like that. Like what was how did you get in the door with those? I mean, was it like a hey, you got in through Google and then that turned into YouTube and you and Uber and Discovery. Like what was that like? Like those initial stages going through that.
Gilad Bechar (03:42.926)
So I think that we started as a very small boutique agency back in the day. And we knew mobile like no one else knew. Like we started from one thing that we know. And it was a niche within a niche. Like when you think about marketing, you have TV and you have radio and you have like so many different channels. then, okay, you have digital. And within the digital, you have the mobile marketing. And within the mobile marketing apps, like it's a tiny niche, but on that niche, we knew how to show the world that we can get you 5X.
a return on, on, on investment so much faster than others. We knew how to actually get you ranked in the algorithm of the apps on Google play store, hiring in the middle of months to conquer the top placements for the right keywords and phrases. Like we knew things that others just didn't know how to do. So when Google reached out to us, basically they saw me lecturing in a, in a conference. was funny because it was in a Google campus in Tel Aviv.
and they saw me lecture in front of lots of entrepreneurs. Like back then we also were the, the mobile marketing experts of Microsoft, ventures and things like that. And basically, we showed a lot of case studies. showed a lot of, a lot of great success. they are pre-installed in all of the devices on Android. So every single Android device that you have, it's already pre-installed. You have maps there, you have Gmail and all of those, but they didn't have that, kind of,
Market penetration on iOS. And they said, Hey, you know what, if you know how to do that on, on, on the iPhone platforms, like on iOS, great opportunity there. we fight against 24 other agencies as part of a big RFP that they were looking for the right vendor. We managed to get the highest prediction score. And from there, we started with three products of theirs and scale to 26 languages later on more than 30 of their products and kind of a global reach. but obviously it took time. I knew once we got into the door and getting the stamp of approval of Google that.
We are no longer just a niche for just startups and kind of know how to actually do something extremely well. If we can get in the door with someone as prolific and as advanced and someone that actually built Google Play and we can help them to do that on the other platform as well. I knew that there we have our name on the map.
Gilad Bechar (05:51.694)
it was like the, probably one of the biggest achievements that we've had in the past. you know, when we started from 2013 to 2015, that was kind of, stop saying, sorry. Yeah, we're still small. We're still new. We're on that edge. Hey, you know what? We know what we're doing. it took time to get there.
Kyle James (06:03.89)
You're right, right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you mentioned something and you said like, okay, you went through five acquisitions and like the podcasting a few other divisions, but, then you talked also about like the niche within the niche. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to bounce around here a little bit, but like, do you think that's like the reason why like YouTube and discovery said yes to you? can, you're right. The first step in that big door, they said yes to you because you were so niched down and you.
that expertise? Like, do you think it would have been different if you didn't have the niche down to the niche?
Gilad Bechar (06:42.412)
We think that to come to these type of beasts, they have everything sorted out. They have an agency for creative. They have an agency for media. They have agency for everything. Those companies spending, you know, massive amount of, of, of, budgets on, marketing every year. and they have the in-house team and then they have the agencies that are supporting them. So getting in the door with someone like that, if you are not one of the biggest holding companies, it's almost impossible to penetrate.
Having said that, you have within a very specific niche, like once I had the meeting with the president of Dunkin' Donuts and I could show him that what they're doing on digital is great, but on the mobile marketing side, on the app itself, they're losing more than 25 % on conversion just because they're not utilizing best practices of how the screenshots, how the preview video, how the icon, like how all of those things are scheduled for basically first usage of a new user. And I can show him.
hardcore data, what they're doing wrong. And I can show him, Hey, this is the path they're actually changing it. It's not a big deal. It's not a tens of millions of dollars of investments. It's like in the hundreds of thousands, you can make a massive increase. What will it be for you to have 25 % better cost of acquisition on the mobile channel? that's very meaningful. Okay. And if I can solve it, solve you that in less than $200,000, will that be an interesting thing for you? And to get into this value prop.
And show them that you can actually solve a very meaningful element in their funnel. And the ROI, they're going to be probably the best investment that they've done this year on the marketing side. It reduces the friction, it reduces the risk, and it actually gives a really good entry point. And I think that if we weren't mobile first experts, it was almost impossible to find those nuggets of, can get in from here and actually give you a massive value. And once we are giving the value.
Then it opens the appetite. Hey, what else can you do? we have that. We have that. How does that look like? Hey, let's do an audit about those elements and then basically show them some more mistakes basically that their current vendors or the current internal team are just overlooking when they have massive budget on so many initiatives and just starting to fix more and more and more of those things inside. So think that if we weren't super niche.
Gilad Bechar (08:51.054)
Within a niche, it was almost impossible to find those entry points and those places where we can actually deliver them value. And they would just ignore, you know, just another inquiry. Yeah, okay. We're getting 1000 of those messages on LinkedIn or on so many platforms. Who cares? Another one that wants to tell me.
Kyle James (08:59.12)
Right. Yeah.
Kyle James (09:06.79)
Yeah, it's like they're, it's like they're like looking for that expert. Cause like they have, you said, like they have all the agencies they have, even the departments, but like what they don't have is like the fine tune, like, you know, the zeroing, you know, magnifying glass going to, okay, what are the details in this case? Like that was kind what your team was doing was like it, you brought this like expertise as super niche spot within the app, right? Or the app development, right? Or I think that's what you said. Hopefully I said that right. Correct. Thank you.
Gilad Bechar (09:33.08)
So optimization here.
Kyle James (09:34.662)
Thank you so much. But like you never realized you had that like where that was like the tip of the spear that got you in because you could provide a service that nobody else could like no other. You had the data, you had the details, you had the the knowledge behind it that which, okay, now they know you're experts and then once you're in the door, you're in the door. But then you went now you shifted though, you said that like, I'm not shifted, but you said that you, you acquired five different companies, one being the podcast and a few others. Like why, how do you.
Like how, cause I think there's a lot of business owners out there and founders who are like, Hey, I'm, I'm niche down, but like, I do want to be, I do want to acquire other companies, but how, how do I balance between acquiring more companies, but then still staying niche to being, to being a valuable asset in the marketplace.
Gilad Bechar (10:19.054)
You're completely right. think that we kind of evolved just because there's many, many things that we saw that, okay, we are on that mobile ticket and that mobile ticket opened us the door and actually got us to work with more than 700 insane brands, brands, kind of the biggest brands in the world, which is amazing. That's kind of the level of stamp of approval that you wanted to work with. But at the same time, because we can only compete on the mobile side of things when they are opening up a digital RFP, when they need this and this and this and that, then you're only answering those.
two elements out of 10, you're still not in the big game. So what we saw is that a lot of those relationships can evolve. So when we work with Samsung, ask, hey, can you also take our social media management? said, of course, and then show them how we can actually integrate it in and then build those sets of capabilities. But if they were reaching out to us on an RFP, prove us five massive social media accounts that you're managing already, we didn't have that to show as part of that, but they trusted our strategy and they trusted who.
uh, who we are and what we brought to the table. And they knew that we weren't going to say something that we can't really stand behind. Um, so that kind of evolved into those things. And I feel like as the time went by, when we acquired the, uh, video production house and we acquired the web design, uh, a house that kind of, uh, added, it was our first acquisition in 2018. And we looked under the hood and said, Hey, you know what? The video production team actually created 1500 videos.
branding videos for so many clients B2B and B2C. And it's not just mobile, like a lot of digital businesses, a lot of like massive names that are, don't even have an app, but they are fantastic in storytelling and the web design team knew how to create amazing websites. And you know what? It's, it, we kind of found stuff in a place where we're not just mobile anymore. We have another line of business and two lines of business that are not just mobile.
And then when we've done the additional acquisitions on the development side, actually acquiring a web development firm with app development skills and things of that nature, hey, you know what? Now we can be like an end to end solution. And we added the influencer marketing into the, into the mix. we added on the BI capabilities into the mix. And now we have a full scale solution for digital and mobile. And then where the missing piece was the PR, wait a minute, when we are doing so many launches.
Gilad Bechar (12:33.142)
Why won't we also do the PR side, the communication side of actually getting you into Forbes and Fortune magazine and TechCrunch and VentureBeat and entrepreneur.com. And hey, look at that. Like we have here a fantastic PR team that can actually help to fill out that blank. It was a very big acquisition for us at the time, but that was kind of coming into a place where they're getting another 40 or 50 retainers that they had with a lot of clients that they managed.
in a much broader sets of, of clients and then with the podcasting unit that it was kind of bolstering into one big, one big agency that kind of have all of the different departments that can actually be a one stop shop for your clients. So nowadays, we are still getting a lot of increase. Like we are very much known for the mobile marketing expertise, but we are much broader than that today. And around more than 50 % of the revenue is coming from, many other services that are not even mobile.
Kyle James (13:10.535)
Yeah.
Gilad Bechar (13:28.224)
specific. so we kind of brought in our sets of capabilities and we are all like the common thing and the common ground for all of the services is that we know how to get your growth to actually exceed your growth goals. That's the one common thing and common thread for all of the different services together. and it started from mobile and expanded to digital and expanded much beyond digital, basically giving you like a one kind of a
Kyle James (13:29.18)
Hmm.
Gilad Bechar (13:51.726)
360 view of kind of building you apps and building you, websites and everything you need in order to actually over achieve your growth goals. and it's under one roof. So it started as a tiny niche, but it expanded from there pretty significantly.
Kyle James (14:02.023)
Hmm.
Kyle James (14:06.162)
Yeah, it's cool. Cause like, I'm most like the expansion is like, that's what the acquisitions come from is like, as you're identifying other areas that you can build upon within your clients, it's like, okay, well, if they needed this help and they help in this area, let's expand on the video production. Let's expand on the podcast. Let's expand on different areas because that's what they need help with. Like, so it's like, like, it's like a strategic. not just like, we're just acquiring a company, just to acquire them. It's no, we're acquiring them because this is a part of our goal and our strategic, you know, initiatives to.
just to really just land and expand within each company you're working with. Okay. So shifting gears here. So you're using AI with, know, like why, why implement AI? What, what are you using AI for? And specifically like what types of challenges are you trying to solve when you're implementing AI?
Gilad Bechar (14:52.418)
So, yeah, I think that this is a great question. think that this is something that, we, we went very, very hard on AI, in the, the end of last year when we appointed the VP of AI and had a program that we call kind of the AI champions, where we have 16 AI experts within each and every team in the company. have an AI, person, basically an AI champion within that team to rethink about that service. So whether it's creative, whether it's media buying, whether it's BI, whether it's
Uh, the organic, the SEO, the absolute optimization side of things, everything related with conversion optimization, content writing, every single piece of the business PR, podcasting, what have you. Um, and the goal there is to try to see if we were to create the agency to today or yesterday, will it be structured in the same way? And most of the times the answer is no. Like if you're doing the same thing that you were doing in 2024, I believe that you're doing it wrong.
And I think that with the pace of innovation and the pace of AI tools that enable you to do so much more things, how even the role of an account management looks like, how the role of strategists look like, how the role of media buyer or creative, every single one of the pieces that we have in the business need to be kind of restructured from almost from scratch. When you're thinking about the pace of creation, when you're thinking about many things that you're doing super labor intensive,
downloading a report, doing a pivot table, extracting it, getting it to another sheet. Instead of it, you can actually have AI tools that are doing all of that for you and basically creating that deck and producing the insights and where the human interaction is so important is to actually taste that product, if you will, and seeing is that a good enough type of a product? Is that the best product that you can actually do today? And even if you are doing the manual walk, some things that weren't fully automated just yet.
Um, basically asking, uh, any one of those custom GPTs that know the client extremely well and knows your best practices extremely well and taking the things from notebook LM and all of the different things about the best practices and asking, well, based on everything, you know, about the client and our best practices and the things that are working in the industry and the trends that you have in that niche. Is that the best outcome? Is that the best deliverable that we can create? And then getting a score from all of those, uh, LLMs and basically know how to improve that product to actually how to improve that deliverable.
Gilad Bechar (17:11.074)
to get a much better impact for our clients. think that like the amount of usage that you can have, A, save time, B, be much more kind of smaller with the level of analysis, just because you have so many more things to take in consideration. All of those things together kind of make it like that if you're not investing in AI and you're in the agency space, I think that in two to three years, you won't gonna have business anymore.
I think that every single, uh, marketing agency out there, and you can see that on the evaluation of the stock market, and the publicly traded the stock companies in our niche, WPP publicist, all of those massive, massive base, they took a very big hit because of the emerging of AI. think that the WPP lost around 48 % of their, of their, um, uh, valuation in the last year, which is insane, but.
When you're thinking about, about those friends, it's because AI, you weren't going to be embracing it, if you weren't going to rethink about every single element about how you're doing it today. And should it actually still take 600 hours to create a commercial? If I can actually prompt it in V03 and just get a beautiful video every single time it's eight seconds, type of a video and then connecting those things, then you can actually create a fantastic looking video in a matter of, of, know,
Kyle James (18:15.163)
Hmm.
Gilad Bechar (18:26.616)
two days instead of 600 hours with production films and all of those things. If you continue doing things in the old ways, you're usually doing it wrong. And with the pace of innovation today, I feel like if you're not kind of innovating about every single one of those elements, how those product needs to look like, how they need to behave, what are the type of expectations, how fast can you actually deliver things to your clients?
And how you can actually pivot extremely fast. something works, double down. If something doesn't work, kill it and move to the next one. I feel like that's the only way to actually stay relevant in today's world. are investing heavily into that, even though that, um, you know, it hurts the EBITDA pretty significantly having 16 positions and the VP AI and we have the programmers and like, it's a big, big, big investment for an agency that have less than 120 employees, but still.
I think that that's the only way of staying relevant and staying ahead of the curve and helping our clients to be in the forefront of the tools and the new things that we can do faster and better for them to bring them better results. If we are bringing them better results, we will stay relevant. If we want, they will do those things in-house. They will do that with another agency that is forward-looking. So I think that that's the only way to survive, if you will.
Kyle James (19:34.202)
Mmm.
Kyle James (19:41.668)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. it's pretty wild to see how much change is happening because I think you have the right mindset. It's like, OK, every single because like your teams have this perspective of like what's working, what's not, what's the best like, I guess almost like the direction that the company is headed towards. Like if you have the AI that can go, OK, I'm going to analyze all five of these different departments and figure out, OK, is this the best way we can be presenting this project or this product for our customers? And if it's not like what's good, what can we change? How can we make it better?
How can we do it faster over time? cause then it allows that scalability that you're talking about here. And as like for you, Gilad, like tell me like, what are, you know, cause there's, so much change happening. Like you said, even 2024, right? Like if you're still doing the same thing since 2024, like, Hey, heads up, you might want to make, you might want to make some changes here, but like for Movers though, like what are those upcoming AI initiatives and where do you see AI playing? Like, especially some of the
biggest role in your operations next as your team continues to expand.
Gilad Bechar (20:44.206)
It's as I mentioned before, like it's for every single team. We're building different types of infrastructure. So we'll have AI agents for almost every single role in the company. Some things are very easy, right? Like things about like getting the insights from the client, digesting them and setting asana tasks for every single internal team based on what the client wants. Other AI agents that are related with media.
getting scraping all of the different information from all of the different platforms and giving them one consolidated report instead of actually exporting it manually. When you're thinking about the creation of creatives, every single one of the creative pieces, what worked, what didn't work, what are the insights, what are the learnings out of the last campaign? So we will be able to create better creative in the, in the next iteration. It's for every single piece of the business. When you're thinking about content writing, yes, writing the content is still important. If it's purely AI written, lot of times Google will just
the bank that, that content piece. But if you are still doing the research and kind of giving the insights and giving the case studies and the unique things, but still working with AI to, to, create that content now in four different elements, one with script for the video, one for the blog posts, another one for, a PR, suggestion and two clips of that to social. That's something that shouldn't take you now, three days to, to, just recompile that content to so many different placements. So.
I think that we have, are kind of building an AI agent for almost every single department in the company. A lot of times it's not just one, like we are having like a AI scraper, just for example, to analyze your competitors, looking on what happened on all of the public, like on Facebook, for example, you can see all of your competitors, how, what type of ads are they running? And then on Google, you have the same type of ad transparency. It's called like in each and every platform, maybe differently. And you can see what happens on TikTok, the best trending things.
So if you're consolidated all of those things and you have a video, so you're transcripting that video and then understanding what are the things that are best performing for my competitors and take that into the research when the copywriter or the creative director thinks about the next, the next iteration, they have what worked for us, what worked best for the competitors and just get it as another layer of information. So it will be the back of their mind. What other things that we might want to actually explore or test or things like that. So I think that we are kind of developing on every single line of business.
Kyle James (22:54.13)
Mmm.
Gilad Bechar (23:08.078)
What are the three, four, five things that will make us smarter, faster, and at the end of the day, be, be able to provide better results and a much better outcome for each and every one of those initiatives. A lot of times, even if you're trying to analyze a simple thing as a creative, you have now an account, you're just inheriting from another agency. You're just onboarded a new account. They have 1200 videos within their YouTube account, for example. And you're saying.
Kyle James (23:34.918)
Mm-hmm.
Gilad Bechar (23:36.256)
Where do I even start? Okay. Let's start from the top 10%, the things that actually work best. Like that's usually how you're going at it. But then when we are coming up with new concepts, a lot of times we might think, Hey, that could be a great idea. That could be a great, a great initiative. That's based on all of those learnings. Maybe we should actually test that. But if you are not analyzing from the 1200 things, also the common ground of things that didn't work.
What made the things that worked really well? What made the things that didn't work? It could be about the pace of the video. It could be about the captions. could be about, you seeing male or female presenter on the screen? Are you actually having what's going to be kind of in the first three seconds? What is the call to action at the end of that video? Like you have so many components. So we divided into more than 25 parameters and trying now to give a score from one to 10 on each one of those parameters. And then see the combination of this.
Kyle James (23:59.236)
Mmm. Mm-hmm.
Gilad Bechar (24:25.162)
entry in the first three to four seconds to grab their attention and that call to action at the end and having a male skewed over the age of 30 to 40 or a female from 20 to 25. Those combinations working much better for that specific audience. And I feel like those level of insights, if you're trying to do that with a brilliant creative director, he will miss or she will miss things that the AI will not just because you're giving score on so many different parameters. So using AI to extract.
Kyle James (24:47.282)
Mmm.
Gilad Bechar (24:54.072)
data points to lead you in the right direction is really, really crucial in today's world. And we'll make you, it's not like every single thing that we will test will work, but the vast majority of the things that we we are testing are things that have a higher likelihood of getting the performance that we want. And that's basically save our clients a lot of time. It saved us the frustration of creating something that doesn't work is something that also helped a lot of to our morale internally and basically being more right than wrong.
Kyle James (25:15.047)
Mm-hmm.
Gilad Bechar (25:22.088)
on all of the digital type of services.
Kyle James (25:24.912)
Yeah, because I think a lot of people are going to look at the content like to say like, what's the what's happened? Which one has the most views like that's a very common like parameter they look for. But in this case, like you're saying is like, hey, it doesn't need to need to be just that. There's 25 different other like perspectives and parameters that we can look at to go, OK, even those ones that didn't do so well. OK, what did they not do well in and what did they do well in? So that way you know, OK, let's take bits and pieces from this case study or use case or project and use that towards building a better
you know, better video, better product or whatever it is that you're aiming for. And like that's, that's why I think what goes the extra mile. Cause to the, even a trained eye, they may not see everything. And how can you get the AI to go, okay, I need you to cover all, all of it full 360 to give us a complete perspective. So that way we know what to do moving forward. And I think it's brilliant. And as we start wrapping up this conversation, Goliad, like where can people maybe learn a little bit more about you that you'd recommend them check out?
and maybe a little bit more about Moverse as well.
Gilad Bechar (26:26.934)
Of course. So you can go to our website, www.mobbers.com. You have there a very advanced blog. have, obviously you can reach out to me also on LinkedIn. I would love to chat if you have any kind of growth challenges. But at the end of the day, mobbers.com is probably the source of information. We probably over-investing in this website to be able to show everything that the company does, because you have so many different lines of expertise and lines of business.
And we really want to show that on each and every one of them, even though that we do a lot on each of them, we are really taking it to the edge. So you have a lot of learning and materials on mobiles.com.
Kyle James (27:04.594)
Cool, awesome. Gala, think, man, thank you so much for being on this call. You've been awesome. You know so much about the business, and I just love you and your perspective. I know everyone else here has definitely enjoyed the same. So thank you so much for being on, my friend.
Gilad Bechar (27:16.958)
Thank you so much for having me.
Kyle James (27:18.354)
Yeah, and thanks, everybody, for listening. And remember, if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, I hope it's clear. Please, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that AI could cause, it may not be worth it. So schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now, have a great rest of your day, everybody. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
