Episode Transcript
Hunter Zhao (00:02.487)
Welcome to the AI Chronicles. I'm your host, Hunter Zhao. Today, we're going to dive headfirst into how Mongoose Media is using AI inside their own business. We're going to share the exact steps you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside your own company or struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer.
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Today I have with me Lauren Picciullo, who's the founder of Mongoose Media. Welcome to the show, Lauren.
Lauren P (01:19.406)
Thank thank you, Hunter, glad to be here.
Hunter Zhao (01:22.293)
Awesome. So, Lauren, tell me, how did Mongoose Media come to be?
Lauren P (01:27.582)
Mongoose Media originated seven and half years ago from one very clear decision. As founder, I had been fired from my last company and was out with some friends and decided I don't want to update my resume and apply for jobs, so I'm just gonna make one myself. And thus, out of pure laziness, Mongoose Media was born. And now we are a 20 plus.
Hunter Zhao (01:51.041)
Yeah.
Lauren P (01:55.63)
pack members and it's a wonderful roster of clients that we've been fortunate to work
Hunter Zhao (02:02.049)
I see, well that's a very unique story actually. for a digital agency like Mongoose Media, it starts off usually just with one person, yourself, right? So was it, I guess, difficult to bootstrap everything all the way up to the way it is? It's been seven years, but it's still very impressive that you're able to get from one person show all the way to 20 employees.
Lauren P (02:16.727)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren P (02:30.926)
I mean, there's highs and lows. There's, everyone has their own plateaus peaks in whatever the opposite of peaks or ebbs and flows. I had, three people that came on relatively early that I had been working with for years and I have their undying faith in supporting the business. So I was surrounded by talent and I fortunately came from the wall.
Hunter Zhao (02:51.843)
Hmm.
Lauren P (02:58.7)
Disney company where I was four accidents away from being the CEO, which meant I had a Rolodex of amazing humans in my life. And we've been predominantly referral based for the entire time. early on, I think like in the first year almost we had helped create six new millionaires from our paid ads performance. So when you have the level of success that we did in our early on case studies, it became a referral engine pretty quickly. And
Hunter Zhao (03:16.035)
Wow.
Lauren P (03:27.136)
After about three years, we started actually putting together a website because our referrals were now having grandbaby referrals and it was just like further degrees of separation. said, just tell us where they can go find you. I'm like, okay, fine, we'll build a website. And it's been really a wonderful experience ever since.
Hunter Zhao (03:47.011)
That is awesome to hear and for our audience, some outside information that I was provided earlier, was said, Lauren, you're able to scale 5K meta spend on ad all the way to 500K revenue returns. That's amazing.
Lauren P (04:05.102)
We've done that multiple times. What we like to say and what's more common, like, I mean, you have to always take in those numbers. Like, they're lovely. We have great case studies. You can go to Mongoose.media. Mongoose.media slash case studies if you want to see them. But the reality is, is there's always stuff that comes into it, right? We helped one client with less than $100,000 in ad spend in 90 days do over 100, oh, sorry, do over $1 million in revenue. That 100,000 was management and ads.
So you're to 10x that. Now, if you look into the lens, when did that happen? Well, at the advent of COVID. So there's things that are always going to come in. And so it depends. I don't want to be like, I want to ensure that there's transparency in all of that. while on multiple times, we've taken 5K of ad spend and done over $500,000 in revenue. One of my favorite is we've done that in the cruise industry, where we had over half a million dollars in cruise sales after three days of running a brand new type of campaign.
Hunter Zhao (04:45.25)
Of course.
Lauren P (05:00.331)
But more recently, like we're recording this in August 2025, we have on multiple occasions been able to turn 6,000 or less in ad spend to six figures and more.
Hunter Zhao (05:12.611)
Wow, that is amazing. That's a huge accomplishment. Thank you for sharing, Lauren. So I know you're using AI over at Mongoose Media. I think it's being a fan myself of AI, I live and breathe it. I think it's fantastic what you're doing. But before we dive into that, can you tell me why you decided to start using AI in the first place? And what challenges were you trying to solve?
Lauren P (05:17.346)
Thanks. Thank you.
Lauren P (05:25.102)
100%.
Lauren P (05:37.774)
Sure, so the advent of AI actually came about for a company now called Jasper, formerly called Jarvis. So there was a Facebook group and it was a brand new software on generative AI. And as a wannabe futurist and a forever shiny object chaser, I saw this and I was like, okay, this is interesting. And I went specifically from the SEO route. So my background for the agency and performance
paid media, that's Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok, et cetera, where we can track dollar in, dollar out and treat ad networks like ATMs. But we wanted to look and tackle the organic traffic side. I don't have an SEO background. I didn't really know anything about SEO, but I thought, hmm, in like 2019, yeah, 2019, we had found out about this tool.
And, uh, there was a Facebook group, there was a mastermind. So was like, okay, if I'm going to learn about a tool that helps me get into the AI space and SEO, I'm going to sign up. So I went to Austin, I went to their headquarters and just really went all in. Um, so myself and then one of our pack members, we were doing generative AI content writing blogs. This is about a year and a half before chat. Chippy tea. was in the news in Australia in 2019 or 2020 to prove it, but, um,
To that effect, after 14 months, we were able to generate 100,000 plus organic visitors to a brand new website monthly because of the content we created with AI that after a few months, we implemented some shopping tactics and some performance enhancements on the website, which led us to doing over $10,000 a month in organic sales purely from content that we co-wrote with AI. And it was just this momentum that we had seen and
I was able to become like Jasper's very first case study landed me in Forbes. was featured. I'm on server, another AI SEO tool that we use their homepage. And it was just, there was so much traction and so much momentum for something I'm not familiar with, but neither was most people. So we jumped on fairly early, took risks, had massive rewards. And as chat GPT became more prevalent for people to have a better user experience with AI.
Lauren P (08:00.874)
we were able to adopt it across multiple networks or multiple divisions within our company. And then since then, most recently I was at South by Southwest and I had the chance to go to Google's headquarters and talk to like their heads of AI and then listen alongside like rocket scientists. Cause obviously AI is like the word vehicle. There's motorcycles, there's RVs, there's bicycles. There's many different types of AI. Generative AI is just one. There's programmatic AI, which we use nonstop in paid advertising, but it was just this
momentum of as you know, this is everyone's daily conversation. So we came in early with generative AI, chat GPT enabled us to introduce AI to everyone. And now it's become, I wouldn't say it's as used as the internet in our company, but it's between how often we use our cell phone during the day at work and how often we use the internet. That's the amount of usage everyone on my team is with AI right now.
Hunter Zhao (08:56.341)
Incredible. So here, when you say AI, is it mostly revolving around chatbot tools like chat GPT that's publicly available? Or are you talking more, I guess, agentic solutions or specific workflow automation tools that enables something a bit more advanced?
Lauren P (09:18.104)
question, it depends on a per-role basis. There's a lot that we use that's enabled behind ChatGPT, and in our agenda workflows we use Make. We've had since it was called Integromat, so what I pay per year is what a lot of people pay per month, like yay for early adoption, and grandfathered pricing, right? So in that capacity, ChatGPT is the large majority of what we'll use in our pro accounts for those type of automation workflows.
But because of so much other software that we have enabled to use high level, we use ClickUp. All of our tools have some sort of AI enablement that I haven't gone deep into see what they're reliant on. But I would assume the majority is honestly on chat. But we use a wide variety of AI services. We use HeyGen, which is an AI generative tool where my team, we took a three minute video of me.
and they just make videos for me with full scripts done. We use like Opus AI to cut some of my podcast episodes. We've used like 11 labs. Like there's so many different AI tools that are relative to various roles. And I would say like, if anyone's listening, like what's the AI tool that we use them with right now, it's a hundred percent Favim note taker. And I've just upgraded to Teams. I can't believe no one's sold me on Teams before. It's the best. I should see if I have an affiliate code, but that's the one that
Hunter Zhao (10:18.979)
Okay.
Hunter Zhao (10:38.307)
Yeah.
Lauren P (10:46.538)
Everyone on my team is like required to use.
Hunter Zhao (10:50.667)
Interesting, interesting. Okay, so what sort of results have you been seeing so far? solid ROIs or KPIs that you could share with our audience?
Lauren P (11:02.702)
Sure, so at Monogamous Media, really offer like three core services. It's paid advertising, it's advertising paid media. We have a content creation studios or creative services. And then we also do life cycle marketing. So it's from email, CRM management to chat bots. So I'm gonna break it down from those three. From the paid media side, we have, I'll go specifically on Facebook because I can go a thousand and a half examples. On Facebook side, when we use AI within its meta AI,
So there's also you can go on the app or you can go to meta.ai and you can see it's an alternative to chat.gpt pros and cons when we've done AI enablements to our ads we have found significantly stronger returns and where the stronger returns has been greater appearance in their marketplace I want I don't want to get too specific but I can if anyone wants to geek out with me reach out anytime but because we've used AI so much within that meta ads ecosystem
we're able to create an abundance of creative. So that burden of operations was lifted from us. We're able to access additional types of creative that if you're not using AI, you're limited to. And what that means is you can create five ads or you can create 10 ads. And those 10, that difference of five means you have greater opportunity of showing up for a more cost efficient ad. Long story short, how we use AI with Meta has led us decrease our CPM. So how much we're paying to get in front of our audience and has increased our
conversion objectives. So AI has enabled us to perform better in meta ads, as well as reduce the burden of operations of coming up with more copy and coming up with more creative or doing background remover on e-commerce stuff. From the lifecycle marketing team, we do AI assistance. So we build chatbots and we have seen landing pages increase conversions by 25%. So when we install an AI
assistant like a chat bot on a web page or inside of an ad like an Instagram or Facebook ad. What we have found is that people treat comments on ads the way they look at reviews on Amazon. So Hunter, have you ever bought anything on Amazon without looking at a review?
Hunter Zhao (13:18.753)
Question I can't remember the last time I did that so probably no
Lauren P (13:23.158)
Okay. If someone has like you unicorn you, but I'm sure anyone who's listening to this is like, I always read the reviews. Well, that's what a lot of people are doing with social media. They're reading the comments and comments can lead to a lot of conversations, which lead to conversions. And there's such a neglected component of paid media that by having AI chatbots installed, connected to the ads and on the landing pages, we can now respond to potential customers and we can stop.
letting people assume that we know all the answers on that landing page. Which then goes into, oh, and so that, yeah, the stat is like a 25 % increase, as well as doing a lot more lead capture that never would have occurred. Which means that we capture their information, even if they don't become a customer, they still become part of our ecosystem. And then with the creative studio side, our content creation. As I mentioned, we use Hey Jen, so we're able to create a lot more new content without me having to film.
We use, additional AI in terms of like enhancing our videos, like we'll do explainer videos and all that stuff. Like the whole studio is leveraging AI to have more cost effective productions, or even like I have a podcast. have a quarter million listeners per month, which is amazing, but a 40 minute episode may have two mids and 10 shorts from it. Instead of it taking someone, what would have been eight hours a day to create, we can do it in eight minutes or less. So enabling those tools allows us.
to create more volume at scale without disrupting quality. We maintain human in the loop always. So where I don't have the same performance numbers as I do from life cycle marketing or paid ads, what I can say is our output is significantly larger while our costs are relatively the same and our quality is not degraded in any capacity.
Hunter Zhao (15:15.747)
I see. So using AI, you're able to do more while retaining the quality. And you're able to stay consistent, but essentially scale. Use it to help you scale and serve more clients. OK.
Lauren P (15:21.315)
Yes.
Lauren P (15:29.962)
100%. And I know like at the advent of when we were using AI in like 2021, um, we had a lot of people that were like, Hey, AI is going to take our jobs. This is copywriters. Like what are they going to do? We hired more people as soon as we started using AI. So it was, it allowed us exactly as you said, we could do more with less, but because we could do more with less maintained quality, we then had a demand for more, which meant we had to hire more. So the way we've used AI, the way we continue to use AI, like we just,
are constantly hiring. Like we're literally hiring two new video editors because we just can't keep up. There's, mean, we can keep up. We have such a great demand that we're like creating whole new roles, technical and creative video editors. It's fun.
Hunter Zhao (16:12.931)
Wow, impressive, impressive. So what are Mongoose Media's upcoming AI initiatives? So you shared what you've done so far, but where do you see AI playing a role in your operations next?
Lauren P (16:19.896)
Mm.
Lauren P (16:26.356)
So it's going to go back to the SEO piece because Google AI Max and Andromeda from Meta. Those are the two biggest product initiatives in paid ad space in five years. Before Meta's Andromeda launched, Zuckerberg spent over $65 billion this year in AI enhancements for Meta. And a lot of that has been spent and invested inside of Andromeda, which is their programmatic AI.
Google AI Max is launching. These are tools in which the buttons to push and the levers to pull as a media buyer when you're like, who do I want to go after? Those decisions are being removed. As a performance marketing agency owner, being mindful of what's coming, the decisions that are being pulled from the media buying side, we now can apply that same critical thinking to the next part, which is where I see AI going, and it's managing the websites.
we still have to control the destination that we're sending our paid traffic to or getting traffic. And right now what we're investing in and looking at is continue development of getting visibility in AEO. So answer engine optimization so that we are getting index in LLMs, but also making sure that the programmatic side of languages. like, don't know if you saw Google's Gemini is now creating
AI chat bots essentially, but that are offline. They don't live anywhere. It's private to your device. It's not shared. So it's essentially deconstructing how SEO has worked for the last 20 years. Predominantly, you would have your website set up for search engine crawlers. But now with Gemini making their own offline chat bot,
using anything that's on your page that it can read, the schematic, the structured data, the data flow for AI to read is what we're going into next. But also because it's so programmatic, it's meta tags, and it's a lot of stuff that's outside of my familiarity, it's how might we leverage AI so that the content we create for web is more AI accessible.
Hunter Zhao (18:46.019)
I see, I see. And it does bring up a concept. don't know. I'm sure you've heard of it, but it's now called GEO, right? Generative Engine Optimization. And that's where you want your product or company to show up, articles you wrote in your blog article, to show up as a reference in chat GBT's response, in Gemini's response. So that's something that people are trying to optimize against.
Lauren P (18:55.352)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren P (19:05.399)
Exactly.
Hunter Zhao (19:11.331)
Sometimes I think, well the early adopters at least, they need to adjust the structure of the site, the metadata so that it's... Yes.
Lauren P (19:20.396)
Yeah, yeah. it's like AI page content is the way that Gemini is saying that you need to do. because AI is a computer, it's still going to read your page like a computer. So you want to have a UI UX experience where the user interface and the user design is set up for the person. But in part of that silent web movement where you'll have a question, we saw this to be true with chat bots.
A lot of us assume what people want to know on a landing page. But then when you read the questions people have on these chat bots, you're like, what? You're on this page and you're asking them about peach allergy? That's not even an ingredient in this supplement. What? But we can't make assumptions. It's personalized and relevancy is going to be the only way that you're going to win in a continued enabled environment, AI enabled environment. So that structured data and all of that to make sure that GEO, right, or
Hunter Zhao (19:55.21)
Yeah.
Lauren P (20:13.198)
AEO, whatever tool it is, is that you're showing up. The best way to show up is that the computers can read you. The AI chatbots can read what you have. And maybe in six months and two years from now, it's not going to require as much programmatic stuff. And programmatic stuff I'm talking about is like, do you have H1, H2 on your website? Are you using division stuff? And a lot of it is like AI accessibility. It's as users.
If you don't have A.I. access, sorry, if you don't have ADA compliant web pages, if you don't have accessibility widgets on your website, I was sued. I was one of my companies was considered allegedly not accessible from a blind user. Now, I can't say anything else on it, but you can't. It's a public filing. And because of that, we went into A.I.
resources that made our websites more accessible. But now that accessibility with Gemini's update is making it important. So you have to have AI page content and you have to have accessibility widgets because accessibility widgets, if you have visual impairment, needs to tell screen readers, hey, this is a button. Visually, it looks like a button, but does the computer know that it's a button? There's specific languaging that you do. And again, in six months, two years, it might not be that burdensome on the programmatic side. But that's what
We have found we want to make sure that we're showing up in any of the LLMs that we can. And part of that is through structured data. And then the second part is just right now it's not an AI thing, but because Reddit is one of the most indexed pages and there's a lot of rich content. We have seen case study after case study that Reddit threads are showing up in LLM stronger, especially when they're tied to a creator that's connected to a brand. Sorry, I know I'm like talking about a lot of different things and I can go super nerdy and geeky into some of that.
But when you've got a team with as much diversity of leadership and thought as I do, I'm just like constantly inundated and overwhelmed with how great the team is doing on these kinds of initiatives.
Hunter Zhao (22:13.591)
That's very impressive. You're obviously very, very knowledgeable about the SEO domain. And as we move into a new era of AI-centric information delivery, we're going to need to adjust as people that's, I guess, trying to get visibility, trying to appear in front of the right people, make sure that we structure our content, our website.
Lauren P (22:34.542)
Mm-hmm.
Hunter Zhao (22:42.029)
properly, make it accessible, readable, and properly indexed for generative engines. And I guess now that's a specialty of Mongoose media.
Lauren P (22:49.645)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren P (22:55.258)
Well, I wouldn't say that it's necessarily a specialty. It's just in a space that we're trying to know and understand. So I signal that we're figuring this out. What I can for sure say a specialty is I'm beyond confident that we're in the top 1 to 5 % of all Facebook media buyers in the world. Our Google media buying team, our head of search was actually number two in the world by Google. So they identified him as this number two ad specialist.
Hunter Zhao (23:00.917)
Mm.
Lauren P (23:23.864)
So in those things, I feel really confident. But as an agency owner seeing the new frontier coming, I know that I have to be mindful that a lot of the stuff that we do today won't be a job anymore, right? I've got like court typists when we have recording devices now, right? We had phone operators that were plugging into different devices. That's what media buying is. We're not gonna have those same phone operators that are connecting lines. So in me trying to...
Hunter Zhao (23:42.04)
Yeah.
Lauren P (23:53.016)
protect my team from any shit moments and be aware of us not becoming dinosaurs and irrelevant, I believe through everything I've read from the paid media side and through LLM is that what is on your website is gonna be more important than ever. That you need to have clear stuff and you need to have like the website experience from paid ad to what you're driving traffic to, from organic to what's showing up inside of these engines, right?
I don't care if it's the decentralization of search. It's whether it's Google or chat, GPT doesn't matter when someone is trying to find you as a solution. I predict and I see for me, like I don't have a crystal ball, but I, I can see the roadmap very clearly that with each step, it's protecting my team and protecting my company as maintaining its relevance by ensuring that the off ad destination properties.
Hunter Zhao (24:34.199)
Yeah.
Lauren P (24:49.078)
are set up for the most success as possible. And these are just two things that we think are gonna make a big difference that we're gonna be constantly researching and testing. if it is something you wanna know, we're happy to share our mistakes. You don't have to make the same expensive ones and share back what's working now when it does.
Hunter Zhao (25:05.602)
I see, I see. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks again for sharing. Now to our audience, Lauren, where should people go to learn more about mongoose media?
Lauren P (25:15.284)
well, if you want to check out Mongoose media directly, you can go to the website mongoose.media. Or alternatively, if you want to connect with me directly, LinkedIn Lauren E. Patrulo as in Elizabeth because I was married into my last name and someone beat me to Lauren Patrulo on all the handles first. But if you connect with me on LinkedIn, that's where I'm most active and we'll be sharing a lot more transparently of what's working now for us in this geo-ao world. We're figuring it out.
We don't have answers, but we're trying.
Hunter Zhao (25:45.539)
Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much, Lauren. It was great to have you on.
Lauren P (25:51.502)
Thank you, Hunter, I appreciate it.
Hunter Zhao (25:53.261)
Remember, if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself alone. The time and stress that the AI will cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Go to gpt-trainer.com to schedule your consultation. Signing off for now, have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
