Jonathan Becker
Jonathan Becker is the founder and president of Thrive Digital, where he and his team have deployed more than $3.5 billion in paid acquisition budgets for companies like Uber, Asana, Square, Tempur-Pedic, and MasterClass. He spent the first part of his career mastering SEO and is a world expert in DTC, lead generation, demand generation, and user acquisition.
AI & Technology Skills
AI shifts human roles from manual execution to high-level strategic modeling and creative direction.
"The effect ultimately that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. We have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's m..."
LLMs can replace massive amounts of manual drafting for complex documents like RFPs and ad copy variants.
"We can have ChatGPT come up with all kinds of variants of copy that we would not have necessarily thought of. It can do a lot of drafting of things like RFP responses... it's like 80% good and still r..."
Generative AI tools like Midjourney and Dall-E allow for rapid prototyping and real-time iteration of creative concepts during client meetings.
"On our creative group, we can come up with mockups, in literally, 1% of the time that it took... these rough drafts that you might show the artwork of to a client to say, 'Do we like this more or do w..."
Growth Skills
Paid growth should only be scaled once product-market fit has been validated through other organic or direct channels.
"Product market fit. If you know that your business sells into audiences. Let's say you are a social media influencer or you had a really strong email marketing game, or organically your content surfac..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
The best performance marketing hires often come from technical backgrounds like math, physics, or engineering rather than traditional marketing.
"If you're making your first hire, you probably want them to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution,..."
Fermi problems (logic questions) are useful for testing a candidate's ability to decompose complex problems and maintain composure under pressure.
"I'll ask the question of, 'How many windows are there in New York City?'... One is can they think on their feet? I'm not actually looking for the correct answer... also from a client services point of..."
Leadership Skills
Performance and brand teams must be integrated to ensure creative assets are optimized for specific ad channel mechanics.
"Performance marketing and brand marketing in a lot of organizations are two different things. And the designers that occupy brand teams bandwidth and whatnot often don't have a sense of how paid acqui..."
Marketing Skills
Messaging should be treated as a continuous, evolving conversation that changes based on the user's stage in the funnel.
"I think about us beginning a conversation at the top of funnel creatively with an audience, having that conversation change as we say different things, and the audience that we're targeting ultimately..."
Effective storytelling in high-stakes environments requires a clear narrative structure and the confidence to challenge the audience's assumptions.
"In a pitch situation you want to tell a story, it's important, and that story has to have a beginning, middle, and end... be brave and tell them what they need rather than just conforming to what they..."