In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Bryan Phelps, founder and CEO of Big Leap, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in modern marketing.

Heating up: audience-first, not channel-first. Bryan makes the case for what some call "search everywhere optimization" — the idea that being found is no longer about ranking on Google, but about showing up everywhere your ideal customer already spends time. For some brands, that's Pinterest and Reddit more than Google. As Bryan puts it, the goal is to "contribute to those communities versus try to take from those communities."

Cooling off: single-channel attribution. The old model, where your brand is found on search, click, convert, "rarely happens anymore." Bryan walks through why zero-click behavior and AI-mode search results are blurring the clean line between spend and outcome: a conversion that looks like paid search might actually have started in an AI chat. His fix is to focus on the cause and effect of marketing. "We almost need to go back a little farther now," he says, "to the cause and effect, the correlations, the incrementality testing."

The throughline: marketers who look at channels in silos keep making the same mistake. "When you cut that spend because it's not directly performing, it removes performance elsewhere." The teams winning right now are the ones open-minded enough to see how brand advertising lifts branded search, how branded search lifts paid search, and how all pieces move together.

The conversation also gets into what AI means for marketing careers, like why deep single-channel specialists may need to go broader, and why the real skill is increasingly about pulling the whole mix together.

To close, Bryan shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: getting off LinkedIn, out of the AI hype cycle, and onto a Utah golf course. "It's easy to feel like everyone else has it figured out and you're behind," he says. "That's not always the case."

In this episode:

• Why "SEO" has become "search everywhere optimization"
• How to find your audience beyond Google, Meta, and the usual channels
• What zero-click search and AI overviews are doing to attribution
• Why incrementality testing is making a comeback — and why your CFO belongs in the conversation
• The hidden cost of cutting spend in a single channel
• How AI is reshaping marketing roles and career paths

About the guest: Bryan Phelps is the founder and CEO of Big Leap, a brand-led performance marketing agency he started in 2008. He's grown the company onto the Inc. 5000 and Utah's Best Companies to Work For lists, now scales that playbook across Setfire Creative and Leadgenics, and is a Forbes Agency Council contributor and Utah 40 Under 40 honoree.

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Welcome to the Advertising Heat Check, your real-time pulse on what's heating up and cooling off in advertising, coming directly from leading enterprise marketers.

The first episode drops May 6th, 2026, and new episodes will come every Tuesday and Thursday thereafter.

Learn more at advertisingheatcheck.com