Hey, it's me, Anthony. I've been wanting to get a newsletter organized for a while now, and my peanut brain finally got around to doing it. I’ve been wanting a newsletter that gives some industry insight in a simple and clean way. What tools are being used, what media buying trends we’re seeing, whats maybe going on at PALO, and other things we’re seeing work across the industry. Our goal is to try and bring value in a simple and fun way. We hope you like it! We’re aiming to do this weekly and potentially different versions of the report weekly, monthly, etc.

🏆️ 2024’s Best of the Best

Last year, we wanted to highlight some of the best pay-per-call marketers in the game, as we saw that the networks got all the attention. It looked like our space really loved it, so we thought we’d do it again with some fresh faces and great people. Click the frame below to check out the list!

⭐️ Our Predictions for 2025

This past year, we’ve seen a bunch of changes to the space. Whether it is how the standard marketer is now becoming an offer owner or with the FCC’s new ruling forcing traditional lead gen to pivot their models. Here’s what we see happening over 2025.

• Inbound calls will continue to be the most valuable product offered and will see a surge in volume after the new FCC rule rolls out.

• Majority of coreg/lead players will begin to take their leads in-house and utilize a call center to get their leads on the phone rather than sell them off.

• More marketers will begin to vertically integrate and own the offer. We’re seeing more marketers who can generate insurance customers begin to set up their own agencies and service customers themselves. They’ve solved the hard part of generating a lead, and now, with companies like Senior Market Sales, they can partner with a bigger player to ensure the back end is handled better.

• Networks will need to become more niche and provide value outside of simply just having caps or budgets. Verticals like legal are difficult to build as it’s fragmented by state licensures and the networks that focus on the biz dev will have a moat. More networks need to re-evaluate their moats or begin thinking about developing one.

• AI ads will be impossible to distinguish what is real and what is not. I wouldn’t be surprised if the FTC forces companies to disclose if the content or interaction with a consumer involves AI.

🛠️ Tools We’re Using

🤖 Conversation SMS: Contact Loop / We’ve been having great success with this platform. They make it pretty easy to get campaigns spun up, and they handle all the scripting. We’re using this for our social security disability and personal injury campaigns.

🗣️AI Voice Agent: Voice Fusion / This has been a very cool tool to mess around with. There are quite a few tools out there that promise to do the world when it comes to AI and voice agents but a lot of them fall short. Voice Fusion is another Contact Loop product we’ve been testing. There are also other promising tools out there like All Rise AI.

📹️ AI Creative Generator: Arcads / This isn't a groundbreaking discovery, but it's really helping us pump out a lot of ads for META using video we film and then replace the faces with AI-generated faces to have more spokesperson videos in half the time. We’re still playing around with this and will update you in the next report. If you’d like our step by step on how we do it, just reply to this email.

If you need an introduction or for us to point you in the right direction, just email me at [email protected], and I’d be happy to do so.

🔑 Other Cool Stuff

We’ll cover some of our media buying efforts in the next report.

🔹 Zapier QA Bot: Not the most sophisticated thing when it comes to QA but we’ve built out a nice bot that listens for certain keywords and flags and then alerts us inside Slack. Disclaimer, it needs A LOT of work but it’s getting some nice results. We’re beginning to have it listen for calls that also can help coach our call center reps on areas they can improve. This can also be used to help spot warm transfers that should be inbound calls coming from affiliates. Check out the Zap template here. If you need the prompts we use too, just email me!

1. You’ll need to download a call recording of a sale and upload it into Deepgram to get a full transcription. Then find a few more to get a diverse set of data.

2. Then take all of those transcriptions and load them into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize these into a prompt or instructions you can ask another GPT on how to identify a sale.

3. Then just adapt this to whatever your goal is or whatever your favorite AI tool is. We chose ChatGPT since it connects with Zapier well.

This can be extrapolated to any type of call. Find a recording where someone is pissed or where a call center rep needs help. Just be patient, the GPT is going to suck at first. You need more data to feed it to make it better but it will evolve into a smarter tool.

🎵 What We’re Listening Too

Anthony

🎤 Full Clip: A Decade of Gang Starr

Sory

🪩 Afrobeat Vol. 3

Dylan

🎸 Human The Double Album

Christina

🎙️ 30 by Adele

📚️ Books We’re Reading or Rereading

📕 Zero to One (Anthony) - I love the concept of having a monopoly in a good way and the idea that competition is for losers. 2025 is going to be a year that players in our space really need to differentiate and this book covers a whole lot of that for me.

📗 Pay Per Call Revolution (Dylan) - As somewhat of a newbie in this space, Dylan is taking the education route seriously and taking it head on by learning some true veterans like Adam Young of Ringba.

📘 Rocket Fuel (Sory) - We’re taking a different type of leap for 2025, PALO is implementing EOS for the first time to see how it can make us more aligned and scale easier. Sory is truly adopting this model and helping PALO forge ahead with it.

📙 Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook (Christina) - As our ops manager, Christina takes process and speed seriously and this book/system has been a huge value add for not only her but our team once she dives into things and gets involved.

📼 Content We’re Loving

🔴 Corey Quinn’s Deep Specialization Podcast - great content relevant to our industry and tactical.

🔴 Daily Stoic & Daily Dad - All around perfect quick content on how to live your life in a positive way. Bonus, he also has the Daily Dad for the Dad’s out there that want to add stoicism into their parenting routine.

🔴 Wisdom from the Top - Learn from leaders, plain and simple.

🖊️ Closing Remarks

2025 - dang we made it. This is PALO’s 15th year in business and looking back it’s been absolutely wild. We’ve seen so much change from regulation, to new verticals, to new players coming in a blowing the doors of new campaigns. So much!

I’d just like to thank every partner, publisher, client, advertiser, team member, non-paying buyer, tech owner, and more…for coming on this ride with us. We can’t wait for a great year ahead.

~Anthony Paluzzi