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date: 2026-01-20 format: media type: podcast language: EN participants: - Seva Ustinov (Plurio / Elly Analytics) - Josh Elledge (Host, The Thoughtful Entrepreneur) topic: AI agent for performance marketing, ad optimization, creative fatigue, dashboard problem status: published owner: Seva source_refs: - The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, Episode 2381 - Apple Music transcript (speaker roles identified manually — original had no role markers) published_links: - https://go.upmyinfluence.com/post/2381-boosting-advertising-performance-through-ai-with-plurios-seva-ustinov - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2381-boosting-advertising-performance-through-ai-with/id1394227396?i=1000754496804 - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5mI7JgDgXZmo9sMIU5C3Qo notes: - Recorded approximately December 2025 / January 2026, published March 2026 - Apple Music transcript — no speaker roles in original; roles identified by context - Product descriptions may reference earlier stage of Plurio (pre-rebranding from L-Analytics) — need to be updated for current product state - L-Analytics / ellyanalytics.com mentions = old branding, ignore - Personal stories, opinions, identity, and storytelling are evergreen and accurate - Host Josh Elledge also runs UpMyInfluence / PodVerified — separate pre-podcast meeting exists in Fireflies raw transcript recording_date_approx: 2025-12 to 2026-01

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The Thoughtful Entrepreneur — Seva Ustinov + Josh Elledge

Episode 2381: Boosting Advertising Performance Through AI with Plurio's Seva Ustinov Host: Josh Elledge (The Thoughtful Entrepreneur / UpMyInfluence) Guest: Seva Ustinov — Founder & CEO, Plurio Published: March 2026 Language: English

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Published Episode Links

• Web: https://go.upmyinfluence.com/post/2381-boosting-advertising-performance-through-ai-with-plurios-seva-ustinov
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2381-boosting-advertising-performance-through-ai-with/id1394227396?i=1000754496804
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5mI7JgDgXZmo9sMIU5C3Qo

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Episode Description (from Apple Music)

Title: Revolutionizing Digital Advertising: Strategic Insights into AI-Driven Campaign Management with Seva Ustinov

In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, host Josh Elledge sat down with Seva Ustinov, the Founder and CEO of plurio, to discuss the seismic shift occurring within the digital advertising landscape. As managing ad spend across Google, Meta, and TikTok becomes increasingly fragmented and complex, Seva shares how autonomous AI agents are moving beyond simple data reporting to active execution. This conversation provides a masterclass for high-growth founders and marketing executives who are looking to bridge the gap between surface-level platform metrics and true bottom-line business outcomes.

Key Episode Highlights: 1. The Full-Funnel Gap: Why standard ad platforms often fail to optimize for long-term business goals and how AI bridges that data void. 2. Autonomous Execution: The shift from passive dashboards to active agents that can pause, scale, and reallocate spend in real-time. 3. Force Multiplying Creativity: How AI frees up marketing agencies to focus on high-level strategy rather than manual spreadsheet analysis. 4. Combating Creative Fatigue: Using AI to proactively spot when ad assets lose effectiveness and rotating them before ROI drops. 5. Transparency and Trust: The "Human-in-the-Loop" model that provides clear reasoning for every AI-driven campaign adjustment.

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Transcript (Apple Music, speaker roles identified)

Note: Original Apple Music transcript had no speaker identification. Roles assigned based on conversational context: Josh Elledge = host (asks questions, frames topics), Seva Ustinov = guest (explains Plurio, gives examples).

Note on product info: Recorded in late 2025 / early 2026. Product descriptions (pricing model, features, website URL) reflect an earlier state. Current product capabilities have evolved significantly. Treat product-specific claims as need to be updated.

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Josh Elledge: Can't wait to learn all about what Plurio is. Before we get into that, first off, thank you so much for being here, Seva.

Seva Ustinov: Thanks for having me here.

Josh Elledge: Yeah. You're based in the Bay Area in San Francisco. It's great to have you.

One thing I always love finding, when we talk to founders and people who create great things, is they tend to be multi-passionate, have a lot of hobbies, a lot of fun things. What have you been geeking out on lately?

Seva Ustinov: Well, actually, last year, I started to play pickleball, my first time and then another time, and then every week, and then two times a week with multiple different friends and that really catched me up and I enjoyed so much.

Josh Elledge: So who was it, a friend that got you in?

Seva Ustinov: Yeah, he just like invited me once, like, hey, do you want to hang out? Do you want to play? And I was sure, why not?

I used to play tennis when I was a child, and it's kind of similar or simpler. And but that, like, I was blown away, like how fun it is and how easy it is to start. Like, from there, I'm like, now part of this meme about what do people do after 30.

Josh Elledge: Yeah. Well, it is. It's such an accessible sport.

And you're right. It's that you get a lot of — you just, you get a lot of endorphins out of it because you're like, oh, hey, we're playing a real game here. We're volleying back and forth quite a bit.

Like, it's just easy to kind of pick up and feel like you're doing pretty well. And then, of course, then you start getting strategic. And I've played against some seniors here in my — in our big development here.

And let me tell you, they wipe the mat with me — or not the mat, I guess, the court with me. And they do so without even breaking a sweat. They're just like standing in one place, returning everything and I'm flying all over the place.

So yeah, you could definitely — it's one that you can get pretty good at. Well, Seva, tell us about Plurio. So I've got it pulled up on my website right now.

It says one AI agent to run your performance marketing growth. I'm intrigued.

Seva Ustinov: So it actually started as a marketing data platform. So think about all the companies and business owners and marketers that run lots of Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok and others, channels. And when they spend like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, they really want to understand like what's actually working, what's not.

Do I spend my money right? Can I get more out of it? So we started with building a data platform that shows like the true performance of each channel, campaign and creative.

But then we discovered that analytics is not enough. People don't want to use it, don't know how to use it. It's just sometimes like complicated, time consuming.

So we decided to build an AI agent that will do that autonomously. Just go through the data, figure out like what things could be done better, how to optimize ads, how to improve its performance. And like that was pretty exciting turn of events because now you can just set everything up and just let your agent analyze and optimize everything for you.

Josh Elledge: It's exciting. So if I understand this correctly, you've got like, so anyone who is — and where might they be advertising? Like what platforms does this work well with?

Seva Ustinov: The analytics part works with any kind of digital ads. AI agent works well with Google and Meta, and the list of platforms will expand soon. So basically think about all the businesses that run digital ads online.

Maybe it's Google, Meta, TikTok, Reddit, influencers, affiliates. If you generate sales or leads or trials or subscriptions from your website or your mobile application, then it's the right thing for you.

Josh Elledge: When you're in — advertising is not my superpower, so I'm going to lean on you to help me out as I ask dumb questions here. But my understanding from what little I do know is that if you are running your ad campaigns in a real set-it-and-forget-it way, you're going to get hosed. That great ad management requires, I don't want to say babysitting, but certainly a lot of hands-on, being very micromanaging.

But typically, that's where you would hire an ad agency because it's their job to babysit from minute to minute what's going on, so that we can maximize ROI. Can you help a dummy out like me and help me with my vocabulary and what I'm talking about and why, again, Plurio kind of solves that problem? Because an AI agent, they can work 24/7, right?

Is that a general idea?

Seva Ustinov: So imagine you run an online school for children to teach them programming languages and you run ads to attract new students, new customers, and maybe you run it in — it's an online thing, so you can run ads in multiple regions. You can try different landing pages or quizzes or sales funnels. And when you run ads at scale, you pretty fast get to hundreds of different creatives, sales funnels, and combinations of things that you need to track, like what's actually working and what's not.

And Google and Meta, they do a really good job at optimizing their ads automatically for leads, like whatever conversions you send there, they will optimize it. But when you have longer sales funnel, like you got that lead, you get it on a sales call, on an introductory lesson, and then they subscribe to your product, digital product, or in this case, like a student class — like that takes time, and Google and Meta cannot optimize it because they don't have that data. So marketers end up looking at the ads performance every day for multiple hours, and adjusting the bids, launching new creatives, stopping existing ones, scaling, downscaling.

And when they have hundreds of ad items at the same time, that becomes pretty intensive, time-consuming, and just hard, because you don't —

Josh Elledge: Yeah, it's challenging.

Seva Ustinov: Like, have you seen those dashboards with hundreds of lines of data that you have to analyze and make decisions about? And this is where AI agents can actually help, because they're not tired.

You can say, okay, imagine a prompt like, hey, go analyze all of my campaigns and find things that work really well and scale them. But before that, check that it didn't start to burn out, or creatives inside that campaign are fresh, and it actually makes sense to scale them. So those things that people will do, marketers will do in their heads, looking at the data.

Now, you can ask agents to do that, and then they will generate what their thought process is, what they suggest to do. If you like it, you can confirm it. If you like it even more, you can say, okay, do that every day for me, please, and just send me reports.

Josh Elledge: Wow. Boy, what's the future of ad agencies?

Are they still —?

Seva Ustinov: They will manage ads even more than employees. Somebody has to still take responsibility for all these tools, algorithms, and now AI agents, make sure that they are set up correctly, make sure that it makes sense.

I'm not worried about agency people. I actually used to run my own marketing agency with 100 plus employees before Plurio. So I know the stuff.

And small business owners, medium-sized businesses, they still need experts to take responsibility for everything, be on the edge of technology and now AI technology. So there is still room for everyone. It's just everything becomes better and easier and faster and more efficient.

And like things that used to take hours now take minutes. But then still you can spend that time on the creative side or scaling your business or, I don't know, maybe enjoying your life.

Josh Elledge: Yeah, it's that principle I'm trying to think of like what that's called. Jevons's paradox, right?

So that's kind of what you're experiencing. And I would imagine now looking at 2026, I mean, this is an exciting year for what's possible and having agents do this. So Seva, who is working with you?

Are you working with agencies or are you working just kind of directly with clients that are managing their own ads now? Where does this fit in?

Seva Ustinov: So right now we focus on clients, so the end customers who actually manage their ads with their in-house team or with their agencies, but who have their own CMOs, head of paid acquisition or titles like that, that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, sometimes millions of dollars per month on digital channels. But we plan to expand to mid-sized businesses and to SMBs eventually and start working with agencies. It just makes sense to tweak the technology for larger-scale accounts first and then go to a self-service later.

Josh Elledge: Well, this is exciting. So, next steps, someone that's listening to our conversation. And generally, do you mind sharing a little bit about how pricing works?

Seva Ustinov: I think it will end up with just a few percent of the ad spend. So the value from agents, it's not just freeing up time, but actually improving your metrics. So, if we improve efficiency by 10 percent, it just makes sense to charge one, two or three percent of the ad spend as a pricing model. [need to be updated — pricing model may have evolved]

Josh Elledge: Well, that's amazing. All right. Our friend that's been listening to our conversation, where do they go? What do they do?

Seva Ustinov: Just go to plurio.ai, subscribe to our waitlist or book a demo call. And like me or my co-founder or someone on our sales team will walk you through everything and give you recommendations how to scale your ads with our agents, with our data platform. [need to be updated — website and onboarding flow may have changed]

Josh Elledge: All right. So just check the show notes to our friend that's listening in their podcast app right now. Just go ahead and click. We have direct links so you can go and experience Plurio for yourself.

I would imagine that for the right person, it's pretty much easy to figure out a positive ROI engagement. So you're only going to invest in Plurio if you are going to out-earn what your investment is. That's probably pretty easy math for you guys to figure out.

Seva Ustinov: Yeah, absolutely. Like just, we start with pilot projects and we show the value with like 1000 plus percent ROI and that's an easy decision from there.

Josh Elledge: Love it. All right, Seva Ustinov, founder of Plurio AI agent. Seva, thank you so much for joining us.

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Key Quotes

"We started with building a data platform that shows the true performance of each channel, campaign and creative. But then we discovered that analytics is not enough. People don't want to use it, don't know how to use it."

"When you have longer sales funnel — like you got that lead, you get it on a sales call, on an introductory lesson, and then they subscribe — Google and Meta cannot optimize it because they don't have that data."

"Have you seen those dashboards with hundreds of lines of data that you have to analyze and make decisions about? And this is where AI agents can actually help, because they're not tired."

"You can ask agents to do that, and then they will generate what their thought process is, what they suggest to do. If you like it, you can confirm it. If you like it even more, you can say, okay, do that every day for me."

"I'm not worried about agency people. I actually used to run my own marketing agency with 100 plus employees before Plurio."

"Things that used to take hours now take minutes. But then still you can spend that time on the creative side or scaling your business or, I don't know, maybe enjoying your life."

"We start with pilot projects and we show the value with like 1000 plus percent ROI and that's an easy decision from there."

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Key Topics Covered

1. Origin Story: Started as marketing data platform → discovered analytics alone isn't enough → built AI agent
2. The Data Gap: Ad platforms show CTR, CPM, CPC — but businesses need revenue, LTV, qualified leads
3. Delayed Conversions Problem: Consumer software/fintech/education funnels take 7 days to months; platforms can't optimize for what they can't see
4. Agent Value Prop: Not tired, can analyze hundreds of ad items simultaneously, generates reasoning for suggestions
5. Human-in-the-Loop: Agent suggests → you confirm → or automate with daily reports
6. Agency Future: "Not worried" — agencies shift from manual analysis to managing AI systems
7. ICP: Companies spending $100K-$1M+/month on digital channels with complex sales funnels
8. Pilot ROI: 1000%+ ROI on pilot projects

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Content-Worthy Angles (for future posts)

Angle	Quote/Detail	Cluster
"Analytics isn't enough"	"People don't want to use it, don't know how to use it. It's complicated, time consuming."	Performance Marketing
Pickleball as a personal story	First hobby story for Seva on a podcast — humanizing, relatable, "meme about what people do after 30"	Founder Journey
Online school example	Detailed analogy: children's programming school, multiple regions, quizzes, long funnels	Performance Marketing
"Agents aren't tired"	Simple but powerful framing of agent value	AI-First Operations
Agency future reframe	"They will manage ads even more than employees" — agents don't replace agencies, agencies manage agents	Performance Marketing
Jevons's paradox applied to marketing AI	Josh named the concept — efficiency gains create more work/opportunity, not less	AI-First Operations
"Enjoy your life"	"Things that used to take hours now take minutes... maybe enjoying your life" — rare personal/lifestyle angle	Founder Journey
1000%+ pilot ROI	Concrete claim about proving value	Performance Marketing