Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs with Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker

Episode Overview:

The golden age of Google-only SEO is over. In this revealing conversation, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Claude Zdanow (CEO) and Chris Becker (President) of Onar—a publicly traded marketing technology and agency network—to explore how businesses must fundamentally reimagine their digital marketing strategies.

From tracking brand visibility in LLM responses to measuring "share of wallet" in ChatGPT, this episode tackles the measurement crisis facing every CMO today. You'll discover why traffic is down but revenue is up for many brands, how to use AI agents to track your competitive position in AI search, and why meeting customers "knee to knee" in real life is more important than ever. These shifts are pushing even system-focused companies like Uniframe Systems to rethink how they measure visibility and performance across both AI and traditional channels.

If you're still optimizing for traffic and rankings, this episode will challenge everything you thought you knew about digital marketing success.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why the 2010-2020 "golden age" of SEO is definitively over


• The shocking reality of zero-click search and what it means for your business


• How to measure your brand's "share of voice" in LLM responses


• A tactical 3-agent framework for tracking competitive positioning in AI search


• Why "get niche, get rich" is the survival strategy for mid-market brands


• The power of combining IRL ("knee to knee") marketing with digital tracking


• How to reframe your entire data measurement strategy for 2025 and beyond

Guest Information:

Claude Zdanow - CEO, Onar

• Nearly two decades of experience scaling marketing and advertising enterprises


• Led Onar through four strategic acquisitions


• Previously worked with global brands like 7-Eleven, Disney, and Microsoft


• Building a publicly traded marketing technology platform focused on middle-market brands

Chris Becker - President, Onar

• Oversees all P&Ls across Onar's agency network


• Maintained a lower than 5% annual churn rate for five consecutive years


• Focuses on measurable value delivery and operational excellence


• Leading Onar's shift from traffic-based to behavior-based measurement

About Onar: Onar owns and operates technology-enabled marketing agencies including Juicy (performance marketing) and healthcare marketing through their network. Through Onar Labs, they've developed Cortex, a proprietary AI marketing intelligence platform. Recent acquisitions include Retina AI for predictive customer lifetime value analytics.

Host: Jeremy Rivera
Founder of SEO Arcade | Host of Unscripted SEO Podcast

Episode Transcript

Introduction and Credentials

Jeremy Rivera:
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I'm here with two fine guests today, Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker. Let's do a tag team introduction for both of you, focusing on what you guys have done that builds trust that you are the expert in your field.

Claude Zdanow:
Wow. What a question to start this off with. Well, I'll go first. My name is Claude Zdanow. I'm the CEO of Onar. We are a publicly traded marketing technology and agency network. What that simply means is we own and operate technology-enabled marketing agencies that help middle market and growth stage brands advertise digitally on the internet across performance media, SEO, email, and a range of other services.

And I guess what have I done to have credibility in this space? I guess I've been in the industry for almost two decades. I've run now two different agency groups like this where we've done multiple acquisitions of marketing companies. Under Onar, as of date, we've now done four acquisitions since the inception of the business. And yeah, we have a team all over the world and are building a fun and interesting business. And I'll hand it over to our president, Mr. Chris Becker.

Chris Becker:
Hey guys, I'm the president of Onar, and on the president's side for my role and responsibilities, it really sits on the internal-facing side of the business. So I oversee and manage all P&Ls that we own, the technologies and the agencies.

One thing that my background lends itself to that I look at is we have a real focus on what value do we actually provide? What is the meaningful thing to companies? When companies come to us, any time a business engages with a piece of technology or an agency, especially an agency, they're looking to make more money than they were charged for, just point blank.

And if you look at the agencies that have been managing for the last five years with Onar and then previously with Claude at the holding company that he was with prior, our retention rate is incredible. We have a very low churn rate. So when I look and say, what are the things that we've done to build trust? I think there's no metric that points to that than having lower than a 5% churn rate annually for five consecutive years at a performance marketing agency.

With that, I'll say that we've worked with incredible clients. We have some really cool backgrounds and we've done some cool things, but that may be the actual metric that points to trust for me that means the most.

The Right Marketing Mix for Small Businesses

Jeremy Rivera:
That makes sense and this opens the field to quite a bit because not only are we talking about digital marketing agencies, but multiple digital marketing agencies. I would imagine that the mix or approach of those agencies would need to be somewhat different from each other.

So let's talk a little bit about cross-channel or multi-channel. What is the right mix for small businesses to consider in their marketing strategy online, as well as—and then the flip side of that is—for SEOs, how do we need to adjust what we've done to better integrate across those multiple disciplines or channels to function better and come out with better outcomes?

Claude Zdanow:
Well, let me speak to the first part of that question, and then I think I'll hand it over to Chris to talk a little bit more about the SEO side of things.

I think to be clear around operating multiple agencies and making acquisitions, we're primarily as of today focused on two verticals, right? The smallest one being healthcare, working with B2B, more of a B2B and some B2C marketing.

But the largest part of our business and where we've made all the acquisitions to date is actually not going horizontal, but actually going deeper into performance digital marketing, specifically for e-commerce brands and anyone looking to drive leads, sell products, sell services on the internet. Specifically in walled gardens. So think of Google, Meta, TikTok, retail media, et cetera.

And so when we talk about making acquisitions, we're typically not necessarily buying other agencies that compete with one another or they're going to offer other services. We're buying agencies to build out a more robust level of offering that we currently—or there isn't the same thing we are currently doing—and in some cases add some additional services. But those services are complementary to what we're already doing, right? So it's putting one and one together to equal three or four, right? The idea of...

We're buying—we have an existing platform, an agency for example that was previously called Storia. We bought an agency called Juicy and then we put the two of them together and they're now called Juicy. Juicy is our overarching performance marketing brand, right? And we did that because we want that one platform, one center of excellence that can speak to the clients that know us and want to be part of that. And there's pluses from both businesses.

And so each time we look at an acquisition or buying another business, it's really around two things. One, how does it make us better at what we do, right? Maybe it's more data, more industries we've worked in as it relates to e-commerce, for example, and sometimes that could be additional services. And so that's really the focus when we talk about multiple agencies.

So think of us as a holding company where we have two existing services or agency verticals that we're buying businesses into. That's not to say that we won't grow out of that in the future and maybe have more verticals, but that's our two core verticals.

And I'll leave one caveat to that, which is