David Veldt
Founder & Director of Digital Marketing
David (Dave) Veldt founded Interactually in 2013. An interest in graphic design led to web design and then into web development. He started his first company in 2009, creating websites for small businesses.
After graduating from Grand Valley State University, Dave combined his marketing education with his web experience and joined a full-service digital marketing agency as an SEO Specialist. There, he jumped into the deep end and worked with clients such as Polaris, Jostens, RelayHealth, Cintas, Auto-Owners Insurance, Huntington Bank, and many more.
From there he worked with another agency and added PPC to his toolkit, managing many large ad budgets across several platforms, while continuing his work in technical and enterprise SEO. He rounded out his digital marketing experience by moving to an in-house role with X-Rite and their subsidiary company, Pantone.
With Interactually, Dave has led countless ad campaigns, SEO engagements, and analytics projects and has had the privilege of working with companies across many industries, including healthcare, ecommerce, SaaS, manufacturing, home services, education, and many more. In 2023, he led the company's PPC pivot to simplified campaign management packages, focusing our work and opening it up to small businesses as well as the large companies we have always enjoyed working with.
Dave lives near Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife and children. He is an avid mountain biker and gravel cyclist, snowboarder, and Detroit Tigers fan.
Interviews
- Marketer Interview (article): A Decade of Insights with David Veldt, Founder of Interactually
- Inbound Back Office (podcast): How to Navigate Relationships with Enterprise Clients (David Veldt, Interactually)
- Grand Rapids WordCamp (article): David Veldt Speaker Interview
Articles Written by David Veldt
ChatGPT Couldn't Give Me the Name of a Movie About a One-Armed Baseball Player or: Why Using Chatbots for Medical Diagnosis is 'Concerning'
Today, The Washington Post published an article titled "ChatGPT is little help for doctors in diagnosing diseases, study finds."
Yesterday, ChatGPT couldn't give me the name of a movie about a one-armed baseball player.
The fact that it couldn't give me the correct answer wasn't concerning, but the frequency in which it gave incorrect answers, the absolute confidence in which they did so, and the fabricated synopses for the movies they gave, was. While my example might be a little ridiculous, the WaPo article was enough for my eyes to pop out a little, considering here at Interactually, we only trust AI to perform some limited digital marketing tasks, where the stakes are quite a bit lower than medical diagnoses.
Marketing Teams Expected to do More with Less in 2024
According to a recent CMO survey by Gartner, marketing budgets fell to just 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024. Spending on labor and agencies dropped, while spending on paid media jumped. In other words, companies are expecting their marketing departments to do more with less, and increasingly throwing money at outputs rather than people to manage them, hoping that AI can come to the rescue to make up the gaps in productivity and ROI.
It's easy to jump to conclusions from this. My high-level, obviously biased reaction is that this trend leads toward less strategy, lower conversion rates and effectiveness, and potential disaster. Case in point: Look at how many companies who have made generative AI the core component of their SEO strategy have been hit hard; many after seeing initial success.
Can We Include Prospective Patient Names in Email Subject Lines?
Last winter, I came across the following question (paraphrased):
"I provide a lead gen service and work with a doctor who has requested we include prospective patient's names in the email subject lines of our leads. As all of our forms go through a vault, we require our clients to log into the CRM to get the information. The doctor doesn't care and I told him he would need to sign something taking full responsibility."
I answered:
Wow, HIPAA violations galore on this. First of all, don't think about it as specifically as email subject lines, it's much more high level than that. To summarize the biggest points, YOU shouldn't be seeing their names at all (sort of hard to avoid when you're the one managing the emails), and marketing emails don't fall under any of the permitted uses of PHI (personal health information).
It's Coming. Are You Ready?
Since we've been dealing with the dumpster fire that has been the Universal Analytics -> GA4 migration for months now, and with a couple months to go, this video is spot on.
Notre-Dame Cathedral is On Fire. Here's how Google is Responding in Real-Time.
A terrible tragedy is unfolding as I write this. Notre-Dame de Paris is on fire and at the time of this writing, the iconic spire has just collapsed in the blaze. I haven't heard any news regarding loss of life, so hopefully everyone is safe. It is already apparent, however, that the loss of history and artifacts in this building will be significant, if not total.
What the Repeal of Net Neutrality Means for Digital Marketing
A year ago, a conservative family member asked me who I voted for, and I'm 95% certain they asked even though they knew the answer. After I replied they said, "I thought you'd be for Trump, being a business owner and all." Ethics and potential constitutional crises aside - which are some major things to set aside, but there's a lot going on right now - I explained that there was no greater threat to my business than the Trump administration.
In addition to demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to the Internet, President Trump said nearly a year before his election:
