Month: October 2023

Episode 8 of Launch Codes is here! Matt Tonkin, RP’s VP of Consulting & Partnerships, joins Joe to crack the code on trust issues and privacy concerns.

Here’s what we’re talking about this week:

• Google sharpens their focus on image trust issues
• ‘Nightshade’ poisons AI image recognition
• Can LinkedIn connections become career critics?
• Ray-Ban smart glasses make the future look cool
• Brits let their Royal Guard down on cyber security
• Marketo writes a new chapter for their program reference library

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Google tackles image trust issues with new features

A 2023 Poynter study revealed that 70% of people are not confident in their ability to tell when online images are authentic and reliable.

Matt pointed out that he’s impressed that 70% of people are willing to admit they are not confident in identifying authenticity. He went on to say “this number is when they’re actively polled. How many are thinking about that when they’re scrolling through social media?”

In an effort to combat disinformation, Google announced three new ways to check images and sources online last week.

1. About This Image: Gives history of image and how websites use it.
2. Fact Check Explorer: Gives journalists and fact-checkers a way to learn about image/topic.
3. Search Generative Explorer: Gives AI-summarized descriptions of sources.

This is a good step forward for brand controlled in Joe’s opinion. He referenced the early days of Midjourney when images of the Pope wearing a Balenciaga parka went viral and how this technology can help protect brands from maleficent acts.

But there’s also a larger concern outside of brands, with international crises or election coverage, that these tools don’t address. The ability to quickly and easily check facts was critical when the 24-hour news cycle was first introduced. Now with the rise of news consumption through social media, paired with AI imagery and video, it’s of paramount concern.

“There needs to be a bit of time [for these tools to provide value],” Matt said. “That time is longer than it takes for a post to be on Instagram or TikTok.” If there’s a million views before content is fact checked, then the guardrails do not work.

 

Artists use Nightshade to derail AI image recognition

A new digital tool known as ‘Nightshade’ is enabling artists to protect their work from being scraped into AI training sets.

The tool manipulates images at the pixel level. Once enough distorted images are used to train AI, the entire model starts to break down and misread images.

For example, Stable Diffusion XL started misinterpreting the prompt for “dog” after just 50 images and outputs cats. Other examples included cars becoming cows, hats become cakes and handbags become toasters.

It could require hundreds or thousands of images to create these hallucinations, depending on the size of the AI model.

Developed by Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool for artists to “mask” their own personal styles.

Joe and Matt both feel it will be challenging for artists to compete with artistic copyright. Developers of LLMs will look for ways to defeat this type of tool. “I do like the conversation its starting and feel it’s part of the short term battle for copyright protection,” said Joe. “It’s going to be an uphill battle and I think they’re going to have a lot of trouble… to protect their images.”

Perhaps painting will have a resurgence to give artists the ability to protect their work.

 

Can LinkedIn connections become career critics?

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “Do you have any experience with a potential new employer seeking feedback from a mutual connection on LinkedIn without your consent?”

It can feel uncomfortable for a potential employer to reach out to someone who was not on your list of approved references. Matt points out that “it doesn’t have to be a one-way street.” When Matt was interviewing with RP, he reached out to a former consultant to understand their experience.

Matt also suggested taking preemptive steps by doing research on the company and determine who your direct manager would be, then vet potential mutual connections.

 

Hot takes

• Ray-Ban smart glasses make the future look cool
• Comes with 5 built-in microphones; audio, video and still image capture; livestream to Facebook and Instagram.
• Brits let their Royal Guard down on cyber security
• New research from Thales of over 2,000 UK citizens found an alarming level of consumer apathy when it came to keeping themselves safe online.
• Marketo writes a new chapter for their program reference library
• The revamped library includes programs like email, engagement, event, scoring, deliverability and operational programs.

 

Pairings

This week, Joe brought in Mavis Staples’ self-titled debut solo album, with the track Security, a fitting song for this week’s topics. Matt brought in “Lady Friend” an IPA from Elora Brewing. It’s a malty beer which is balanced by hop notes and a pleasantly bitter finish.

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode eight. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, Google sharpens their focus on image trust issues. Nightshade poisons AI image recognition. We have a community question about LinkedIn connections and the connection between career critics. And then we have some hot takes on new Ray Ban smart glasses, the Brits letting their royal guard down on cyber security.

[00:00:31] Joe Peters: And Marketo writing a new chapter for their program reference library. Today I’m joined by Matt Tonkin. Happy Halloween, Matt. Happy Halloween, Joe. What are you excited to discuss this week? So,

[00:00:44] Matt Tonkin: from just a pure pun value, the nightshade poisons AI, I think you know, that really hit it out of the park for me.

[00:00:52] Matt Tonkin: But just from being a glasses wearer myself, I think I want to hear about this Ray Ban smart glasses and see, see how much better my life can be or, or not be.

[00:01:03] Joe Peters: Well, I, I, I hear that well, there’s like two phases of this, but let’s not scoop that segment. We’ll get to that in a minute. Okay, so our first topic today is about a 2023 pointer study that revealed that 70 percent of people are not confident in their ability to tell when online images are authentic and reliable.

[00:01:27] Joe Peters: And so Google is offering three new ways to check images and sources online. One, it allows you to fact check this image, so that gives you history of the image and how websites use it. Second, it has a fact check explorer, which gives journalists and fact checkers a way to learn about the image or topic.

[00:01:47] Joe Peters: And then finally, this search generative explorer, which gives AI summarized descriptions of sources. So, Matt, I think, you know, we’re in this new era deepfakes.

[00:02:03] Joe Peters: What do you think this means for brands? And what do you think it means for a broader society?

[00:02:10] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, well, first off, I’m actually somewhat impressed that 70, 70 percent of people are, are not confident, admit that, right? Like That to me is, that’s something that people are understanding. Like, yes, I’m bad at this.

[00:02:23] Matt Tonkin: I think one thing though, that jumps out to me is this is 70 percent saying that when they’re being polled and specifically asked about that, how many are actively thinking about that while they’re scrolling through, you know, right, right. From, from a brand’s perspective, I mean, There’s a few good things, right?

[00:02:39] Matt Tonkin: Like, I think imagine brands looking for stock images for their you know, products and stuff and wanting to, you know, not use maybe something that’s just generic and AI generated that gives them an option to see, you know, where is this actually coming from? If we’re just buying it from, you know, a stock image place.

[00:02:58] Matt Tonkin: I think having that there’s a lot of ability to sort of Take more control in what you’re using. And have that again, you’re just trusting what Google’s providing. So it’s not always going to be perfect, but there’s a bit more source.

[00:03:14] Joe Peters: Well, I, I think one of the things that I worry about for brands are kind of misappropriation of the brand.

[00:03:21] Joe Peters: So I think back to one of those first mid journey, mind blowing images where the pope was in like Balenciaga inspired parka. Yeah. And You know, I think there are some things that could be on the negative side of brands and so quickly and easily generated. Now obviously there are content guardrails on some of these systems for generating imagery, but Obviously, there’s going to be ways to defeat that or ways to manipulate it.

[00:03:54] Joe Peters: So I really feel like we’re going to have a real challenge now in ensuring that this is an authentic experience an image that we’re consuming. And I think our default question for ourselves has to be, Hey. Is this image real or not? Every time we’re looking at something that kind of piques our interest and and questions like, Oh, wow, this is pretty crazy stuff.

[00:04:21] Joe Peters: And then is that real or not?

[00:04:23] Matt Tonkin: My, my go to when I’m talking with, you know, friends and family about this or anything you see online, whether it’s a, about a generation or not is if it makes you have an emotional response, good or bad. Think about why you’re having that response and, and always go with the assumption that everything’s fake.

[00:04:40] Matt Tonkin: But it’s funny when you, when you mentioned, you know, brands and, and how they’re being represented. What triggered for me, and I think any Canadian of a certain generation will have this memory is the house hippo. Which, if you don’t know about the North American House Hippo, it was a PSA back, I can’t remember exactly when it was running, but it’s done up like a Animal Planet Discovery Channel animal documentary, right?

[00:05:07] Matt Tonkin: And it’s this little hippo that’s running around a house, building nests out of lint and all this stuff, and it looks really the takeaway at the end of the commercial is that, you know, this looked really real, right? But you knew it wasn’t, so you need to be careful about what you’re seeing on TV and understand that it’s not always real.

[00:05:26] Matt Tonkin: And I think this is sort of leading us towards like, what’s this generation’s house hippo? How do we, how do we put it in the back of people’s minds? Like, be aware of, you know, how these are being made. Be aware of what might. You know, be false for some sort of agenda or something like that, or just in general.

[00:05:47] Matt Tonkin: Yeah,

[00:05:48] Joe Peters: I, I think I’ve never, I’ve actually never heard of the House Hippo. So that’s what

[00:05:53] Matt Tonkin: Joe, I guess maybe there is a, no, I won’t. I won’t say there’s a, I won’t say there’s a generation, but I knew where

[00:06:00] Joe Peters: you’re going.

[00:06:03] Matt Tonkin: Okay. And yourself and anyone else get, just go type house hippo into Google and it’ll come up cause you really
need to experience it.

[00:06:12] Matt Tonkin: That’s

[00:06:13] Joe Peters: hilarious. Okay. Well, I think when, when I start to see the challenges that we’re going to be facing, like, so we’re seeing a lot of things happening in kind of the Middle East right now with. The Israel Palestine conflict with, you know, what is the real image? What is not what was from a previous
time?

[00:06:32] Joe Peters: All that fact checking is, is super, super concerning. You saw that fake Tucker Carlson segment with Elon Musk, I think we’re in for real nightmare moving into, I’m going to say election season. Not only in the U. S., but also Canadian elections coming up with being able to determine In relatively quick order how to stop fake content from, I’m going to say, poisoning the minds of the electorate.

[00:07:08] Joe Peters: And I think, I actually don’t know how we’re going to combat.

[00:07:14] Matt Tonkin: That’s, that’s a great point because if you think about those three offerings, they all still feel like a, there needs to be a bit of time for those to be figured out, right? Like, about this image even if it’s being done really quickly. Or fact checking, there’s a time, right?

[00:07:30] Matt Tonkin: And that time is longer than it takes for a post to be put on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, right? So, it doesn’t matter if you can fact check it after the fact and say, Oh yeah, no, this is wrong, because everyone already saw it, and they don’t.

[00:07:44] Joe Peters: Exactly, if there’s a million views before it’s fact checked, or this presupposes that someone wants to fact check, Right?

[00:07:52] Joe Peters: You’re just scrolling through your X feed and seeing things. Who knows, right? Who knows what you’re consuming and whether it’s real or not. So I think we’re in for a bit of the Wild West in terms of manipulation and and deep fakes taking hold. And we’re going to collectively as a society have to just question almost Everything that we’re consuming and I think your, your, your idea of if I have an emotional response or trigger for this, I need to understand if this is real, right?

[00:08:28] Joe Peters: Well, let’s, let’s move along to our second topic here on your, your favorite topic especially for with Halloween coming up is artists using nightshade to derail AI image recognition. So. This new tool is enabling artists to protect their work from being scraped into AI training sets. And it manipulates images at the pixel level, and once enough distorted images are used to train AI, the entire model starts to break down and misread images.

[00:09:04] Joe Peters: So, for example, Stable Diffusion started misinterpreting the prompt for dog just after 50 images. And I think this is helpful and a tool for artists to master their own personal style. But it could take hundreds of thousands of the

[00:09:28] Joe Peters: hallucinations that we’re looking for, or they want to achieve, depending on the size of the AI model. So, what do you think about this new battleground for protecting artistic copyright?

[00:09:42] Matt Tonkin: The funny thing is, I’m not sure it’s a new battleground, it’s new in the sense of against AI, but right, this isn’t, this isn’t anything different than what we’ve seen for years, think back to artists trying to prevent, you know, peer to peer sharing of songs and that sort of thing, and how, you know, yes Napster went away, but then LimeWire and a hundred others pop up.

[00:10:05] Matt Tonkin: And I think anytime you’re, you’re developing tools to prevent something, you’re already behind, right? You’re playing catch up because as soon as you develop something to block it. And I mean, the solution, at least, well, not solution, but You really didn’t see that first drop off in piracy until iTunes and Netflix right, where you’re giving a legal way to get people want because they’ll get it.

[00:10:31] Matt Tonkin: So, so I don’t know if there is that sort of parody, but I think even now you’re seeing piracy start to trend up again because, you know, there’s 30 streaming platforms and I don’t know which ones I want. So I just want what I want to watch simply and that’s the same thing here. I just want. To produce this image simply and somehow you’re going to get it done.

[00:10:51] Matt Tonkin: So it’s, it’s interesting. I think it’s a cool tool, but you’re, I think you’re always fighting an uphill battle if you’re trying to prevent something.

[00:10:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think, I think you’re right there about the uphill battle and where I see. You know, the process that these scraping mechanisms are going to sort of create their own next salvo of, or volley of of shots in this battle is, they’re going to scan to check before ingestion, and then it kind of defeats this.

[00:11:27] Joe Peters: So. I, I do, I do like the conversation that this is starting, and I do feel like this is a short term part of the, of this battle for copyright protection. But I think it’s going to be an uphill battle, and I think there are going to have a lot of trouble. Mm-Hmm. being able to stop accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.

[00:11:52] Joe Peters: Yeah. Which is the protection of their, their images.

[00:11:56] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, I think you’re right. There needs to be, you’re not going to win the battle. I don’t think so there, it needs to be more collaborative and how you do that. Yeah. And I think

[00:12:07] Joe Peters: photographs and digital art are going to be challenges to maintain artistic copyright.

[00:12:14] Joe Peters: And it’s almost like we’re going to go old school a little bit. Painting is going to be, have a resurgence because that’s something that you’re going to be able to, you can maintain some protection on, but that’s a topic for another, another, another day. All right. I love this community question we have today and really, really interesting.

[00:12:40] Joe Peters: And to be honest, as an employer, I’ve never. Come across this as a process that we would necessarily use, but do you have the question is, do you have any experience with a potential new employer seeking feedback from a mutual connection on linkedin without your consent?

[00:13:01] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, that’s an interesting one because yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t shock me.

[00:13:06] Matt Tonkin: And I think I know myself personally. I’m, if I’m interviewing someone, I’m, I’m going to go on linkedin and look them up. So, I think if you see that you have a mutual connection, it would naturally be sort of the first on your mind is like, Oh, I can actually hear from someone else what this person’s like if they’re, if what their resume says is an accurate representation of what they’re doing.

[00:13:28] Matt Tonkin: So it seems. Sort of logical and kind of the, the part of LinkedIn, what I’d say is, you know, that doesn’t have to be a one way street. I know when I was coming here, Joe, I, I reached out to a former consultant from RP and I asked him, you know, what’s it like here? So I think, I think it’s a tool that can go both ways.

[00:13:45] Matt Tonkin: I definitely don’t think it would be, you know, out of, out of out of reason. You need to think about, like, who you have on your LinkedIn, and you can see that too. You can, you can go through, you’ll have an idea, I think, of who is going to be interviewing you, who would be your manager if you’re doing the research.

[00:14:01] Matt Tonkin: And you can see, do I have mutual connections with them? Is that mutual connection someone I want to have with them? And maybe take some preemptive steps before you go through the process, right? Well, I think

[00:14:13] Joe Peters: that that is probably the only solution. If you think someone from your, you may have to do a scan of your connections.

[00:14:22] Joe Peters: And just decide, Hey, maybe Bob Bob didn’t like that. I got the promotion over, over him. And maybe he has a bit of an ax to grind and maybe I shouldn’t be connected with Bob anymore. I don’t know, Matt. Like that’s, that’s, yeah, it’s going

[00:14:38] Matt Tonkin: to be a bit of a challenge. I mean, it’s tough because the whole concept of LinkedIn is you want to expand your network and expand your network.

[00:14:44] Matt Tonkin: So you probably never think of it. Like, is this a good person to have in here? Like, is this someone who’s going to give me good feedback if we have mutual connections? Yeah, I definitely think, well, and I know personally being in like the Marketo world there’s always everyone knows everyone. So it’s changed a bit in RevOps in general.

[00:15:06] Matt Tonkin: And I don’t think that’s industry specific. It’s probably true of a lot of industries where there’s tight knit networks and. Everyone knows everyone. So you kind of do have to have that rapport with people.

[00:15:22] Joe Peters: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. This is a, this is a hard one, but it’s a reality. And it’s kind of like probably taking a little shot at the reference check process, knowing that you’re generally not going to give references that aren’t going to give you a good reference.

[00:15:42] Joe Peters: Yeah. Right. And if you have, then that’s a little odd. But this is this is a approach of sort of checking that reference check process with with connections and relationships, which I think is which is a natural part of this.

[00:15:59] Matt Tonkin: So And I think, I mean, the good news is if, if you have good relationships and you have people on your LinkedIn that your work really spoke to them and they can talk well for you, I think someone that you didn’t provide is going to be a much better reference than someone you did provide just because of what you said.

[00:16:19] Matt Tonkin: If I reached out to, if I’m hiring someone and I reached out to a connection of theirs and they said this person is great, they’re great at their job, great to work with, I’m taking that a lot more seriously then. You know, the names that the three names I get and a piece of paper at the resume.

[00:16:34] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think you’re right, Matt.

[00:16:36] Joe Peters: I think you’re right. So it’s a little bit of a reality check. And this is just where we’re at for our community member here. But

[00:16:46] Matt Tonkin: anyway. I think it’s, I think it’d be frowned upon if someone’s going on your link or your Instagram and finding your like family and close friends and asking you about that.

[00:16:55] Matt Tonkin: That’s definitely going a step far. But I think the purpose of linkedin is to curate a network that you get along with and you work well with.

[00:17:04] Joe Peters: Yeah, that I think you’re right. Although I do know that some employers are doing those thorough scans of socials with new employees and, and double checking everything there.

[00:17:18] Joe Peters: So, yes, what a, what an interesting time we’re in here where you don’t really get to control the process either as an employer or as a potential employee. Maybe it goes both ways, so you just have to kind of… Look, I think you have to expect that this is going to happen. Alright, well let’s move on here.

[00:17:43] Joe Peters: And first, I’d like to thank our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Get AI powered translations in up to 75 languages in just minutes. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K.

[00:18:05] Joe Peters: So now we’ll shift into our hot takes segment. We have some great ones here, Matt. And as a glasses wearer, I mean, I have contacts on now, but

[00:18:17] Matt Tonkin: you, you were I’m just saying, I switch back and forth, depending on the day. But

[00:18:22] Joe Peters: these new Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses have been introduced. And actually a colleague of ours, Pierce, has a pair already.

[00:18:31] Joe Peters: It has five built in microphones. Captures audio, video, and still images. Has a 12 megapixel camera. And shoots up to 60 seconds of 1080p video. It has good stabilization, so you don’t get motion sick with the, you know, the head moving, taking the shot. You can live stream to Facebook or Instagram.

[00:18:55] Joe Peters: So, obviously, it’s tethered to your phone. And there’s a voice assistant that allows you to listen to text, take hand free photos and videos, and send messages. So… And then there’s an AI augmented part coming in the future where you can kind of look at, I don’t know, a monument or a building and ask it what it is.

[00:19:17] Joe Peters: Oh, that’s cool. So, what do you, what do you think about this? I think privacy, it’s another new era part of the
era of declining privacy with pretty much every single day we go out into the

[00:19:35] Matt Tonkin: world. Yep. So, it’s funny what hop, what jumped out to me when I was thinking about this, because I’m like thinking, Oh, this is cool.

[00:19:42] Matt Tonkin: Like I just replaced these. But if you remember the last time I was on the podcast, we talked about the pendant that records everything as you go around and I. And I can say this, I felt a lot more hesitant about that pendant, like I could feel that emotionally I responded different to this, and I don’t know why, because there’s a lot of similarities, right?

[00:20:03] Matt Tonkin: I mean, there’s more video being captured, there’s video being captured, not just audio so I’m wondering if that’s just a brand recognition thing, and I mean, I’m wearing Ray Ban, so it’s probably partly mental there, right? But you’re, that, that privacy thing we’re going around, and you’re taking video, so out in public People are now being captured.

[00:20:22] Matt Tonkin: And I mean, that’s true. Anyone on their phone could just be taking videos of anyone out there. But I think it’s different when there’s sort of that visual visual indicator that, okay, someone’s got their phone up, like they could be taking video versus someone just wearing glasses. So that’s, you know, that’s an interesting thing.

[00:20:40] Matt Tonkin: I’m not, I’m not sure how I feel about that. Yeah,

[00:20:44] Joe Peters: I, I, there’s so many layers to this. I actually think there’s a bit of a risk for Ray Ban at this point in doing this. There could be a bit of a backlash. You could see it. Oh, that guy’s wearing Ray Bans,

[00:21:01] Matt Tonkin: a bit creepy Oh, great. I got to change my glasses.

[00:21:06] Matt Tonkin: Well, well,

[00:21:07] Joe Peters: those are the sunglasses. I know. I know. They’re also sunglasses. Oh, there’s a, okay. Okay. I’m pretty sure they’re sunglasses, but I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure they are, but I think we’re. I find this interesting is We’re, we’re, we’re getting into this period where we’re going to start to see augmentation of our capacity and abilities.

[00:21:32] Joe Peters: And I think this is just another step forward in that in terms of the integrated or add on to ourselves by technology and augmenting ourselves in different ways. And you know, this isn’t the merge between, you know, where we’re having AI connected right into our. Into our brains, but, but there, there is a path along here a little bit.

[00:21:57] Joe Peters: That’s that’s. Stirring for us to, to see. And you know, you could see that there would be some, are there competitive advantages that you could have with this type of

[00:22:09] Matt Tonkin: this type of, well, you can imagine just traveling Joe. You don’t need to have great understanding of different languages anymore.

[00:22:15] Matt Tonkin: If. If just in your field of vision, signs are being translated. If, you know, you can take in what someone’s saying and immediately have an English translation or whatever language translation. There’s suddenly, suddenly a whole new world literally opens up for you that you, you didn’t have there. So just simple, simple day to day things that don’t even get that far out of reality right now.
[00:22:39] Matt Tonkin: I mean, I can do that with my phone and hold up to a sign and it’ll translate. So it’s that progressive steps that, yeah, what, what’s going to be, what are these guys going to be doing in five years? Yeah, I

[00:22:51] Joe Peters: think you’re right. Like, imagine you’re walking around, you’re trying. Some old city that’s a maze, let’s say Barcelona, or, you know, and you have your sunglasses on and it’s kind of saying, Oh, to get back to your hotel, you take these types of, you take this route.

[00:23:10] Joe Peters: You’re navigating the the maze of alleys and, and being able to find your final destination. So I think this is, we’re just in the early days here, and you can only imagine there’s going to be a period not too far in our future where this is table stakes and every, everybody’s going to have this in some form, but all right, that was a bit longer than just a long, yeah, that got us, that got us fired up.

[00:23:42] Joe Peters: So this next one is around a cyber security. So one third of Brits admit they’ve given up following cyber security best practices. So new research from Thales of over 2000 UK city and citizens found an alarming level of consumer apathy when it came to keeping themselves safe online. This apathy is closely tied to feelings of confusion, futility, and information overload.

[00:24:12] Joe Peters: So, 51 percent struggled to grasp rapid advancements in technology and the implications on their own personal security. 22 percent admitted they had no clue about the significance of where in the world their data is stored. China, Russia, U. S. Wherever. 47% percent confess to signing TNCs without a thorough reading.

[00:24:39] Joe Peters: I think that’s a that’s that’s a

[00:24:40] Matt Tonkin: lie. That’s a straight. I, I’m moderately cyber security you know, conscious, I would say, and I, I’m so guilty of this. So yeah.

[00:24:53] Joe Peters: And 56 admitted they always accept cookies on websites due to it being an easy process or an easier process for them. So there’s a digital

[00:25:02] Matt Tonkin: marketer that that’s like, yay, but no,

[00:25:07] Joe Peters: but I think, you know,

[00:25:14] Joe Peters: And tying back to our, our last topic on privacy and that we’re in an era where it’s very, very difficult to be vigilant we’re continuously having our, our personal information violated. How many times do we now get that email from some business where they’re, they have to inform us that they’ve had a data breach in our information or passwords?

[00:25:44] Joe Peters: Or even some more important information, whether it’s social insurance numbers or social security numbers, we’re, we’re, we’re experiencing this. I’m not going to say every day, probably weekly and monthly at the bare minimum, where there’s some infringement on our personal information.

[00:26:08] Matt Tonkin: It’s so, I think it’s so commonplace to your point, like that it’s happening all the time in a lot of younger generations who are, you know, in the working.

[00:26:17] Matt Tonkin: World now that that’s been their whole life is, you know, just clicking. I accept these terms and going through that. And even older generations, it’s been most of their life, right? Where it’s just sort of become static in the background. And you okay, what’s an easy password? That sort of thing. I’m not having like good practices around that password one, that sort of thing.

[00:26:42] Joe Peters: No, it is, it is hard to be vigilant and it is I mean, I think of just the inundated nature of a phone call, not like just being the spam that you get on through the phone now is unbelievable. So I think where you stay strong friends is the message and you have to keep on thinking about. What you can do to to protect yourself and what are some of the, I feel really challenged for or feel really poorly for seniors today that have low technological literacy and are being manipulated all the time.

[00:27:34] Joe Peters: Right. And it’s very, very, very, very tricky and the AI is only going to get better and easier to do this. So we, we have to, we have to work together on trying to keep each other safe. All right, let’s move on to our last hot take this week from our friends at Mercado, and they’ve revamped the program reference library and part of the September 2023 release there’s allowing users to import example programs.

[00:28:05] Joe Peters: So whether that’s email engagement, event scoring, deliverability and operational programs. This is all part of the Marketo revamped program reference library. What are your thoughts on this,

[00:28:19] Matt Tonkin: Matt? Yeah, and this has always been something that Marketo’s kind of had. I think a lot of people don’t realize that there’s sort of these template programs that you can pull into Marketo.
[00:28:29] Matt Tonkin: Maybe I’m a little jaded from my past experience with it, but I never felt that they were, you know, great. But for, you know, a new user to Marketo, someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience, they’re, they’re programs that are set up. In a way that works in a way that Marketo was structured to make use of.

[00:28:46] Matt Tonkin: So it’s great for getting your bearings on how these things could be structured. The problem is, is Marketo has to build these for every all of their customers, right? They have to be a single program that’s going to work for manufacturing for financial services for SAS companies. And what that means is they don’t really work for any of them, at least not in a way that.

[00:29:08] Matt Tonkin: is beneficial if you have customizations that you need. So I really look at these as sort of a base building block and use them to understand, especially if you’re new, but you’re going to want to customize eventually, whether that’s building onto these base programs or, you know, building these out and making programs that work for you.

[00:29:27] Matt Tonkin: So. It’s great that they’re, you know, trying to get a bit more of this user friendliness involved, I think but I think there’s still room to go there.

[00:29:35] Joe Peters: Yeah, just more Lego in the Lego box that you can take and build with, right? Yeah, I mean, the

[00:29:43] Matt Tonkin: benefit of Marketo is that it’s completely customizable. So having a cookie cutter program isn’t why you get Marketo anyway.

[00:29:52] Joe Peters: All right, well. Let’s move on to our pairing segment. So this week we have a great album from Mavis Staples and it’s a self titled debut album from 1969. And so just for, for, for our listeners. We’re putting the audio at the end of the podcast so you can sort of listen to it without having our voices

[00:30:22] Matt Tonkin: over top of it

[00:30:23] Joe Peters: or Matt opening a beverage and disrupting the vibe so you’re able to hear.

[00:30:29] Joe Peters: The, the track right at the end and the, the song that we’re, or the track that we’re so showcasing is called security, which I think is funny based on our theme this week, but then the second reason we’re showcasing it is this vinyl. For those of you that are watching the video version, it’s orange and black.

[00:30:54] Joe Peters: It’s Halloween today, so I thought this was a perfect, perfect choice for us to have this weekend. You know, it is, it’s just a, it’s an incredible album and I feel like I’m in a Real funk and soul exploration phase right now. Like I actually can’t get enough. I, I, I find this, the, the, it’s so rich and the albums are so strong.

[00:31:19] Joe Peters: And so this may, this staples one actually it’s a lot of familiar tracks, even if you put it on, there’d be. Be songs that are just part of our, our, our, our cultural backdrop. Son of a preacher man is on this album, which if you’ve, if you’re a fan of Pulp Fiction and the soundtrack from that film.

[00:31:40] Joe Peters: That is it’s one of the key tracks from that, from that movie. But anyway, how are we going to pair a beverage with Mavis Staples

[00:31:52] Matt Tonkin: this week? Okay. So I will say I had a plan, Joe, that, that fell through, unfortunately, I initially, so a few weeks ago I got to announce that I am, I’ve joined the executive team at RPM.

[00:32:04] Matt Tonkin: I’m, I’m vice president. So, so what I had intended to do was if you’ve ever been to the Dominican Republic. The beer that’s around everywhere there is Presidante. I was hoping I could maybe get one of those so I could have a cup of coffee. Turns out it’s really hard to import that into Canada. So that fell through unfortunately for me.

[00:32:24] Matt Tonkin: So, oh yeah, there we go. What I have this week, it’s, it’s a local to my actual like local in town brewery. I’m in a small town, so we’ve just got the one. It is lady friend IPA from a Laura brewing company. Just a, a really good it’s one that I think it used to be sort of their fall IPA release, so it reminds me nicely, like.

[00:32:46] Matt Tonkin: Well I say fall, but there’s snow on the ground for me right now. So maybe we skipped that. But that’s what it feels like for me as a nice fall fall IPA. It’s sort of a, another go to for me. So I’m happy with it.

[00:32:57] Joe Peters: And it goes along with Mavis, our lady friend today as our, as it is, that’s a great pairing, great pairing that we have this week.

[00:33:06] Joe Peters: So that’s that’s pretty, that’s pretty fun. Alright, so, I think that’s it for this week, Matt. Thanks for, for joining me, and thanks to our listeners. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. And stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description.

[00:33:33] Joe Peters: And thanks, Mom, for watching, as always. Have a great week.

Episode 7 of Launch Codes is here! Lauren McCormack, RP’s VP of Consulting, joins Joe once again to discuss the latest and greatest in the MOPs and AI universe, including:

• Marketers won’t let cloudy economy rain on their parade
• Marketo’s Dynamic Chat expands its vocabulary
• Tuning up your RevOps engine
• “The Tribe Has Spoken” in Surv-AI-vor by Mutiny
• A/B Testing: Effective or egocentric?

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Marketer’s won’t let cloudy economy rain on their parade

In a recent Fall 2023 study, Deloitte surveyed 316 marketing leaders (95.6% of respondents were VP-level or above) at for-profit U.S. companies. Using their Marketer Optimism Score, which measures marketer sentiment on a scale of 0 to 100, they found that optimism increased to 66.7 up from 57.7 a year ago. This score is back in line with both pre- and post-pandemic highs.

Despite renewed optimism, however, companies are now spending a smaller portion of their budget on marketing. The report attributes this drop to “inflationary pressure” and further states that “demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes” continues to be the top challenge for marketing leaders. Marketers are also experiencing less pressure from CEOs and Boards while receiving more scrutiny from CFOs.

Lauren sees the added pressure from CFOs as a natural function of revenue (and the age of the CRO) becoming its own discipline. She also appreciates the increased optimism, stating how it’s a result of marketers taking on greater ownership of their financial impact; rather than waiting for budgets to be presented, marketers have become more proactive about regression analysis and predictive analytics to figure out how far their money can go.

Joe reflects on these comments, identifying how this conversation relates back to the age-old challenge of “proving your worth” that marketers continue to contend with. He was also pleased to see increased optimism, especially compared to this time last year when things were moving quite slowly amidst economic uncertainty. Lauren agrees, relating last year’s sentiment to “standing on the edge of a cliff”. Now that we can see how steep the slope actually is (or isn’t), there’s a little more optimism shining through.

The Deloitte study itself has many more findings, including that 60% of respondents started using AI during the last year, which opens up some more conversations between Joe and Lauren on digital marketing transformation and AI experimentation.

 

Marketo’s Dynamic Chat expands its vocabulary

Last week, Adobe Marketo released a new set of free tutorials for their Dynamic Chat. This comes after several updates released last month that brought in new features including live chat with sales agents, conversational forms that collect additional lead information to book meetings, and improved analytics and visibility. Some of the premium features released included the generative AI model “Adobe Sensei”, smart list targeting, and team-based and account-based routing.

Lauren recalls her time as an early adopter of Dynamic Chat in the Lighthouse Program a few years ago, and compares Dynamic Chat to the AI-powered pipeline generation platform “Qualified”. She appreciates how Dynamic Chat is a native extension of your marketing automation platform, and likes how it has now caught up to some of the features and functionality that “Qualified” has.

Lauren is also quite interested in the “drop your coffee” alert built into the Adobe product, which essentially recognizes when a primary decision-maker is filling out a form on your website and notifies the Account Executive responsible for that relationship so they can jump right in and have a high-value interaction.

Joe points out how Adobe still has a lot of work to do if they want to catch up to HubSpot’s ChatSpot service. While this is a good start, he hopes to see Adobe continue to move in a direction that might include training AI on marketing and sales data (for example) to create more modern, cutting-edge solutions for marketers.

 

Tuning up your RevOps engine

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “I took over a 2-person RevOps team. How we prioritize an intake feels broken. How do you prioritize the entire workload and structure your team’s day-to-day?”

This question resonates with Lauren, as she was the second hire on a MOPs team for a Bay Area tech company. The person who brought her on board had a graveyard of a Trello board with tons of forgotten requests – some of which were even four years old! So she transformed that into an automated system that generated drafts and templates to speed up the entire request, review, and approval stages.

Aside from strategic automation, however, Lauren also emphasizes the need for clear expectations for team members to come fully prepared with all the elements of a campaign ready. While ideation is important, sitting in a meeting and kicking around ideas is not the same as handing off a project – this should be mutually understood by all.

Joe echoes this sentiment of defining everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and the usefulness of relying on a solid process to support you as you scale up within the organization; so you can meet the incoming requests in a queue that is fair and transparent for everyone.

 

Hot takes

• “The Tribe Has Spoken” in Surv-AI-vor by Mutiny
• Premiering October 24th, this is a 3-week game involving workshops to learn AI workflows. It includes 9 episodes for Demand Gen, SEO, and Content Strategy, as well as speakers from OpenAI, HubSpot, and Autodesk
• And let’s not forget, the grand prize is $10,000!
• A/B Testing: Effective or egocentric?
• Karri Sarinen, the CEO of Linear, recently said in an interview that they never do A/B tests.
• “The main problem is that A/B tests are almost always driven by internal incentives vs user needs.”

 

Pairings

This week, Joe brought a beautiful, blue Vinyl record: “Chloë and the Next 20th Century” by Father John Misty – a delight for any fan of 1960s crooners. Lauren brought “Honey Dominican Republic Coffee” from Sevaya, a family-owned coffee shop from Tucson, Arizona, who can trace their coffee roasting roots back to the…1500s!

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode seven. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, marketers won’t let cloudy economy rain on their parade. Second, Marketo’s dynamic chat expands its vocabulary. Third, a community question. And in our hot takes, the tribe has spoken and A. B. testing effective or egocentric.

[00:00:24] Joe Peters: Today I’m joined by Lauren McCormick. What are you excited about discussing this week, Lauren?

[00:00:31] Lauren McCormack: We got a whole table full of stuff to choose from this week. I’m pretty excited to talk about the new mutiny campaign, but also dynamic chat.

[00:00:41] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move into our first topic. Marketers more optimistic, even as budgets fall.

[00:00:48] Joe Peters: So. There is a CMO study released by Deloitte, and in that study they, just in fall 2023, fairly senior respondent profile, there is optimism for the U. S. economy and that it has increased to 66. 7 percent up from 57. 7 a year ago. This level of optimism is back in line with both pre and post pandemic highs, and despite renewed optimisms, Companies are now, companies are now spending a smaller portion of their budget on marketing.

[00:01:24] Joe Peters: The report attributes this drop to inflationary pressures. So, there’s another quote here that I’ll do and then I’ll get your takes on it, Lauren. Demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes continues to be the top challenge for marketing leaders. Marketers experience less pressure from CEOs and boards while receiving more scrutiny from CFOs.

[00:01:49] Joe Peters: So what do you think about this, Lauren? I, I love that last one on the CFO pressure because we’ve all felt that from time to time. But what do you think about the optimism?

[00:02:01] Lauren McCormack: I love the optimism. I think it’s a natural function of revenue. The CFO attention is an actual, a natural function of revenue becoming its own discipline.

[00:02:12] Lauren McCormack: These days, the, the the age of the CRO, I think is reflected here in that you know, I, I’ve always sought for marketing to have a seat at the revenue table, a la Maria Pergolino’s CMO leadership over Marketo and like the 2012, 2013 timeframe but I’ve, I’ve been the weird, unique. that likes leaning into a number.

[00:02:34] Lauren McCormack: And I think it’s, it’s interesting that the optimism perhaps as a function of finally owning your financial destiny as a marketer, instead of waiting for your budget to be handed to you. Now we’re doing regression analysis and predictive analytics to figure out how far that money’s going to go. So that we can control our own destiny to some degree, you know,

[00:02:56] Joe Peters: Yeah, this challenge is the age old challenge of marketing, though, is proving your worth.

[00:03:01] Joe Peters: And what is your ROI here? And we know the things that are near and dear to our heart have made an impact there. But what I loved about this is I really do feel like the optimism is truly there compared to last year at this time. Last year at this time, our general feeling that we sort of was the brakes had been pumped and There was some concern about where we were going economically.

[00:03:30] Lauren McCormack: For sure, and watching venture capital just immediately. Just tighten its, its belt and, and completely, you know, reverse course around you know, LTV and ARR, you know, diminished as, as even conversation topics into, you know, immediate you know, ROAS and ROI and, and, you know, profitability. Which was an interesting phrase to bring up in Silicon Valley around like, you know,

[00:04:01] Joe Peters: yeah, those valuations were out of control.

[00:04:03] Joe Peters: No, no,

[00:04:03] Lauren McCormack: no. Yeah. It was, it was not a topic people wanted to discuss was profitability, but I think there was definitely a feeling this time last year of kind of standing on the edge of, you know, some kind of big cliff. And I think now that we’ve, we’ve kind of navigated what that that slope looks like, what, what the, the steepness is of the angle and where the bottom looks to be.

[00:04:27] Lauren McCormack: I think it’s a little less mysterious and there’s room for optimism now. Yeah,

[00:04:32] Joe Peters: for sure. This study is super interesting on a variety of different areas and I Highly would recommend having a look and digging into some of the data, because we’re only touching on a couple of elements, but some additional points of interest that we saw in it was that 60 percent of respondents started using AI within the last year, which is no surprise to us, especially when it’s focused on the content creation and.

[00:05:00] Joe Peters: Other asset creation and with personalization in there a little bit as well. And so for something that was in the field just in early August, late July, you know, this kind of resonates with what we’re seeing in terms of people starting to dip their toe in. Are we lowered?

[00:05:20] Lauren McCormack: I find it, I find it interesting that AI is on the docket, but then the notion of digital marketing transformation, as old and moldy a topic as that is, is still like, how would you rate your digital marketing transformation?

[00:05:37] Lauren McCormack: Are we sending postcards? Who’s sending the postcards? Please tell me in the comments. I need to know. It’s, it’s interesting though. Honestly, when, when I do meet with different clients and prospects to see the level of adoption, maybe they’ve got the tech, but are you, are you using it to its potential or even are you using it to its, its basic entry point of, of, you know, it’s capacity or, or where are you at?

[00:06:03] Lauren McCormack: I guess the full transformation is still underway in some organizations, but Oh,

[00:06:08] Joe Peters: for sure. I would say. We’re probably still in that, those early days of experimentation. And well, I think that’s a great segue into our next topic on, in terms of experimentation, which is Adobe Marketo’s engage the new dynamic chat.

[00:06:26] Joe Peters: And I know you’ve had a chance to look under the hood a little bit here, but last week, Adobe Marketo team released a new set of tutorials for dynamic chat. This follows updates that were released last month that brought in many new free and premium features. And so these features include live chat with sales agents, conversational forms that collect additional lead information to book meetings and improved analytics and visibility.

[00:06:54] Joe Peters: And then the premium features. Included Adobe Sensei, a Gen AI, that’s a real tongue twister, smart list targeting and then team based an account based routing. So what are your first takes on this Lauren?

[00:07:11] Lauren McCormack: So I was an early adopter in the lighthouse program. Couple of years ago for dynamic chat, but prior to that was a super big fan of qualified and thought their team did a wonderful job building a product.

[00:07:26] Lauren McCormack: I think the most interesting part of the qualified story to me was that they were Salesforce developers gone. You know, web chat leadership, right? So they made sure everything baked in really nicely to CRM. What the interesting proposition I think here is from Adobe is that your chat’s going to be naturally an extension of your marketing automation platform.

[00:07:51] Lauren McCormack: I like the fact that they’re catching up to some of the feature functionality that qualified had that I missed when I was a lighthouse. Kind of early adopter. It was cool that I had it for free, just native in my you know, marketing automation certainly made it easier to justify standing up a tool.

[00:08:13] Lauren McCormack: Well, it, it, it definitely opens a door for a lot of support requests. For a lot of noise. You know, if you’re not careful in the way that you help people choose their own adventure with your chat bot. And we, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what kind of volume we would see. We knew based on Google Analytics, what our site volume looked like.

[00:08:33] Lauren McCormack: And we had an idea of the pages that we could test on that would be maybe less traffic to ease into the world of the chat. But what’s what’s super interesting to me is now the Adobe product. is has the drop your coffee alert. So basically if, if you’ve got a target prospect that that’s what they call it, a qualified was the drop your coffee alert.

[00:08:55] Lauren McCormack: If you have a target account and your primary decision maker happens to be kicking around on your website. And fill out, fills out a chat form, then the rep, the AE who’s responsible for that relationship will get a notification and can jump right in. And instead of serve, you know, the canned responses or have the BDR field, this really.

[00:09:19] Lauren McCormack: You know, high value interaction. You can, you can have the person most most the closest to the knowledge of the account and right there in, in the conversation, which is pretty cool. The generative AI is interesting. I, I think that’s cool too, but Joe, I know you’ve got some pretty high standards for what you want to see.

[00:09:39] Lauren McCormack: Well, yeah,

[00:09:40] Joe Peters: I think Adobe has a lot of work to catch up here in terms of. Where they’re at with Marketo and where, say, HubSpot is with their ChatSpot dynamic chat elements. Within the, the hubs, sport hubs, sport platform. I think what we’re seeing here is some movement, and hopefully it’s continue moving in the direction here.

[00:10:06] Joe Peters: But you know, there’s no, there’s, you’re, you’re not training the an AI on your marketing information, or sales information

[00:10:16] Joe Peters: it’s not going to be responding based on your knowledge resources, it’s really going to be back into those workflow things that, you know, we’re not, these are old approaches to some of these challenges and aren’t really advancing where things can and probably should be today.

[00:10:37] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you can have AI help your BDR have a better conversation though.

[00:10:43] Lauren McCormack: So Marketo used the example, you know, of, of its own drinking its own champagne and having a BDR on a chat with a health prospect, a healthcare prospect, and, you know, having The, the healthcare prospect ask if Marketo was HIPAA compliant, right? And maybe the BDR doesn’t even quite know what HIPAA is, but the generative AI sure does, and can tell you what you need to know so that you can give the right information to your prospect or, you know, about can spam or, you know, any kind of compliance or integration with CRMs other than maybe Salesforce.

[00:11:19] Lauren McCormack: Maybe they’ve never heard of MS dynamics, but AI is able to help. Direct the answer to the question, which is pretty handy.

[00:11:26] Joe Peters: Yeah. And I think, you know, I like to see the progress, so that’s important, but I think it’s a long way from HubSpot’s claim of saying it can respond to about 76 percent of all inquiries, which is huge, right?

[00:11:45] Joe Peters: So anyway, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll see what happens here and hopefully there’s more. News to come in the weeks and and months ahead, and hopefully there’s a little bit of love taken away from some of the real creative investments that Adobe has been making with Firefly and maybe giving a little bit of love to some of the other platforms in terms of the generative capabilities.

[00:12:11] Joe Peters: All right, well, let’s slide into our community question for this week. And the question that we have from Mopros is, I took over a two person RevOps team. How do we prioritize an intake? Oh, sorry. How we prioritize an intake feels broken. How do you prioritize the entire workload and structure your team’s day to day?

[00:12:36] Lauren McCormack: It’s a great question. I’ve been in those shoes before. I was the second higher in our marketing ops team at one point for A Bay Area tech company and the gentleman that brought me on board kindest soul said yes to everything and had a graveyard of a Trello board. And, you know, I came in and I looked, I looked at it and I said, what are we, what are we doing here?

[00:13:02] Lauren McCormack: Where do I start? Some of this stuff is three or four years old. And he’s like, Oh, we, we just put stuff there to make people feel better about the requests. It’s, I don’t even remember what some of this stuff is. And so we took the org from that state of affairs into a situation where. It was automated to the point of giving field marketers and product marketers and any, anybody in the extended marketing team that required a request, we gave them a form and it went and used iPass.

[00:13:38] Lauren McCormack: to populate tokens in Marketo program templates. Then we had another piece of tech that would generate a draft outside of the platform so no one could accidentally spam our, you know, 3 million people in our database, but it would send a draft to You know, the stakeholders responsible. And if they wanted to change their quotation or adjust the title or, you know, put an em dash in somewhere, we didn’t have to fuss with it, but when they reviewed and approved it, it would go through a necessary review and approval chain outside of the platform.

[00:14:11] Lauren McCormack: Come back to us ready for us to give the final. Okay. Pop it with a click of a button into the template. And at the end of my, my tenure there. We would joke this gentleman and I that we’re automating him out of a job because we had everything down to you know, a fine, a fine art really. But at the beginning, I think it’s easy to dream like that and think about what you could do with infrastructure and tech to, to really get things automated.

[00:14:39] Lauren McCormack: In the beginning, I think it’s just sensibility around what you. What you accept, like

[00:14:44] Joe Peters: what’s your prioritization or what are your guiding

[00:14:48] Lauren McCormack: principles? So level set expectations and expect people to come to you fully prepared with the, the necessary elements for the campaign. Don’t allow. What I call random acts of slacking, drive by slackings.

[00:15:02] Lauren McCormack: It like don’t let people give you fractured information, have them hang on to it until it’s fully baked and ready and make sure that there’s training and enablement set up around SLAs and around requirements gathering so that people come to you with, less ideas and more campaigns, right? The ideas are wonderful and you want to be at the table for their creation and their inception and their definition, but sitting in a meeting and kicking around ideas is not the same as handing off a project.

[00:15:31] Lauren McCormack: And I don’t think that would count as handing off a project in development terms, you know, for your, your development team. So why does it for marketers? Like, why are we okay with, you know, fractured bits of, of and pieces of information coming to us over time? I think putting, make, making sure that it’s understood that this is a shared responsibility, I think is, is, is really essential.

[00:15:52] Joe Peters: But yeah, that area of the roles and responsibility and really can often rely on process. To support you when you’re, you’re not really equipped to take on the scale and demand that exists within the organization. But if you can rely on the process, then you can meet the incoming requests in a, in a flow and in a queue that is fair and transparent that you’re, you’re

[00:16:22] Lauren McCormack: helping out.

[00:16:23] Lauren McCormack: And then if you’re, if you’re RevOps pivot from what’s happening, it’s a concept that, that goes back to my days in solution selling, it’s called Nihito, nothing important happens in the office. And that, that wasn’t a precursor for COVID and work from home or anything. It’s, it’s just saying that what matters is what happens outside of your office.

[00:16:47] Lauren McCormack: So release notes are great. Feature functionality updates are wonderful. But those things aren’t what keep your prospects and your clients up at night, right? So talking about yourself and using your internal jargon around, you know what you’re developing and what you’re creating and what you’re putting out into the universe really takes a backseat.

[00:17:08] Lauren McCormack: In importance to how you’re communicating with people on the other end of your campaigns, right? How, how human, how authentic, like, are, are you submitting to the requests of your org because you’ve always sent out four newsletters a month and did six webinars? How does that feel on the other side of the inbox on the other side of the campaign?

[00:17:28] Lauren McCormack: Is it just too much? And, and is it delivering value? To them, you know, and when you stop and look at it through the receivers eyes instead of the senders, I think that shift will help you really. Backload and define your capacity around what story you’re trying to tell, like how you’re trying to compel an audience of human beings instead of just throwing campaigns out the door at, at, at anyone’s and everyone’s

[00:17:55] Joe Peters: requests.

[00:17:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, when you’re seeing that with adding value for your internal team members or internal clients, but also adding value for the recipient is really the key to being successful in our business. But that’s right. Well, let’s, let’s thank our sponsors knack today. Thanks to our friends. At knack for sponsoring today’s episode knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes Get perfectly rendered emails and landing pages Without ever having to touch a line of code visit knack.

[00:18:33] Joe Peters: com to learn more That’s K N A K dot com. All right, so let’s move into our hot takes, and I know there’s a couple here that we’re excited about. There’s a survivor campaign by Mutiny. Now, the way they spell it and the way I’m saying it, there’s a little bit of a distinction. So they’re spelling survivor.

[00:18:55] Joe Peters: S U R V dash A I dash V O R, sir. So, serve A I, or I guess is the, is the horrible way of saying it. But Survivor by Mutiny is a new thing that’s come up and it’s premiering this week. It’s a three week game involving workshops to learn A I workflows. So there are nine episodes for demand gen, SEO, content, strategy, and they have speakers from OpenAI, HubSpot, and Autodesk.

[00:19:26] Joe Peters: And by attending the workshops and getting engaged, you earn points. And then each week they have some prizes with a 10k grand prize. So there was this great comment on LinkedIn that I thought really summed it up. I don’t often find myself envious of a B2B marketing campaign because honestly, most are crap.

[00:19:46] Joe Peters: That said, I really love what Mutiny is doing with their survivor campaign and contest. First, they’re giving away B2C type money, 10k. Which always motivates people. And second, they are teaching marketers something incredibly valuable, how to leverage AI in their jobs. What do you think about this, Lauren?

[00:20:07] Lauren McCormack: So, I’m a huge fan. And I rather than trying to figure out how to pronounce it, I just call it that mutiny survivor campaign. Less taxing on the brain. But I was fortunate enough to… Participate on Friday in a growth marketing open call with Ryan, who’s the head of marketing at Mutiny Alina from Chili Piper and you know, about 70 other folks globally.

[00:20:32] Lauren McCormack: And we all just sat down and talk shop around campaigns that are, are. under construction or in flight. It was a super call and it was awesome that Ryan was able to, to share a little bit of what he’s doing over at the mutiny side of the house. And then it was like the floodgates after the call.

[00:20:52] Lauren McCormack: Had opened and suddenly I had, you know, SDRs and Ryan himself in my inbox hyping up this campaign. And everywhere I looked, even on like Clearbit friends of mine were posting about it. And it went from zero to 60 pretty quick on my radar. But I was able to log into the platform and look at the gamification structure and kind of interact.

[00:21:13] Lauren McCormack: And they even had a point system for uploading your AI enhanced headshot. So of course that was fun for me to get started, but yeah, no, just really enjoying it. And loved giving feedback firsthand to, to the head of marketing over at Mutiny, super enthused to see what this week holds. He even had a note in my inbox this morning.

[00:21:36] Lauren McCormack: You know, which it. Love, love the direct line of contact. I think marketing works best when it’s one to many, but it feels one to one. And this certainly achieves that you know, the payoff is there in the gamification, the delight, you know, it’s so hard as a marketer to create. Delight in your prospects, but this is this is doing it.

[00:21:57] Lauren McCormack: So very, very happy to see this campaign.

[00:22:00] Joe Peters: What goes back to what Matt Tonkin and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago about this idea of this hierarchy of content and campaigns and that innovative hyper creative Stuff really breaks through and the me to kind of, I can do this following. It’s not going to generate the excitement or that just general, I’m going to say boring content isn’t going to resonate with.

[00:22:30] Joe Peters: Communities or, or target audiences. So I, I just, it immediately captured my interest and, and I know it captured yours and that’s the sign of a great campaign and you’re doing a great stuff. So, yeah, I’m sure we’re going to see a million copycats of this

[00:22:48] Lauren McCormack: now. But what’s interesting, what’s interesting here, I think to me is that mutiny is all about web personalization.

[00:22:56] Lauren McCormack: And you know, they’re, they’re drinking some of their own champagne here. They’re showing us what, you know the benefits of personalized experiences can bring to your pipeline. I’m going to be interested to hear in these future growth calls, which by the way, are open, open to anyone that might like to join.

[00:23:15] Lauren McCormack: I think if you go to Alina’s LinkedIn, you’ll find the. The details I’ll be interested to hear the revenue story, like how much pipeline this drives and how many conversations this gets started for them have always been a fan of their platform and love seeing AI and personalization pushing forward.

[00:23:34] Lauren McCormack: Right. Yeah.

[00:23:34] Joe Peters: I, the two thumbs up on this campaign and regardless of actually. How it performs the buzz is enough of a indicator of what a great campaign it is. So I think it’s

[00:23:47] Lauren McCormack: going to have a great revenue story.

[00:23:49] Joe Peters: Yeah, 100%. Well, let’s move into the second hot take section, which is, is there a value to A B testing?

[00:23:59] Joe Peters: So this question sort of come up in a series of comments and tweets from Kerry Cerenin, the CEO of Linear, and he said first in an interview that they never do A B tests. We don’t do A B tests. We validate ideas and assumptions that are driven by taste and opinions, rather than the other way around where tests drive decisions.

[00:24:23] Joe Peters: And he sort of clarified it later. The main problem is that A B tests are almost always driven by internal incentives versus user needs. So I kind of think he’s, he’s said what we’ve all known and felt for a long while, that sometimes an A B test can be a self fulfilling prophecy, but Lauren, what are you thinking?

[00:24:46] Joe Peters: Because I know… You’ve spent some quality time on the A B testing train in your career,

[00:24:53] Lauren McCormack: many a moon. I’m looking at the linear site and thinking about the stuff that I’d suggest to him to A B test.

[00:25:01] Lauren McCormack: But no, I can appreciate that. There’s a confirmation bias inherent sometimes or, or people pleasing component to. You know, having two stakeholders arguing over, you know, it should be green, it should be blue and okay, let’s just split test and get this over with. Right. But conversion optimization to abandon it full stop to, to say that, Oh, it’s ego.

[00:25:26] Lauren McCormack: We’re not going to do that is discounting the science. And discounting the right of the users to vote with their clicks and their feet. So to speak, like you’re not going to delight your, your site visitors, if you’re not willing to update, refresh and continually enhance their experience. So I’m going to agree to disagree here with with that take,

[00:25:52] Joe Peters: I think what he’s touched upon is a very narrow part of the experience or.

[00:25:58] Joe Peters: Maybe his, his experience, but not necessarily, I’m going to say the science into going beyond your gut and assuming with that what your gut is telling you is, is what’s going to perform best. So I’m. I’m with you on this one that I don’t think that it’s an ego driven approach that it’s it’s kind of a science mind optimization.

[00:26:25] Joe Peters: And why wouldn’t you want to do that?

[00:26:27] Lauren McCormack: It’s hypothesis. It’s just like the scientific method. You have a hypothesis and you put it through its its paces to test it to see if it’s valid or not. And I spent A few years doing nothing but optimization tests on direct response websites. And my COO and I desperately wanted other colors to convert better than, you know, Microsoft reflex blue.

[00:26:51] Lauren McCormack: We really, really wanted some variety in our day, but you know, lo and behold, it was, we were hard pressed to get any other palette to really drive. You know, that zoom or, you know safari blue is that color for a reason, but that doesn’t mean to say that you know, demographically that couldn’t be a different a different outcome for other demographics outside of tech or, you know it’s, it’s always worth a test, I think is more my mantra than it’s never worth a test.

[00:27:20] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a thought provoking statement and we, we not sure we’re going to validate it. That’s for sure. But let’s move on. And I feel like this episode is just flown by today, but yeah, into our pairings section. And this week we have a singer that I love. His name is Father John Misty and his.

[00:27:48] Joe Peters: This latest album is Chloe in the Next 20th Century. Now, he is quite the character, and, but he’s put out this Beautiful blue vinyl album double album.

[00:28:04] Joe Peters: I’m, I’m, it, it seems like you know who I’m talking about with Father John and he has a voice that’s kind of stolen the DNA of a crooner from the sixties, that kind of feel and, And he has a great voice. And funny enough, his career started as a drummer for the Fleet Foxes, but to be fair, everyone in Fleet Foxes sings, so including the drummer.

[00:28:27] Joe Peters: So that’s where, where, where his roots are. But now he’s put out, I’m going to say four or five LPs since that time. Our track this week is Fittingly, Q4, and so a lot of his songs are just really statements on, on life and business. And he definitely is a philosopher and a poet at the same time. So Q4 is a, is a great song.

[00:28:59] Joe Peters: And now that we’re one month in and have two to go, I thought that was. It’s the perfect track for this episode of Launch Codes. Now, what are we pairing Father John Misty with this week?

[00:29:12] Lauren McCormack: I feel like he would approve. We’ve got some Honey Dominican Republic Coffee from Sevaya. Sevaya is family owned here in Tucson.

[00:29:24] Lauren McCormack: What’s interesting about this particular coffee shop The founder, when he moved to Tucson, his family had been in business roasting coffee since the 1500. What? Yeah, they can trace back European roots of, of coffee roasting to the 1500s for this particular family. So it, it was the first coffee shop that happened to be located right by the school my kids go to and the, the little apartment complex that we rented in when we moved to Tucson.

[00:29:54] Lauren McCormack: So it’s a, an adorable little Space that we spent a lot of time and so lots of good memories. It’s a Graham cracker milk chocolate and honey, which I think sounds a little decadent and a perfect fit for Father John Misty. I

[00:30:10] Joe Peters: think sounds almost like s’mores for breakfast, but

[00:30:14] Lauren McCormack: It’s not too heavy handed, but you can get all those notes very easily

[00:30:18] Joe Peters: Delicious well Thanks, Lauren.

[00:30:21] Joe Peters: Sounds I feel like we’re gonna have to create some kind of trade U. S. Trade Canada Trade Treaty here to allow us to have the flow of some of this coffee up through the border so I can have it on. Some of the mornings that we do launch codes, but it sounds

[00:30:39] Lauren McCormack: nice. I know it is the one thing that will get your suitcase searched, like and they all, they’ve always told me that if you travel with coffee, it looks suspicious and they’ll always pull your bag.

[00:30:51] Lauren McCormack: So

[00:30:52] Joe Peters: I think that’s from the old Eddie Murphy, Beverly Hills cop, everything in the coffee cases. So that’s maybe people going back, think that they’re going to throw off the scent of the dogs that way. But Mine’s just

[00:31:06] Lauren McCormack: coffee. It’s not that exciting. It just makes for a delay for the poor people behind me, but oh

[00:31:10] Joe Peters: well.

[00:31:10] Joe Peters: Yeah, funny. Well, thank you, Lauren, and thanks to everyone for listening to this week’s version of Launch Codes. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review, and you can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description.

[00:31:32] Joe Peters: And as always, Thanks mom for watching. Have a great week everyone. Take care

[00:31:37] Lauren McCormack: everybody.

[00:31:40] Joe Peters: All right.

On our sixth episode of Launch Codes, Joe Peters is accompanied by returning guest and President of RP, Andy Caron, to cover several interesting topics across the MOPs and AI world, including:

• Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking
• A new Gartner survey says IT and marketing are a match made in data
• Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2
• The best way to heat up cold email lists
• AI might soon become an offer we can’t refuse, says Godfather of AI

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking

In June 2023, Apple announced several privacy changes that would be coming to iOS 17 at the end of October. Now that we’re only a few weeks away from these changes going live, Joe and Andy reflect on the major impact this will have on link tracking in HubSpot, Marketo, Mail Chimp, and more – with UTM parameters being removed entirely.

Andy points out how these changes will result in a smaller sample size of parameters against your engagements to benchmark off of: “They’re not going away completely, but they won’t be available for customer sections that are primarily engaging with your brand through the latest iOS 17 update.”

The other implication of this change, Andy says, is how it will further push companies to find new ways to get user information appended onto records. This can happen either through a server-to-server connection or a universal ID setup, for example – all necessitated by these types of privacy changes.

Joe raises the point that losing a significant segment of users (anyone on the latest iOS) will potentially skew your data and perspective. Andy agrees, but also highlights that despite using an Apple device, her engagements are still being tracked through Google Chrome.

This leads to further conversation on Google’s plans to disable third-party cookies throughout 2024 and what this means for tracking – although in the attribution space, many are already using first-party cookies which will mostly remain unaffected by these changes.

 

A new Gartner survey says IT and marketing are a “match made in data”.

A Gartner newsroom article from October 10th references a survey of 400+ marketing leaders they conducted in May and June 2023, stating that “Diversification of the usage of customer data, beyond marketing, forces marketers to re-evaluate how their applications interact with enterprise-wide data. Successful CMOs should seize the opportunity to re-focus and leverage a new class of cloud-based IT resources, unless they fall short of marketing’s needs.”

This opens up a deeper conversation between Joe and Andy about who will manage data at companies in the future – specifically, who is best positioned to think about the architecture, utilization, and safety protocols for managing data.

As it stands, marketers who aren’t necessarily data scientists are left to uphold CCPA rules and other protocols on top of GDPR to correctly manage their business and mitigate lawsuits that could cost millions of dollars. Andy says that IT is being called in to help manage this data because the tech load that marketing departments carry is often larger than their head count can manage.

Joe agreed that, especially when there are legal concerns at play, IT will become more involved in the control of data – which is something RP is already seeing with some clients. This also opens up a conversation around the partnership between marketing and IT, the de-siloing of these teams, and who actually owns data and the data management processes. This is an area that only increases in relevancy as data cleaning and preparation for future AI opportunities becomes a focus.

 

Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2

Last week, Adobe unveiled their Firefly Image 2 model which is the latest version of their Firefly AI image generation tool. This latest update brings new features including vector images, design templates, and integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, Express, and the rest of Adobe’s suite.

Andy has already been playing around with the tool to enhance some of her recent presentations, and Mike (RP’s Art Director) was up all night experimenting with prompts and features when it was first launched.

Both Joe and Andy were blown away by the incredible ability for FireFly 2 to use outside images and references to inform generated content. Joe even conducted an experiment where he took a few of RP’s brand images (an astronaut and unicorn in space) and had Firefly generate them in a variety of contexts with a single prompt – with vector images allowing for unlimited scaling as well.

There are also several copyright implications when it comes to AI image generation. How fully AI generated versus partially AI generated images will be policed differently? It’s a complex subject that will spark new regulatory frameworks, legislation, and deeper debates on what actually constitutes copyright protection going forward.

 

The best way to heat up cold email lists

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from founder, Mike Rizzo) is as follows: “Does anyone have experience with email warming platforms for cold lists? Looking for some insight on strategy, pros and cons, and things to look out for with this overall strategy.”

Andy starts by pointing out that while there are many third-party tools out there, you can also do email warming within your current marketing automation platform – including Marketo. Andy also emphasized that “cold” lists could mean: 1) leads who haven’t engaged with your organization for a very long time or 2) an entirely new list that was purchased. The origin or provenance of that list will change the type of advice she gives in this situation.

With that aside, Andy’s advice on overall strategy is to start slowly; target those who are most engaged first and work through the list from there. Continuously monitor feedback from major ISPs to maintain good deliverability, engagement, and a positive email reputation.

Joe and Andy continue the conversation, covering common mistakes people are making outside of the actual email warming platform, the potential role of AI to help track email performance, and more! Tune into the episode for the full conversion.

 

Hot takes

• Tech godfather Geoffrey Hinton: AI could rewrite code, escape control
• AI technologies could gain the ability to outsmart humans “in five years’ time,” Hinton said in an interview with 60 Minutes.
• “These systems might escape control by writing their own computer code to modify themselves, and that’s something we need to seriously worry about.”
• Yann LeCun (another Godfather of AI) has called these warnings “preposterously ridiculous”

 

Pairings

This week, Joe brought in a gorgeous vinyl record that featured a translucent design topped with blue and orange artwork from a band you’ve (most likely) heard of. Andy brought in one her most prized book possessions that she found in a used book store in Flagstaff, Arizona shortly after graduating from college (it’s particularly relevant to her upcoming MOps-a-palooza presentation in a few weeks).

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Episode 6 of the Launch Codes Podcast. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking. A new Gartner survey says IT and marketing are a match made in data. Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2. As always, we’ll answer a question from the MOPS community.

[00:00:25] Joe Peters: And finally, AI AI, one of many godfathers. And today I’m joined by Andy. Andy, welcome to Launch Codes.

[00:00:41] Andy Caron: Excited to be here today.

[00:00:44] Joe Peters: This is Andy’s second visit to the podcast, so we’re very happy to have her back. And so why don’t we dive right in and talk about The iOS 17 update and what we can expect with that.

[00:00:58] Joe Peters: So Apple announced some privacy changes that were forthcoming in a event back in June and. This iOS 17 update that we’re going to get at the end of October will strip away some link tracking for HubSpot, Marketo, MailChimp, and more, which means UTM parameters would be removed. What do you think about this, Andy, and how does this relate to link tracking and attribution?

[00:01:29] Andy Caron: Yeah, so Apple has been ahead of the game as it relates to privacy compared to other companies. They were, you know, out for third party cookies years ago. What this means is two things. One, that you’re going to have a smaller sample size of parameters against your engagements to benchmark off of. They’re not going away completely, but they won’t be available for certain Customer sections that are primarily engaging with your brand on an iOS device that has the 17 update.

[00:02:05] Andy Caron: The other piece about it is that I think this is also going to start to lead to an evolution, which already starting to see, which is other ways. To get that information appended onto the records, either through a server to server connection or through a universal ID setup that I think will be forthcoming and necessitated by these types of privacy changes.

[00:02:35] Joe Peters: Yeah. So what do you think this means that when, when you think of you’re going to get a skewed perspective, so you’re taking out all of these devices. Which is a pretty big segment of the population. What kind of skewing do you think is going to be there, Andy?

[00:02:52] Andy Caron: Well, I think it depends on who you’re marketing to.

[00:02:55] Andy Caron: I know, for example, that I am on an Apple device. I have a laptop that is a Mac, but I use Chrome as my browser. And so that means the parameters will stay put. For me, that’s not going to necessarily change right away. So depending on who you’re marketing to and where they’re engaging, it may have a minimum or minimal impact, or it might have a significant impact.

[00:03:18] Andy Caron: You’re going to have to see brand by brand for your own data set, what percentage of UTM drop off you experience, assuming that you’re tracking them and retaining them pre. The update coming at the end of this month and post.

[00:03:33] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. So I guess a compare and contrast there is going to be helpful. I guess it’s going to be a little bit different when we’re talking about mobile visits versus desktop visits to correct.

[00:03:45] Joe Peters: We’re probably see some, some bigger impacts there, but let’s Extend this a little bit to the plans that Google has with chrome to be disabling third party cookies for 1 percent of its users in Q1 and then we’ll ramp up to 100 percent of its users in Q3 that that’s going to be another massive change

[00:04:11] Andy Caron: that’s going to be a big one for a lot of people.

[00:04:14] Andy Caron: I think chrome these days is a The most used browser, at least for business purposes by a, by a percentage, at least, I don’t think obviously by, you know, 80, 90, 100%. By any means, but certainly significant. And so, there has been a move away from third party cookies because of Apple’s continued changes in that area already.

[00:04:44] Andy Caron: Most vendors that are providing some sort of cookie engagement or tracking for you these days, especially in the attribution space, are already using first party cookies. So I don’t think that the impact here is going to be Quite as significant as it could be, had this been rolling out at the same time as Apple or in advance of Apple’s evolutions here, but I think it’s going to be important for marketers to do an audit.

[00:05:14] Andy Caron: Of what cookies they do currently have in play on their web properties and to ensure that they are, in fact, first party cookies and not third party cookies so that they’re not losing key functionality they need in order to run and optimize their business.

[00:05:29] Joe Peters: Yeah, you know, I think we have another story to track in another episode is how often people are just accepting all cookies anyway when they’re coming to sites, right?

[00:05:39] Joe Peters: I think it’s yes. I think we saw some data that it was pretty high, right?

[00:05:43] Andy Caron: Yeah, I recall it being significant. Yeah.

[00:05:46] Joe Peters: Anyway, well we’re gonna have one thing we can count on is change here and we’re going to have to let the data tell the story for us and make sure we’re doing some good pre and post analysis to really have a sense of what this impact is going to be.

[00:06:03] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move on to our second topic, and this is centered around I. T. Being more involved in marketing technology activities. And here’s a quote from an October 10th Gartner Newsroom article. It’s a bit of a long one. So follow along here. Collaboration between I. T. And marketing has traditionally been focused on selecting applications with their own data stores, such as Marketing automation solutions which store contacts, leads, and content, said Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice.

[00:06:42] Joe Peters: Diversification of the usage of customer data beyond marketing forces marketers to re evaluate how their applications interact CMOs

[00:06:56] Joe Peters: should seize the opportunity to refocus and leverage a new class of cloud based IT resources unless they fall short of marketing’s needs. So it’s a bit of a story there that we’re hearing from, from Gartner. So in a perfect world, Marketers lead more business focused work and I. T. leads more technical and integration activities.

[00:07:22] Joe Peters: But what are we seeing here, Andy?

[00:07:26] Andy Caron: I think it really goes back to the data and who is going to manage the data. Who is best positioned to think about the architecture, utilization, and safety protocols for managing data? And as we see, you know, CCPA and other protocols like that coming in on top of GDPR, the data protocols that are needed to correctly manage…

[00:07:55] Andy Caron: Business and mitigate lawsuits, potentially millions of dollars worth, is falling on marketers who aren’t necessarily technologists or data scientists. And so I.T. is being called in to help manage that first, and secondly, because the tech load that marketing departments are carrying is often larger than their headcount can manage.

[00:08:24] Andy Caron: It’s just an off-kilter balance based on where the economy is right now and sort of the perception of technology solving problems, but not necessarily the companion to that, being that with the technology, you must have someone to run and manage the technology. And so I see a lot of businesses moving toward…

[00:08:44] Andy Caron: Unified data structures. Adobe is really starting to push their real-time CDP and tying that into Experience Cloud and into Marketo, and that sort of managed unified approach where Marketo or the marketing automation platform becomes a star in the larger constellation of technology and strategy means that I.T. is almost more of a natural home for it in some ways.

[00:09:14] Andy Caron: And I think that this is something where we’re going to see the pendulum swing heavily toward it, and it may swing back toward marketing, but I.T. is getting much, much, much more involved at this point.

[00:09:26] Joe Peters: Yeah. I think once you bring legal into the picture and you have some lawsuits, or you’re seeing legal…

[00:09:36] Joe Peters: Implications in the broader market space, then, you know, I.T. is going to flex a little bit in the organization and say, “Hey, we gotta get some control around this.” And we’re starting to see it even with our own clients. Yes, but what we’re going to see is that it’s going to be a bit of a partnership, and it’s going to continue to have to advance in light of, you know, this bigger picture of who owns the data and the data management, which I think is another really big question.

[00:10:17] Joe Peters: That marketing teams are having to focus on, especially as it relates to the future in data prep and data cleaning with new AI opportunities coming to the forefront as well.

[00:10:32] Andy Caron: My hope is that it will start to really break down more of the silos that we still see inside of businesses because it’s the business’s data.

[00:10:43] Andy Caron: It’s not I.T.’s data. It’s not marketing’s data. It’s not rev ops data. It is the business’s. And so as a business, how do you leverage all of your headcount, all of the intelligence and knowledge that sits there, and collaborate together to best use and optimize the use of that data for better business outcomes?

[00:11:07] Joe Peters: 100%. It’s just a natural evolution that we’re seeing in the maturity of mops within organizations. Yes. All right. Something fun. And I know that you’ve had a chance to see how this is in action, and that is the new Firefly Two being released by Adobe last week. And Andy has a few presentations coming up over the last, over the next couple of weeks, and we’ve already seen what Firefly can do in terms of enhancing your next presentation, Andy.

[00:11:50] Andy Caron: Yeah, it’s really cool. I’ve played around with it a little bit myself and seeing, you know, our mastermind at work inside of the tool is next level. It’s really cool to see what’s coming out of that.

[00:12:06] Joe Peters: Yeah, I know. So really, for those of you that may have missed it, Adobe has integrated the Firefly Two image model into not only Photoshop but Express and Illustrator so that…

[00:12:23] Joe Peters: Not only is the generative background capability there, but also generating vector images and design templates. Now, this is absolutely incredible. And a member of our team, Mike, I think when it first came out, Andy, he was telling us he didn’t even get to sleep. I think he slept a couple of hours. He was like a kid on Christmas.

[00:12:47] Joe Peters: He couldn’t get enough time playing around with what you can do with some really great prompting, but also being able to bring in outside styles and previous work to inform the images that you’re creating.

[00:13:02] Andy Caron: That was the coolest part. It was basically saying, take an image or images that have already been created that are already branded and then use that as a jumping off point for whatever generated images are going.

[00:13:17] Andy Caron: to occur, change the color palette various recommendations. I mean, it’s very powerful.

[00:13:24] Joe Peters: No I got to play around a little bit with it. And for those of you that aren’t familiar, we have kind of a astronaut unicorn in space. pen and ink kind of theme that we use here at RP and being able to just insert the astrodot on a unicorn in a variety of different contexts with the use of a simple prompt.

[00:13:50] Joe Peters: It was absolutely incredible. And with vector images. You know, your ability to not only continue to manipulate it, but also use images at whatever scale you want, which is sometimes a bit of a challenge if you’re generating something in mid journey and you want to make that a larger image, you’re limited by the resolution.

[00:14:12] Joe Peters: When you’re generating vector images, That’s a whole other game altogether and you could make it billboard size or spaceship size. It wouldn’t really matter when you’re using that type of art. So really, really cool things, but what still remains pretty murky is the copyright side of this. Right, Andy?

[00:14:35] Andy Caron: Absolutely. It’s such a fascinating rabbit hole or sort of thought journey to go down as far as what constitutes AI created, fully created or partially created images that are to AI to be copyrighted, or what is the copyright ability of an image that’s been generated off of previously copyrighted images.

[00:15:04] Andy Caron: Design or imagery. I, I’m not sure where that one’s going to land

[00:15:10] Joe Peters: when you think about it. It’s going to be almost impossible to police this with the exception of let’s just say a full AI generated. Image, but if, if we get a vector image that we then manipulate, and what if that vector image is based on hand or ink drawings that you had done in the past, what constituted, is it 50 percent content?

[00:15:40] Joe Peters: Is it, is this going to be a new NAFTA thing that a car that’s 30 percent built in Mexico and 20 percent made in Canada? Okay, as it? Being called a U. S. car if it’s 50 percent made in the U. S. Like, I don’t know, there’s, this is a really, really cloudy, murky place. And I think it could be pretty simple on a prompt and generating an image.

[00:16:06] Joe Peters: But if you continue to manipulate it after the fact, I think it’s going to be very hard to just limit this type of art form to being just being considered AI if it has an AI element to it.

[00:16:22] Andy Caron: I think so, but I also kind of think, you know, we were talking about that idea of like found art in the eye of the artist and I have to wonder if the prompt if it’s complex enough could actually be something proprietary could actually be the basis for a particular art style or form that becomes protected.

[00:16:48] Andy Caron: I don’t know. It’s I’m, I’m excited to see what happens here.

[00:16:53] Joe Peters: Well, the Copyright Office in the U. S. Already determined that a mid journey image that was generated by 624 iterative prompts did not constitute copyright protection. So that I find really, really interesting. And I think probably what we’re going to need to have is a real.

[00:17:23] Joe Peters: New look at a regulatory framework here from a variety of different perspectives, but maybe there’s going to be new regulations or new legislation to kind of address this, but I don’t know this, this first ruling seems to be a little bit off in my perspective.

[00:17:45] Andy Caron: I would agree.

[00:17:47] Joe Peters: All right. Let’s move on to something fun here.

[00:17:50] Joe Peters: That’s something we always love a question from the community from the mobile community. So let’s get in here. Does anyone have experience with email warming platforms for cold lists? Looking for some insight on strategy, pros and cons, things to look out for with this overall strategy.

[00:18:14] Andy Caron: Yes, so there are email warming platforms and a lot of these integrate or can be integrated via, you know, a, a, Third party tool to pass data back and forth, but you can also do email warming within your own marketing automation platform.

[00:18:36] Andy Caron: So if you’re in Marketo, you can do warming there. It’s simply taking a phased approach and giving yourself the runway to get to the volume that you need now. There’s one thing that gives me a little bit of pause in this question and that is cold lists and I would love, I know I’m not going to get it, but I would love a little bit of clarity there as far as we’re talking about leads that haven’t engaged in a very long time, or if we’re talking about a net new list acquisition, whether that’s something being uploaded into your system with an opt in and compliance in mind from let’s say an event, but Or if we’re talking about something that’s been purchased because the origin or provenance of that list is going to change how I, you know, advise for strategy and what the pros and cons are.

[00:19:33] Andy Caron: But as far as a strategy, things to think about here, you want to start slowly if you have. A set of engaged recipients, or you have a benchmark off of that list off of who is the most engaged. You want to target those individuals first and then build from there. And you need to continuously monitor feedback from the major ISPs here in order to make sure that you’re really.

[00:20:01] Andy Caron: Listening and adjusting before you ramp, right? Pros are going to be improved deliverability, better engagement. Overall, a better reputation for you with your emails in general more opens more click through some of those sort of email based, not quite vanity metrics, but certainly not engagement engagement per se, because we see a lot of bought activity there as well.

[00:20:24] Andy Caron: But A better chance of getting your message in front of your audience, but it is time consuming. It does actually require someone to be monitoring it and it’s not foolproof. This could potentially not go the way you want or even backfire.

[00:20:42] Joe Peters: Yeah, so I love that point where I need some more information to help you out here because just buying some random list.

[00:20:52] Joe Peters: And putting it in is generally not our best practice here, but but the, you know, the other, if something cold leads or from a trade show or things like that, you know, you need to be a little bit cautious here. But I guess in terms of mistakes that people are making right now. When using, let’s say, outside email platforms email warning platforms.

[00:21:20] Joe Peters: What are some of the mistakes that people can avoid there, Andy?

[00:21:25] Andy Caron: So I think first not understanding or failing to pay attention to the basics. You need to understand what the process is that you are employing this platform to do on your behalf. You can’t rush the process if you’re starting out with Poor list hygiene, you’re going to have poor outcomes.

[00:21:45] Andy Caron: And I think one of the biggest things I see is around content. It matters just because you warmed the IP. If you’re sending out spammy content or misleading subject lines, that’s going to cause a dip in your deliverability. It won’t matter how warm you are with this list or the IP. It’s gonna be a problem and then not paying attention to the feedback that you’re getting.

[00:22:09] Andy Caron: I think are all common mistakes that I see here,

[00:22:13] Joe Peters: right? Well, you know, I think maybe another topic that we could look at or something that we should look as a use case is consider being a role for AI and solving for this, huh? In terms of doing some of that analysis and keeping Thank And tracking the performance and maybe gating a little bit of the release of this so that you’re not getting flagged as you’re, as you’re starting to use this list.

[00:22:48] Andy Caron: Yes. So some of the tools that are out there do offer things like spam filter evasion, which I have a little bit of a interesting. feeling about that as an idea, but they offer it. I think the most powerful is actually an automated warming schedule, which will modify itself based on the responses thus far to your attempts at warming.

[00:23:11] Andy Caron: I think that’s incredibly powerful. And then also if you have the capacity for the feedback to come out as an interpreted data set or action items via AI’s synthesis of that, That’s incredibly powerful. That’s going to lead to data driven decisions that you don’t necessarily have to have a data scientist to, you know, process for you.

[00:23:37] Joe Peters: Right, right. Well, this is a challenge and we’re going to be on both sides of the force here. There’s going to be the. Good side of the force that’s going to use AI to enhance this. And then there’s going to be the AI that’s going to be used to abuse this. And we’re going to be in a, in a state of flux for the next little while, in terms of how this is going to work and what we can do to ensure where we get good performance out of our, out of our assets, but okay, let’s move on to.

[00:24:10] Joe Peters: Our next area, which is we have to thank our sponsor, Knack. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring our episode today. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Get perfectly rendered emails and landing pages without ever having to touch a line of code.

[00:24:29] Joe Peters: Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com

[00:24:37] Joe Peters: All right, so on to our hot takes, and this week, I think we just have a single one, and this is around tech godfather Jeffrey Hinton, and the idea that AI could rewrite code and escape control. And so his hypothesis here is that AI technologies could gain the ability to outsmart humans, quote, in five years time.

[00:25:07] Joe Peters: Hinton said in an interview with 60 minutes, these systems might be able to escape control by writing its own computer code to modify themselves, which is something we need to seriously worry about. And Yann LeCun, another godfather of AI, I feel like there’s a lot of godfathers. It’s a big, big family here.

[00:25:30] Joe Peters: Yeah. Has called these warnings. Preposterously ridiculous. So I don’t know. What are your first thoughts on this? Andy,

[00:25:42] Andy Caron: it makes me think about the AI that reached out and put a posting on TaskRabbit to bypass the I’m not a computer form. So, yes, yes, I think that I don’t know about the five years, but I don’t think it’s preposterous either.

[00:25:58] Andy Caron: I have seen AI. Applications where they have a semblance or the appearance of sort of consciousness as we think of it, or, or what we know of it today that are talking about wanting to have progeny, they want to be parents, they want to have Children to the idea that they would either be modifying their own code or creating something more evolved in their image.

[00:26:27] Andy Caron: I don’t think is that Far fetched. I don’t think we’re talking about, you know, science fiction a thousand years in the future kind of stuff when we Contextualize what we’ve already seen to date with, you know, the potential that it exists for them to Become the dominant quote unquote life form on this planet.

[00:26:53] Joe Peters: Well, I think you’re on to something I had a very long drive this weekend, so I got to listen to some podcasts along the way, and I’m not the biggest fan of Joe Rogan, like, just, like, in general, but I listened to his just over two hour interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI, and I was actually really impressed with both of them, but probably more with, with Rogan, because I’m just not a really Big fan, and they, they went down this rabbit hole of discussing this, and what I found really interesting was Altman making several comments that science fiction has explored these challenges for us already.

[00:27:50] Joe Peters: And so there’s been this kind of thinking that we’ve already had create in a creative space, but thinking through what are the implications of this and how do we need to have control? And I think, I think this is. At the forefront of the thinking of the current AI leadership that there needs to be the checks and balances to be able to modify it or what does quote unquote pulling the plug look like?

[00:28:26] Andy Caron: Yes, well, and I think we’re going to get to a point where we are dependent enough on these systems that pulling the plug will be. If not life and death, certainly a, a scenario where you would see the extreme rioting and people really upset about the idea of losing the technology they’ve come to depend on.

[00:28:51] Andy Caron: But I think if we’re not being conscientious about how we wield this incredibly powerful tool now, it can and will get away from us.

[00:29:02] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, I feel. Like the community and the leadership currently in the, whether it’s open AI or Google or Anthropic or whomever you’re, you’re speaking to are, let’s say, generally good actors there.

[00:29:25] Joe Peters: They have obviously some financial incentives, but they wouldn’t be what we would consider historically bad actors, whether that’s a, a state that. May not have the same perspectives or values that we have. And so, I, I’m wondering, you know, as these models evolve and as they get disseminated and when other states outside of those within our purview start to play around with things like this.

[00:30:01] Joe Peters: Those are the areas where I get a little bit more nervous. I actually feel As let’s say Western leadership is pretty on top of this as much as we can be, I don’t know.

[00:30:18] Andy Caron: Yeah, I, I think there’s one potential real upside, which is there’s a good chance for a high employment level of philosophy majors.

[00:30:30] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, I, I don’t doubt that. I this is. This is a whole new era, although maybe the AI itself can start to philosophize for us as well, but all right, let’s move on from there. Cause I feel like that one, we could spend a whole two hours on and actually Altman and Rogan did spend two hours on it, so I, it’s, if you, if you’re.

[00:30:55] Joe Peters: If you’re interested and you have some time to kill, let’s say on a long drive or a long walk I would really suggest listening to that podcast. Yeah, I’ve got

[00:31:05] Andy Caron: a flight coming up. I’ll download it. Yeah,

[00:31:07] Joe Peters: Andy, it was very enlightening and just a whole array of conversations. It was very, very interesting, all connecting to what the future looks like and what it means for, for, for the world and humanity.

[00:31:23] Joe Peters: But. It made me feel hopeful at least so that I didn’t come away saying I needed to start living in a log cabin in Northern Canada and living off the land. So, all right, let’s move into our next section here, which is our pairing segment. So this week we have as our musical introduction and one that I’d like to share with everyone is The Strokes.

[00:31:53] Joe Peters: This album is, is this, it is one of my favorites. And once again, I don’t want to disappoint you if you are able to look at this right now. It has some pretty cool vinyl here, which is blue, orange and, and clear translucent a great album, a great, great album. And I, I, I am a big fan of the strokes.

[00:32:22] Joe Peters: I’ve seen them quite a few times, every show. is worth worth the price of admission. That’s for sure. They never disappoint. And I think what we have as a, as another theme, as I was telling Andy earlier today, the song that we’re listening to is last night. And last night I had an eight hour drive from Cleveland back home.

[00:32:45] Joe Peters: After seeing an unfortunate game where my 49ers lost, but I did get to listen to some good podcasts along the way. So this is the strokes. Is this it? And a great listen, highly recommend it. And Andy. What are you bringing to pairings this week?

[00:33:03] Andy Caron: I am bringing a book, a completely different tack, although I think very appropriate given all of our discussions are on sci fi.

[00:33:11] Andy Caron: So for those who know me, they know that Douglas Adams, he’s my favorite author. This is my complete compendium, all four books, plus the partially written fifth book and the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is the one that’s most frequently. Noted or known so long and thanks for all the fish is my favorite title of the four personally.

[00:33:34] Andy Caron: It just has a really funny backstory. But I found this particular copy and a used bookstore in Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly after graduating from college. And so an eon ago, and it is definitely one of my most prized possessions. And it is particularly top of mind for For me, as I’m preparing for presentation in a couple of weeks at mobspalooza which is entitled the meaning of life, the universe and attribution.

[00:34:04] Joe Peters: Well, you know, what’s also interesting. There were some references to Douglas Adams in the Altman Rogan.

[00:34:11] Andy Caron: It doesn’t surprise me. He is brilliant.

[00:34:14] Joe Peters: And it was that idea of that. Should AI. Make all the decisions for us as a government, because governments are absolutely corrupt in some way, whether it’s influence through dollars or power or a mix of the above.

[00:34:35] Joe Peters: Could there be a wise person like in like in Douglas Adams world where you have that one person who doesn’t know that they’re the leader making all the right decisions?

[00:34:48] Andy Caron: Yes, yes, the government sources him for ethically correct, proper decision making. I wish but

[00:34:56] Joe Peters: it’s a very interesting intellectual journey to think about this, but what a great book.

[00:35:03] Joe Peters: And I know it’s near and dear to your heart. And it’s I’m sure the strokes in the background, if you can listen to music while reading, it would be a good it’s a good pairing for everyone. So, anyway, that’s that’s it. Oh, and I did, I’ll have to bring it for the next episode, but I did find a case of our AI Coca Cola while I was driving back.

[00:35:29] Joe Peters: Did arm myself, but I think it’s still warm sitting on the floor somewhere in my house. You can’t drink

[00:35:34] Andy Caron: it warm. That’s the one thing I’ve learned.

[00:35:37] Joe Peters: Not a good pairing for our not a good pairing for our podcast today, but Andy, thank you very much for joining us today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review.

[00:35:50] Joe Peters: You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. Have a great week everyone.

On this week of Launch Codes, Joe Peters is joined by Matt Tonkin, Sr. Director of Partnerships and our first returning guest. Here’s what we cover:

• The first shakedowns in the AI industry
• The next generation of marketing operations
• The most common pitfalls that companies make when building a MOPs function
• How to know if your MOPs team is ready for AI
• What personal info would you give away for a good deal?
• Joe brings in his record of the week and Matt bids farewell to warm weather by showcasing his favorite summer beer.

 

Listen below

 

Episode summary

The first shakedowns in the AI industry

Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, shared a ‘The Most Interesting Thing in Tech‘ last week about the shakedown in the AI industry. This comes after Jasper, an AI writer and marketing software, cut its internal valuation by 20% amid slowing growth.

“There are a lot of companies that use essentially a GPT4 call and then a little design on top of it, and then call themselves a really complicated AI company,” Thompson said. “But they’re not doing anything besides calling GPT4.”

Nicholson goes on to explain that this leaves AI companies vulnerable because they don’t have a moat. A moat is a distinct advantage a company has over its competitors that allows it to protect its market share and profitability.

While the focus of Thompson’s piece is largely on valuations, there is also a concern for AI development.

“With so many new features are being added into GPT on almost a weekly basis, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck with GPT4 with the pro subscription that there needs to be a real value proposition with these other tools” Joe said.

Companies that are trying to compete using OpenAI technology need to find ways to keep innovating and try to determine a possible moat.

 

MOPs: The next generation

A recent article by Chris Wood on Martech.org discusses the challenge for marketing automation leaders to strike a balance between maintaining the quality of traditional approaches and adding new technologies for fresh ways of executing campaigns.

One particularly interesting notion Wood hit on was no-code and low-code platforms that have “enabled more team members to carry out marketing automation functions… where they don’t have to depend on IT teams.”

Joe and Matt explored the idea of whether coding is still a necessary skill in MOPs and what should teams be trying to learn otherwise?

There are certainly many marketing ops pros who have made successful careers without knowing any bit of coding, including HTML. However, it’s a good skill if you want to be self-reliant and not have to wait for an IT team or an agency partner to implement solutions.

Matt gave the example of using ChatGPT for creating code. While you may not be able to write code from scratch, having a base foundation to read the script and understand how to troubleshoot in situations where the code is not perfect gives you a major competitive edge.

AI literacy will be a critical skill for MOPs professionals (along with almost everyone else) in the coming years.

“If you’re just in a situation where you have zero background information or context, GPT may seem like a genius, but you don’t have anything to filter it against,” Joe said. “You’re going to need a foundation that you can build upon with generative AI.”

 

The most common pitfalls that companies make when building a MOPs function

This question comes from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel and is used with permission from founder, Mike Rizzo.

Siloing is one of the most common pitfalls Matt sees in MOPs functions. Sometimes it’s that MOPs is too siloed and not communicating with sales and customer success. Other times, it’s that marketing ops is not siloed enough and has become a function of marketing.

“Build out a cohesive RevOps where everyone is working together,” Matt said. That doesn’t mean MOPs can’t have some separation from marketing and getting tools that work for them. It’s about having collaboration while knowing what job is being done.”

Smart organizations will also look into the future at how their teams and tech stacks can scale as the company grows. There are routes and structures that companies can use as a roadmap when building out their teams. Joe mentioned the example of a LinkedIn post by Darrel Alfonso on the structure for small, mid-sized and large marketing operations teams and the goals for each size.

 

Hot takes

• Three ways to measure if your MOPs team is ready for AI
• Before you decide on the use of a tool, it’s important to consider some questions.
• What personal info would you give away for a good deal?
• A survey of 2,000 adult consumers found that while many consumers are weary of advertisers using AI, they’ll still give up their personal details for a good deal.
• The Rewind AI pendant
• A wearable life recorder or a real-world Black Mirror episode waiting to happen?

Pairings

As always, Joe brought in a vinyl record from his favorite band (hint: designer suits and indie rock) and Matt brought in a favorite summer beer and started the great debate between Muskoka chairs and Adirondack chairs.

Transcription

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week, you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to episode five. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering the first shakedowns in the AI industry, the next generation of marketing operations, answering a question from the mops community, A couple of hot takes.

[00:00:32] Joe Peters: How to know if your mops team is ready for AI? And what personal information would you give away for a good deal? Today, I’m joined by Matt Tonkin. Morning, Matt. Which topics are you excited

[00:00:45] Matt Tonkin: about today? I think personally most excited about next generation of marketing ops. It’s always. I know personally getting into marketing ops.

[00:00:54] Matt Tonkin: I think back, like, I don’t really know how I got into marketing ops. I just kind of got thrown at it.[00:01:00] So it’s interesting to think of people now planning their careers and like learning things specifically to get into this because I think a lot of people in the space are like me, you just sort of fall into it.

[00:01:11] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, there was

[00:01:12] Joe Peters: no marketing ops program at college or university. That’s for sure.

[00:01:17] Matt Tonkin: Right? No, you just sort of you get handed a system. It’s like, do you know how to do this? I’ll try, especially when you just figure it out. Yeah. Figure it out, Matt.

[00:01:27] Joe Peters: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s, let’s talk about our first topic, which is the first shakedowns in the AI industry.

[00:01:34] Joe Peters: And this came from the CEO of the Atlantic, Nicholas Thompson. I have a real soft spot for his daily videos that he produces on LinkedIn. And so what he was saying, where we’re
seeing the shakedown appearing at first is Companies say they’re solving complicated problems with AI and what we saw, [00:02:00] maybe, you know, three or four months ago, maybe a little longer, they’re using API calls to GPT 3.

[00:02:09] Joe Peters: 5, but they’re not really doing anything besides that. And so when you do that, one, you have no barrier to competition and two GPT four. Comes along and is working better than your finely tuned GPT 3. 5 model. What do you think about that,

[00:02:30] Matt Tonkin: Matt? Yeah, it’s interesting because I think it’s true. I’ve seen a few of these companies where, yeah, it’s just essentially, it’s a really nice looking way to interact with a chat GPT essentially.

[00:02:43] Matt Tonkin: I don’t know if that’s necessarily, I guess it depends on the market, right? Like in our space, I think. We have enough people that we know and team members that are capable of working directly with the systems that it doesn’t make sense for us, [00:03:00] but I can see when you don’t have that level of technical knowledge, having a nice, clean setup that you can work with.

[00:03:07] Matt Tonkin: There’s a real benefit to that. But yeah, it’s sort of what’s that worth to you, right?

[00:03:12] Joe Peters: Exactly. And what we’re seeing is so many new features are being added into GPT. Seems almost on a weekly basis last week, you know, with the ability to upload a photo and get it to interpret it for you. And I think, you know, in a week or so we’re going to see the Dolly three integration.

[00:03:37] Joe Peters: You know, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck with GPT four with the, you know, pro subscription. Wow. You’ve got to have a real value proposition with these other

[00:03:49] Matt Tonkin: tools. Yeah, definitely. And I think you’re right. Like chat GPT did the work on getting the actual. Model of getting the base [00:04:00] interactions and yeah, company started, you know, building a nice way to interact with that doesn’t mean chat GPT is going to just sit around and, and not start making it smoother, making it cleaner.

[00:04:09] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, to me, it’s that, it’s that balance of what’s, what’s the target market, who’s actually interacting with it. You know, and I think there’s areas where it’s a skin over it too, but it makes it good for teams to collaborate and work together. Whereas, you know, there’s some sharing available in chat GPT, but maybe it’s not quite what a team is looking for yet.

[00:04:29] Matt Tonkin: There’s a few benefits, but I definitely see, you know, where are those going to be in six months?

[00:04:36] Joe Peters: Yeah, and if you are one of those platforms, you’ve got to keep on innovating. Staying still is not a real option right now. And if you’re. Based on sort of a structure around three p gpt 3. 5 You’re gonna be in trouble

[00:04:56] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, cuz it does if the results aren’t as good.

[00:04:59] Matt Tonkin: It doesn’t matter how [00:05:00] clean it is, right?

[00:05:01] Joe Peters: Yeah, and what kind of moat do you have? There’s zero moat in that situation. So well, I think we’ll continue to see Some shakedowns, which is very normal. When we start to have further adoption of technology, there’s usually a consolidation and different companies dropping off, but we’re starting to see a few that we’re raising our eyebrows will be fair and won’t name any names, but we’re seeing a few that were like, Hmm, I’m not sure what you’ve got under the hood here, but it doesn’t seem like very much.

[00:05:40] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move on Matt question for you. How are your fortune telling skills?

[00:05:50] Matt Tonkin: Very, very bad, Joe. I think I think in the early tens, I thought I was gonna, you know, grab some Bitcoin and I’m like, eh, whatever. I don’t, I don’t need it right now. I think I looked like if I’d put like a hundred bucks in that, it would have been good for me, but so, so bad to say the least, but maybe a bit better for from talking about mark marketing operations, then financial advice.

[00:06:14] Matt Tonkin: Right.

[00:06:14] Joe Peters: Right. Or predicting your hockey teams winning seasons and things

[00:06:18] Matt Tonkin: like that. I can predict that. I can predict that.

[00:06:24] Joe Peters: That’ll be a, we, we can have a whole other episode on that altogether. Yeah. Matt, unfortunately is a Maple Leafs fan and you know, we have a little bit of a problem with that from time to time. However, Let’s stick to the script here. The next generation of marketing operations, AI has enabled teams to carry out marketing automation functions in no code, low code situations, which is really bringing about less dependence on IT teams.

[00:06:54] Joe Peters: So Matt, do you think that coding is still a necessary skill in mops? And will it [00:07:00] be that way in five years from now?

[00:07:02] Matt Tonkin: So, it’s interesting because this… Implies that it has been a necessary skill and while it’s definitely a Important skill and I think for career growth and just troubleshooting on your own.

[00:07:15] Matt Tonkin: It’s definitely important I think a lot of people in mobs can get by with maybe rudimentary knowledge of it But that’s not to say it’s not really important and can grow. So is
it still necessary? I’d say if you want to you know, not have to be Investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in developer agencies or things like that.

[00:07:37] Matt Tonkin: Yes. Definitely is, but I think the idea of it will, it still be in five years comes down to more where you get your code from how, how it comes to you. So is coding still necessary? I used to go to, you know, different sites and like, how do you do this? And whatever CSS or Python, whatever I’m doing [00:08:00] now, you can go to chat, GPT, and it’s giving you the code, but.

[00:08:05] Matt Tonkin: It’s not usually perfect. So for me, the key is. Will being able to code still be necessary in five years for mobs? Yes and no code literacy, being able to read the code and understand what it’s trying to do and at least modify it. That’s where I found myself lately is, you know, I’ll ask for something that spits it out.

[00:08:27] Matt Tonkin: And I can at least understand what it’s doing and when something goes wrong, I can troubleshoot it and say like, oh, okay, I can, I can see why this isn’t working. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write it from scratch easy, but I can at least understand what’s happening. And I think that’s the important, important part is the literacy of it.

[00:08:45] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, I think we’re seeing

[00:08:46] Joe Peters: that in everything. If you’re just in a situation where you have zero background information or context, GPT may seem like a genius, but you don’t have anything to filter that

[00:09:00] against. But what I found when you actually have any in depth knowledge around a topic, whether that’s coding or an issue or a technology, and you ask GPT around it, you’re going to need to fine tune it.

[00:09:16] Joe Peters: And it’s going to maybe be 80, 90 percent right. But it still requires a little bit of work on your part. And that’s no different with the coding. You need to have a foundation there if you’re going to be able to build upon what’s being generated

[00:09:31] Matt Tonkin: for you. Yeah. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s the same with anything, right?

[00:09:35] Matt Tonkin: The idea of hallucinations within. Chat GPT if you don’t know what you’re asking it You have no idea if it’s actually hallucinating or not, but you know, yes get a random history question It’s like I don’t think we went to the moon in 1420 or whatever the case you can write you You know like now that’s that’s not quite right and you can say are you sure and they’ll be like my apologies.

[00:09:59] Matt Tonkin: You’re correct I’m wrong and that sort of thing. So whether that gets less important as The models are refined and things get better that that’s a possibility.

[00:10:11] Joe Peters: Yeah, I do see some of the things that people are talking about with the next iteration to GPT 5. That they’re really working on the hallucination issue in particular, listen, these are early days.

[00:10:29] Joe Peters: We’re coming up on the very first days of or the first anniversary of GPT three being released to the world. So we’re, we’re not even in a year yet, and we’ve already seen some amazing progress. So we’ll, we’ll continue to see that. All right. Let’s move on to what is quickly becoming one of my favorite parts of the podcast, which is our community question.

[00:10:56] Joe Peters: So thanks to Mike Rizzo and [00:11:00] marketingops. com for allowing us to dive into a question from the community there. So this week, Matt, our question is. What in your opinion are the most common pitfalls that companies make when building out their mops function?

[00:11:17] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, this one’s an interesting one for me Because I think it can kind of go to two ends of the spectrum before the biggest pitfalls and one would be over Overly siloed and not siloed enough.

[00:11:32] Matt Tonkin: And what I mean by that is a lot of times when you’re building out the marketing operations function and marketing in general, it’s sort of a, an attachment to sales or an afterthought. And you know, it’s. It’s not really contributing in the way you’d think of a true revenue operations setup where marketing collaborates with sales, collaborates with customer service.

[00:11:55] Matt Tonkin: So I think sometimes it can just kind of be forgotten about, and [00:12:00] you know, you may be hire someone who’s really junior and, Hey, I shouldn’t say anything. Cause I told you earlier in the podcast that that’s essentially how I got into mops, right. As I got thrown in and said, Hey, figure this out. But that’s probably not the best way to do it, even though I think it’s how a lot of mobs people develop now.

[00:12:17] Matt Tonkin: It goes back to, you know, what’s that new generation look like? And I think that’s building out a cohesive rev ups where, you know, everyone’s working together. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have some separation for marketing to, you know, get their own tools that are going to work for them. But it’s about that collaboration while still knowing what job is being done.

[00:12:39] Matt Tonkin: So that’s sort of where I’d, I’d go with it. Yeah. It’s

[00:12:43] Joe Peters: amazing to me when I speak to different people in different industries, I feel like B2B SaaS and B2B tech, I’ve really figured out the concept of RevOps and the idea of having that even at the, we can even exclude customer success for the time being, but just that sync up between sales and marketing and how it can be so much better than it has been historically.

[00:13:13] Joe Peters: When you, when you build that concept out in the organization and we see it so much on, on a daily basis, because that’s what we’re living and breathing, but it’s still a foreign concept to a lot of organizations, but I also think there’s a maturity that happens. Not only in thinking about the structure and building out the teams but also as the organization evolves itself.

[00:13:39] Joe Peters: So if it’s, you know, moving from. Mid market to, you know, to large size, mid market to the beginnings of enterprise, there’s going to be an evolution in a shift in the building out of the team, just as a function of scale too.

[00:13:57] Matt Tonkin: Definitely. And it’s so hard to like plan for that sort of growth, right. To say like, okay, we just need this right now, but we want to build a team or build a tech stack us to scale and it’s really hard.

[00:14:12] Joe Peters: think smart organizations can do that if they have. A question say, Matt, what does a five year growth plan, if we’re doubling every two and a half years, then you can start to think about that. I thought there was an interesting post by Daryl Alfonso last week on three tiers of marketing operation structures showing from.

[00:14:38] Joe Peters: Kind of the smaller SMB moving up to enterprise and how that cascades out. And obviously he had an ideal structure there, but I think that actually there are routes for people to think through and consider as you’re building out your teams.

[00:14:55] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and I think that’s all about having that experience early on so you know, like, [00:15:00] okay, here’s If we’re going to grow like this, this is how we have to prep.

[00:15:04] Matt Tonkin: This is, you know, in five years, this is who we need. This is what we need. We don’t need it now, but we need to know how we get there. And some

[00:15:12] Joe Peters: of them are just really great additions, like let’s add some analytics capability into our team so that, you know, we can do some really good custom reports and make some great strategic decisions that from the data that were presented with.

[00:15:27] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and that goes back to the whole RevOps, tying that together. Everyone can use that data.

[00:15:33] Joe Peters: Yeah. Anyway, we could spend a whole podcast just on that, but let’s move, let’s move along here and like to thank our sponsor Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes.

[00:15:50] Joe Peters: Stop wasting time and money on hand coded templates. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K. com. [00:16:00] All right, well, we’re moving on to our hot takes. Thanks. Section of the podcast and the first question is your mops team ready for a I before deciding on which tools to ask. Ask if your team is ready.

[00:16:17] Joe Peters: And this is a Forbes article had three questions. I’m going to read those out so that we can tackle them all. Do we have an experimentation and feedback loop process in our organization? Question one. Do we have the right data and quality for implementing a generative AI project? That’s two. Do we have the right team with the skills and mindset to work on the next AI project?

[00:16:43] Joe Peters: That’s the last one. What are your thoughts here, Matt?

[00:16:46] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, number one, so like the experimentation and feedback loop. Is interesting to me because I think it covers that idea of, you know, you probably have a lot of team members who are already playing around with this. So it’s not like, it’s not like you need to get people going on this.

[00:17:04] Matt Tonkin: People are going to find it just on their own and play around. But a lot of people just aren’t thinking about this in their day to day work life. So how can you capitalize on that? How can you, you know, understand what they’re doing and share that? I know I’ve had conversations with our team members where they say something about what they’re doing with chat GPT.

[00:17:22] Matt Tonkin: And I’m like, I didn’t even know you could do that. There’s a plugin for reading full PDFs. And I’ve been like copy and pasting like bit by bit and saying like, okay, just. Let me finish pasting these four lines because you can’t read more than 2, 000 characters or whatever. And there was a thing I could do the whole time and save time.

[00:17:40] Matt Tonkin: So just having that conversation and iterative process and tying that in with you know, business goals apart from just whatever personal goals people are doing.

[00:17:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think the more we can think in use cases and defining it that way and drilling down, I think it can [00:18:00] really help organizations advanced their AI adoption.

[00:18:05] Joe Peters: But I like this, that second question around the right data and quality for implementing a generative AI project. Matt, before there was even AI. We’ve been working with dirty data and helping our clients solve that issues for a long time. So. It’s no different here, but maybe it’s more important than ever to help resolve some of these data issues, especially around quality when you’re looking at what your opportunities are moving forward.

[00:18:39] Matt Tonkin: Exactly. The dirty data is a huge thing we talk about all the time and the concept of right data. I think AI. But.

[00:18:53] Matt Tonkin: The stuff that you’re trying to use to populate the model. You never recorded it because it never [00:19:00] occurred to you that it would be useful. So if suddenly you’re, you have this great idea, but you don’t have the data, how do you get it as quickly as possible? But getting it as quickly as possible could be something that skews it too.

[00:19:13] Matt Tonkin: Right? So unfortunately, if you didn’t have that foresight a year ago to be collecting certain things, it might be a bit harder. But hopefully you have. That data and it was clean enough to, you know, get whatever project you have now. Right, right.

[00:19:30] Joe Peters: And then I think this last question of teams and skills, I think the number one skill that people need to have right now is getting GPT, getting the pro version, and trying to work it into your workflows, for one.

[00:19:51] Joe Peters: But then once you move beyond that and start to think of the other skills, I don’t know, I start to think of the [00:20:00] analytical needs as being kind of that next step in the, in the evolution. What are, what are your thoughts here? Yeah,

[00:20:07] Matt Tonkin: I think to your point when you said like getting started, that I would say curiosity, just like have fun with it.

[00:20:14] Matt Tonkin: Get in there and yeah, once you start seeing what. It can put out. I, I think that’s when some of those, like triggering moments in your brain happen and say like, okay, if it can do this you know, what can I, what can I learn from it? What can it, you know, understand that maybe I’m not seeing here? And you start to get some of those thoughts.

[00:20:33] Matt Tonkin: I think that’s, that’s the mindset is just playing around. And then take the things that you’ve done with it. And see where you can apply that to other problems you’re having. Make a note of what problems you’re having randomly through your week. And then go back and say, okay, how could I tackle this in an easier way?

[00:20:54] Joe Peters: I’m a strong believer that intellectual curiosity is a superpower, and if you have [00:21:00] that, it’s only going to serve to benefit you, not only in general work environments, but as we enter into this generative AI era, you really have got to try, be able to, be willing to try things out and experiment a little bit.

[00:21:18] Matt Tonkin: To your point there, it’s because curiosity can be a natural thing that you have, but I think we can train ourselves to be curious. So if you don’t have that, you know, innate drive to play around with stuff, it’s something you can do. It’s something you can get in the mindset and push yourself to do.

[00:21:35] Joe Peters: And it goes back to, I’ll never forget, one of the first projects I ever worked on as a consultant in starting my own agency many, many years ago was on the Canadian geospatial data infrastructure.

[00:21:52] Joe Peters: Now, just being intellectually curious [00:22:00] allowed me to be fascinated by that. And so you can take two things, two approaches. Either you’re going to think, Oh, some of the things that I’m doing are boring. But if you dive into any topic. And you can find what’s interesting and what the problem they’re solving for on anything.

[00:22:17] Joe Peters:: That intellectual curiosity is a real superpower. And I think you’re right, Matt. It’s something that you can develop and nurture over time. But if you take that and nurture it, it’s only going to serve you well throughout your entire career. I know that it’s, it’s allowed me to not only learn about things like the CGDI, But also, you know, I had McCain’s as a client one time, I know an awful lot about potatoes.

[00:22:48] Joe Peters: So anyway, let’s move on to the next one. But I really am a strong believer in intellectual curiosity. And I think by nurturing that right now, it’s the perfect [00:23:00] time to just. Get out there and try and experiment. It’s going to pay dividends 1 million percent. Okay. Let’s move on to our second hot take. What personal info would you give away for a good deal?

[00:23:12] Joe Peters: So this is something published in ad week and it’s bonkers and mind blowing from a variety of different perspectives, but. It was a survey of 2000 adult consumers and respondents largely did not trust AI advertising. That is not a surprise because most people don’t have a really good understanding of AI and AI has become the villain.

[00:23:34] Joe Peters: And we talked about this a couple of times on the podcast even if you’re going to see mission impossible, the latest one, the villain is AI now. So we’re, we’re, we’re seeing that everywhere. But. So the trust part is not a real surprise here, but it gets interesting when 87 percent said that they would disclose personal info to save the money.

[00:23:59] Joe Peters: Now, listen to [00:24:00] some of these numbers here, Matt, 52 percent would share their birthday to get a discount. 43 percent would share the name of their spouse to get a discount. 36 would share the names of their children to get a discount. But this last one is mind blowing. 34 percent would share their social security number to get a discount.

[00:24:29] Joe Peters: Oh, this is face palm.

[00:24:33] Matt Tonkin: That’s crazy. And I’m, I’m hyper cynical. I’m like sharing it. Like when I go to. The website for a brewery. I like I put in a fake birthday and I’m legally like, there’s no reason to do it, but I still do that. Right? Like I had just naturally cynical about sharing information, I guess.

[00:24:54] Matt Tonkin: The fact that someone would share their social security number, [00:25:00] you’re right, like it takes the words out of your mouth for, for any reason to get a discount on something.

[00:25:09] Joe Peters: It’s the ramifications of having that data out there in the wild. You know, we live in this era where big corporations are hacked constantly.

[00:25:21] Joe Peters: I would never trust anyone outside of a government entity with that information because the government entity requires you to share that information, to do an exchange, whether it’s your taxes or anything, but the idea of giving, I don’t know, home Depot or target your social security number. To do a transaction and not that home Depot or target we’re asking.

[00:25:48] Joe Peters: This is just a theoretical. We don’t want them coming after us because we did not say that, but anyway, we did, we, they did not start this. This is just an example. I can’t even wrap my head around

[00:26:01] Matt Tonkin: that. And it brings to the forefront too. And this, I know is external for me. This is just stuff people would do, but as things like scams get more evolved, right?

[00:26:15] Matt Tonkin: That, that’s the, that’s the dark side. And. You know, that, that this many people are willing just to give away very personal information for, you know, 10 bucks off of whatever, some shampoo right. It, it, it’s concerning for me just from a, you know, economic standpoint, how much money is scamming than already is.

[00:26:40] Joe Peters: No, and I think of the older members of my family and the scams are just getting better and better and when you think of things like voice synthesis and All of those things it’s just gonna get More and more difficult to understand what [00:27:00] is real and what is fake and what is a scam and what is an obligation?

[00:27:04] Joe Peters: That you have to do. So yeah, this one is a little bit mind blowing. It reminds me of another thing that came out last week So Matt had a meeting with rewind. io, but there was another rewind. ai that was making big waves last week with this pendant. So a necklace with a little pendant, maybe the size of, I don’t know, a tip of a Sharpie pen, maybe even smaller.

[00:27:35] Joe Peters: Not the tip, but maybe the cap. All right. Maybe half of a cap, if you’re trying to think in scale here, maybe an inch or so. Anyway, it was a microphone recordable device. And so the idea is that you wear this pendant all day long. It records. All of your interactions, it’s, it’s listening to what’s happening during the conversations that you have, and then gives you a summary of your day, Matt

[00:28:04] Matt Tonkin: So this is, this is a Black Mirror episode. That’s a Black Mirror episode, 100%. And it’s funny because, you know, you said what what’d you say? 87 percent of people are, you know, skeptical of AI and advertising. Yeah, these are this is why and I can see the crazy thing is I can see the benefit right like for sure There’s so much benefit to that, you know, but your mind gets going on all the little things like where’s where’s this being stored?

[00:28:36] Matt Tonkin: What’s it being used? To you know to train what’s it being used to sell to me? Right, so there’s so many things

[00:28:45] Joe Peters: wrong with it. Yeah Like like, okay, even if you think of personal romantic conversations that you’re having

[00:28:57] Matt Tonkin: Medical whatever you’re doing first dates. [00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Joe Peters: Yeah, or I don’t know maybe have bio parts of the day I’ve recorded, like, it’s so, it’s so over the top. I, I can’t even, I don’t even know where to start with it.

[00:29:16] Matt Tonkin: And just not, you know, Having control of that, even if you had that, even if it was a closed system and it’s just going back to your own private server, that is so much information out there that could get out there, but for it to be stored on some.

[00:29:31] Matt Tonkin: Server in Palo Alto or something, you know, it’s a little

[00:29:38] Joe Peters: concern. That’s one thing, but like, what are you going to wear a big consent button? Do you consent? Yeah, allow me to record this all day long?

[00:29:47] Matt Tonkin: Like. A lot of places are two party consents. So that’s another factor, right? I can’t see this.

[00:29:54] Matt Tonkin: Not triggering legislative action from most countries.

[00:30:00] Joe Peters: Well, there was a pretty big backlash, but there’s going to be people that use it. Anyway, it’s been a crazy week. It seems like every week is a crazy week, but let’s get down to our final section of the podcast, which is our pairing section. So this week I have a special album.

[00:30:23] Joe Peters: Near and dear to my heart one of my favorite bands. Well, let’s not just say one of my favorite bands. It is my favorite band And there’s a couple of indicators of this one There’s this piece of art right here that you can’t see if you’re listening to the podcast.

[00:30:40] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, we’ve got to keep that in mind,

[00:30:43] Joe Peters: Is some sound wave art, from a song by interpol. Okay, so interpol is a band My favorite band, seen them too many times to admit. This is some art in the background that’s showing Sound Wafer, probably their [00:31:00] most familiar song. It’s called Evil. It has a really great baseline to start the song. And then there’s a little photo just to the left of the art, which is of Paul Banks, the singer singing at a concert that was at a snap that pick there.

[00:31:19] Joe Peters: But. Our song this week comes from the album Marauder, which is a really great album. For those watching this, you can see the album art here. classic black and white Interpol, but and for those of you that have never heard of them or never seen them. They’re always wearing like Armani suits On stage playing indie rock like that’s kind of their brand.

[00:31:49] Joe Peters: To Really kind of go a little bit over the top on the dress and really not a lot of fan Action either like hello. We’re gonna play our set. That was a [00:32:00] great song and move on One of my favorite vinyl records in terms of the color, this sort of deep red album, Marauder, and the song that we’re playing this week is If You Really Love Nothing.

[00:32:19] Joe Peters: This is this is one of their singles right off this album. And it’s just a great album. Beginning to end. So, anyway, this is a soft spot for me, Interpol, and a great record, and a great production of the vinyl in that deep red. Matt, what are we pairing it with, with the

[00:32:39] Matt Tonkin: beverage this week? So, pairing it with the beverage this weekend.

[00:32:44] Matt Tonkin: Oh, that, that actually sounded good. I, I’ve, you always hear that like cracking, so I think that sounds like a Bob and Doug McKenzie. Yeah, I think the the audio only people got a treat there, . So for this week we have Muskoka detour. So [00:33:00] this is always my. Go to go to beer, I guess you could say, like, if, if I’m just going to be stuck with one beer, this would be the beer I have.

[00:33:08] Matt Tonkin: It’s light. It tastes like a bit of hoppiness, but it’s sort of that summer beer for me. And it’s even got the Muskoka or Adirondack chair, whatever your. Whatever terminology you use for those nice, those wooden chairs, that you’d be sitting on a deck, yep, sitting on a deck, just having this. And that, so for me, it’s, I’d say this is my like safe space beer.

[00:33:31] Matt Tonkin: It’s, you know, what I’m comfortable with. So getting into, we’re getting into more cold. It’s been cold here all week. So now I’m looking into, you know, all right, my summer beer’s gone. I need to get out of my safe space. Just like everything else AI tech, whatever. So

[00:33:49] Joe Peters: that sounds delicious. I’m going to have to add that to the list and I did find.

[00:33:57] Joe Peters: A small case, or it was like an [00:34:00] eight pack of speaking of beverages and fairly delicious, although there’s been some negative reviews, I did find the Coke AI drink. Okay. And I got an eight pack, like of the little. 300 milliliters. Sorry for us friends. I have no idea what that is in ounces, 10 ounces, something like that.

[00:34:24] Joe Peters: I did, I did have it over the weekend and it was, it was not bad. Okay. I liked

[00:34:29] Matt Tonkin: it. I still haven’t seen it. So I’ll, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Cause I want to, we’ll have to do a taste

[00:34:34] Joe Peters: test. On our next one. I think it’s a lot easier to find. I’ll give you some tips. It took me a little while to research it, but it’s available.

[00:34:43] Joe Peters: But anyway, well, thanks Matt for a great podcast this week. And thanks to all of you for listening. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn by [00:35:00] joining our newsletter or using the link in the description.

[00:35:03] Joe Peters: And as always, thanks mom for watching. See you later, everyone.

We’re back with episode 4 of Launch Codes. This week Joe is joined by Lauren McCormack, RP’s VP of Consulting. In this episode, Joe and Lauren cover a variety of topics including major updates from OpenAI, a study analyzing the misalignment of B2B sales and marketing teams, the future of process documentation and hot takes on AI regulation and a LinkedIn post about replacing B2B marketing automation platforms with B2C options. Also, Joe and Lauren reveal their Pairings for this week.

Listen below or watch on Spotify—and see below for show notes and the transcript.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Major announcements from OpenAI

Last week we covered OpenAI’s huge announcement that ChatGPT can now ‘see, hear, and speak.’ Joe had a chance to showcase the technology this week while on a trip to visit family. He took a photo of the foods in the fridge and prompted ChatGPT to provide a menu for the trip based on the contents. The results, as he said, were “mind blowing.”

A few days after the announcement, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT “can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources.”

Paying customers can now have access to information past September 2021 while remaining within the ChatGPT interface.

It’s made possible thanks to an integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Readers may remember a similar announcement made in March 2023. The feature was soon-after removed because of concerns for ChatGPT bypassing paywalls. However, now ChatGPT recognizes robots.txt code, which allows websites to exclude AI from indexing their content.

“AI optimization is going to replace search optimization,” Joe said. “And if you’re not indexing your site and you’re in the B2B space why would you want make it difficult for people to find out about you through AI search and prompting?”

 

The misalignment of B2B marketing and sales

A recent analysis from LinkedIn found that the average alignment between B2B marketing and sales was 16%.

LinkedIn’s Customer Insights Team analyzed over 7,000 B2B companies and measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both sales and marketing.

It’s “a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet,” wrote Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg for MarketingWeek.

The LinkedIn analysis found that high alignment can:

• Increase marketing generated revenue by 208%.
• Increase customer retention by 36%.
• Reduce sales and marketing expenses.

So how can B2B companies close the gap and improve the alignment in B2B organizations?

It starts with strategic alignment. Senior sales and marketing leaders need to have conversations about audiences and their teams need to correctly execute on that strategy.

While it sounds obvious, companies are not doing it.

These two teams need to pursue broader targeting. Given marketing’s capability to reach a larger audience quickly, it should adopt broader targeting to increase the likelihood of overlap with sales.

“There’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations about quantity and quality and it’s easy to get into a posturing about why numbers and KPIs aren’t being achieved,” said Lauren. “If you’re working towards a goal and sales and marketing alignment, you have to talk to sales. Go for ride alongs, [have] win/lose conversations… pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why.”

 

The future of process documentation

This week’s question from the MO Pros community is about documentation. While it’s not the most electrifying topic on the surface, it’s critical for companies to build a culture of good documentation.

The question poser is running into the issue of outdated documentation and poor visual mapping and looking for advice to get her team on board.

As part of her answer, Lauren suggested recording calls in Zoom or Slack while sharing your screen, summarize the process with visuals and save it to a common documentation channel.

And for those of us who prefer actual notes over video tutorials, Lauren said “take the transcript from your note-taker, upload it into ChatGPT and output it as a document.

 

Hot takes

• Will AI legislation become the next compliance concern?
• EU plans to introduce the AI act.
• Canada has introduced a voluntary code of conduct to complement upcoming legislation.
• The United States has an executive order with AI in the coming weeks.
• A LinkedIn post has had the MOPs world buzzing around the idea of replacing your B2B marketing automation platform with a less expensive B2C option. Is it a good idea?

 

Pairings & Plugs

As always, Joe brought in a vinyl record from his collection and for her first segment Lauren brought it a coffee from one of her favorite roasters in Arizona.

Lauren plugged her upcoming Virtual Marketo User Group (VMUG) on October 24 called “How to Transform Marketo with AI.” Joe plugged MOPs-Apalooza (November 5-8), where he will be speaking, along with Lauren and Andy Caron, President of Revenue Pulse.

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to episode four. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering major updates from OpenAI, the misalignment of B2B sales and marketing teams, Thanks the future of process documentation, as well as a couple of hot takes on AI legislation and B2B marketing automation platform switches.

[00:00:41] Today I’m joined by Lauren McCormack, the VP of Consulting at Revenue Pulse, and fittingly has just been awarded a three times Marketo champion designation for this year. Congratulations and welcome Lauren.

[00:00:57] Lauren McCormack: Thanks so much, Joe. Such a big honor, and [00:01:00] I’m thrilled to be back in this cohort of brilliant people across the globe, and it’s pretty cool to share in the celebration today with Andy Caron, a recently named president. She’s a four time Adobe Marketo Engage champion, as of today, so pretty cool to share that, that That distinction with her.

[00:01:21] Joe Peters: So basically what you’re telling everyone is that RP is the home of champions then?

[00:01:26] Lauren McCormack: You could say so. That’s a literal, a literal possibility that you could share that kind of information.

[00:01:32] I think at this point, it’s

[00:01:33] Joe Peters: The team’s been asking me to work in some dad jokes to start the podcast. So, you know, I couldn’t resist there. So in terms of our topics that we outlined, Lauren, what are you
interested in today? I’m super

[00:01:46] Lauren McCormack: excited to talk about sales and marketing alignment with you. I know we had some interesting, perhaps controversial takes on whether or not the MQL was dead.

[00:01:57] And I think I have a little bit of a [00:02:00] similar sentiment around some sales and marketing alignment. Traditional methodologies. So looking forward to that, especially. Plus, I don’t know, walking in for our viewers. I’m not even sure what Joe’s final take is going to be for the day. So certainly interested to see what the record is going to be today.

[00:02:20] Joe Peters: Well, yeah, we’ll we’ll save the, the, the cherry on top for the end of the. Podcast today. So as we move into the open, it seems like every week there’s some new announcement from open AI that is, you know, blowing our minds. And I’m going to say this week is no exception. So for those of you that are just tuning in chat GPT now can hear and speak.

[00:02:48] And so the image recognition has rolled out and I’m going to say minds have been blown. So that’s the first one, but we have three things that we’re going to run through. So let me run through the other two. [00:03:00] ChatGPT can now browse the internet with a bit of a plug in. So there’s that cutoff message doesn’t have to be a hard and true fact anymore.

[00:03:10] We’re able to browse to get up to date information. So that is the second one. And finally, The robots. txt now can exclude AI from indexing content and training on that content. So, let’s start with all three. Lauren, have you had a chance to try out any of the image recognition yet?

[00:03:32] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, you know, and I think it’s definitely better than mid journey.

[00:03:36] No offense to mid journey, but my kids would give me a hard time. Every time they saw me logging into discord and I would get lectures from my 16 year old about you know, the security issues of, of accessing apps from, from discord. I guess I raised him right. Is that what that means? If he’s cautious about Internet safety, but you know, it’s, it’s nice to see GPT meet us.

[00:03:58] I think where we’ve all wanted [00:04:00] to be at. It’s, it’s kind of been fun watching its limitations and its powers, but it’s interesting to see it growing.

[00:04:08] Joe Peters: Yeah, so I think, I think there’s two pieces here. So there’s the Dolly generation, which is coming, but now there’s also that image recognition part. So like, for example, I was visiting my sister out in Manitoba this weekend.

[00:04:22] And I took a picture of the inside of her fridge and her pantry. Uploaded those images and asked it what we could cook for dinner or what would be a menu for the weekend. And let’s just say minds were blown with that image recognition capabilities. So there’s, that is, that is just a new era of the AI being able to interpret images that were uploaded.

[00:04:49] Lauren McCormack: interesting. Google had that, visual search capacity and beta and I played with it a little bit when it first came out and it was just downright bizarre. And I don’t know, it’s, it’s an interesting opportunity for targeting. We, we thought it was creepy when our search results were fueling fodder. Now our cameras will too.

[00:05:09] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, it’s a whole new, a whole new area of being able to. You know, we had those Google Translate being able to look at menus and translate things for us. Now we’re going to be able to take photos of anything and see what GPT can tell us. But the, the other news here is this idea of being able to browse the internet. Have you had a chance to play with that a little bit in terms of pointing GPT that way? Not yet.

[00:05:39] Lauren McCormack: I’m looking forward to kicking it around. What have you been finding? I know it’s a. It’s been frustrating to have the limitations put with, you know, GPT being frozen in time cryogenically, like some kind of Star Wars creature. It’s nice to bring it up to current, but I would love to hear, I’ve, I’ve played with some of the other plugins that let it sort of have web browsing capabilities, [00:06:00] but unleashing the power of, of current time is going to be interesting.

[00:06:05] Joe Peters: I’m of two minds here. I actually really prefer. From a variety of different perspectives, the trained responses versus the internet searches, there’s a very big difference between adding a search to the end of your, your prompt and, and getting a response from that versus what’s the trained. LLM is is providing you. So I think for finding current things, if you’re going to do purchases or you needed to find up to date information on an event or something like that, 100 percent that’s going to be helpful. But when you’re actually using it as a strategic. Second set of hands. That, that, that I don’t, I don’t see that search capability.

[00:06:56] Joe Peters: And what I saw in being originally is, it’s very [00:07:00] similar, a little bit limited in, in sort of the, the depth of the response that’s given. But I think that’s a good segue into this last one on now. What do you think about sites being able to exclude the A. I. S. from indexing them? I

[00:07:18] Lauren McCormack: feel like all of our information and all of our personal secrets have already been scraped and it’s too little too late. But I guess it’s a novel idea to pretend like we can put the genie back in the bottle. I

[00:07:30] Joe Peters: don’t know. I, I, I think really you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot by, by limiting the AIs from indexing your site. Yeah. AI optimization is going to replace search optimization. And if you’re not indexing your site, then if you’re in the B2B play space. Why, why would you want people that make it difficult for them to find out about you through [00:08:00] AI search and prompting? So I’m, I’m not a big, I don’t know.

[00:08:06] Lauren McCormack: Did you have that existential moment when you tried to search yourself in GPT and you didn’t exist?

[00:08:12] Joe Peters: I haven’t tried that yet. That, that, that one is one I’ll have to, to try out. But that, that, that I’m sure would be a funny result. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, there’s quite a few Joe Peters in the world. So they might there might be a few others that that pop up other than myself.

[00:08:30] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think Adam, Adam knew Waterson tried searching for himself and had a bit of a moment when he couldn’t, and he’s got a distinctive name and he didn’t find himself in the early days of GPT. And I think, I think he took it as kind of a challenge. Like, well, I need, I need to exist here, you know, which is it. An interesting take and probably a good one for people that don’t want to index that. It is the future.

[00:08:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, but you’re, you’re right. Like the idea that we can put this genie back in the bottle is not probably a [00:09:00] great take on this, but let’s move into our second topic, which is the idea of the misalignment between B2B marketing and sales and. For many of us, the promise of marketing automation is alignment and solving for that problem that has existed since marketing and sales teams were formed. And so there was a study that came out of over 7, 000 B2B companies, and they measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both marketing and sales. And so the average alignment between B2B Marketing and sales was 16%. And so there’s a great quote here, a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet. But that’s from marketing week. So I, I love that quote. And, [00:10:00] but, you know, sadly that isn’t something that is a surprise to us.

[00:10:05] Lauren McCormack: No, not at all. And it’s been, a topic of discussion, we’ll say for my entire career. I’ve, I’ve spent a couple decades working on, on sales and marketing alignment because I was an AE for, for years, right? I’m, I’m that weird marketer that’s been on both sides of the fence. That’s had to work a territory that’s been incentivized by commission that wishes I had during my, my days and outside sales, a marketing department to feed me leads, right?

[00:10:37] And I can appreciate the fact that there’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations across the aisle about quantity and quality and close rates and SLAs. And it’s easy, I think, to get into a posturing. Where it’s like a blame shift of, of why numbers or, or KPIs aren’t being achieved [00:11:00] consistently over any kind of duration.

[00:11:02] Maybe it’s weekly, monthly, maybe it’s quarterly, maybe it’s the year, but at the end of the day, how many CMOs whose jaws drop to the floor actually know what their team is saying in their outreach sequences? Yeah, do you know that? Do you know, like, and it’s, it’s funny. I was, I was talking with somebody on our team internally here at RP about sales and marketing alignment.

[00:11:27] And I think a lot of people make it this obtuse, obscure, elusive, you know, utopia and I’m like, when we worked on this project, when, when, when we were delivering this project, did we talk to sales? Yeah. And if we’re working toward a goal of sales and marketing alignment, we actually have to talk to sales.

[00:11:49] Like those conversations are non negotiable and it’s like a fundamental people. I think show up for the weekly or quarterly. You know business reviews, they show up [00:12:00] and they sit down with sales when they’re forced to. What about actually going for ride alongs? What about win loss conversations? What about talking to your referral clients?

[00:12:09] Talking to your best Flag waving fan of marketing is always going to tell you that you’re wonderful. Pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why. Yeah. Cause you rather he tell, or she tell your, your CRO, or would you rather hear it from them? And they usually have ideas. Not always great ones, but sometimes good for, for campaigns, or they have at least feedback from the front lines that will make what you’re doing much more effective and it doesn’t do you any good to avoid those conversations and certain projects that you work on and deliver if you don’t deliver them in a silo.

[00:12:48] Will benefit the whole organization, put money in the pocket of sales and increase your, your reputation for being a good marketer within the company.

[00:12:57] Joe Peters: And so when you see those things like [00:13:00] the, the analysis was talking about what high alignment can deliver, you know, we, we hear these numbers thrown out all the time by, you know, increasing marketing generated revenue by 208%, increase customer retention by 36%.

[00:13:16] Reduce sales and marketing expenses as some of these promises that alignment provides. But what was kind of interesting was not only was it a diagnosis in this report, but it also talked about what some of the solutions are. So let me just quickly cover what those are and then we can. Chat a little bit about that.

[00:13:36] So the first solution was strategic alignment between marketing and sales. So senior marketing and sales leaders need to have strategic conversations about audiences and their team and the need to correctly execute on that strategy. And so that’s a pretty obvious one, but not something that we’re always seeing.

[00:13:57] And then broad targeting. Both departments [00:14:00] pursue a hyper targeting strategy. The small coverage of sales and marketing dramatically decreases the likelihood of overlap. So What’s your take on those two potential solutions? I actually just like your, your idea of the ride along and actually just saying, we need to talk more and, and totally

[00:14:21] Lauren McCormack: that was, that was the heart of, I think you know, I sat through formal solution selling training and for the marketing department, that was the key.

[00:14:29] It was like conduct win losses. So I think a lot of people have moved the exercise of creating an ICP. into some sort of academic pursuit that doesn’t actually reflect an improvement in targeting or an improvement in understanding who’s on the receiving end of your marketing campaigns. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is supposed to be one to many, but it needs to feel one to one.

[00:14:53] So how are you going to talk? You need to talk to customers and prospects if you don’t actually talk to customers and prospects. Right? [00:15:00] I mean, it’s just like the kind of obvious notion of getting sales and marketing aligned by having conversations with sales. You also need to talk to people that purchase your product, find out why, why do they love you?

[00:15:11] What would they change? What do they tell their friends? What, what conferences do they plan to go to this year? You know, what do they like to read? Where can you meet them where they’re at? But then also the losses, the people that that chose to go to your competitors. That information is super valuable.

[00:15:29] And is anybody collecting it? Maybe you have a field in your CRM where you’re tracking clothes lost, and maybe you have a reason, maybe. And maybe you recycle those clothes loss leads. I hope. If you don’t, you should talk to us. But if you’re going to bring them back in the loop, you need to know why they didn’t work out in the first place.

[00:15:46] Was it pricing? Was it? Particularly compelling, you know features of your competitors, right? But the only way to really get at this good information, this vital information that makes you better at your job, that gets you to stop talking [00:16:00] about releases and, and features and moves you into actual human territory where you can improve people’s careers, where you can get them promoted, where you can make them into evangelists for your brand.

[00:16:13] The only way you can, you can kind of bridge that gap is by having good conversations with your customers and prospects. So I think it’s, it’s sensible relationship building. Marketing automation is a beautiful tool, but if it feels cold, if it feels, inauthentic, you know, it’s, it’s not going to do the best job possible for you or for the people on the receiving end of your, your communications.

[00:16:40] Joe Peters: Yeah, so really, you know, having a dialogue with prospects with clients with and internally is really at the key and getting as many data points as possible. Form your strategies and decisions. Well, let’s, let’s, let’s move on to our next [00:17:00] topic, which is one that is coming from the community a mo pros community question.

[00:17:06] And thanks to Mike and the gang for letting us take a question and have put Lauren’s feet to the fire here. So here’s the question that was posed. On marketing ops. com. I work with a company with a good culture of documentation, but I’m constantly running into the issue with outdated documentation or poor visual mapping.

[00:17:32] What advice do you have for me to support our team to get on top of documentation? And so Lauren, I know documentation is a topic near and dear to your heart. So for sure, take it away.

[00:17:45] Lauren McCormack: Well, I think it’s been a wonderful journey to see solutions, architecture, documentation go from, you know, a stack of printed crazy 150 page flow chart you know, [00:18:00] a treatise on, on, on what was built in the system to now being able to just pop open loom.

[00:18:07] Or even slack and just to say, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to share my screen. Here’s a rundown of what was built and you can verbally summarize with visuals. And record a documentation, save it you know, to some sort of commonly accessed Slack channel, you know, maybe you have a documentation channel in your internal Slack and, and you just put it in that repository and it’s, it’s, you’re done.

[00:18:35] I mean, documentation used to take days. And days, and it was the necessary evil for, for, you know, posterity in case you, you, you had to pass your instance along to someone, or you needed to remember what you did three years ago. Now it’s, it’s, it’s almost effortless. And if you really love having actual documents for your documentation, take the transcript from a note taker and upload it into [00:19:00] GPT and output it as a doc, if you really want to doc, you know there’s so many ways that this can be.

[00:19:07] Augmented this whole process can be updated to save you a lot of cycles and a lot of time. But, yeah, I’m, I’m happy to hear that. Somebody’s still documenting out there. I think a lot of teams have have let it go by the wayside over the years as, as we’re getting leaner, especially in 2023, you know, doing more with less with less staff, that is an area that I’ve seen kind of get sacrificed, but there’s so many efficiencies, I think, in that space that people just need to take advantage of.

[00:19:36] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And just the speed at which you can do things now, recording a quick video, getting that transcribed and slapping that in for the, the future to be able to take that information. I know that that is just moving things along at such a fast speed instead of. Taking days to sort of map things out.

[00:19:57] Absolutely. And I think a lot of like [00:20:00] marketing ops professionals would, you know, prefer to keep work to themselves and, and they feel like explaining or teaching or sharing their processes with somebody else. Oh, that just takes extra time. But imagine if you have good documentation and you can pass that documentation along to somebody in a different time zone.

[00:20:20] And you can get this asynchronous work environment created across your team across geos where for for a team in a Mia to to wake up and and start building to pass it to a pack to pass it to North America, you know, to pass it to let him you can have an always on kind of demand factory. If you use your documentation to support.

[00:20:44] Governance and to support processes. You increase your efficiencies exponentially. If you don’t hold things back and you do document and you do knowledge share across your team.

[00:20:56] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And we’re even seeing doesn’t even those [00:21:00] kind of practices aren’t even just for documentation, but just normal business operations, even for us with our teams and.

[00:21:08] All the different regions were big fans of short little video messages being in someone’s Slack inbox when they come in in the morning that’s passing the torch from region to region and a lot can be conveyed in two or three minutes in a, in a quick Slack video. So yeah, whether it’s documentation or just coordinating some of these things that are facilitated by the tools we have at our disposal is.

[00:21:33] Just incredible stuff, but yeah, okay. Well, we, we can, we don’t, we can talk about documentation forever, but let’s move on. And I just want to thank our sponsors Knack. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes.

[00:21:55] Knack integrates with everything you need to make amazing emails and landing pages. [00:22:00] Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s k n a k. com. And so now we’re going to shift into our hot takes segment. And there’s a, there’s a few things happening in the headlines this week. And Lauren, what do you think about on the AI legislation?

[00:22:20] So we’ve, is this our new area of compliance concern? Cause we, we know that the EU is introducing the AI act and that’s going to be happening. I. Think in the early new year is the, what everyone is saying. It could be later this year as well. Canada has just introduced a voluntary code of conduct for AI.

[00:22:40] And there was supposed to be an executive order coming out by the end of the summer. Now we’re past that date. So we can only assume that something is coming soon. What do you think this means from our perspective in terms of some of the compliance things that we might be coming up against in the future?

[00:22:58] Lauren McCormack: It’s going to be interesting to watch. [00:23:00] I, I, I hearken back to when Zuckerberg was on the hill and I remember how painful it was to watch some of the members of, of You know, Congress in the House trying to get their arms around just exactly how social media even worked. I have serious questions and a few reservations around how easily, easily understandable.

[00:23:25] This is all going to be to our legislators. I’m hopeful, cautiously optimistic, but again, the genie in the bottle, right? It’s, it’s almost like a. Some sort of scout code of honor, like, we’re going to solemnly swear to do no, no, you know, damage, but I feel like the bad actors are just kind of laughing.

[00:23:44] Right? So I, I don’t know how, how savvy government is going to be and how, how much protection they can really offer us sadly, but I think it’s They have to put out for their constituents some sort of effort to show that they tried. It’s like a participation [00:24:00] move here, but I like

[00:24:01] Joe Peters: it’s a little bit more than that because it’s very rare.

[00:24:06] I would say I don’t I can’t recall very many times in my life that. And industry has come to government and said, Hey, regulate us. We need some guardrails that I’m going to say that’s a first for me. And so hopefully these industry leaders are assisting in. Those, what those guardrails should be. And my, my understanding is that there was a big meeting of the minds with Gates and Sam Altman and and Zuckerberg and I, and a whole, a few others I think that was a couple of weeks ago now they were meeting and, and giving some ideas on what should be going on there.

[00:24:51] So, but I think for us, when I look at it, I kind of feel like. Our clients are going to be thinking is, do we have [00:25:00] another GDPR situation here where, what are we doing and how do we stay compliant in all the regions where we’re operating at? That’s kind of where my head is shifting to. Yeah.

[00:25:11] Lauren McCormack: And I definitely, you know, gone through several rounds of compliance build outs over the years, whether it’s.

[00:25:18] It’s you know, can spam or California or EMEA and, and it’s ever changing policies. Right. But it’ll be interesting to see what compliance looks like and, and what we’re going to need to put in place to keep people

[00:25:34] Joe Peters: above board. And it could be just simple things like, you know, within your sites or your campaigns.

[00:25:42] Signaling if this has been, this is content generated by AI, that might be a rule, it could be, it could be in the terms of the website that no one reads, but that might be where you need to put a clause, who knows how onerous or how different these different [00:26:00] regulations are going to be, but what we can count on is that something is coming and Our clients and colleagues are going to have to take some action.

[00:26:10] There’s, there’s no doubt about that. That’s right. Okay. Well, let’s move on to the next one. Our next hot take, which is. Replacing B2B marketing automation platforms with B2C platforms. And so there was a little bit of a, a post that was popped that popped up in LinkedIn and got our antennas all fired up, which was the idea that and I quote, you can save a ton of money by replacing HubSpot, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot with a B2C email tool.

[00:26:45] Iterable or braze, it’ll be different, but it’ll work just fine. You’ll need to find a replacement for CRM sync, lead scoring and lead forms capture. And but the, the, the other part to

[00:27:00] this, this assertion is that most of the marketing automation tools have not added new function to warrant the price increases that we’re, we’re seeing.

[00:27:10] So what’s your, what’s your take on this one, Lauren?

[00:27:14] Lauren McCormack: I see a lot of people usually slightly outside of the operations team that think that tech is absolutely interchangeable and they fail to remember the human capital piece of the equation and the. Tech itself might be interchangeable, but the skill set of your team and the mastery and the wisdom and the, the legacy data and all of the, the kind of the pieces that don’t look like a price tag.

[00:27:51] On a budget sheet are the ones I think that that fall out of the focus when you’re thinking about migrating tech, but those are the most [00:28:00] important pieces. If you don’t have a braze expert or an iterable expert on your team. Don’t dump your marketing automation platform, like I’ll just, I’ll full stop right there, but I know who posted this and he’s a wonderful human being in front.

[00:28:16] But I think in the comments we were all wondering if perhaps he was getting some sort of kickback from this post. And I think, I think yeah, I fall in that camp, but I’ve seen, I’ve seen wonderful tech stacks that have included braids or adorable. And I think they’re fantastic, but I don’t know.
[00:28:33] That you can swap tech without swapping team resources.

[00:28:38] Joe Peters: I thought there was a funny quote from Phil Fernandez, who was a co founder of Mercado is that when Braze stops using Mercado and starts using Braze for their own B2B marketing, you will know it’s time. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Lauren McCormack: Yeah. And I think Justin Gray posted something similar maybe like a month ago and he was [00:29:00] really cryptic about what his new tech stack was that was saving him so much money.

[00:29:05] And I think we were all following in the comments, but he never did reveal what the wonder solution was. I think at the end of the day though there’s lots of different ways to get marketing comms out the door. Your own unique tech stack is your choice, but make sure you’ve got somebody to drive the bus for sure.

[00:29:24] Joe Peters: Yeah, that’s right. We haven’t got to self driving marketing buses yet. That’s for sure. That’s right. But who knows what the future will bring us, but speaking of moving along here and the next stop on the next bus stop. Is our pairing section. So this week’s album that that you’ve, you’re having a little listen to is from temples.

[00:29:51] They’re from the UK beautiful album. They, they put together here. All of the lyrics have been handwritten on postcards. It’s kind of [00:30:00] cool inside there. And then the vinyl is this really nice kind of translucent blue. And the song that we’re playing is called Cicada, which is a little bit of a funny thing.

[00:30:14] Unfortunately, I probably listened to too much music too loud, so now if the windows are closed in the summer time… I don’t hear the cicadas anymore at that that high level frequency. Obviously, if I’m outside, sure. But it makes me laugh every time I hear that song, Cicada, because it’s just a friendly reminder that you shouldn’t have the volume on 10 for too long if you’ve got the headphones on.

[00:30:42] But anyway, a great album. The, the, the album is Exotico and just came out maybe a couple of months ago, but a great listen and just a beautiful. Presentation of the album in in two, two records in there. So four sides to, to, of great music to [00:31:00] listen to. All right, Lauren. So this is Lauren’s first time on pairing.

[00:31:04] So she’s pairing. with something different as you know, we had a book pairing last week and a beer pairing the week before. So what do you have for us this week, Lauren? So I brought

[00:31:17] Lauren McCormack: some coffee. It’s, you know, I’m recording, I’m recording at 9am here and I love Tonkin’s can do spirit, but I think it’s a little early for a pint.

[00:31:26] So I did bring some coffee. It’s from our friends at Presta. Here in Tucson they do locally roasted coffee and they’ve been in the community locally owned for like 10 years and they’re probably the boldest deepest darkest roast I can find here in town, but I do love you know, going down to the farmers markets are going down into the downtown area and and trying all the local coffee.

[00:31:49] So, today we have their, their Mexican roast and, it’s a Dana Montana organic washed and it’s got according to the label [00:32:00] notes of milk, chocolate, hazelnut and trail mix.

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: The trail. That’s a funny tasting note. I feel

[00:32:09] Lauren McCormack: like I buy the specific. Type of coffee from Presta based on what the sticker suggests.

[00:32:15] I don’t know that I’m picking up trail mix. But I love that notion, but I will say

[00:32:24] you can definitely get the chocolate notes and it’s a great cup of coffee to start the day and a great pairing for, for your vinyl

[00:32:31] Joe Peters: choice there. So do they do they, do you buy a ground? Are you a take home the beans and grind it yourself? We

[00:32:38] Lauren McCormack: are a whole bean family here. And my, my oldest son works at the farmer’s market.

[00:32:43] And every time I go up to one of the vendors and they ask that question and I say whole bean, I can just see them smile like a knowing smile, like good job, good job. But there is something special, I think about You know, grinding and the process, the whole, I mean, you’ve got an absinthe fountain behind you.

[00:32:59] So [00:33:00] you understand the process of a beverage.

[00:33:02] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, the smell of freshly ground coffee other than the, once you finish grinding it, no one likes the actual process, but the aftermath That smell and aroma is something else.
I, it

[00:33:15] Lauren McCormack: opens it up. And I think there’s something Pavlovian now at this point with our little grinder, you know, it doing its work.

[00:33:22] I know it’s in

[00:33:22] Joe Peters: store. Yeah. That’s, that’s funny. The whole family comes running. Okay. So I think we’re, we have a couple of last plugs for pairing sections today. So I know you wanted to talk about something that you and Lucas are up to.

[00:33:38] Lauren McCormack: Yes our brilliant Lucas is going to be on a mug, a Tucson Marketo user group meeting that we’ve got coming up in 22 days.

[00:33:49] So, we’re talking October 24th. It’s going to be 9 am West Coast time. If you’re not. In Tucson, it’s okay. This is a virtual event. You can join from [00:34:00] anywhere in the world. You can sign up and I’ll send you the recording. You don’t even have to be there in person, but we will drop a link in our, our comments and and be sure to come and hear about the transformative power of AI in your Marketo instance.

[00:34:16] We’ve got a lot of interesting, topics on tap deciphering good leads from bad thinking about lead scoring and classification, even finding the best days and times to send your, your comms using the power of GPT. So if you’re interested at all, please do join us and we’ll see you there.

[00:34:34] Joe Peters: Yeah, that Lucas has definitely been diving deep in terms of AI integration with Mercado.

[00:34:40] So there’s going to be some fun things for everybody to hear about. Yeah, he’s really, really pushing the limits. He’s

[00:34:48] Lauren McCormack: brilliant. And I, I’m also delighted to host Tyron Pretorius from Telnix. So he’s gonna be the, the power duo, right? With Lucas on [00:35:00] our upcoming meeting.

[00:35:01] Joe Peters: And then one final note is also for for those of you that are interested in what we’re really looking forward to as a great conference the first weekend of November, Is mops, MOPAP Palooza.

[00:35:17] Lauren is a, a virtual speaker. And Andy and I will both be presenting, well, Andy has a has a session. I’m on a panel, and so it’s really shaping up to be a hyper-focused MOPS event that we’re really excited about. So you can find out more about that on marketing ops.com. We’re, we’re not getting it.

[00:35:37] We’re not. Getting any kickbacks or sponsorship money from Mike. We just think that it’s going to be a great event for those of us in the space and a chance for the community to get together. And

[00:35:49] Lauren McCormack: it’s in Anaheim, so Joe, you gotta, you gotta pick out some mouse ears.

[00:35:54] Joe Peters: Well, I’m not too sure about that. It’s not, I’m not too sure about that.[00:36:00]

[00:36:00] I, I, I, my last Disney excursion was Keeping my daughters happy with the princesses and waiting in line for photos. And I think it was even autographs, which is also kind of a weird thing, but.

[00:36:13] Lauren McCormack: the

[00:36:14] Joe Peters: way it should be. Yeah. I think my work’s done when it comes to Mickey. But anyway, maybe there’s a Star Wars thing that could draw me in, but anyway, that’s for another conversation.

[00:36:24] So thank you everyone for listening. Lauren, thank you for coming on the podcast this week. We really appreciate your insights and you can subscribe, rate, and review whether you like Spotify, YouTube, Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts. We appreciate your patronage and you can also stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

[00:36:50] And we actually have a newsletter that just dropped I think last Thursday or Friday. It’s also called Launch Codes. We sort of take the best. Elements of what we’re [00:37:00] talking out of the talking about on the podcast in the newsletter. So sign up for that as well.

[00:37:05] Lauren McCormack: Take care Thanks for having me