Month: November 2023

This week on Launch Codes, we’re thrilled to debut a new segment called “AI Navigators.” In every episode, we’ll focus on a different element of AI, helping marketing ops professionals through the challenges and opportunities it presents. In our 12th episode, Joe is joined by Andy Caron, President of RP, for an in-depth discussion on:

• Will the curtains close on OpenAI’s latest drama?
• How MOPs can take center stage for campaign planning
• Hot on the trail: What’s the best way to track a lead?
• Introducing our new segment: AI Navigators
• Marketing ops skills that MO-pen doors
• Class is in session: Amazon announces a school for AI
• Unplug to unwind: Cutting the cord on negative news!
• Pairings
• Read The Transcript

 

Listen below

 

The drama continues at OpenAI

We recorded last week’s episode around 9am on Monday. At that time, OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman had been fired and was moving to Microsoft. By the time we’d published that episode on Tuesday, the landscape was completely different.

On Tuesday, November 21st, the whole team at OpenAI was threatening to quit and then by Wednesday, November 22nd, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman would return as CEO, along with a new board and Greg Brockman as president.

Joe and Andy discussed the chaotic and uncertain nature of the AI industry, highlighting the disorganized thought process surrounding AI’s direction and governance.

They also touched on the significant transformation in OpenAI’s governance, moving from a non-profit to a more technologically mature board structure.

This shift aims to stabilize the leading technology in the space, emphasizing the importance of avoiding flakiness and ensuring a focused, effective approach.

Joe and Andy left with a hopeful outlook, suggesting that these recent changes might mark the end of a turbulent chapter and the beginning of a more structured and promising future in AI development.

 

5 ways MOPs can elevate campaign planning

As companies plan for 2024, MOPs teams should take the opportunity to get noticed as potential game changers. These tips come from Megan Michuda at Martech.org.

While it may be a bit late in the year for marketing ops to influence annual campaign strategies, these tips are valuable throughout the year.

Andy emphasized the importance of MOPs being proactive in creating these plans and adapting to market shifts. She noted the critical role of MOPs in leveraging data for strategic planning and ensuring data accuracy for future analysis.

“Our market has shifted so dramatically over the last several years on even a monthly, if not quarterly basis,” Andy said. “And so having that plan for how do we recalibrate, how do we think about modifying what we’ve set, not in stone, but sort of prepared for that process and know that that is part of the plan.”

Joe stressed the need for MOPs to think strategically and align their contributions with the organization’s overall objectives and key results (OKRs), saying “We get enveloped in this world of execution and operations… but thinking strategically about how MOPs can ladder up where you contribute to the OKRs and how you’re adjusting throughout the year is super important.” Remember to use data in a strategic way to support decision-making.

 

Track a lead using Acquisition Program vs. lead source

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “Does anyone actually use Acquisition Program in Marketo? If our business uses lead source, would that be sufficient?”

If your business is using lead source and that is sufficient for you, you may or may not want to take the time to use Acquisition Program.

Andy explained that while Acquisition Program is automatically set when a Marketo landing page is used, it requires additional steps to set up if using a global form or a non-local landing page. She highlights that Acquisition Program, being program-specific, offers detailed insights into what content is effectively driving form submissions, which complements the broader view provided by lead source about how people are reaching the content.

When paired with lead source, Acquisition Program can actually be quite powerful. Here’s an example: Someone came in via LinkedIn or via Google search. That’s going to tell you how people are getting to your content. But the Acquisition Program is going to tell you what content is actually getting that form fill for the first time.

If you still aren’t sure, err on the side of creating more data that could be useful in the future, rather than regretting not having it when needed.

 

AI Navigators

We teased a new segment at the beginning of this post. It’s aimed at helping MOPs navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.

One of Joe’s inspirations for starting this segment came from an experience he had at MOPs-Apalooza.

He was on a panel about AI and the future of marketing ops. The moderator asked the audience if anyone had AI guidelines within their organization — and the only hands Joe saw raised were from the RP team.

This lead Joe to create a template for AI Guidelines and Principles that you can download (and it’s ungated).

The template is divided into three sections, focusing on different AI use philosophies in organizations: open use, moderate restrictions, and high control environments. He emphasizes the importance of organizations identifying where they fit on this continuum and establishing guidelines to ensure everyone is aligned on AI usage.

Many organizations haven’t yet considered the implications of AI use, especially regarding data privacy and security risks. Andy also stressed the balance between AI and the human element, advocating for a human-centered approach that augments rather than replaces human decision-making.

 

Hot Takes

• What are the MOPs skills of 2024?
• Joe and Andy discuss Sara McNamara’s list of the best B2B MOPs skills for 2024
• Amazon is launching AI school
• Amazon aims to train two million people in AI as fight for skilled workers ramps up with Microsoft and Google. Workers with AI skills have the potential to earn up to 47% more in salaries.
• Doom scrolling: It’s time to log off
• People are ingesting too much negative news and psychology experts say it’s causing people to spiral and can exacerbate anxiety, and depression. Joe and Andy dove into how people in MOPs, and the wider population, can protect themselves from experiencing these situations.

 

Pairings

In “Pairings” this week, Andy and Joe delve into the intersection of music and literature. Joe shared a favorite album from The Strokes called “Room on Fire,” drawing parallels between its tracks and the recent developments in AI. He highlighted songs like “Between Love and Hate” and “Automatic Stop” as reflective of the AI industry’s current state, ultimately selecting “Reptilia” for its irresistible hook.

Meanwhile, Andy took us into the realm of science fiction with Dennis E. Taylor’s “We Are Legion (We Are Bob),” the first book in the Bobiverse series. This intriguing novel explores the concept of a self-replicating spaceship navigated by a human consciousness, leading to philosophical questions about identity, replication, and the nature of consciousness itself. Andy’s enthusiasm for the audiobook version adds another layer to this recommendation. Join us as we explore these creative realms in “Pairings,” where music and literature come together to enrich our understanding of the world.

 

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 12. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’ll the curtains close on OpenAI’s latest drama, how mops can take center stage for campaign planning, A community question, hot on the trail, what’s the best way to track a lead?

[00:00:34] Joe Peters: We’re introducing a new weekly segment called AI Navigators, and Hot Takes, marketing op skills that mope indoors, class in session, Amazon announces a school for AI, and Unplugged to Unwind, cutting the cord on negative news. Today I’m joined by Andi. Good morning, Andi. Good morning, Joe. What are you excited about talking about today?

[00:01:02] Andy Caron: I am really excited about this idea of a school around AI. I think that’s really cool. I’m definitely interested in what we’re looking at with this open AI drama, if that’s going to be going away. And finally, I’m always interested in talking about It’s balance and mental health. So that sort of unplugged to unwind theme is one that I’m, I’m keen to chat about as well.

[00:01:29] Joe Peters: Yeah, we, we’re trying to do a lot of that work here at RP as well. So that’s something that really hits home. That’s for sure. So let’s move into their first topic on the drama continuing at OpenAI. Mercifully and thankfully, Sam Altman is returning to OpenAI as CEO along with President Greg Brockman. The deal also includes some new board members.

[00:01:57] Joe Peters: And so last week when we recorded things at 9am on Monday, November 20th, everything was up in the air. The whole team was quitting on Monday sorry, Tuesday, November 21st. And then by Wednesday, we kind of came full circle, and there’s a return with a new board, and there’s a whole series of rumors around why this happened.

[00:02:26] Joe Peters: Andy, what’s your take on the drama, and how, how do we sort of move on from here, I guess? I

[00:02:39] Andy Caron: think this just is a wonderful tableau of just how all over the place everyone is with AI, right? Is it up? Is it down? Is it sideways? We don’t know. We want these people. No, we don’t. We’re quitting. No, we’re not. I, I think the whole thing to me just perfectly illustrates actually in a nice little capsule how discombobulated we are around what to do with this, who should be doing it and what the primary focus should be and who should be focusing on those things.

[00:03:18] Andy Caron: I think it’s just all over the place and I think this is a perfect example that clearly articulates just how. a disorganized the entire thought process around it is.

[00:03:31] Joe Peters: It’s also, I’ll agree with you on that. There’s a lot for people to do individually and a lot for organizations to do. It is kind of oddly symptomatic, I think is not an unfair.

[00:03:48] Joe Peters: Term to or a call to make on this the board governance I think was the real shocker for me and understanding how the board was structured and how it wasn’t really equipped to move from being kind of that non profit structure Open AI in its, you know, original format kind of idea that this would be an open for all type of structure so Moving to this new model with a new board that’s maybe has a little bit of technological maturity.

[00:04:29] Joe Peters: I think can only serve us well because what we don’t want is flakiness by the leading technology in the space. It’s too important. Correct. Yeah, I agree. So hopefully we can just move on and that this is the end of a chapter or as Some people like to say the end of the first inning. So we have a long game ahead of us and hopefully we can just move on.

[00:04:59] Joe Peters: The, all the other rumors on what are the. Reasonings behind it. What is the technology development that could have triggered something? Is there something massive in terms of a leap forward in the capabilities of the AI? Who knows? Q Star idea could be an amazing new development if this sort of Unbridled learning and I’m going to say optimization kind of agent exists to be able to process and learn in real time, the optimal way of solving a problem or achieving a task.

[00:05:42] Joe Peters: You take that to stock trading, for example, or derivative trading or any of those things, a model like that unleashed could be super interesting, but that in and of itself, I don’t think is really what happened here. We had. Personality conflicts in a very oddly structured board that led to, I’m going to say, and I don’t think I’m stretching to say this, an amateur approach to letting go of a, of a CEO that in a way that probably did wasn’t, wasn’t justified from anything that we’re seeing.

[00:06:26] Andy Caron: That makes sense to me. I mean, I think at the end of the day. It’s also about where people with this level of intelligence feel valued. And if the value wasn’t being recognized, it doesn’t surprise me that he might have thought about stepping away as well.

[00:06:44] Joe Peters: Well, there’s, Sam Altman has a bright future no matter what he decides to do.

[00:06:50] Joe Peters: Indeed, right. And whether that was going to be at Microsoft or OpenAI. Right. I’m just happy that it’s resolved and maybe we can close this chapter and move on. But. It does, it does seem to be resolved and hopefully we won’t have to chat about this type of development and drama anymore. Why don’t we just switch gears and move to our next topic on five ways mobs can elevate the annual planning process.

[00:07:23] Joe Peters: And this came from Megan Mishuda at martech. org. And it was around the planning process for 2024 and how MOPS team take an opportunity to get noticed as game changers. And there was a couple of things here that I thought was really interesting in the article. One was the idea of building a planning template with business objective, key actions and reporting measurements.

[00:07:52] Joe Peters: Another one was around streamlining information flow, and then a couple of other areas around translating data into strategy, annualizing sorry, prioritizing the annual plan, and establishing a process for adjustments throughout the year. This, to me, Andy, just seems to be good thinking, good planning.

[00:08:14] Joe Peters: And good guidance for our colleagues and MOPS to kind of prepare and arm themselves to make a contribution not only to the planning process, to set a course for themselves for the next year.

[00:08:29] Andy Caron: I agree. I think the thing that I like about it most is encouraging MOPS to lean into and prepare for the creation of this plan before it’s asked of them at the 11th hour.

[00:08:42] Andy Caron: In a flurry of activity to produce it. Once marketing realizes that mops is holding the keys to the bulk of their performance and success data from the previous quarters and years. So in that proactivity, I think that this is wonderful. Number five is my favorite, the, the establishing a process for adjustments.

[00:09:06] Andy Caron: Our market has shifted so dramatically over the last several years on even a monthly, if not quarterly basis. And so we can talk about anticipated ROI, but if you’re using the same playbook that you were using for Q4 last year, assuming you’re on a fiscal based annual model, right, against the standard calendar, it’s not going to work.

[00:09:29] Andy Caron: It’s a completely different… And so having that plan for how do we recalibrate, how do we think about you know, modifying what we’ve set, not in stone, but sort of prepared for that process and know that that is part of the plan.

[00:09:47] Joe Peters: I couldn’t agree more. I think we’re sometimes our colleagues have their challenges is that we are marketing operations.

[00:09:58] Joe Peters: So we get. Enveloped in this world of execution and operations. It’s not, there’s no surprise there, but thinking strategically about how mobs can ladder up where you contribute to the OKRs and how you’re adjusting throughout the year is super important. And then the other area that I love is the idea of data to strategy.

[00:10:28] Joe Peters: As custodians of the data that is so important to leadership and. In terms of our marketing performance and execution data. This idea of laddering it up and thinking about it in a strategic way can only serve our MOPS colleagues better, right? Like, that should be a real focus.

[00:10:52] Andy Caron: Yes, I think streamlining the flow of that information, talking about, okay, what are we going to be?

[00:11:00] Andy Caron: Measuring against what’s the critical data for us to have and then where are we sourcing it and how are we interpreting it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down with a client and said, okay What are your if not OKRs and KPIs and what’s the data that you have to? provide benchmarking for that And we’ll go in and look at the field or fields that they’ve indicated and they’re, they’re not being consistently maintained, they’re 90 percent blank.

[00:11:28] Andy Caron: There’s not a strategy around how to even ensure that that data is there for future you to be able to interpret it. And so that I think is the other half of this is if we’re planning now, it also tells us what actions we need to be doing currently to ensure that the data is there later when we go to do the analysis.

[00:11:49] Joe Peters: 100%. So, this is great advice from from Megan and really something that everyone should be thinking about. We’re getting close to the very end of the fiscal year so there may or may not be a huge window to make the contribution to the next year’s plan. Regardless, having this thinking and taking a little bit of time to go through these types of questions can only serve you well.

[00:12:20] Joe Peters: Alright, well, let’s move on. To our question from the community and marketingops. com. Thanks for, for making this contribution this week. So our question is, does anyone actually use Acquisition Program in Marketo? If our biz uses LeadSource, would that be sufficient? So why don’t we start there,

[00:12:44] Andy Caron: Andy? Yeah.

[00:12:45] Andy Caron: Yeah. So Acquisition program is an interesting data point. It is set within the specific Marketo program where acquisition has occurred. Realistically, that may or may not always be the case. Sometimes it’s the marketing acquisition, but you purchased the lead three years ago and it was blank, so you filled it in.

[00:13:06] Andy Caron: I didn’t understand acquisition program for the first year that I had back in 2012. I, it wasn’t clear how to use it. There wasn’t good instruction. On what it was for, how it was used necessarily. It was in the documentation, but it was a little loosey goosey. And so what I would say is if your business is using lead source and that is sufficient for you, you may or may not want to take the time.

[00:13:33] Andy Caron: To use it acquisition program is automatically set. If you’re using a Marketo landing page, local to the program, and someone fills out a form on that page. But if you’re using a global form and then putting it on your website, or you’re not using a landing page that is local to the program, you have to take the time to create a flow step to actually set the acquisition program inside of your.

[00:14:01] Andy Caron: Flow steps in your automation. And so what that’s going to mean is that you’re creating that additional data point. Now, the way that I like to think about acquisition program is this is program specific and it ladders up to potentially what you might think of as the tactic what Marketo calls your channels.

[00:14:23] Andy Caron: And when you set the acquisition program, it sets a tag of acquired, which then also syncs over to the SFDC campaign, if you’re using Marketo paired with SFDC and connecting that data. And so when paired with lead source, it can actually be quite powerful. Lead source to me. is what led to the acquisition program, right?

[00:14:47] Andy Caron: So they came in via LinkedIn or via Google search or what have you. So that’s going to tell you how people are getting to your content. But the acquisition program is going to tell you what content is actually getting that form fill for the first time. And I think there is good valuable data there if you choose to collect it and to use it.

[00:15:08] Andy Caron: I think really sufficient is a, is such a valuable data. a, a unique case by case term, right? What is sufficient for one business might not be sufficient for another, or it may be sufficient for now, but it won’t be sufficient for future six months or 12 months in the future. You, or let’s say you get promoted and your replacement, they may want or need that data.

[00:15:35] Andy Caron: I always err on the side of create more data that You think will be useful. Don’t create data just to create data, but create more data if you think it will be future state useful, create it now, and then if you don’t use it, you can always deprecate it, erase it, get rid of it, whatever. But if you have it and you need it, it’s a much better place to be than if you need it and you don’t have

[00:15:59] Joe Peters: it.

[00:16:01] Joe Peters: Right. So this is, this is kind of like a strategic housekeeping kind of decision where, you know, it doesn’t
really hurt. But it could be a problem later on if you don’t have it.

[00:16:18] Andy Caron: Well, I think it’s about identifying unique data sets, right? What brought someone into the system as a lead source isn’t the same as what brought someone into actually filling out a form and giving you their information for the first time.

[00:16:34] Andy Caron: And so having those two separate data sets if they’re useful and understanding that they are separate and why they’re different from each other and differentiating them strategically, I think is really the key

[00:16:46] Joe Peters: here. Yeah. More is better in this situation. So, all right. Well, thanks, Andy. And thanks to our marketingops.

[00:16:56] Joe Peters: com community for this question this week. Now, keeping consistent with the needs of the community is really the inspiration for this next segment. that we’re going to be calling AI Navigators. We’re going to do this each week. We’ll be looking at a different element of AI to help our MOPS colleagues in thinking through some of the challenges and opportunities that AI is going to present.

[00:17:30] Joe Peters: When I was at MOPSpalooza, it seems like That was a month ago, but it was still, we’re still in November when I was on AI panel, the Paul Wilson, who was the, who is leading the panel discussion, asked the crowd, how many had AI guidelines? How many of the participants in the room had AI guidelines? And I’m pretty sure it was only the RP team members that put their hands up.

[00:18:06] Joe Peters: Yes. Yes. That was it. In thinking about that, we know that most of our community is using ai, or at least has, has tried it. I thought it might be helpful to share some of our thinking at RP so the community could use that to inform some of their thinking, not providing things that are gated, just a link for people to downloads.

[00:18:38] Joe Peters: We’ve created a a template that people can use just internally to help. I’m going to either foster an internal conversation, personal exploration around this, or internal to your team or group to start to think through some of these things. So, the document is divided into three sections. One on kind of the philosophical AI use models for organizations.

[00:19:14] Joe Peters: And, and maybe I should explain that a little bit. I think there are three different philosophies in organizations. One is an open use free reign use AI, however you want in, in some organizational con constructs, that’s. That’s really helpful, and you want as much creativity and learning as possible. A middle of the road approach would be some moderate restrictions, which are, A, don’t put up our data, don’t put up our client data.

[00:19:51] Joe Peters: Kind of think about those things or several areas for restrictions before you do it. And then there’s high control environments, and some of our clients are in that space where every single use case needs to be approved. And nothing can be done with AI unless it is approved. So organizations need to think where do you fit in that continuum and then determine some guidelines and principles that can be shared internally so that everyone’s on the same page.

[00:20:26] Joe Peters: So this template document that we’re, we’re going to be posting on our website and in the show notes as well is just a place for people to come and take This information, food for thought, and be able to use that to fuel some conversations that are pretty important in organizations. Because in the absence of any kind of outline or guidelines or principles, individuals get to choose how they’re going to use AI.

[00:20:57] Joe Peters: Which may not always be the right model for organizations.

[00:21:06] Joe Peters: Any thoughts there, Andy?

[00:21:08] Andy Caron: I think that this is an important conversation, and I think some people haven’t even thought to have it yet, to be honest, which is interesting, they’re, they’re so busy thinking about if they could, they haven’t had the should we conversation you know, I reviewed this Again, I, I know I’d seen it prior, but I, I went through it a little bit more deeply just with a newer lens of not, you know, the spring and innovation and lots of new stuff coming forward.

[00:21:38] Andy Caron: And I, I think the thing that was most interesting to me through my current lens is first around the data privacy and security and the risks inherent with what kind of data you put in particularly open source or open models. First, and just how risk adverse I’ve seen clients be when you’re talking about data and data modeling and AI.

[00:22:09] Andy Caron: aNd then on the other side of that completely, the How do we balance AI and human element in there, I think is a wonderful addition, right? How do we look at human decision making and augmenting human with AI as opposed to replacing them or making that the focus as opposed to the people doing the work with AI as an assist?

[00:22:41] Joe Peters: I think that human centered Approach is really important and as well because our mops colleagues are generally the more technically proficient. Team leaders in marketing. There’s a chance for our mops to play a real leadership role in this space. Because if this thinking isn’t happening elsewhere, there’s a chance for you to say, well, put up your hand and say, we may need to be starting to think about this and this is a foundation that we can have a bit of a conversation about.

[00:23:21] Joe Peters: There’s, there’s, there’s nothing proprietary here or anything. This is just food for thought to help. And enable you in making some of these decisions that are, which are really important for organization.

[00:23:36] Andy Caron: Agreed. The one thing I, I don’t think that it necessarily dives in as, as deeply as I would like that I think has also been a focal point for our own organization is around the socialization of what’s happening.

[00:23:51] Andy Caron: We talk a lot about training and preparedness, but I think there’s also an aspect here around how the work that’s being done is socialized, is shared, built upon, becomes a foundation for someone else’s. I think that’s another aspect of this where it needs to be not just an organizational approach, but also an organizational utilization.

[00:24:18] Joe Peters: Well, Annie, don’t, don’t scoop our future segments here. There’s, there’s, we, we need to keep it enough for, for our future. future weeks here, but week by week, we’re going to start to talk about these things. And there are other really important parts around organizational culture, AI literacy, AI councils, learning and, and considering what all of the opportunity can mean for an organization.

[00:24:47] Joe Peters: There’s a lot here. But I think moving on from this is just a first part of the conversation. Yeah, just a first first. We want to give you bite sized chunks every week. And this is week one in having that conversation as this in this A. I. Navigator segment. All right. We can’t forget to thank our sponsors.

[00:25:13] Joe Peters: 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. Get to market 95 percent faster with Knack. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. All right, let’s move into our hot takes segment. And I love this first one on what are the mop skills for 2024.

[00:25:39] Joe Peters: And Sarah McNamara shared this list of the best B2B mop skills. Based on job descriptions. And the list, Marketo HubSpot at the top, Tableau second, Excel three, followed by SQL, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. Where to start here? So, what do you think, Andy, about this list?

[00:26:05] Andy Caron: I like it. I think that there’s nothing on this list that surprises me per se.

[00:26:14] Andy Caron: But I do think that sequel is almost synonymous with Tableau. And so those two, not that they’re redundant by any means, but one is an extension. of the other. And so I think that the, the, the two are sort of almost slashed is, is interesting. I think also the fact that there’s no mention of other code Python AI.

[00:26:40] Andy Caron: That was,

[00:26:40] Joe Peters: that was, that was what I thought was missing here. Yeah. And, and that’s a, that’s a skill that we’ve been really nurturing here at RP. Exactly. But the other, the other ones here, um, are really just the core of our business, I would say.

[00:27:01] Andy Caron: They are. The other piece that I might anticipate, anticipate.

[00:27:06] Andy Caron: Be seeing added in 2024 is around CDP as a discipline and data architecture. I think that’s another piece that’s
really going to become a core MOPs skill that is a necessary part of the team.

[00:27:25] Joe Peters: Right. And there has been some really interesting conversations around, well, MOPs. subsume a data ops kind of function in organizations.

[00:27:36] Joe Peters: And if being the custodians of such important data, there is a real shift in that mindset and thinking that those skills are going to be super important moving forward as well.

[00:27:49] Andy Caron: Yes, I had a really interesting conversation at Mousepalooza with the CMO at OpenPrize and we agreed that we felt like the trend was going to be to move away from being a database marketer to being a data marketer.

[00:28:05] Andy Caron: And I think that is the theme that I have front and center for me as I’m looking at trends and where we’re going to be headed in the next year or two.

[00:28:15] Joe Peters: I love that. I hadn’t heard that before, but I do love

[00:28:18] Andy Caron: that. I coined it. So you’re welcome.

[00:28:19] Joe Peters: A little TM in the corner of that post. All right. Well, let’s move on to another hot take topic here.

[00:28:32] Joe Peters: And that is about Amazon launching. So the Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is wanting to train two million people in AI as it fights for skilled workers. And so they’re offering free training in a program centered around eight online courses. There’s, there’s a lot more details in here, but. I think conceptually, this is a really interesting move by Amazon, not only to kind of democratize this learning, but also identify talent for them to recruit for their future AI workforce needs.

[00:29:18] Andy Caron: I agree. I think that this is one of those things that you need to have on your resume and it’s a fantastic item to add if you’re still in school and you’re looking to bulk up before you start to job hunt. I think this is one of those perfect. Items that’s paired, or if you’re returning to the workplace after having taken some time post 2020, 2021, I think this is going to be huge.

[00:29:46] Andy Caron: I’m curious to see if the, what the 2 million audience will be comprised of, who will make up the bulk of that, or if it will be very differentiated and, and multifaceted.

[00:30:01] Joe Peters: Interesting. We may have had a little glitch in the space time continuum there. I lost you for a second. And so. Just in case, do you want to just recap your last thought?

[00:30:12] Joe Peters: I

[00:30:12] Andy Caron: was saying that I thought it would be interesting to see who the, what the two million person audience was comprised of. If this is students that are looking to bulk up their resumes, people that are returning to work after maybe having taken some time away, if it will skew toward one particular age group or population or if it’ll be fairly differentiated in who ultimately ultimately…

[00:30:36] Andy Caron: Receives and completes the training that Amazon’s going to provide.

[00:30:42] Joe Peters: Okay, that, that makes, that makes sense. It’s very interesting. I think all the big players are democratizing the learning, which is super important. I think we’re seeing that, that everywhere now, and there’s a lot of opportunity to, to learn.

[00:30:57] Joe Peters: So you put your hand up and dive right in as, as deep as you would like. Alright, let’s move to our third topic this week on doomscrolling. It’s time to log off. This is a story from Wired. com and we’re seeing that people are ingesting too much negative news. And social media algorithms tend to elevate the most contentious content.

[00:31:23] Joe Peters: So feeds are showing you things that will elicit a visceral or emotional response. And negative news can… Increased anxiety, depression, PTSD. And so a professor from the University of Vermont told Wired that this idea is that stress is cumulative in this area. And one thing starts stressing you out and then another and another and another.

[00:31:54] Joe Peters: And you’re spiraling in sort of this scrolling fed loop of, of I’m going to say anxiety. Yeah. And so I think we’re in a, we’re in a situation where. It’s important for, for us to figure out ways to either stop the scroll or take the breaks or look for other, other ways to fill in the moment that might be a little bit more positive and healthier for us.

[00:32:29] Andy Caron: Yeah, I think the generalized level of anxiety that exists for a lot of people these days is reaching a fever pitch. It’s not tenable. I was chatting with someone recently, and we were talking about the difference Today, of being sent to Europe on a business trip versus a hundred years ago, a hundred years ago, we’re traveling from Chicago.

[00:32:52] Andy Caron: You’d get on a train, you’d get to the steamer ship. Then you’re looking at least a three week crossing. By the time you get over there and get to your destination, you’re going to do other things. You’re probably going to set up other meetings, et cetera, and then you’re going to head back. So we’re talking about what at minimum for an important business meeting in Europe, a three months.

[00:33:11] Andy Caron: Period of time and your work. Supported you in taking that time because that’s the time it took to get there. That was the pace of life. I don’t think we’ve had a chance in the last 100 years to evolve from a nervous system, from a composition of the chemical aspects of our brain to deal with the fact that today if I have to go to Europe.

[00:33:35] Andy Caron: I’m working all day, I’m grabbing my bag, I’m going, I’m hopping on a red eye, there’s Wi Fi on the plane, so I’m going to try to work while I’m on the plane because I need to use that time to be efficient. I might get a little sleep, then I land, I grab a cup of coffee, I like boost myself back up, I maybe get a couple hours of sleep, then I, you know, go out.

[00:33:54] Andy Caron: for a business dinner. Cause I got to do that. I’d get up the next morning. I have my meeting. Then I run to the airport, hop on the plane, get back on the wifi, maybe get a few hours of sleep. And then I’m expected to be online the next day. And even saying that the level of anxiety and tension that I can feel.

[00:34:10] Andy Caron: feel from that pace, I think perfectly exemplifies the fact that the pace at which we are expected to do life in general doesn’t jive with the way that our nerves, nervous systems are wired, the way that we as humans have evolved. to have a cadence and style of life, and then you add in the fact that you’ve got a computer in your back pocket all day, you go, you lay down, what do you do?

[00:34:36] Andy Caron: You go on, you go to look at one thing, and next thing you know, you’ve spent an hour and a half, and all you’ve done is added additional layers onto that snowball of anxiety and stress.

[00:34:48] Joe Peters: Exactly, and I think we have to find our own ways that make sense to us. I think we know. We know if you ask anyone.

[00:34:58] Joe Peters: Intellectually, we all know that this is a challenge, but what are we actually doing about it? That’s, I think the question that we need to challenge ourselves and as we move into this new year resolution phase, this might be a time to examine our use of different technologies and figure out a time to give ourselves a bit of a break.

[00:35:26] Joe Peters: What’s the mental health? break we can take from this. And, and I, I think maybe that’s a good segue into what we want to do in one of our first episodes of the new year is really start to talk about wellness and mobs and what that means. And, and it’s not only wellness at work. We can’t just pretend that, that there’s just this magic severance between work and home life.

[00:35:56] Joe Peters: And technology and how it kind of connects to us in all of these spaces, we really start to, we need to really take some time to think about ourselves and how we’re taking care of ourselves and each other.

[00:36:11] Andy Caron: So Joe, do you doom scroll?

[00:36:14] Joe Peters: Absolutely can, but I have tips to stop. Like I know, I know when I’m doing it.

[00:36:20] Joe Peters: So for example, my guilty pleasures, I’ve put only on my iPad and I’ve taken them off my phone. Okay. And that is my control function. I can’t just do it whenever I want. I actually have to go get that device, spend the time and do it. And I, and for me, that’s really helped me a lot. I still love to go on X and, and, and, cause I love all the learning that I can do there and amongst all the other stuff that’s, that’s on the platform.

[00:36:56] Joe Peters: But if I just have it on my phone all the time, it can be my default that I go to. Whenever I have a few minutes, and that’s the, that can be the unhealthy part.

[00:37:07] Andy Caron: My tactic, so I, I don’t separate church and state in devices per se, but I have been known to, to get into it once I’ve laid down and I, I’ll have to stop myself because I can, you know, spend an hour and go, geez, that, that was time I should have been sleeping or, you know, could have used more, more efficiently.

[00:37:27] Andy Caron: I like to listen to audio books as I’m going to sleep. But my tactic is I, as I’m falling asleep with my audio book, have started putting my phone in airplane mode and then I will play solitaire just to get my brain to shut down because I need something to shut it down and sadly that is my phone.

[00:37:51] Andy Caron: I wish it wasn’t a screen. They say that’s not optimal. to look at your screen right before you fall asleep, but the the solitaire sort of relaxes and shuts my brain down enough. But then if I do click over and sort of almost automatically go to Facebook, it’s not live, right? I can’t get into the scroll, the, the, the videos, the snippets, the reels, all the other stuff.

[00:38:14] Andy Caron: That will then have me going down rabbit holes and so having that actual physical disconnection from the internet while still being on my device is, is a way that I’ve found. to mitigate that for myself. So that’s been very useful. You’ve

[00:38:30] Joe Peters: kind of just allowed kind of like whatever is cached as your limit, which is, which is kind of, that’s a fun way of doing it.

[00:38:39] Joe Peters: I think this is, we’re going to, this is a hot take, but I, I, this week, but Yeah, there is. This is an important conversation. And I think thematically, I think there are things that we need to do better, not only as organizations, but to challenge ourselves as individuals assist ourselves because there is some really unhealthy behavior that is oddly become normalized.

[00:39:09] Joe Peters: And when you compare it to earlier eras, like I think of my, what my parents were always yelling me about watching TV, the idiot box, that that’s what they called it. Now, now, now, well, what does this, what does it make? What is this? What’s our phone? Right? I don’t know. But anyway, let’s move on. There’s a lot, there’s a lot for us to cover here.

[00:39:36] Joe Peters: And I think we can help each other out and start to strategize on having these moments of disconnection and And because it’s in our best interest, I really think it is. All right. Well, let’s move into our pairings this week. I thought we’d go to the Strokes one because the Strokes are one of my favorite bands in my top two or three.

[00:40:05] Joe Peters: So I have a real soft spot for them, but I thought with everything that was going on, Room on Fire was perfect album. And the tracks kind of feel like it could be used just the titles to tell the whole story around AI recently. Between love and hate, automatic stop, under control, the end has no end.

[00:40:33] Joe Peters: These are just tracks off the album that we could put the whole Altman saga into that sequence there. But in the end, I couldn’t help myself. The hook is too good in Reptilia. So that’s the track we’re going to share this week, but a great album. The colored vinyl is amazing on this one in terms of what Vinyl Me Please has done.

[00:40:57] Joe Peters: You can see that in our, in our show notes. As always, we play a little bit longer segment of the song at the end. End of launch code. So at the end of this episode, you want to hear Reptilia in a, in a longer format, you’re, you’re, you’ll have that opportunity there, but I couldn’t help myself make this connection and I had a lot of trouble picking the track, but I think this one is good for us this week.

[00:41:25] Joe Peters: So what do you have on the reading side, Andi?

[00:41:28] Andy Caron: So I like to alternate fiction and non fiction. So this is a a fiction section for me. The book I am bringing is the first in the Bobiverse series, which is what it’s affectionately come to be known as. But the first book is called We Are Legion, We Are Bob.

[00:41:45] Andy Caron: And… The We Are Bob is in parentheses, but We Are Legion is the first installment in a four book series by a sci fi legend. I mean, just amazing work coming from Dennis E. Taylor. I absolutely love this book, but it postulates this future. Of a von Neumann probe, which is a self replicating spaceship that can then be used for exploration.

[00:42:15] Andy Caron: So it has 3D printers on board and you can build more ships as you find deposits of various minerals and other items in space. Rather than having to build it all and launch it all from Earth, which is an interesting first piece. But what makes this really fun… Is this is a human consciousness that has been loaded into a computer and that has been launched with the spaceship as its navigator and as its primary crew member, I guess because of self self replication, this man, former man, Bob is also replicating himself.

[00:42:56] Andy Caron: And so it gets into these fascinating areas above and beyond. space exploration and sort of the challenges and realities of finding, you know, the materials needed to even make the spaceships with, if you could clone yourself. What work would you have that person do versus what would you pick for yourself?

[00:43:16] Andy Caron: How is that person individuated from you? Are they you? Are they a separate person? And then as they replicate out from that first replica, how, what’s the drift like? Would you even like a version of you? Are there different things that come to the fore or more subdued in individuals? And how do you Potentially work in a community of yourself in a whole slew of varieties, and it’s just such a fun, great exploration that also looks at human consciousness in a digital environment and what would be necessary to even maintain sanity in that type of a scenario.

[00:44:01] Andy Caron: So, fantastic series. The first book is really great and I highly, highly recommend, as I always do, the audible version. The narrator is just fantastic. He is Bob for me. So Canada recommend that book and that series enough.

[00:44:16] Joe Peters: It’s so interesting when we have fiction informing our reality today. Yeah. And science fiction or Theater or TV series are, are really helping us understand our future.

[00:44:37] Joe Peters: In terms of our technological advancements, I find it fascinating. Well, this is super interesting. I’ll have to add it to my Audible list. I have about 72 hours of a backlog of Audible books to get through still, but There are sales right now, Joe. I know. I have, I think I have like, I also have like 12 credits still left on Audible because I haven’t gotten through, but there’s so many podcasts, so many great things to listen to these days.

[00:45:03] Joe Peters: But this, this Baba versus. Really interesting and I’m gonna have to find some time on a long drive to listen to Bob, but all right Well, thanks for sharing that. So this is the end of this week’s episode. Thanks to everyone for listening Be sure to subscribe rate and review. You can find us on Spotify YouTube and Apple Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter Also called launch codes using the link in the description and thanks mom for watching.

[00:45:37] Joe Peters: Have a great week everyone

This week, a shocking announcement takes the AI world by storm! On our 11th episode of Launch Codes, Joe is joined by Matt Tonkin, RP’s VP of Consulting & Partnerships, to discuss

• Massive drama in OpenAI
• Google tightens its belt on spam complaints
• The platform pivot: How to learn a new automation tool
• CMOs say ‘the more the merrier’ for MOPs teams next year
• The future of fashion: AI wearables that ‘Tech’ all the boxes
• YouTube stamps out AI ambiguity with new labeling
• Read The Transcript

 

Listen Below

 

Sam Altman fired from OpenAI, joins Microsoft

OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman has been fired, according to an announcement issued by the company last Friday. Shortly after the announcement, OpenAI’s co-founder and president Greg Brockman resigned. And just this morning, it was announced that Microsoft would be hiring both Altman and Brockman.

This comes as a major shock to everyone, and Joe iterates that he’s been an admirer of Altman as a leader and communicator in the AI space. The whole situation is strange, especially considering the vague reasoning for Altman’s departure in OpenAI’s announcement: “He [Altman] was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Matt comments on this, stating this reason seems almost purposely veiled, and it’ll be interesting to see if we ever learn more details down the road (maybe in a movie!).

Joe and Matt delve into a deeper discussion surrounding the drama-filled dialogue that took place between Altman, OpenAI, and perhaps even Microsoft over the weekend. There is a lot of speculation surrounding what was said during those negotiations, but we know with certainty that it remains unresolved. For now, the new interim CEO for OpenAI is Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch.

Joe is also surprised by the current shift towards “decelerating” the AI movement, and how Altman’s departure seems to contribute to this. Joe went on to say, “The moment your foot’s taken off the gas, someone’s going to be putting their foot on — whether that’s some other company in the US, Europe, China, who knows? No one else is going to be taking their foot off the gas”. It’s an important point that OpenAI is certainly considering. We’re all curious to see how this will play out.

 

Google and Yahoo make big changes to prevent spam

We’ve seen a lot of headlines about Google and Yahoo email deliverability changes coming in Q1 of 2024, but a recent announcement by Outreach has brought this topic back to the forefront.

It will affect organizations sending more than 5,000 messages per day to the Google or Yahoo network, regardless of platform. Spam complaint rates of 0.3% or higher will be blocked from sending messages.

Joe comments that this could be a big problem for enterprise companies that are reliant on a high-volume outbound messaging model. The COO at ColdIQ said on LinkedIn, “It’s symptomatic of a larger trend — the old predictable revenue playbook is dying. Inboxes are overwhelmed and buyers aren’t responding to cold outreach like before. SDR teams have grown exponentially yet yield diminishing returns.”

This all comes as no surprise to Matt, who says it’s a natural progression of the last five or six years of legislating this area through things like GDPR. Although the 0.3% number looks scary, Matt feels that you probably don’t have too much to worry about if you’re following best practices. This puts even more emphasis on good targeting; marketers need to make sure their content is highly valuable to the people receiving it.

 

The platform pivot: How to learn a new automation tool

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “What’s the best way to break into Marketo or SFMC when you only have 1 year of experience in each but more than 7 years of experience in Eloqua?”

This is a tough one because we often see roles and positions broken down by the tool being used. But the reality is, which Matt and Joe agree on, the knowledge you gain in one tool isn’t lost on another. Switching tools will require an understanding of new processes and new terminology, but the core strategic mindset on how to use an automation tool is transferable.

To expedite that initial learning curve, expose yourself to people who have used that new platform you’re learning, look at the documentation, and lean into as much exposure as possible. It depends on how much time you have, but someone with a good MOPs mindset can probably move between platforms within a matter of months — especially with a community as helpful and supportive as the MOPs one.

 

Hot Takes

• Marketing Ops Function Continues to Grow in 2024
• The State of Martech and Marketing Operations was released for 2024. 63% of CMOs expect to increase the size of their MOPs function in the next 12 months.
• The Growing AI Wearables Market
• Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you see, say and hear in the real world, then summarizes it and securely stores it for future use.
• Humane AI Pin: a wearable device developed by Humane, a tech startup led by former Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. Priced at $700, it’s designed for artificial intelligence applications and attaches to clothing via a magnetic system with a detachable battery.
• YouTube will tell users when content was created with AI
• YouTube will begin to require creators to label AI-generated content on its platform.

 

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 11. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, massive drama and AI. Second, Google tightens its belt on spam complaints. From our community, the platform Pivot, how to learn a new automation tool. And then in our hot takes, CMOs say the more the merrier for mops teams next year.

[00:00:25] Joe Peters: The future of fashion, AI wearables that tech all the boxes. And finally, YouTube stamps out AI ambiguity with new labeling. Today I’m joined by Matt Tonkin. Matt, what are you happy or excited to discuss this week?

[00:00:41] Matt Tonkin: So we’re recording this on a Monday morning and as someone who checked out a little bit on the weekend, had a busy weekend what, what happened to like open AI is well, yeah, I want to know what’s going on.

[00:00:54] Joe Peters: So I’ve been following this. Very, very closely over the weekend. Pretty shocking. So right now it’s what time of day is it? It’s 20 after nine Eastern on Monday morning. So I feel like this is fast moving drama. Who knows what could happen today, but as this is what we know, as of now, Friday afternoon, the board of open AI fired Sam Altman and shortly after Greg Brockman, the president quit.

[00:01:31] Joe Peters: And then there was kind of a sign of a whole bunch of departures going to happen to follow them in whatever they decide to do. So, obviously a real shocker. Sam Altman presented to President Z and Biden just the night before was the keynote speaker at the APEC CEOs conference in California. I think it was in San Francisco and then the next day he’s fired.

[00:02:07] Joe Peters: So really some weirdness. And, and the, the, the reason they said for him being let go was something around clarity of communications, like vaguely in that. So there’s a lot to unpack there. So that’s drama point one, or step one. Yeah.

[00:02:33] Matt Tonkin: And it feels like how much has happened. Yeah, when I read the reason.

[00:02:40] Matt Tonkin: It seems purposely veiled in, in some ways. Right. So it’ll be interesting to hear sort of like the back and forth, but it seems like it came as a huge shock to, to anyone involved. So I find that surprising.

[00:02:58] Joe Peters: Yeah. So going into it, it’s pretty,

[00:03:06] Joe Peters: it’s hard to fully appreciate. I’m a big fan of, of I think he is an incredible communicator and a great leader in the space of AI. So I really wondered what, what could really happen that would for, for a board to be so upset that they would let him go like that he is, if you’d compare him to the communication style of.

[00:03:35] Joe Peters: Elon or Zuckerberg, like they’re not even in the same category. He’s so thoughtful and just, just a great communicator. Very rare from that perspective, uh, a lot of charisma and, you know, a lot of people are following him. And so when, when you kind of peel back the layers of the onion, what was really surprising to me was the very unusual board structure that they have, like very unusual, there’s only.

[00:04:08] Joe Peters: Four board members outside of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. One of them’s at OpenAI. I always butcher his last name, but it’s the Ilya Sutskevich, uh, is the, is the technology person connected or the, you know, the hardcore developer part of the team. And then the other board members are. Pretty, I’m going to say basic and what I mean by that is they’re not really outstanding people, the type of people that you would expect.

[00:04:51] Joe Peters: Well, one, Microsoft doesn’t have a seat on the board, which is shocking for a 10 billion investment. And then you have like a former CTO of Facebook, but he left in 2008. Matt, what was Facebook like in 2008? It was just becoming a commercial product at the time. And then the others are, are, I’m going to say people that you wouldn’t really expect to have so much power.

[00:05:22] Joe Peters: Right. And if,

[00:05:24] Matt Tonkin: so if it’s a six member board, it’s obviously a unanimous decision. Or four to two.

[00:05:31] Joe Peters: Yeah.

[00:05:32] Matt Tonkin: Yeah. So, yeah, who, who really made the decision, I guess, then the way you’re describing it. And you mentioned
like Microsoft not having a… And that was the first thing when I did see the news and stuff, a lot of the comments were along, like, how does this affect the relationship with Mike?

[00:05:51] Matt Tonkin: And then you give me a little note on what actually has happened in what the last 10 hours, that’s. Almond’s been

[00:06:01] Joe Peters: hired by Microsoft. Yeah. Well, while you’re kind of skipping. Okay.

[00:06:06] Matt Tonkin: I’m a fresh, fresh baby to everything that’s coming in on this, like what?

[00:06:18] Joe Peters: So the, the, the, the dialogue going back was what was, could be the reason.

[00:06:23] Joe Peters: And so a lot of the commentary was that safety was at the core and. There was a difference in perspective on safety. And what that actually meant for the future. So Altman had alluded on Thursday that they’d made another massive breakthrough. And so that was where people thought the tension was on
the safety side.

[00:06:53] Joe Peters: It turns out if you believe what’s happened, that that wasn’t the case. So, so listen, it’s, it’s Saturday. The drama continues. It looks like the board is going to resign. And Altman’s going to go back. Okay. That was Saturday. Sunday turns out that wasn’t the case. And obviously Microsoft is playing heavy on in the negotiations here.

[00:07:27] Joe Peters: They lost 80 billion in market cap on Friday. So they’re pretty worried about what’s happening. 100%. And so it seemed like, well, last night when I was heading to bed. It remained unresolved. And there was a picture of Sam Altman holding a guest badge at OpenAI headquarters, okay, which, and then you have these trigger points where all of these key members of the OpenAI team are leaving.

[00:08:02] Joe Peters: They had set a time and people were leaving. So wake, waking up this morning, find out Microsoft has hired. Altman and Brockman and Microsoft Ignite is going to be this new AI space and they’re going to lead it and have a ton of money to take AI forward and I really wasn’t familiar with him before this morning.

[00:08:37] Joe Peters: Obviously, I know the tech but the New CEO of OpenAI has been announced, and that is Emmett Shear. And he is best known as the CEO of Twitch. Which, I don’t know, doesn’t seem to be like an obvious one for me, but maybe Twitch had some really moves happening in AI, but he has been out of the game. And, and had, had left Twitch, I’m going to say for six months, nine months or something and and just took over as CEO of OpenAI and he dispelled the rumor that the reason for the departure and the dismissal was not safety oriented.

[00:09:33] Joe Peters: And that he is committed to commercializing their innovations. So Matt, it’s crazy. It’s like, it’s, this is the second inning of the AI development cycle. And these moves are just jaw dropping. And this,

[00:09:58] Matt Tonkin: yeah, it’s like a, sort of a watershed moment. And this, well, cause conversation around like safety and, you know, for commercialization of this, like.

[00:10:08] Matt Tonkin: Those are all those, like, very hot topic words for the general public versus, you know, the tech community that’s more involved in AI right, in that balance. So, that’s what I, I find interesting, like, how does this hurt perceptions publicly about open AI? Is there, you know, you start getting all the worries about, like, well, what was happening that, that made this so necessary and that sort of piece.

[00:10:34] Joe Peters: Yeah. Very, very true. And obviously there’s going to be a story. There’s a book and or a movie about this coming, like, this is, this is pretty fascinating. And the

[00:10:49] Matt Tonkin: script will probably be written by ChatGPT.

[00:10:55] Joe Peters: You know, but I feel, I feel like there’s a big shift happening here now. And. The one thing that really surprises me is there’s this deceleration movement. They’re called decels now, which I think is pretty funny. This deceleration movement on trying to slow things down. But I’m going to tell you, there are, no one else is slowing down.

[00:11:24] Joe Peters: And, and maybe you would like it, but the moment your foot’s taken off the gas, Someone’s going to be putting their foot on and whether that’s some other company in, in, in the U S the EU, Europe, China, who knows? No one else is going to be taking their foot off the gas. So I don’t think the genie’s out of the bottle and we’ve got to figure things out and I, I really am curious where this goes, but anyway, that’s enough of the drama today, let’s, let’s shift gears, but definitely.

[00:12:05] Joe Peters: More to come here and more details that we’re going to find out. And I really would like to know what this breakthrough was that they had on Thursday. And maybe that’ll shed some light on why.

[00:12:19] Matt Tonkin: Is it something, is it something that even is elaborated on in the next week, do you think? I don’t know.

[00:12:26] Matt Tonkin: Right? Like, or is it just suddenly like disappear and that wasn’t mentioned and we don’t know exactly that. What that mention was,

[00:12:34] Joe Peters: we’re going to have to wait for the movie. I think Matt, anyway. All right, well, let’s shift gears. Not a lot of mops in that first segment, but we’ll bring it right back to the ranch here as we get into our next topic, which is Google and Yahoo making pretty big changes.

[00:12:58] Joe Peters: To prevent spam. So we’ve seen a lot of headlines on deliverability changing changes coming in Q1, and we really focused on this you know, in a couple of podcasts ago, but really it’s these new rules that are going to affect organizations sending more than 5, 000 messages. per day to google yahoo networks regardless of the platform and this could include password resets newsletter product announcement it doesn’t matter so organizations with spam complaint rates of 0.

[00:13:37] Joe Peters: 3 let me repeat that 0. 3 or higher will be blocked from sending messages to Google Yahoo. And this, this could be a really, really big problem for some enterprise companies reliant on kind of that high volume outbound messaging model. So there is a quote from cold IQ, the COO from there, and the point was, quote, It’s symptomatic of a larger trend.

[00:14:09] Joe Peters: The old predictable revenue playbook is dying. Inboxes are overwhelmed and buyers aren’t responding to cold outreach like before. SDR teams have grown exponentially, yet yield diminishing returns. End quote. So what do you think about this, Matt? There’s, there’s a lot to unpack here, but it’s not a surprise.

[00:14:32] Joe Peters: Not a surprise.

[00:14:33] Matt Tonkin: It’s a natural progression that we’ve seen over the last five, six years of, you know, legislating this type of thing with GDPR and, You know, even in the States, which in the United States, I know Canadians tend to say the States a lot I’ve been called out on that a bit, but even in the United States, you’re starting to see more of that legislation put in place and a place that’s historically been kind of slow to the compliance game.

[00:15:00] Matt Tonkin: You’re starting to see that being put in place at a legislative level, which means, you know, it was just a matter of time before, you know, Google started. All right. Let’s, let’s use our weight and throw it around a bit. I’d say if you’re following good practices, you probably don’t have too much to worry about.

[00:15:19] Matt Tonkin: I know I work with a lot of companies that they probably don’t have to worry too much about this. That 0. 3 percent though is a scary looking number. Yeah. But it comes down to a matter of like. Yeah, you can’t just buy lists and blast out lists anymore one. It’s a it’s a bad tactic. It doesn’t work very well.

[00:15:38] Matt Tonkin: So This is almost Google saving you from yourself

[00:15:44] Joe Peters: Yeah, and so I think what are the solutions one quality is going to matter probably personalization And maybe even how that could be in that AI assisted personalization. We’ve had some pretty fun experiments with that. What else do you think is on the, on the table here?

[00:16:11] Joe Peters: Hyper

[00:16:11] Matt Tonkin: targeting that someone is interested or has reason to be interested. And what I’m sending is valuable. And that’s, I mean, that’s been key for getting good open rates, getting good click rates is send something valuable. Don’t just be like, Hey. By my product people get flooded, right? And so, there’s
gonna be that change in tactic.

[00:16:33] Matt Tonkin: How do you actually reach out to people in that sort of approach? And anytime something like this happens, there’ll be a few articles that are big and like, Oh, okay, do it this way. And everyone’s going to do that. So it’s going to be switched to LinkedIn, LinkedIn, direct messages. And suddenly everyone’s going to be flooded with LinkedIn direct messages.

[00:16:52] Matt Tonkin: And it becomes, I remember years and years ago, HubSpot put out an article that for some reason, I think it was 10 PM or 10 AM Eastern on Tuesdays and Thursdays get the best engagement rates for emails. And you know what happened? Everyone sent emails at 10 a. m. Eastern, and no one opened any emails. So it’s sort of that, that cadence and that flow.

[00:17:16] Matt Tonkin: And I see that happening. I see a bunch of, Okay, we can’t email as much, do this, and that getting overwhelmed. And everyone sort of will find their, find their area that works for them.

[00:17:29] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, I, I don’t know how many, we’re sort of overwhelmed with a lot of spam now. And I’m going to say my DMs on LinkedIn, 90 percent of the time are someone trying to sell something now, maybe even higher.

[00:17:48] Matt Tonkin: And it, the worst is when it seems like a genuine connection or, or need, and then you connect and then immediately they’re selling something to you. And that’s sort of that bait and switch that that’s what it was with email originally. And this, that’s going to cause linkedin to start cracking down as well.

[00:18:10] Matt Tonkin: Yeah,

[00:18:11] Joe Peters: it’s, it’s moving from one thing to the other. It’s the whack a mole of channels, right? So anyway, let’s move into our community question. And thanks to the marketingops. com community for. Giving us a great topic this week. So let me read the question for you, Matt. What’s the best way to break into Marketo or SFMC when you only have one year experience in each, but more than seven years experience in Eloqua.

[00:18:45] Matt Tonkin: Oh, so that’s always, that’s always a tough one, right? Because so many times like roles and new, new positions get broken down by what tool you’re using. And it’s unfortunate because in a lot of ways, you know, there’s the idea of like transferable skills. And that knowledge on how to structure a RevOps team, how to structure, how processes are happening and how data’s met and read, all of that is transferable between these platforms.

[00:19:13] Matt Tonkin: In the end, the best way to get experience is to have experience, which is, which sucks because the only way to get experience is to have an opportunity to be in with the tool.

[00:19:23] Joe Peters: If this is, but the knowledge isn’t lost, right? The knowledge isn’t lost. No, it’s part of it is just understanding. The kind of switch in language and process within the systems and

[00:19:37] Matt Tonkin: but yeah, that’s 100%.

[00:19:39] Matt Tonkin: I know Marketo uses the term programs for what most in marketing would term a campaign. And then Marketo campaigns are more like a workflow for most. And, and that can be that hardest part, that terminology, that just knowing how to do certain things. But again, it’s just, you get experience with that and those transferable skills, that strategic mindset doesn’t get lost.

[00:20:04] Matt Tonkin: So a lot of it’s exposure, look into the documentation, talk with people who’ve used the platform that can kind of do that translation, right? I think that’s sort of the, the perfect part. How long does that take? Depends how much time you can invest. But I think someone with a good mobs mindset can probably move between platforms in a matter of a few months.

[00:20:25] Matt Tonkin: Not saying they’re going to be an expert in it, but they can

[00:20:29] Joe Peters: make that transition. Yeah, make their way around in the platform and get things done. Yeah, and… I’d say also
rely on the community when you’re, when you’re blocked on something. So if you, you know, can’t figure out or decode what doing X is in, in platform Z, then ask the community.

[00:20:53] Joe Peters: We, we have a great mops community out there and people are very, very supportive. Okay, let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. NAC’s dark mode allows you to test and preview your emails to see exactly how they’ll look in dark mode.

[00:21:20] Joe Peters: Visit NAC. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. All right, so let’s move into our hot takes, Matt. And our first one is from the State of Martech and Marketing Operations, released for 2024. And 63 percent of CMOs expect to see an increase in the size of their MOPS function in the next 12 months. So this research was done in August of this year, and the reasons why they feel this is happening is that Martek continues to play a role, a key role in marketing strategy, and 30 percent of an organization’s marketing budget now is spent on Martek, according to this report.

[00:22:11] Joe Peters: So what are your first thoughts on this, Matt?

[00:22:14] Matt Tonkin: Honestly, this makes sense to me. If you think about sort of a bit more turbulent last 12 months that we’ve had. And the thing with marketing operations is that you only tend to notice it when things are going bad, right? It’s one of those things that it’s under the hood a lot of the time.

[00:22:32] Matt Tonkin: And that’s a challenge for marketing operations. Marketing operations professionals who need to find a way to surface what they’re doing to show their value. But I think a lot of the times. It’s that it’s only noticed when something’s going wrong. So when times come for cuts and stuff, it looks like, Oh, what’s this person doing?

[00:22:52] Matt Tonkin: And you see a lot of cuts. And we saw that happen over the last 12 months or so. And then suddenly it does, it starts cascading and you don’t have people that have the knowledge that have, you know. The, the understanding of how your data is set up, how everything’s processing and you start to not be able to know what you need to know.

[00:23:12] Matt Tonkin: You know, the old phrase for advertising budgets. I know half my budget’s wasted. I just don’t know which half. Well, if you have a good team, you know what you, that’s, that’s the whole underlying purpose is knowing how to do these things, knowing what works and actioning on them. And that’s. drives marketing strategy.

[00:23:37] Joe Peters: Well, I, I think you’ve made some good points there and it is encouraging for a space it, I, I do, I do think that. People are understanding the ROI component of MOPS is much easier to understand than other parts of the, of the function. So let’s move on to our next area. A little jump back to AI again. And there’s a couple of new AI wearables that have been released.

[00:24:07] Joe Peters: There’s first is this rewind pendant. And second is this humane AI pen. And let’s start with the humane one. And then we can get. Into the rewind one and the humane AI pin. I really would just encourage you to kind of have a look at it. They have a weird URL. It’s like H U dot M A N E dot AI or something
like that.

[00:24:36] Joe Peters: Or no, it’s H

[00:24:38] Matt Tonkin: H U dot M A dot N E. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:43] Joe Peters: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It’s very, very funny. But cause it’s a little bit hard to find, but I’d encourage everyone to just go watch the video. It’s about 10 minutes. It’s pretty fascinating. And if it isn’t fully, let’s say perfect today. The profile is a little bit big, like the way you’re going to wear it is kind of a bit odd and big, but if you kind of think about it, I do feel like it’s given us a glimpse of the future.

[00:25:19] Joe Peters: What were your first takes at it? The interesting

[00:25:22] Matt Tonkin: thing for me and like with that video is that it wasn’t, I don’t know, it didn’t have like this huge flash, like appeal. Trying to sell you on this thing, it, it was just, here’s this device, here’s how it works, and very, I felt, matter of fact, here’s how things work, and it felt like, you know, taking all of the cool or slightly scary pieces of the other wearables we’ve seen, and sort of like, putting it all together, it really felt like, sort of a, all in one device for AI, um, so, so that was what stood out to me first, it was very much a, Let’s describe how and why and not not get too flashy

[00:26:01] Joe Peters: with it.

[00:26:02] Joe Peters: Yeah So just just so if you can conceptually think about it It would be like if you took an iPhone It’d be like the size maybe like the top third of your phone Maybe a little bit thicker and then has a magnet or clip structure. There’s a kind of different backs to it. So it can either be, you put it on one side of a shirt in the, in the, in the battery or the back of it, the clip is behind, or so it’s kind of like in between your shirt or on either side of your shirt, or you can clip it onto a jacket or clip it onto a purse or different things like that.

[00:26:47] Joe Peters: So that form factor is a bit. A bit awkward. It looked a bit awkward on the people, but then you’re able to engage with it. At different points, kind of eliminates some of the surveillance fears by having a glowing light so it doesn’t, you know, you’re not secretly recording people, although I bet you if you put a piece of black electrical tape over it, that would cover it up pretty quick.

[00:27:17] Joe Peters: But anyway. It also has a little projector, so it will project onto your hand and you can control it using your finger and thumb to advance things. I don’t know. It looked really interesting and I think it would be fascinating to try it, but I think it would be also really weird to wear it around. And

[00:27:44] Matt Tonkin: it looks cool, right?

[00:27:45] Matt Tonkin: You see it on your hand. Functionally, and like, is, is that something people want to do? Is that, you know, is that better than a phone? Or your watch. Or your watch. Is that, like, how, how well does it work, one? Is it, if it’s not clean functionality, like, if it… It can be as cool looking as you want, but if the actual interface doesn’t work, and I mean, we just saw what the video was.

[00:28:14] Matt Tonkin: I haven’t had a chance to play around with this, so it might work perfectly, but I have my doubts that it does. So that’s one thing too, right. Is, is it better enough that it’s going to replace something like a phone? Yeah. And the one thing with this too, you know, we’ve got all these different ones coming at the rewind pendant.

[00:28:32] Matt Tonkin: You know, we’ve seen all these wearables. When does it kind of consolidate and become like a phone where, you know, A huge chunk has an iPhone and then, you know, the smaller divisions, there’s maybe like really 10 at most key models that people have. So when does it become like that where everything gets consolidated or does it?

[00:28:52] Matt Tonkin: Does everyone just have a different wearable?

[00:28:56] Joe Peters: I do, I do find it pretty interesting. I think they’re on to something. It’s, it’s worth having a look. It’s probably V1 is not going to be if they get enough funding and sell enough that. They can get to V2. It’s probably a compelling. More compelling when it’s a smaller form factor, but right now, and some of the criticism that I’ve heard has been the kind of surveillance recording people, and I, I think they’ve tried to address that.

[00:29:32] Joe Peters: And then the other thing is I have a phone and a watch. Why do I need this too? And that, and that I think is probably a legit question and maybe it eliminates. One of those things, I don’t know to your

[00:29:49] Matt Tonkin: point on the whole, like recording and they address that very early in the video. They pretty much outright say, you know, it’s not going to just be recording you.

[00:29:58] Matt Tonkin: It, you have to interact with it, which is kind of a very different approach from that rewind pendant where the whole point is it’s recording.

[00:30:06] Joe Peters: Yeah. So that rewind pendant, for those of you that aren’t familiar with that is a necklace with a little, it looks kind of like. A little cylinder, maybe an inch, uh, long and a half an inch thick.

[00:30:21] Joe Peters: And it’s at the end of this pendant and it’s kind of just recording all day. And then it sort of processes it and condenses it and gives you details on what it’s heard all day long. Now they’ve really, like if you check out their website now, it’s really walked back because they got a lot of criticism on that and they’re all their use cases are like, what would it be like for a CEO to condense all your conversations that you’ve had all day?

[00:30:50] Joe Peters: Or what about someone with ADHD to get a summary of what there is? So they’re really trying to, it’s very actually hard to see a picture of the pendant. On the website now,

[00:31:01] Matt Tonkin: so I haven’t looked at it in a while. I’ll have to

[00:31:03] Joe Peters: yeah. So obviously they’ve taken their criticism on the surveillance side of things to hurt.

[00:31:09] Joe Peters: But anyway, this was supposed to be a hot take and ended up being longer than some of our other segments. So. Maybe we should move on and this last one, I think, and this is a theme that we’ve talked about a little bit is YouTube now going to be telling users when content was created with AI and having the ability to have those labels.

[00:31:33] Joe Peters: So that people have awareness on this. I think when we get into things like elections, conflicts, public health crises, any kind of public official or public figure, this, this sort of AI label is going to be important. And we’re going to have to have more and more of these. Yeah. It’s,

[00:31:57] Matt Tonkin: And to me, it’s a natural progression of.

[00:31:59] Matt Tonkin: You know, misinformation flags and fact check, fact checking flags where, you know, if it can tell that there’s something off about it, surfacing that not necessarily removing it, but making sure people are as informed as possible.

[00:32:16] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s, it’s a pretty.

[00:32:18] Matt Tonkin: Hey,

[00:32:23] Joe Peters: this is going to be something. And I know, I know we’re going to have a several iterations before this is nailed.

[00:32:29] Joe Peters: It is next year’s us election is going to be fascinating on what’s going to happen in this space.

[00:32:40] Matt Tonkin: We’ll know a lot more. I mean, we’ll see how well YouTube can actually

[00:32:44] Joe Peters: action on this. Yeah. And I think all the platforms are thinking about this now. I know Metta came out with something last week too, I think in the, in the similar um, area of trust, but okay, let’s move on to our pairing segment.

[00:33:01] Joe Peters: And this week I’m in the office today, so I don’t have access to my turntable or the vinyl. But we, that’s not going to stop us from sharing, um, our pairing segment today. So album that I would like to share with you today is a Grateful Dead album. It’s, it’s, it was kind of their last, well, not, not the last, but it was the first time they kind of had broader commercial success.

[00:33:36] Joe Peters: The album is called In the Dark and the song is called Touch of Gray. And It’s not the for the deadhead fans out there. They’ll be like, Oh, Joe, why are you sharing that song? This isn’t the they’re, you know, the best part of their catalog, but I thought it was fitting with everything that’s going on in AI and the The fact that we’re a bit in the dark and everything’s got a little cloudier here in terms of where things are going.

[00:34:05] Joe Peters: So I thought touch of gray was a very fitting track for us to have as our music pairing this week. And the vinyl is super cool. It’s kind of this. Purpley vinyl, you’ll, you’ll see it in the, in our show notes and show a cover, but it this track in the dark and touch of gray, I thought were perfect for today.

[00:34:31] Matt Tonkin: Well, so for me I’ve got my beer and

[00:34:37] Matt Tonkin: the beer I’ve gone with today is from Quebec and it’s Unibrew, Unibrew, depending on the pronunciation, and This one I felt served very well for what we’ve done. So for anyone who doesn’t have an elementary level of French like myself, Le Fin du Monde is the end of the world. And email spam rates, open AI in shambles.

[00:35:04] Matt Tonkin: It really can be like the end of the world, but just remember… It’s not the end of the world. So, yeah, well,

[00:35:11] Joe Peters: those ones are pretty strong. Yeah. So you have too many of

[00:35:15] Matt Tonkin: those that can be, yeah, yeah,

[00:35:18] Joe Peters: it can be those, those are a flashback to my youth heading over across the border to go back. And those, those are, those pack fandomo.

[00:35:31] Joe Peters: But all right, Matt, that’s awesome. And we’re on the same wavelength. As with our choices this week, setting them up thematically to what’s happening in our world. But all right. Well, thanks, Matt. And thanks to everyone for listening. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube and Apple.

[00:35:54] Joe Peters: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter, also called Launch Codes using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. Have a great week, everyone.

Launch Codes hit double digits this week — Our 10th episode is live. This week Lauren McCormack, our VP of Consulting, joins Joe to discuss a whole lot of events.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

• A year in review: 2023 State of MO Pros Report
• HubSpot is a Clear-Bit closer to data dominance
• Plotting efficiency when mapping out MOPs plans
• OpenAI turbo charges Chat-GPT
• AI will find you a job says LinkedIn
• Pairings
• Read The Transcript

 

State of Marketing Ops Report

This month MarketingOps.com released the 2023 State of the MO Pro Report. The report contains 553 responses collected between May and August 2023.

Three key findings:

• Widespread adoption of MOPs teams
• 88% of orgs over $10 million in annual revenue have dedicated MOPs person/team.
• 64% of orgs under $10 million in annual revenue have dedicated MOPs person/team.
• Smaller teams are trending
• 31% of participants are a solo team, up from 25% last year
• Data is now the primary responsibility
• Analyzing, unifying and reporting data number one responsibility
• Almost 70% of participants ranked data as number one this year compared to fourth place last year
• Top responsibility in 2022 was developing and implementing software/system integrations. Ranks 4th in this year’s report.

“Millions of dollars of rounds were being put into B2B SaaS only to have everything evaporate so abruptly, and now, frugality has been the mantra for 2023.” Lauren said. “It’s no surprise that teams have gotten smaller and to see the people that remain realizing that unlocking data or having governance over data is the future to their success.”

 

HubSpot acquires Clearbit to enhance its AI platform

Last week HubSpot announced it was acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit to enhance its platform with third-party company data.

Gathering company data has gotten easier over the years but challenges remain around analyzing and using data. This acquisition means companies can enrich their internal customer data with real-time external context

Clearbit rebuilt its data pipeline earlier this year with LLMs at the core – reinventing how it processes, categorizes and enriches datasets.

“Thanks to this technology, Clearbit was now able to identify and enrich any company or contact data from any country in any language” CEO Matt Sornson wrote in a blog post about this change.

“The very first time I was exposed to Clearbit, I remember almost falling out of my chair,” said Joe. “The idea of this data enrichment was there and that they had invested so much in this combing the earth for contact information and being able to pop that into your CRM was magical.”

Needless to say, we’re excited to see what comes next from Clearbit with this acquisition.

 

Advice on developing marketing ops plans

Our question this week comes from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo).

Looking for advice on developing marketing ops plans. I’ve been building out process and refining for efficiency with no real guiding light. Any recommendations?

“Revenue is your north star,” said Lauren. “The budget to build the cool stuff comes from the strategy, comes from tying to your revenue North Stars, comes from being able to articulate what the return on your time is to the bottom line.”

If you’re lacking direction, look at your company’s strategic plan for the year. See where can you support and lift the heavy rocks. Where can you build against numbers that will build job security for your boss’s boss?

 

Hot Takes

• Experimenting with personalized GPTs
• The team at RP is experimenting with training individual GPTs – look out for RP-GPT in the near future
• Joe referenced a Sam Altman quote “We have to get the world familiar with AI, so we’ll release it incrementally and not wait for it to be perfect.”
• AI will find you a job says LinkedIn
• LinkedIn announced it’s experimenting with a new generative AI feature for job hunters.
• Testing features to generate brief cover letter-like messages that candidates can send to hiring messengers on the platform. Is this the future of job applications?

 

Pairings

With Joe back in his home office after a week on the road for MOPs-Apalooza, read the episode recap here, he was able to showcase this week’s record, and it’s gorgeous! The record is ‘Cool It Down’ from the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and the lead singer holds a special place in Joe’s heart (see why here). Lauren paired it with Starry Eyes by Dark Matter Coffee. It’s based out of Chicago, a very dark roast and has AMAZING packaging (check it out here).

 

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 10. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, a year in review, the 2023 State of MoPros report. Second, we have HubSpot is a clear bit closer to data dominance.

[00:00:30] Joe Peters: Then we’ll go to our community for a question on plotting efficiency when mapping out MOPS plans. And then we have a couple of hot takes on OpenAI turbocharging ChatGPT. And can AI find you a job, says, well, LinkedIn says so. So today I’m joined by Lauren McCormick. What are you excited about this week, Lauren?

[00:00:53] Joe Peters: Hey

[00:00:53] Lauren McCormack: everybody. I’m just excited for another conversation with you, Joe. So much to catch up on.

[00:00:59] Joe Peters: Oh yeah. It’s been a busy, busy week. That’s for sure. So funny enough if I wanted a Mopsapalooza flashback, I’m going to get one because our first topic today is, marketingops. com’s latest release on the 2023 state of the Mopro report.

[00:01:17] Joe Peters: And it’s a very interesting study. The data was collected over May, from May to August, so kind of a longer open period for respondents. But there are a couple of findings that are worth noting. First is in the area of widespread adoption of MOPS teams. So, 88 percent of orgs, over 10 million in ARR, or annual revenue, sorry, have a dedicated MOPS person team, compared to 64 percent of orgs under 10 million have a dedicated MOPS person team.

[00:01:55] Joe Peters: So, interesting on that first data point. And then, a couple of other ones. Smaller teams are trending. So we’re seeing 31 percent of participants are a solo team, which Lauren and I were, we’re quite familiar with that. That’s up from 25 percent last year. There could be a variety of things here that could be causing it.

[00:02:18] Joe Peters: But the third point is on the data, the primary responsibility. So. We’re seeing almost 70 percent of participants ranking data as the number one this year in terms of a responsibility that they’re taking hold on and, and that that’s a, that’s a big change and also really important change as we see our path towards AI adoption.

[00:02:43] Joe Peters: So. Lauren, out of these three, are there any surprises to you or anything that sort of comes to mind?

[00:02:52] Lauren McCormack: I think it’s a natural function of the change in the landscape that we’ve seen from venture capital. And the notion two years ago around expanding headcount for the sake of expanding headcount to show growth in a company to, to even just talk about LTV of customers, right?

[00:03:15] Lauren McCormack: And the investment at which, you know, millions of dollars of rounds were being put into B2B SaaS only to have everything evaporate so abruptly. And now, I think frugality has been the mantra for 2023, and it’s no surprise that teams have gotten smaller and definitely, I think, delightful, to your point, to see the people that remain realizing that unlocking data or having governance over data is the future to their success, it’s not, you know as we approach a GA4 kind of reduced cookie environment with increased standards around inbox, you know, deliverability restrictions, data’s the only way we’re going to unlock personalized relevant messaging.

[00:04:05] Lauren McCormack: That’s a welcome guest across platforms at scale. And I think marketers are starting to realize that now more than ever, that that’s where the true value lies is first party data.

[00:04:15] Joe Peters: Yeah, if we think of the opportunities with AI and data and, you know, it can also work against us a bit in terms of AI recognizing what isn’t really personalized messaging or direct messaging and anything that’s there from a spam perspective or might be conveyed as spam.

[00:04:37] Joe Peters: That, that’s, that’s going to be a challenge above and beyond all of these platform challenges we have to deal with as well.

[00:04:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think even just unlocking the first party data that you have in the now, not necessarily waiting for AI innovation, but taking your first party data around your MQLs, your SALs, your closed one business for the last year and getting it in platform around paid search and social and looking for more of the same.

[00:05:06] Lauren McCormack: I mean, that’s, that’s an opportunity at our doorstep now. And I, I do think that You know, years ago, it was hard for me to evangelize, sometimes it still is, with a couple of our clients, I, I still am having conversations around the intersection between first party data, paid search and social being kind of the, the quickest way to cash, to revenue, to ROAS, right, and, and the, but the underpinning foundation, the infrastructure and the architecture to make that happen is mobs, and people have seen them As disparate categories and functions for so long, but that intersection is so incredibly powerful and that’s where, that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time professionally is just
trying to evangelize around that intersection of, of data and paid and ops and it’s, it’s a really powerful kind of trifecta if you can, if you can get ownership and you can optimize around all three points, it’s a, It’s a, it’s a definite path for growth for the org

[00:06:07] Joe Peters: and for you.

[00:06:08] Joe Peters: One hundred percent. And for careers. Yeah. And I think that’s the important, important point. One of the topics that came up, I’m going to say several times at Mopsapalooza was this idea of, of mops being able to take on this function of data ops as well. And I think that’s an important thing for people to see.

[00:06:30] Joe Peters: Why not? Recognize that this is a real opportunity for you in MOPS to, to have, I’m going to say, which are one of our most important battlefields over the next couple of years, if not far into the future.

[00:06:47] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I mean, lean into the number, write the charter. Be the definitive, you know group within the org that, that puts pen to paper.

[00:06:56] Lauren McCormack: I, in your session in particular at Mopsapalooza, the notion that who, who, who else is better, you know, versed in the organization than Marketing Operations to own the treaties and to own the, the rules around engagement with new tech than Marketing Ops. We’re the ones that are innovating in the tools.

[00:07:17] Lauren McCormack: Heck, we have to be able to explain them to the rest of the org more often than not. So why not take on, you know, some of the opportunity with some of the onus that comes with ownership around these tools.

[00:07:28] Joe Peters: For sure. Well, let’s move to another interesting data topic, and that’s the HubSpot acquisition of Clearbit.

[00:07:37] Joe Peters: Yes. And what that means for enhancing its… It’s AI platform. So last week they announced they were acquiring a B2B data provider, Clearbit to enhance their platform with third party company, company data. And, you know, we’ve been a big fan of Clearbit for a long time. And so I think this is going to be an interesting acquisition in terms of being able to enrich internal customer data with that real time, external context, that it’s kind of a bit of a gap.

[00:08:10] Joe Peters: In well, let’s say native HubSpot, how you’re going to enrich it through other ways, or it was going to be something else. But I think we also heard that Clearbit rebuilt its data pipeline earlier this year with LLMs at the core, reinventing how it processes, categorizes, and enriches data set. And so I think here’s one interesting quote before I turn it over to you, Lauren, was thanks to this technology, Clearbit was now.

[00:08:41] Joe Peters: able to identify and enrich any company or contact data from any country in any language. And that was a quote from CEO Matt Sorenson. So I think this is a really interesting move and pretty strategic in HubSpot’s continued, let’s say, innovation and advancement as a As a platform in for marketing operations, well, and, and other parts of the business as well.

[00:09:16] Lauren McCormack: I’m so jealous. I’ve been a Marketo soul rather exclusively over the years, but, you know, dabbled in HubSpot and been tempted, you know, and curious around other platforms, you know, Active Campaign when they had Maria Pergolino. I’ve been somewhat curious, but often, you know, returned home to my roots, but with Clearbit, this is kind of where that powerful intersection that I was talking about comes into play.

[00:09:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah. Yeah. They’re owned by HubSpot now, but I, I, I wielded Clearbit like a magic sword, 20 20 20 20 to like get into Facebook feeds, like it would give me the fuzzy match of business emails. I’ll say. Come with like a list of a thousand business emails from my target account. And it would give me a fuzzy match and say, here’s their likely social profile.

[00:10:08] Lauren McCormack: And so as people are scrolling through cute pictures of their kids and their nieces and nephews and neighbors on Halloween or over the weekend, you know, and all of a sudden this charming, you know B2B ad is popping up in a perfectly Perfectly targeted spot to meet them on the weekends and the evenings when they’re relaxed and amiable and treat like so Clearbit was wonderful then.

[00:10:34] Lauren McCormack: And I always thought, you know, we had at that time in my tech stack, multiple layers of data enrichment tools. And I always. I’ve always trusted Clear Bits Enrichment, and I won’t name names, right? Yeah. Classy. But I always trusted Data Enrichment the most, but I’ve always just loved their team. Like there’s a few people, like Sager especially over the years that have just been exceptional and watching them as a business shift.

[00:11:01] Lauren McCormack: earlier this year to like PLG and to have like, you know, like a free product for all and kind of like, what are you guys up to? Why, why are you, why are you stepping back into PLG after being B2B SaaS for paid model for so long? This explains it. Now I have my answers, Joe. Now I know why they wanted us all to come on board before, you know, they made this pivot, but I’m really intrigued to see where it’s going next.

[00:11:27] Lauren McCormack: And I’m kind of wondering what some of my clear bit merch, like my swag,

[00:11:35] Joe Peters: opportunities might be, might be even more That’s, that’s a hilarious point, but I think of the very first time I was exposed to Clearbit, I remember almost falling out of my chair that this was possible, right? The idea of this data enrichment was there and that they had invested so much in this combing the earth for contact information and being able to pop that into your CRM was…

[00:12:11] Joe Peters: Anyway, it’s still magical. It’s still, still magical.

[00:12:15] Lauren McCormack: It’s interesting, but it’s, it’s, I think they were super smart in realizing that what had been their proprietary secret sauce was now becoming public domain to some degree. I know they attempted to dip a toe in intent, but never before in my career have I seen such a jaundiced eye coming from demand marketers against intent data.

[00:12:36] Lauren McCormack: And, you know, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to data enrichment. They were wonderful at building like the TAM calculator. I helped beta test that, you know alongside their team and it’s, it’s cool stuff. I think proprietarily speaking, I mean, you can go in platform and you can look for a lot of the, the capabilities that they offer.

[00:13:00] Lauren McCormack: So they’re pivots and I think acquisition you know, out of all the course, kind of choose your own adventure paths. They could have been on from a company from a girl’s standpoint I think acquisition was perfect for them. And this is a great time for it. So i’m super excited to see where this takes them, but i’m just sad that it wasn’t adobe red Who would have made my name

[00:13:23] Joe Peters: a little bit you what you wonder if there were some stories of shopping around to see who was going to To bite on this one, but i’m sure really interesting stuff and Will be, once again, interesting to see where HubSpot’s going to take things.

[00:13:37] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. So, okay, let’s shift gears into our community question this week. This one’s an interesting one. So, I’m looking for advice on developing marketing ops plans. I’ve been building out, process, and refining for efficiency with no real guiding light. Any recommendations?

[00:14:01] Lauren McCormack: Revenue is your north star, friend.

[00:14:03] Lauren McCormack: Like I know it’s scary to lean into a number, especially if sales won’t even take your calls or give you the time of day. And but I think so many people at Mopsapalooza surprised me by articulating the CMO’s point of view, right? Which, of course, is the whole C suite and the board’s point of view.

[00:14:24] Lauren McCormack: You know my, my, my, Buddy, Arizona colleague down here, my, my Phoenix Mug Leader, Raja Wala, was talking about his kind of personality and the way that he’s always liked to build cool stuff. And the fact that he would go as a mop soul and he hated the strategy. He hated the conversations around building the PowerPoint for the deck and doing all the stuff.

[00:14:49] Lauren McCormack: You know, he wanted to build something super cool, you know, and whether or not it generated, you know, 5 million in pipeline or just was something that he could chat with his other, you know marketing ops souls about just from an interesting, you know, novel build standpoint. He had a pivot, I think, in his career where he realized.

[00:15:13] Lauren McCormack: The budget to build the cool stuff comes from the strategy, comes from tying to your revenue North Stars, comes from being able to articulate what the return on your time is to the bottom, the top line, right? So I think if you’re lacking direction, look at your company’s You know, strategic plan for the year, where can you support and lift the, the, the, the heavy rocks, where can you build against numbers that will build job security for your boss’s boss?

[00:15:48] Joe Peters: Well, think about it. What’s your CMO’s OKRs? Like, just like, maybe, yeah. It’s definitely not buying another technology to add to the stack. So yeah, so I think, I think you’re, you’re right. Like if, if you don’t have anything, just looking at revenue is just a great starting point. If not you can never go wrong there.

[00:16:15] Joe Peters: Pretty much.

[00:16:15] Lauren McCormack: It’s daunting. Like, I mean, some companies you know, I’ve been in a, in a case where contribution to pipeline, you know, I, I can barely tell you how many leads we got this month. Right. So work backwards from that number then and show. In incremental bite sized pieces, how you’re going to build that transparency and visibility.

[00:16:37] Lauren McCormack: And granted, prepare yourself, put a buffer point in there. Once you stand up reporting, you may not want to socialize it right away. It might be ugly, it might have some hard truths, you know. And it’s gonna, it’s gonna tell us maybe a half a story. Maybe it’s not even the full story. So don’t, don’t you know, work with a firm like ours.

[00:16:56] Lauren McCormack: Stand up reporting and then have a book. Meeting the next day to socialize that with your CMO give yourself some refinement time a little buffer is healthy, but Once you can start articulating that, you know Investment in in X Channel Gives wide contribution to close one business. Then you’re onto something, you’ve got job security, you’re able to do regression analysis so that if at the end of the year you have 5, 000 extra dollars, you know where to put it and what to, how to manage the expectations around what you’ll get back from it.

[00:17:29] Lauren McCormack: That’s the powerful conversation that I think. Would help you get to a place of transparency and visibility and alignment across the org. And that’s really what we’re supposed to be doing in ops, not just like gatekeeping and siloing and doing cool stuff under the cover of night. Like we’re supposed to be facilitating growth across the company at the end of the day.

[00:17:50] Joe Peters: Well, that’s some, some great advice. And hopefully that. Community member is listening in to this episode of Launch Codes, but all right, let’s move on to thank our sponsor. 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.

[00:18:12] Joe Peters: Get AI powered translations in up to 75 languages in just minutes. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. Alright, well let’s slide into our hot takes segment and as always, OpenAI is going to be part of the conversation and I know we were supposed to talk a little bit about GPT 4 Turbo and all of the things that we can get with that in terms of what they announced on developer day with, you know, context length increases and all these other things.

[00:18:51] Joe Peters: But I have to ask you, have you had a chance to play around or seen any of the build your own GPTs yet, Lauren? Have you seen any experiments?

[00:19:04] Lauren McCormack: A little bit. Yeah. Last week while, while you were in Anaheim, Lucas got under the hood. Our, our, our our brilliant scientists, our, our math major gone AI marketing ops genius.

[00:19:17] Lauren McCormack: Was, was experimenting a bit with training, you know individual agents that were, were representative of like the brain trust. You know what I mean? Let’s, let’s feed the monster, right? With as much as we can, as much proprietary knowledge as we can. And of course my first thing was like. Are we sure this is secure?

[00:19:39] Lauren McCormack: Lucas ? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, are we sure anything is secure? And I’m like, that is such a fear. Yeah. But,

[00:19:44] Joe Peters: But above and beyond, yeah. That, that, that’s always the question at the, at the forefront of our mind. But I do feel like there is an R-P-G-P-T coming out in the Yeah. In the future. And you know, we’ll probably kick it around internally for a bit first, but such an amazing.

[00:20:05] Joe Peters: opPortunity to play around, not just in, our little world, but in general, I think we’re going to see some of these custom GPTs just kind of take off and the way that you have the ability to not only to set. Some context by uploading some documents to sort of focus the, the GPT, but the ability to also connect other plugins or actually other APIs to do other tasks.

[00:20:34] Joe Peters: I think our imaginations have got to be opened up a little bit to see where the opportunities potentially could be, because it’s kind of mind blowing where, where you could. We, you could potentially go with this. So anyway,

[00:20:50] Lauren McCormack: it’s, it’s the, it’s the beginning of kind of the, the visualization and the expansion, I think of, of seeing what kind of potential we can realize with this technology.

[00:21:00] Lauren McCormack: You know, this is, these are the, the, the little widgets in the fact, these are the Pokemon that the Pokemon trainers will wield, right?

[00:21:09] Joe Peters: Well, I, I thought it was interesting I saw a little clip from, from Sam Altman when he was saying, we have to get the world familiar with AI. So we’re going to release it incrementally so people can become accustomed to it and not just wait for it to be perfect.

[00:21:29] Joe Peters: So I think that’s the other thing with these GPTs, like everything there’s, there’s going to still be the odd hallucination. You’re going to get some results that maybe you don’t like. But. We’re in this experimentation phase where we’ve, we’ve got to play around a little bit.

[00:21:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, definitely. This is the time to be curious and stay curious and ask questions of what the potential, the unbridled potential really looks like.

[00:21:53] Lauren McCormack: This is where dreaming big is going to pay off in, in spades. You can’t, you can’t just avoid it. That’s for sure.

[00:21:59] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, it’s always nice to get a couple of new toys in the sandbox, that’s for sure. And so I feel like we got thrown a couple of new ones, so that’s, that’s pretty interesting. But let’s shift into the next topic, which is kind of funny, because we hear a lot about AI taking away everyone’s job.

[00:22:18] Joe Peters: Well, LinkedIn’s spinning that a little bit and saying that AI will find you jobs. And so they’re testing features to generate… Cover letter like messages so that candidates can send these into the hiring platforms.

[00:22:33] Lauren McCormack: I did my job. They pitched me. They’re like, Hey, test out our new, you know, generative AI tools to improve your LinkedIn presence.

[00:22:43] Lauren McCormack: I’m like, all right, let’s talk, you know, let’s see what you got there. And I didn’t spend a whole lot of time training my algorithm to be fair, but it does have plenty of data on me. But what it suggested for like a profile summary. It was incredibly boring. And I don’t know. It didn’t, it didn’t really capture any of my essence, I didn’t feel like.

[00:23:07] Lauren McCormack: And so I tried again, and maybe one more time, and then I just kind of abandoned. I think GPT understands me better, maybe because I have a name for my GPT relationship. But I don’t have a relationship with LinkedIn’s AI, clearly. They don’t, they don’t get me. And I felt, I felt kind of sad about that.

[00:23:29] Joe Peters: I think the last thing you want to do with your cover letter is have anyone on the receiving end think that, Oh, this was generated by AI.

[00:23:39] Joe Peters: You know, Like, if there’s a time to sort of try and stand out now, it’s going to be to abandon the AI and trying to make yourself notice. So, anyway, probably more, more, more to come here, but right now, probably safe to say our hot take is it’s a little bit underwhelming.

[00:24:01] Lauren McCormack: Mm hmm. So far. Yep.

[00:24:04] Joe Peters: Okay. Well, let’s move into, well, the fun’s not going to stop here.

[00:24:09] Joe Peters: We’re going to move into our airing segment and a chance to talk music for a little bit. So our album this week I have right here, just let me reach over. It is the Yai Yai Yazz, which and their latest album Cool It Down. Pretty cool cover here. Big fans of this band, but also of Karen Oh, the lead singer.

[00:24:33] Joe Peters: She, she is has a. Spot close to my heart when she started to have a family just around the same time that I started to be a dad, and so she took a little bit of a break, but then during that break to focus on being a mom, she recorded a soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are, which was a favorite book in my house, and so that soundtrack and a movie was on repeat for many, many weeks as you know, kids are ought to do, but they’re back at it and back on the festival circuit.

[00:25:06] Joe Peters: And so this latest album, cool it down really a nice purple marble vinyl on, on this one. And the track we have is called burning. And which is kind of funny, cool it down, but then the single is called Burning. You wonder where their creative juxtaposition is there. But anyway It’s, you’re, so the way that we’re doing it now is on the podcast, on launch codes.

[00:25:33] Joe Peters: You have to wait till the very end. Now you have to, you have to hear the close, and then we have a little bit of an outro and you’ll be able to see the album if you’re watching the video on Spotify or YouTube, but. You’ll also be able to hear it the audio of the song. If but we’re, we’re putting it at the end just so that it doesn’t overlay against our voices and make it tricky for you to hear.

[00:25:57] Joe Peters: So that’s this week’s album. Now, why are we pairing with it for beverage this week?

[00:26:04] Lauren McCormack: So you got me thinking about this whole international. Need for for a coffee that’s available outside of Tucson. So So we’re all market yesterday and I picked up some dark matter, which also incidentally has an espresso called unicorn blood Which is really good.

[00:26:24] Lauren McCormack: Wow. Yeah, but for today we picked starry eyes It’s by Dark Matter. It’s their darkest roast. What a great packaging. Isn’t it gorgeous? They’re out of Chicago. And they’re a fun brand. I have to admit, I do like my, my darker, darker, darker roasts here in Tucson a bit more. I thought, considering the complexities of weather and, and just general Chicagoan nature, having been a Chicagoan for a good long while, that.

[00:26:53] Lauren McCormack: The darkest of dark roasts would come from my former hometown, but this is not a bad cup. I do pick up some brown sugar and it is their deepest, darkest roast from what I understand. But worth, worth a spin. And I think it should be more, more geographically available than some of my other choices have been.

[00:27:12] Lauren McCormack: You

[00:27:12] Joe Peters: know what, I was going to ask you that. Well, that looks delicious. And they get 10 out of 10 on the branding of Of the pound like that is that is amazing in my I was on the road last week for mops, a palooza, and then also did a little jaunt down to check out the San Diego part of the coast, which is really fantastic.

[00:27:35] Joe Peters: But in my hotel room, I’ve never seen this before. They set you up with a kettle and then had coffee that you put in like a tea bag and you don’t to it. And, you know, steeped it the way you would tea and pulled it out, but I’ve, I’ve had, I don’t know, probably several million coffees in my life at this point.

[00:28:00] Joe Peters: And I have never, ever seen that. Have you ever seen

[00:28:03] Lauren McCormack: that? It’s sensible. My French press is from Clearbit to take things fully. They sent me a French press once upon a time. I mean,

[00:28:13] Joe Peters: French press ish. Yeah.

[00:28:17] Lauren McCormack: Cold brew bags. But I’ve never, was it cold, bro? Or was it? No,

[00:28:22] Joe Peters: no, they gave you a kettle, which was also kind of a fancy, funky kind of new kettle.

[00:28:28] Joe Peters: You know, those ones that you put down and then you set the temperature on it and then press the button. So anyway, it was very Different, but something that I’d never come across. So the fact that it was a shock for me, it’s a surprise for the coffee connoisseur as well. Yeah.

[00:28:44] Lauren McCormack: Well, I know that instant coffee had its moment and I’m kind of happy that that didn’t catch on, but I’m curious.

[00:28:50] Joe Peters: No, no, no. This, this was, I’m going to say it was fairly delicious. Not. But definitely wasn’t instant coffee in any of the sink or whatever the,

[00:29:01] Lauren McCormack: And that wasn’t really a welcoming, I, the ritual itself is, is part of the charm, I think, you know,

[00:29:07] Joe Peters: but it was combining the Tea and coffee ritual, which was weird.

[00:29:13] Joe Peters: But anyway, sometimes you, you learn more than you you thought you were when you listened to LaunchCode. So we just added that little extra in for you this week, but well, thanks Lauren. And thanks everyone for listening this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple podcasts.

[00:29:33] Joe Peters: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn, or by joining our newsletter, also called Launch Codes, using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. Have a great week, everyone. Take care, everybody.