[Episode 10] The State of Marketing Ops 2023

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

 

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.

3 Ways To Train New MOPs Employees More Efficiently

Hi Joe,

I lead a small internal MOPs team of just 2 people at my company.

Recently, the company has been growing rapidly and we’re quickly realizing our MOPs team must also grow to keep up.

The trouble is, we do things a very particular way in our platforms – so getting new members up to speed is going to be difficult.

Any advice on how we can save time while keeping all new team members trained and aligned?

Thanks,

Growing Greg

pink separator line

Hi Greg, thank you for the great question.

 

“High-quality documentation is an important part of keeping up with rapid growth.”

 

I’ve seen countless in-house MOPs teams go through this exact journey. High-quality documentation is an important part of keeping up with rapid growth. Your team must prioritize it to ensure it’s consistently maintained.

Here’s why:

1. Good documentation is an essential training resource

When it comes to most small to mid-sized companies, there might only be 1 or 2 employees who are experts in a specific platform like Marketo, Hubspot, or any other MAP.

If this person suddenly leaves the company or gives a standard 2-week resignation notice, there will be a substantial knowledge gap for the person who takes over their position.

This is where good documentation practices will go a long way.

You’ll have the perfect resource for transferring missing knowledge over to other employees, resulting in far less downtime during transitional phases.

And the same can be said when your MOPs team begins to expand as a result of company-wide growth anticipation. Up-to-date, digestible documentation will get new employees trained fast.

 

2. Documentation creates consistency and enables optimization

As your MOPs team grows, you’ll want to make sure everyone is following the same processes.

This way you can create consistency across your tools. The level of team uniformity you can maintain will have a direct impact on the efficiency and clarity of your platform instance.

For example, if your MAP has 3 or 4 different processes that all achieve the same thing, the entire instance becomes more convoluted and difficult for your team to interpret.

Recording these processes through good documentation practices will create a clear picture of your instance for the entire MOPs team to assess, optimize, and align themselves towards.

 

3. Standard operating procedures emerge from documentation

Historically, MOPs teams would be highly flexible, fast, and loose.

But over the years, the value and importance of MOPs as a discipline has become increasingly acknowledged and recognized by leadership teams.

And with this recognition comes the need for MOPs to take on more consistency and structure within the organization.

With that said, creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) through good documentation is an effective way to simplify complex processes and promote efficiency. SOPs will also further assist you when it comes to training new employees and reducing confusion.

 

Documentation responsibility

Be clear about who is responsible for creating documentation

The documentation process itself can be time consuming, which often means it won’t be completed.

With this in mind, it’s important to be specific about who is responsible for creating it and how they will do so.

Some efficient methods for both production and consumption are things like cloning workflows and recording demos – rather than word documents that have lengthy explanations. This is especially useful for “How To” documentation that can be used for internal training.

By turning this process into a regular practice that’s performed on an ongoing basis, you’ll ensure proper documentation is always complete and up-to-date in the event that a key knowledge expert leaves the company.

 

Get ahead of the problem

Seeing as your MOPs team is currently quite small, it’s best to get ahead of things and start creating good documentation and SOPs as soon as you can.

Doing so will equip you with a clear, birds-eye view of the processes that exist within your MAP instance, so you can eliminate redundancies, create consistency, and train new hires fast when your team starts to grow.

You’ve got this,

Joe

P.S. New hires may find this blog post interesting: How Should I Approach My First Days in Marketing Automation?

[Episode 9] MOPs-Apalooza 2023

For our ninth episode of Launch Codes, Joe and Andy are recording from a suite in Anaheim, California as they attend MOPs-Apalooza 2023! They discuss several of their favorite keynotes at the event, as well as Andy’s own presentation. Later in the episode, they touch on some fascinating AI news including OpenAI’s latest GPT enhancements and Elon Musk’s new ChatGPT rival “Grok”.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

 

MOPs-Apalooza 2023

Today’s episode was recorded on November 8th, 2023 — the final day of MOPs-Apalooza. Joe and Andy kick things off by commending Mike Rizzo and the entire MO Pro’s team on an outstanding inaugural event that exceeded expectations. There were several takeaways from every single session, and the whole thing was professional and engaging all the way through. Let’s get into some of their favorite keynotes and moments below.

Opening Session by Scott Brinker

MOPs-Apalooza 2023 started strong with a session titled “A Martech Supercollision: Smashing Together AI, Cloud Data, & Composability” presented by Scott Brinker (Editor at chiefmartec.com and VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot). Both Joe and Andy were instantly captured by this one, stating that there were “aha” moments seemingly every few minutes. Joe highlighted a particular standout point on how we are moving along an “innovation timeline” moving from “code” to “low code” to “no code” with AI driving this disruption at every level of our organizations. Andy echoed the importance of this perspective and reflected on Scott’s ability to simplify complex topics into digestible pieces that really resonate.

The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Attribution by Andy Caron

Next up, the two dive into an incredible moment for Andy who had her own session at MOPs-Apalooza this year! The title of her presentation —“The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Attribution” — is inspired by one of her favorite novels of all time, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Andy reflects on how she immediately fell in love with the novels over 20 years ago, highlighting Adams’ unique ability to offer deep insights into human nature and the world around us in a way that is fun and entertaining.

(Spoiler warning ahead for those who haven’t read the books yet!)

Andy explains how in the story, a supercomputer named “Deep Thought” says the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is “42”. The overly intelligent race in the story wants to understand what this number means, but the computer says “They must understand the question for the answer to make sense”. From there, they develop an even greater, more complex computer to find the question to that answer.

This story parallels the exact attribution journey that Andy has seen many companies go through. She describes how people in organizations today are also looking for answers on where (and how) they should invest in complex AI models to drive revenue. They get results that don’t make a lot of sense, so they develop even more complex systems to find the question they should be asking around the answer they couldn’t interpret. Overall, the presentation was a resounding success, and Joe iterated how he was in the room and could tell that the audience was completely engaged.

It was a special moment for Andy and one she said she’ll remember for the rest of her life. She also shared that, to commemorate the convergence of people and the significance of finally bringing this presentation to an audience after a year of working on it, she got her very first tattoo! It was none other than the number “42” on her ankle. Listen to the full episode for more details on Andy’s presentation and the full story behind that awesome tattoo. You can also download the ebook Andy wrote as a companion to her presentation.

Other MOPs-Apalooza Highlights

The following are three other keynote presentations that Joe and Andy enjoyed at the event:

1. Translating Geek Speak to CMO Speak: Unveiling the Secrets to MOPS Career Success
by Jessica Kao and David Alexander

Joe absolutely loved the way they started this session. He highlighted an incredible point that David made which was: As a CMO, he doesn’t want to hear the name of a platform, he doesn’t know if it’s a “Marketo” thing or a “lean data” thing, he just wants to know what it does. This mindset shift towards an emphasis on what a system actually does and the role it plays resonated with Joe and Andy both.

Another part of the presentation they appreciated was the idea that we don’t need to tell our CMOs when something is broken or something can’t be done. Instead, focus on what you can deliver now and the goal you’re moving towards.

2. Get the F*ck Unstuck: How to Unlock Your True Potential
by Hana Jacover

This was another presentation that dealt less with the technical side of things and more on life and how to be successful and happy. Hana specifically touched on self-care and how to take care of yourself in our demanding roles at work. Joe had the opportunity to chat with her after the session and was blown away by her approach.

A standout moment was when she explained how biologically, we are just not designed to take 3 90 minute Zoom calls back-to-back-to-back. We need to have that level of self-awareness and reflect on how we set up the day for ourselves. Andy emphasized the importance of events like MOPs-Apalooza, and how these conferences not only offer technical growth sessions but also personal growth sessions like this one.

3. Building A Unified MOPS Data Platform
by Ryan Vong

The final honorable mention dives back into the technical side of things. It was the last session they attended and Ryan hit multiple home runs. One thing that really stuck with Joe was Ryan’s idea on the cost of bad data, which was: It costs $1 to be preemptive about bad data, $10 to fix bad data after the fact, and $100 if you don’t address it at all — for every data problem that you have.

Another idea that both Joe and Andy resonated with was the modern approach of pushing for “DataOps” which is an area where MOPs can play a real leadership role that connects Sales and Marketing. Andy remembers how even before “MOPs” was a title, she worked in “Database Marketing” which has now come full circle to include the data that is going into our systems.

 

Hot Takes

 

Pairings

Since our team was on location in Anaheim at MOPs-Apalooza, Joe wasn’t able to bring any physical records for this week’s pairings. But he did give a shout out to the recently released single, “Now and Then” by The Beatles – a beautiful song that was completely with the help of AI! For Anydy’s pairing, she recommended a book called “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Tim Wu. It’s a book she has read several times, gaining new insights from every reread.

 

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 nine. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, Top of the Ops, highlights from Mopsapalooza 2023, a cornucopia of treats from AI This Week. And I’m joined live on, on location here at Mopsapalooza in Anaheim, California with Andy. And Andy, what are you excited to talk about this week?

[00:00:26] Andy Caron:: All of it, but especially Mousepalooza, just what an amazing event, absolutely just top

[00:00:32] Joe Peters:: notch. Yeah, I think it exceeded all of our expectations. Hats off to all of the team, Mike Rizzo and the gang. They’ve just really outdone themselves for a first conference. It was professional and engaging from minute one.

[00:00:53] Andy Caron:: Yes, absolutely. Every, every session I went to, there was a, there was a winner. There was at least several takeaways that I was actually taking notes on. It wasn’t just like, Oh, this is interesting, but not actionable. So many actionable things. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible.

[00:01:09] Joe Peters:: I, and just from the opening keynote with Scott Brinker, that was, that was incredible.

[00:01:15] Joe Peters:: There were aha moments it seemed like every couple of minutes that you’d run through something and just trigger a light bulb and you’d be, Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Oh, that’s a really good way of categorizing things. I really loved when he talked about this innovation timeline and moving from.

[00:01:36] Joe Peters:: Code to low code to no code and how it’s kind of like the democratization of, I’m going to say marketing from a technology base, but really empowering marketers to do a lot more than they ever could.

[00:01:56] Andy Caron:: Absolutely. And to be thinking about. Both came right before he, he affairs with me before we cam. like not being bankrupt is a good way to things that, that they probably had,

[00:02:15] Joe Peters:: Possibly thought about back then.

[00:02:18] Joe Peters:: Certainly I’m one of the people who was like, I mean, Coding, low code, no code evolution, and how it connects to AI and use cases. So the idea of that low end use case, that mid range use case, that high end use case, that it’s going to have significant impact in your organization and how no code in AI is driving this transformation within organizations, driving this disruption.

[00:02:48] Joe Peters:: He said, I don’t like saying transformation. We can go with disruption. We’re good with that one. But. I love that framing and integration of those two

[00:02:58] Andy Caron:: concepts. Well, and the fact that he’d already… He had already passed, right, like, the first stage and was already heading into that mid range, right? Like, he had blown past slow, like, that’s already happening, we’re in trajectory for mid already, and it’s happening just so fast.

[00:03:14] Andy Caron:: It’s really, it, yeah, which is true, but I hadn’t paused to think about it and go, yeah, that already happened, like, that’s already the past. It was, yeah, he was phenomenal. And I somehow, this is bad to say, but I somehow missed that he was going to be our first keynote. And so when they said that’s who was coming on stage, I was like, Oh, yes, yes, yes.

[00:03:35] Andy Caron:: So excited. He was, it was phenomenal speaker to see. He just, he simplified such complexity down into digestible pieces that allowed you to really take something and consider it without feeling overwhelmed by it.

[00:03:48] Joe Peters:: Yeah. There were so many takeaways from that. And I’m still waiting to get access to his deck.

[00:03:53] Joe Peters:: He said he was going to share it, but we haven’t seen it yet. There’s just a treasure trove of information and insights there. Well, speaking of treasure trove and let’s segue right into your session where you kind of looked at the meaning of life, the universe and attribution. And there’s so many different layers we can start with here, but Just a small thing to tackle.

[00:04:16] Joe Peters:: Why don’t we, why don’t we start with your, this is your labour of love passion project with some, you know, The Hitchhiker’s Guide, which is your, your, arguably your favourite, most favourite novel. Yes. Tell everyone a little bit about what your mindset was and thinking about this and then I can tell you how it came off But why don’t you talk about your process there?

[00:04:41] Joe Peters:: Yes,

[00:04:42] Andy Caron:: so I read Hitchhiker’s Guide and the concurrent novels over 20 years ago immediately fell in love it was just a Love affair of the the merging of Comedy and sci fi, but with this level of insight into the world, humanity, how we’re wired, and a nuanced way of, of making fun of it and critiquing it and kind of pointing things out without just overtly saying, here’s the, the, the fun.

[00:05:14] Andy Caron:: Flawed aspects of humanity or just consciousness as a whole. And also here’s a fun ride to take along with all of that as you hitchhike across the galaxy and, and have just this like sort of stupid, like in what. Galaxy is a towel, the most useful thing, right? But it is, so it’s, it’s, it’s a fun thing.

[00:05:36] Andy Caron:: So about a year ago, I was thinking about. The sort of parable within the novels of this pan dimensional super race of beings that decided that they wanted to or maybe even needed to know the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, universe, and everything. It’s a huge question, right? And so they built a supercomputer, Deep Thought, to tell them the answer.

[00:06:05] Andy Caron:: And they waited generations, tens of thousands of years. And the culture was just focused and centric around the output that they would eventually get from deep thought and how that would bring everything together. And their whole culture was almost like dependent on whatever this answer would be. It’s a media frenzy around it.

[00:06:27] Andy Caron:: And then the day comes. And out, you know, pops the answer, deep thoughts, like the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, universe, and everything is 42. Exactly. And pin drop, right? Like what, what do you do with that? Right? It’s, it’s such a nonsensical answer. And so of course they do what any overly intelligent organization, race, Would do culture in a planet and they say, okay, well, what’s that mean?

[00:06:59] Andy Caron:: The computer says, well, only when you know the question, well, the answer makes sense, right? So at that point they’re invested. They say, what’s, what’s the question? And the computer says, I can’t tell you that, but I can help you to develop this bigger, more complex, intensely complex computer that will give you the answer.

[00:07:18] Andy Caron:: And then, or the question rather, and then the answer will make sense. And the parable of this against people within their own organizations, building these very complex systems or adopting these very complex AI models and looking for the answer of where they should be investing and how they can make more money, how they can drive revenue, the dependency on that and waiting for the results rather than Continuing to evolve and take action and looking for meaning within the minutia of the day to day and then getting an answer that makes no sense, they double, triple, quadruple down and make an even more complex system to then get, you know, the question that they should be asking around the answer that they received because it didn’t make any sense to me just was too attribution journey that I’ve seen so many organizations take.

[00:08:09] Andy Caron:: It was too perfect.

[00:08:11] Joe Peters:: 100%. And I, what I thought was so cool was. The idea of using 42 as that placeholder and that you, that in the answer 42, 42 has meaning for everyone and everyone gets to figure out what their 42 is. Well

[00:08:26] Andy Caron:: that, that was, that was the, the, the linchpin for me when I knew I needed to take this.

[00:08:32] Andy Caron:: into this form of presentation, so I came across the fact, and Douglas Adams claims that this was not intentional, I don’t know, maybe it’s subconscious, maybe it was intentional, he just didn’t want to say so, but he was a technophile, he loved computers, he loved computer language, early language that he was a big fan of, ASC 2, 42 is the keystroke for an asterisk, and when you think about in the context of data, the asterisk is a placeholder, it’s something, to your point, that you put in place when you don’t, you know you don’t know something, there’s something there, But I love this idea of 42 in that computer, deep thoughts language is an asterisk and an asterisk essentially means whatever you need it to mean.

[00:09:13] Andy Caron:: And so this huge question had an answer that was exceptionally deep actually that could have, that could have fed their media circus for generations, right? What is the meaning of everything? Whatever you need it to mean for you, there’s, there’s something there, right? In the same way that 42 meant nothing to them, the data that marketers are getting from attribution doesn’t mean anything to them because a, the questions are too big and they’re trying to get too much out of one question and one answer, but also be, they’re not speaking the language of their systems, their data to actually understand that there is a deeper meeting in there.

[00:09:56] Andy Caron:: They just. aren’t either speaking their computer’s language or getting the computer to be able to speak their language to output what that action or that meaning is or should

[00:10:06] Joe Peters:: be. It was I can tell it was extremely well received. Not only was I in the room, but I could observe. And what I find in, when you’re going to different sessions, the sign of good session is how often people are bringing up their phones, right?

[00:10:21] Joe Peters:: Oh, I got to capture that. I got to capture that. It was, and he was a celebrity with all the shots that were taken of her, but. I think the other part and I don’t know if this is fair for me to ask but there’s another 42 story that we added In terms of some ink, being added this week. So why don’t why don’t you share share

[00:10:41] Andy Caron:: that story?

[00:10:42] Andy Caron:: Yes Yes, so I found out in advance of coming that there were going to be tattoos happening

[00:10:53] Andy Caron:: On real tattoos And in in preparing for my session I had had this It’s sort of a recurrence of 42. It just was this bizarre thing. Like I actually took my progression and put it into chat GPT to make sure my timing was on point. Right. And I judged and I was pulling it back and saying, okay, well, if I take this long and these slides, how do I get within the range of that, you know, 40 to 45 minute slot that I needed to hit And the final pass, because I, I, after that I was like, I’m done.

[00:11:18] Andy Caron:: I can’t, I can’t do any more. It came back and it said, your session will take 42 minutes and 42 seconds. And I literally cackled out loud. I was like, I see you Douglas Adams, right? Like, yeah. So I have never gotten a tattoo before. I, I, I was a noob. And I, I really, I thought about it long and hard, but.

[00:11:40] Andy Caron:: The, the, in college, everyone was getting them, right? And I always looked at it and said, I don’t know that I want anything on my body until I’m 80. But the reality is, I mean, God willing, I make it to 80, but I think that it, the, the convergence of the people, the significance of what happened here and being able to bring this session that I’ve, I’ve literally been developing for a year, To this particular conference at this time was something that I do want to remember until I’m 80.

[00:12:11] Andy Caron:: And so I got a I got a 42 on my ankle. I just got goosebumps

[00:12:14] Joe Peters:: there. I just got goosebumps because not only do you have that memory, but it’s also, you’ve created a gift for everyone as well. And that you’ve taken this guide and now there is a little ebook on this that, that is available so that if you missed, if you’re getting FOMO from this discussion on the session there is the ability for you to, to download and, and check out what Andy’s been sharing in terms of connecting your guide to the galaxy and attribution is now at your fingertips.

[00:12:46] Joe Peters:: But Andy, congrats on a great session, but let’s get to a couple of other ones that we, we really enjoyed. The first one, there was some non technical streams that I thought were really cool. And by non technical, I wasn’t getting into the nuts and bolts or deep into the technologies, but we’re talking about life and how do you be successful.

[00:13:12] Joe Peters:: So we’re And Jessica Kao, and what was the other guy’s name? David Alexander. David Alexander. They did a session on how to speak the language of your CMO. That might not be the exact title of it, but just work with us here. Yes. Yes. Because I… Loved the way they started the session, and David had some really incredible points.

[00:13:33] Joe Peters:: He said, I never want to hear the name as a CMO. I never want to hear the name of a platform. Don’t tell me a platform. I don’t want to know that. This is a marketo thing or a lean data thing or a clear, but then I just I want to know what it does. So talk to me, just change your mindset a little bit. And I don’t want to hear you mention a platform.

[00:13:51] Joe Peters:: Just tell me about what this system does or what the system’s role is. And I felt like that was, I think for people in the room, I, you could see people’s brains exploding at that idea because we’re so close to it. We live and breathe this. But it’s our language, not the language of leadership. But

[00:14:11] Andy Caron:: I think as very technical people, right, we figure something out, we crack something, and we get really excited about it, and we want to go share that.

[00:14:19] Andy Caron:: But ultimately what we’re not doing, instead of saying like, Oh, there’s this really cool thing I made the system do. I did this cool thing in the system, that’s great, but here’s the outcome that will be driven because of it and that’s what ladders up into senior leadership. What are the outcomes that are occurring within the business?

[00:14:36] Andy Caron:: Or what if you stopped that now, you know, has improved things that will then yield outcomes. Yeah, right. That flipping the script to talking about not what matters to you, but what matters to them. And

[00:14:53] Joe Peters:: I thought the other part, if we take the sort of the next step in that was Don’t tell me when something’s broken or what you can’t do.

[00:15:02] Joe Peters:: Okay. Tell me what you can deliver and what you’re moving towards. But this idea that, you know, we all live in this world where we want perfection and mobs, and some of that is going to be like Maslow’s hierarchy. We may never reach self actualization when it comes to getting everything working perfectly.

[00:15:21] Joe Peters:: So we can always get mired in this. This is broken. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. Look what I inherited. No, no, no. That’s another change in mindset to start to think through this. I can do this right now, and I want to be able to do this next. Beautiful language. A love language.

[00:15:41] Andy Caron:: Yes. I will fund you improving efficiency from 75 to 85.

[00:15:46] Andy Caron:: But I will not fund something where it’s, it’s broken in and I want to fix it. Right? It’s, it’s the gain, not the current status. Yes.

[00:15:56] Joe Peters:: So, great session. A reminder for all of us, and I, I really feel it was an eye opener for those people in the room. It’s a session that a lot of people have continued to talk about, and that was on Monday.

[00:16:07] Joe Peters:: Yes. For those of you at home, it’s Wednesday today, so just it, we, it, it’s a, it’s a theme that I think really resonated with a lot of people. And then this next session that, Hannah Yakover, or I think that’s how you pronounce her last name on self care and, and, and the idea of how do you optimize yourself and how do you take care of yourself in our demanding work life?

[00:16:35] Joe Peters:: So what’s that balance? That you need to create, and what does that look like? And I was just blown away having the chance to chat with her after the session, and hear about her approach, and, and, and, and, and the, I don’t know, it just, there was like light bulb, light bulb, light bulb going off the whole time.

[00:16:56] Andy Caron:: Yes, yes, I mean, I think, Having an opportunity in the middle of pursuing growth, right? That’s what most of us are here for at this type of a conference to realize that, you know, it’s not the technical growth. Right. It’s, it’s getting yourself unstuck from other areas that then allow you to have the baseline to then have the capacity to grow more in the technical and other areas of your career, right?

[00:17:22] Andy Caron:: Personal growth leads to career growth. And I think the connection between those two things is just so powerful.

[00:17:28] Joe Peters:: And I, I, what, what I took away from my chatting with her was. We often don’t think about how do we perform our best at a biological level. We’re not equipped to do three 90 minute zooms back to back to back.

[00:17:45] Joe Peters:: We’re not equipped for that. We’re never going to perform our best in those situations. So that self awareness, that reflection on what we set ourselves up to, what do we put our hands up for? Oh, I can’t miss that. I can’t miss that. And also how do we reset that? These are very powerful things for people to think about, to complement your technological skills with that self awareness, self care, to speak the language of CMOs and leadership.

[00:18:17] Joe Peters:: These are some really beautiful connections being made between what is essential to be successful in

[00:18:24] Andy Caron:: our work life. Yes, and I think it just… Shows how much we’ve come in the sense that these are the conversations that we’re having. It’s not just a way to do really cool stuff, right? It’s how to get yourself to a place where you can do really cool stuff.

[00:18:42] Andy Caron:: And that’s such a wonderful evolution to see for such a technical community. That those are the conversations that we’re having that people are continuing to talk about. These two sessions were two of the most talked about sessions that I encountered across the entirety of this whole conference, because they, they, they, they stepped back.

[00:19:02] Andy Caron:: I mean, I love all the conversation on AI, APS, right? All these cool things that people are doing, but at the end of the day, you can’t do any of that if you’re not doing this.

[00:19:10] Joe Peters:: Exactly, exactly. And well, I, it is also. Eye opening for us to make sure we’re not forgetting all those different pieces. Yeah. As, as leaders in our, in our organization, really making sure that we’re helping equip people in all of these different areas to be successful.

[00:19:31] Joe Peters:: But now the nerd back, like just to get back into it, we just finished seeing this morning. The last session for us was one that Ryan Vaughn put on and Ryan is, He was an extremely thoughtful and passionate person. He was a little nervous going into a session, but he hit a home run, maybe multiple home runs.

[00:19:55] Joe Peters:: It was, it was excellent. And he went on this journey in Canada, we’ll often say he went for a walk in the snow to kind of figure out what he was doing next. And then he came across this challenge of data. Yes. What’s happening with data and what are we doing with it? How are we optimizing it? How are we, how are we making it sure that it’s a partner in our business and an accelerator in our business and not an anchor that we’re dragging along on the ground?

[00:20:32] Joe Peters:: And I, I, there was a couple of things that really struck with me. You know, he had this idea of the cost of bad data. It’s 1 to be preemptive 10 to fix it. And it’s a hundred dollars if you don’t do anything with it for every data problem that you have. And so when you, when you add that, add that up exponentially, that looks that those can be some really big numbers, but this other idea that we need to expand our thinking into A new model of of a modern data approach where we’ve thought of rev ops, we thought of marketing ops, but now we need to be pushing for data ops and, and that is a real role where mops can play a leadership in the connectivity between whether that’s sales, marketing it, this is a journey that cannot be, executed by a single part of the organization, but it can be led.

[00:21:32] Joe Peters:: And I think this is a really great place for, for mobsta to maybe put another hat on, or at least another pin on it, on, on our hats.

[00:21:40] Andy Caron:: Yes. But I think it’s interesting too. I’ve had a number of, of great conversations with some very smart people this week and, and the persistent theme, which Ryan really, I think, hit home was.

[00:21:56] Andy Caron:: I remember one of my very first titles before mops was even a title was database marketing, right? Yeah. And we’re in that final stage of transitioning from being responsible for databases to becoming responsible for data, right? And how that transition from database within a specific system into data within the ecosystem and all the systems as a whole is a paradigm shift that we have to make now.

[00:22:29] Andy Caron:: And then the orchestration of that and how Ryan’s thinking about that is the part that I am so, I’m most in love

[00:22:39] Joe Peters:: with. This concept of composability is something that’s come up in a lot of conversations. Such a through line, yes. And, and I really do think that you know, whether we’re talking about ETLs, reverse ETLs, and, and this idea of interconnectivity.

[00:22:55] Joe Peters:: What has been our aspirational place to be, we have the pieces in place to make it a reality and it’s, it’s going to take some time and investment, but it’s, that’s where the dividends are coming from and not the losses. And that’s, I think that understanding that tension and understanding that opportunity is super important.

[00:23:18] Joe Peters:: Okay, well, as you can tell, we’re big fans of Mopsapalooza. There was no shortage of fun, but before we move on to some of our hot takes, I’d like to thank our sponsors at Knack for helping us out with today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Learn why tens of thousands of marketers rely on Knack to create beautiful on brand emails and landing pages.

[00:23:51] Joe Peters:: So, like every week, this is another mammoth week in AI developments. So, the, I’m not sure, the coincidence. It definitely is an irony, but I’m going to say the coincidence of Grok being released by Elon and the gang at AI, X. AI on on Sunday and the idea that Grok was going to take a theme of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as kind of the Style and humanization, it, it was, can we have any more symbolism?

[00:24:29] Joe Peters:: There’s a

[00:24:29] Andy Caron:: synchronicity to it, right? Like there is, there is that, that bit of, yes.

[00:24:33] Joe Peters:: It’s not a coincidence. This is beyond coincidence. This is the universe saying, hey, there’s too many things to check here. So. It’s early days on Grok. Like we’re, we don’t, no one can get really access to it now. It’s going to be a while before we get to play around with it.

[00:24:50] Joe Peters:: But I think what I’ve taken away from the things that I’ve seen so far is it’s the Twitter idea of freedom of speech being taken to AI. And so the guardrails that. The gang at OpenAI has put on on GPT and making sure that you can’t, you know, generate offensive content. Or that there isn’t a bias or any of those things is kind of out the window.

[00:25:19] Joe Peters:: What I’m seeing a lot of people start to play around with is, roast this person viciously. Use vulgar, say this in a vulgar way. And the, and the AI responding with, without those guardrails. So I don’t know, like, are these screenshots that people are manipulating? We’re not going to be able to know for sure, but I think it’s a whole new era where we’re taking this free speech concept.

[00:25:43] Joe Peters:: If these, if these things that people are sharing are true, we’re in for something. And I don’t think we can really predict how, how much of an impact this kind of. Open, free speech can, can have, and I’m going to say the negative sides of this, and we like to, we like to talk about the positives, but the negatives on this, it, it has me a tiny bit concerned.

[00:26:10] Andy Caron:: Agreed. I don’t know. It’s, it’s, this is, this is one of those things where there isn’t a good gray area, right? Like either it is open or it’s closed, right? That, that, that is the dichotomy that we have to live it within here. And so I think we have to try both ways and see how it works and then make a decision I know it’s going to be it’s going to be not great I think there’s going to be some really negative things that come out of it some scary stuff some things that Maybe turn people off and people, you know scale back from it a little bit Maybe take a step back and really think but i’d rather have us taking a step back and thinking about it now and then moving forward in a very You know thoughtful way than having this, you know scale out later, but it yeah, it’s gonna be

[00:26:56] Joe Peters:: interesting and you know I love twitter twitter and linkedin for business.

[00:27:02] Joe Peters:: I feel like are so important, sources of information I love my feeds. I love what I get but linkedin is a very positive environment. Yes, okay twitter can be assessed pool of negativity And so it’s going to be interesting as we move out of this i’m going to say Boundaries set to this unshackling of the Yeah, it’s going to be interesting.

[00:27:30] Joe Peters:: Interesting is pro is not strong enough. But anyway. No we’ll, we’ll, Elon, he , he knows . He, he definitely is an interesting character and we shouldn’t be surprised that this is his

[00:27:43] Andy Caron:: take on it. No, not at all. In fact, if anything, it was almost too unbrand.

[00:27:50] Joe Peters:: Too much for us. Well, he is too much for, for many people, but he is a very successful entrepreneur.

[00:27:57] Joe Peters:: So we, we can’t we can’t take that away from him. So let’s switch to the open AI announcements and this, we could do the whole launch codes episode on what happened this week with the developer conference and some of the things that have come out. I’ve been like refreshing and refreshing my GPT interface to see if I’ve got the new features enabled because I can’t wait to play with this, but the one that I am just fascinated with is the idea of creating your own GPT.

[00:28:30] Joe Peters:: So you’re going to have your own agents. So you get to. Upload some content, set some parameters around how that GPT is going to behave, how you get to name it, you get to give it a an image or a brand associated with it, and then that you get to save and share that you can either use it for personal use.

[00:28:50] Joe Peters:: Or you can use it you can, you can share it with the world. People will be able to sell these eventually as well. So these are enterprise, which is really where we’re emphasizing. Enterprises will be able to create their own GPTs internally and be able to share them only internally. And that’s going to be a beautiful thing as well.

[00:29:09] Joe Peters:: So I don’t know, I, that, that there are a million other announcements this week in terms of. Things that are going to be improvement, but this is the one that I, I can’t wait to see what we can do with it.

[00:29:20] Andy Caron:: Yeah. I think this is a nod to what people are already doing kind of within their own smaller chat GPTs.

[00:29:27] Andy Caron:: They’re, they’re building out, you know, their helper, their model, right? Like I know someone who’s got a lieutenant data, right? We’ve got someone on staff who’s got buttercup, the unicorn. And that is, he is her, her go to for things, right? A friend recently sent me a chat GPT model that had been built. To respond as if Douglas Adams were sending the response back to you.

[00:29:48] Andy Caron:: So this idea of that customization, this is just making it more accessible, customizable, truly like a a unique version of that engagement and interaction model that you’re already kind of doing on your own, but really cementing it. It’s very

[00:30:05] Joe Peters:: cool. Super cool. And. The idea of these being either web connected or not or having different plugins that they can rely on and I, I think we’re in for a world of creativity and advancement just from this one announcement alone, but what a week.

[00:30:24] Joe Peters:: What a great time to be alive. Whether you’re Online or get to be here in anaheim. It was a just a fantastic week For our mops community and those of us that are passionate about some of the things that are advancing in in ai but all right, let’s move on to our final segment so today I wasn’t, I couldn’t fit my turntable and records into my suitcase.

[00:30:49] Joe Peters:: It’s maybe a little bit much to ask, but there was a song that came out in the last week that almost gives me goosebumps to talk about it. And and it’s the last Beatles song, now and then, which with the assistance of AI, they were able to take. Cassette that John Lennon had made and had a song that he had created.

[00:31:12] Joe Peters:: And for the longest time, it was very hard to use cassette technology to separate the voice. from the piano. Interesting. So it’s only recently that they were able to separate it and then be able to enhance it, clean it up, and then have Ringo and and Paul and, and George contribute to a final Beatles song.

[00:31:37] Joe Peters:: And it is. exceptional in many ways, but also I think a beautiful way of having AI give us something that we We thought we had lost or would never have access to before. And so I know a lot of people are really nervous about what AI generated music is going to be in the future and all of those things.

[00:32:01] Joe Peters:: But I think this is such a beautiful story and a, just a beautiful song as well. So if you get a chance at the end of the of this episode of launch codes, we’ll have a little segment for you to hear that, that track now and then, but I really encourage you to have a listen to it. And it is. It is a really powerful thing to behold.

[00:32:22] Joe Peters:: And so, what are you pairing for us? Well, it should be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it’s not. So, what is our pairing this week, Andy?

[00:32:31] Andy Caron:: I did that as a teaser for the last episode, because it was just so top of mind at the moment. And right now I am circling back in a book that was written a number of years ago.

[00:32:40] Andy Caron:: I’ve read it several times. Each time I read it, I take something new away from it. So Tim Wu, fantastic author. It is nonfiction and it is his book, The Master Switch. So it’s the rise and fall of information empires. And it was written with sort of a view on the internet and what would come based on His exploration of other information empires.

[00:33:04] Andy Caron:: So it starts with electronic or electricity telephony then goes into radio movies and then television. And it looks at how the technology develops. How it becomes this very open source, anybody can play with it thing, and then it goes into a closed source system. And so this, against the lens of where we are right now with AI for me, is really an interesting treatise on what we potentially might be looking at as far as open now than to close, or is that not going to follow that same paradigm in the same way that the internet has not?

[00:33:42] Andy Caron:: Yeah.

[00:33:43] Joe Peters:: Well, it’s, we have a lot to learn from history, right? Always. We have to. We have to remember that we’re, what we’re entering uncharted waters, there’s a lot of lessons from the past that we should be acknowledging and thinking through. Yeah, so

[00:33:56] Andy Caron:: this is a fantastic book and it, it has a great, the, the voice within it, Tim’s voice is, is very present and he is a wonderful storyteller.

[00:34:06] Andy Caron:: He weaves it together in a way where it almost feels as if you’re reading fiction in that sense of kind of having that, That that narrative and through point that gives you that really truly dynamic story fantastic book I everything I do is on audible these days But this is one of my very first audible books way back in the day I’ve listened to it multiple times introduced my husband to it.

[00:34:28] Andy Caron:: He loved it I I have bought copies of this book for people. It’s a favorite. So definitely I think right now It’s top of mind for me to go back and read it again because I think it’s timely Well, I have

[00:34:39] Joe Peters:: some long flights to get through over the next little while, so I might download it and have a listen, but that’s, that’s great.

[00:34:46] Joe Peters:: All right, well, that’s it for this episode of Launch Codes. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts, and stay connected with us on LinkedIn by joining our newsletter in the link in the description of the show.

[00:35:06] Joe Peters:: And, as always, thanks, Mom, for watching. Thanks a lot, Andy.

Brilliantly Simple CX Strategies for Customer Retention

TLDR: As subscription business models become commonplace, customer retention is something you maintain by making proactive investments in CX. To keep customer confidence high, your RevOps team should consistently collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points.

Typical sales and marketing strategies Businesses often prioritize generating as much revenue as possible, as fast as they can. This encourages Sales and Marketing to pursue quick wins and short-term goals. Measuring Sales against quarterly quotas, for instance, drives Sales and Marketing to focus more on leads from which they can quickly close deals.

 

“To sustain revenue long-term, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.”

 

The logic to this short-term thinking: To keep costs low and be as profitable as soon as possible, pursue business you can easily win. But to sustain revenue long-term and maximize the ROI of each client engagement, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.

What’s in this article for you? In the age of subscription business models, customer churn has never been a greater existential threat. Retention’s something you maintain by making proactive investments in Customer Success and quality customer experiences. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain what good CX looks like and the value it provides to your business.

➡️ Prioritize customer retention

➡️ Optimize CX at touchpoints

➡️ Use cross-functional feedback

➡️ Invest in long-term CX

➡️ Embrace RevOps for CX

 

Enhancing customer experience

CX is all about how your business engages with customers at each point of interaction.

Every instance where Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success interact with a customer is an opportunity to build goodwill and keep people interested in your brand, from campaign ads and content to the sales process to customer service and relationship management.

Businesses typically fall short with CX when customers have already signed a deal.

👉 For self-service products where users sign up independently, invest in an accessible UX with support channels and documentation to address more complex use cases. Make it as easy as possible for people to use your service, and they’ll probably continue to do so.

👉 For managed products and services, where clients have specific needs to address, Customer Success reps play a vital role in encouraging retention by regularly checking in with clients, listening to their goals and challenges, and helping them use your products and services to achieve their aims.

 

Quality customer support will encourage them to stay.”

 

Even if a customer isn’t using your product for all its intended features, quality customer support will encourage them to stay. Where Marketing gets peoples’ attention and Sales gets them to sign, Customer Success is why people remain loyal to a business.

 

Strategies for effective CX

You want to discover and resolve any issues before customers lose confidence.

Collect customer feedback through NPS surveys or simple Q&As integrated into products. It’s important to understand where you’re succeeding and what improvements to prioritize in your roadmap.

Monitor social media channels Siloed communication limits how quickly you can solicit and react to feedback. Work with Marketing to gain visibility into social channels and use the data to improve products/services and respond to customers.

Budget time for collecting feedback Give your RevOps team time to collect and integrate feedback from every channel and discuss it regularly as a team. Include BDRs and Product teams for a full scope conversation. Strategize together on how to address the issues clients have. Whether that means tweaking customer support or creating content to clarify certain processes and technical capabilities of your product.

 

Turn criticism into trust

Ultimately, your customer retention, business reputation and ROI from each customer engagement are threatened less by complaints than by failure to engage with criticism.

Each of your channels and customer touchpoints should be conceived as an opportunity to collect feedback.

 

“It’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.”

 

As long as business memberships to sites like TrustPilot cost tens of thousands of dollars each, it’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.

Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying at the first possible opportunity and here on after.

You’ll find out from their feedback where you need to make investments, and can rehabilitate potentially-damaging issues into demonstrations of care that inspire greater trust in your business.

 

The value of CX

The beauty of RevOps is its capacity to focus on CX in a proactive, planned manner.

Take every opportunity to collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points. Make CX a dedicated, long-term investment, and you’ll enjoy greater customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

For any guidance you need in RevOps, get in touch.

How to Steer Sales Ops and Sales Enablement to Shared Goals

Hi Joe,

My Sales Ops team has been growing rapidly over the past year or so.

With that growth, we’ve also added a Sales Enablement team.

But the problem is I feel like our two teams just aren’t on the same page lately.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about which team is responsible for what and things aren’t getting done.

How can I turn this around and make sure everyone is collaborating smoothly again?

Thanks,

Team-Player Taylor

Hi Taylor,

I’m happy to hear about your company’s recent growth! It’s always exciting when things are looking up and I want to congratulate you and your team on this success.

But with growth comes, well, growing pains.

 

“What works for smaller teams won’t necessarily work as you scale up your organization.”

 

What works for smaller teams won’t necessarily work as you scale up your organization.

Things can break along the way. So how do we prevent this from happening?

Here are a few key points that will help.

 

1. Organizational Structure

As your teams grow, it’s important that at all stages of expansion (whether you have a sales team of 3, 30, or 300), there is a clearly defined vertical hierarchy or chain of command.

Of course, it is essential for teams to collaborate cohesively and support each other.

But if your company lacks this vertical structure and the hierarchy is “flatter,” there will often be problems where team members don’t know whose job it is to do a certain task.

I’d also recommend the use of stakeholder maps to help all team members gain a clearer understanding of who is depending on them and what they’re accountable for.

Stakeholder maps are not only very practical for refining and communicating the responsibilities of everyone involved in each project, but they’re also a great tool for guiding new hires on:

  • who can offer them support
  • who to approach with queries, and
  • who can approve decisions to keep projects moving forward.

 

2. Clearly Define Roles & Responsibilities

There can be a lot of confusion in a company – especially a growing one like yours – between Sales Ops and Sales Enablement.

Many members may not fully understand the delineation: Where does Sales Ops end and where does Sales Enablement begin?

This is common in my experience so don’t worry, you’re not alone.

The two teams are closely related, but they differ in important ways.

 

“Start by laying out a clear definition of the roles, responsibilities, and parameters of each team.”

 

I would start by laying out a clear definition of the roles, responsibilities, and parameters of the Sales Enablement team in comparison to Sales Ops. If everyone can agree on this, you’re already halfway there!

One way I like to communicate this is to look at Sales Enablement as the “execution arm” of Sales Ops.

Here’s a quick example to illustrate what I mean by this:

Let’s say Sales Enablement realizes many leads become closed lost during the middle of the funnel.

The buyer had the initial introduction and pitch, but then the proposal is sent a few days later and things fall through.

Sales Ops receives this information and takes a closer look at the operational level – where they discover their sales reps don’t have enough content (case studies, whitepapers, etc.) to send proposals sooner.

This is where Sales Enablement comes back in and goes about producing that needed content (which could mean acquiring collateral from marketing, content creation, etc.). They are effectively enabling the execution of Sales Ops by making sure the buyer experience is everything that it can be – hence the “execution arm”.

 

Calibrate Expectations

Once everyone in Sales Ops and Sales Enablement is on the same page about their roles and responsibilities, it is crucial to set up continuous points of communication between the two teams to calibrate expectations.

At all times: Sales Ops must know what data they’re expected to report to Sales Enablement, and Sales Enablement must know the type of support they’re expected to provide so Sales Ops can execute at their highest potential.

At first, it might take some time for members to fit into their new teams, and that’s okay.

With clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations defined through active communication, I’m confident that you and your teams will be more productive together than ever.

You’ve got this,

Joe Pulse

[Episode 8] Trust Issues & Privacy Concerns

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

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

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Google tackles image trust issues with new features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Artists use Nightshade to derail AI image recognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Can LinkedIn connections become career critics?

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

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

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

 

Hot takes

 

Pairings

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

 

Read The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:06:00] Joe Peters: you’re going.

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

[00:06:12] Matt Tonkin: That’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Stakeholder Maps Streamline MOPs Onboarding

TLDR: Stakeholder maps help new hires understand organizational roles. The map shows who affects or is affected by their work, and highlights the importance of forging relationships with key individuals who regularly impact the new hire’s tasks.

Onboarding challenges in MOPs: The first weeks in a job involve learning new information, building relationships, and adapting to new processes. Newcomers naturally want to show the positive impact they can make. But, in a fast-paced discipline like MOPs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed without some help.

What are stakeholder maps? Stakeholder maps are great for onboarding new team members. These maps help newcomers identify their most important working relationships, learn the responsibilities of different people, and understand how they’ll interact when collaborating on projects.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to explain stakeholder maps to newcomers in your MOPs team. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Understand and use stakeholder maps.

➡️ Manage relationships in MOPs.

➡️ Efficiently onboard and integrate new hires into the organization.

 

Stakeholder 101

MOPs professionals are often spread across many different responsibilities, interacting with teams around the organization.

Stakeholder maps visualize all the relevant stakeholders and categorize them based on their influence over and interest in each project.

Project stakeholders will fall under one of four quadrants of interest and influence. Here’s how your new colleague can interpret them:

  • Low interest, low influence: Keep a minimal level of contact throughout a project.
  • High interest, low influence: Inform with status updates as your work progresses. The project outcome impacts these people significantly, even if they don’t exert a great deal of influence over its direction.
  • Low interest, high influence: Anticipate and meet their needs as you work together.
  • High interest, high influence: Collaborate and communicate closely. Understand how their responsibilities impact the project and what they need to keep on track.

Through this framing, stakeholder maps spell out the dependencies and accountabilities for each project.

Insight that helps newcomers learn what the people around them need and how each stakeholder’s deliverables contribute to projects.

 

“It’s especially difficult for new hires to interpret the influencers, decision-makers, and advocates.”

 

In large organizations it’s especially difficult for new hires to interpret the influencers, decision-makers, and advocates. A stakeholder map trims down the org chart and onboarding docs to the key people with whom to build trust and rapport.

In a nutshell, it’s a practical guide to relationship management and the interaction of responsibilities on each project.

 

Navigating the map

As new hires in MOPs start working on projects, they’ll need to know:

👉 who to approach with queries

👉 who can approve decisions to keep projects moving, and

👉who can offer support and information.

When these things are unclear, miscommunications arise and tasks fall short of deadlines, bloating the project scope.

 

“The value of a stakeholder map is to clarify who does what on a day to day basis.”

 

The value of a stakeholder map is to clarify:

👉 who does what on a day to day basis

👉 who owns which responsibilities around the business, and

👉 which stakeholders people can expect to coordinate and collaborate with in various scenarios and across projects.

By making this information accessible, stakeholder maps encourage people around the company to communicate fluidly and mitigate risks to project success.

For new hires in particular, having a resource to handily digest this information will help them quickly settle in and start making an impact.

Your new colleague wants to know the most important people to meet and processes to learn first. Encourage them to focus on the key people they’ll be working with on a regular basis, whose interests are closely tied to their tasks and whose responsibilities and decisions significantly influence their workload.

Once new hires know their immediate surroundings, you can gradually build out and discuss more tertiary people and processes, but the most impactful and interested people on the map are the most helpful to prioritize.

 

Confident on-boarding

When you’re new to a role or workplace, it can be daunting to make sense of all the new processes and relationships.

Stakeholder maps are a great source of guidance for any new MOPs hire.

Maps help them navigate through the nuances and structures of your organization and build strong relationships around the workplace with the people most relevant to their work.

By using stakeholder maps, your new colleague can settle in with confidence and start contributing to success.

Get in touch for more guidance with onboarding new hires or project managing for success.

[Episode 7] Marketer Optimism Rebounds

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

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Marketo’s Dynamic Chat expands its vocabulary

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

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

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

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

 

Tuning up your RevOps engine

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

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

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

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

 

Hot takes

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

 

Pairings

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

 

Read The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:30:51] Lauren McCormack: So

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do I Enhance Security in MOPs?

Hi Joe,

I’m worried that we’re not doing enough when it comes to security in MOPs.

There are some pretty big gaps and I’m not quite sure what to do about it.

  • How do I go about asking for help?
  • Should I create a plan beforehand?
  • How transparent should I be with leadership?

Thank you,
Concerned Casey

Casey, I can’t thank you enough for that question.

 

“I don’t think we talk about security enough in MOPs—but we should.”

 

I don’t think we talk about security enough in MOPs—but we should.

Marketing automation software holds a ton of sensitive information, whether it’s user account details or some level of personal identifiable information (PII), and our customers trust us to keep it safe.

Particularly now, where marketing relies so much on personalization and connecting the dots between what our business offers and our customers’ needs.

 

The risks of mismanaging this data are huge.

If a hacker or bad actor gets access to a pool of customer information, you better believe they’ll use it for nefarious purposes.

  • Whether it’s selling that information to other cyber criminals or your competitors, using it to access your customers’ accounts on other high-value platforms, or blackmailing your company. There’s no shortage of ways your data can be used.

After a company has been compromised, they’ll spend millions of dollars addressing their security vulnerabilities and the loss of reputation that comes with a cyber attack.

The MOPs teams and businesses that are doing security right are focusing on the following areas:

 

Data integrity

All of these variables influence how secure data is:

  • what data you collect
  • how you collect it
  • where you store it, and
  • how you maintain it.

For instance, there’s no need for you to have your customers’ social security numbers—so don’t ask for them.

And if you do have passwords or PII on your marketing systems, you should look into encrypting or hashing them so that if a hacker gets their hands on them, they can’t read anything.

You can also evaluate whether there’s even a business need for this sensitive information on your marketing system.

 

Controlled access to your systems

Security savvy teams ensure that only the right people have access to the right data — at the right time.

It can be dangerous to have too many user accounts with permissions to access and manipulate the information on your systems.

Instead, you should take a look at all your roles and permissions, and limit access to the people who need the data on a daily basis.

Not everyone should be an admin.

In addition, conducting regular scrubs on your systems to remove any old user accounts will also ensure you’re not at risk of a disgruntled employee compromising your data or your systems.

 

Robust security policies

With solid policies in place that let the right people in and keep the bad actors out, you and your team can focus on what you do best: marketing ops.

If you’re seeing gaps in any of these areas, you should absolutely have a conversation with your security team (if you have one) and your executives.

 

“Good security should mean that you don’t have to think about security.”

 

Be fully transparent about what you think is lacking, what the impact of those gaps are, and what the business should be doing instead.

If they ask you whether this is an immediate need, the answer is yes.

At the end of the day, securing your data is all about being proactive. You need to stay one step ahead of the bad guys—and avoid being the next big data breach in the news.

You’ve got this,

Joe Pulse

[Episode 6] Apple Fights UTM Tracking

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

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2

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

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

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

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

 

The best way to heat up cold email lists

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

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

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

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

 

Hot takes

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

     

    Pairings

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

     

    Read The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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