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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
