Category: Launch Codes

[Episode 13] We Made You a GPT

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

Episode 13 of Launch Codes is officially live! This week, Lauren (RP’s VP of Consulting) joins Joe to discuss:

 

Listen Below

 

MQLs are overrated

On “The Marketing Millennials” podcast last week, Daniel Murray welcomed Google’s Demand Gen Marketing Manager, Steve Armenti. They discussed the future of B2B marketing and one thing that stood out in particular was the idea that MQLs are “made up”.

“It’s a symptom, not the disease”, comments Lauren. In other words, MQLs inherently aren’t the problem. They become problematic when there is a deeper issue of misalignment across silos in the organization — misalignment between Marketing and Sales around what a true MQL should look and feel like.

This often happens when the “lead scoring threshold” or “high value actions” aren’t matching up with what people actually desire from your sales process. Joe agrees with this sentiment, using the example that filling out a form doesn’t necessarily mean you are ready for a phone call.

Lauren expands on this point, using the analogy of a brick and mortar store. In a store, many different types of people come through the doors, all looking for different things. Each of these people has different needs that you can likely identify through their behavior. Similarly, if you treat your website as a “digital storefront”, you can find digital behavior information to guide your sales process.

Joe and Lauren both agree that timing your engagement with a lead is extremely important as well. “Don’t make their phone ring at 8:30 in the morning out of the clear blue and expect to get a conversation. The onus is on the speaker to be understood, not the listener to do the understanding”, says Lauren.

 

Employees can’t resist the “tech-tation” of AI at work

A Salesforce survey of more than 14,000 workers across 14 countries uncovers that many users of generative AI in the workplace are leveraging the technology without training, guidance, or approval by their employer.

Some of the specific findings from the survey include:

  • 55% of respondents have used unapproved generative AI tools at work.
  • 40% of generative AI users have used banned tools at work.

Joe immediately relates these findings back to last week’s Launch Codes episode, where we covered the overall lack of AI guidelines and principles at many organizations. It seems like the solution for many companies is to leave teams to fend for themselves or outright block the use of tools. “We are in a challenging time where individuals are moving faster than organizations are responding”, says Joe.

Joe also recalls a time when search engines like Yahoo first came on the scene in the 90s. Similar to what we are experiencing today with AI, there was no structure around using web search citations for your research at work — and social media was completely banned from the workplace later on too.

Lauren emphasizes that, for many organizations, the easy path is to ignore change and pretend it’s not happening. Joe reflects on this, highlighting that when there’s a lack of understanding around new technology, the default decision is to block it entirely. Joe and Lauren both agree, however, that this situation is kind of “unblockable” — considering that everyone has a personal computer in their hand and AI is already integrated into countless tools we use on a daily basis.

And in many ways, MOPs as a function is well-equipped to deal with decisions around AI usage and guidance. “We’re the ones I think that are most exposed. We’re just at this really interesting intersection of technology, innovation, and untapped business potential that, you know, developers or IT don’t really care to lean into yet”, comments Lauren.

 

OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “What are some good examples of OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company?”

This is a very open-ended question. Despite the potential for nuance depending on the size of your company, public considerations, boards to please, etc, the answer can be boiled down to retention and growth. The most interesting part of 2023, Lauren says, has been the pivot away from looking at long-term customer value to actual contract value.

Before this year, cost per acquisition for a customer was measured against the number of years you’d hope to have them around. But over the last 12 months, there’s been this shift from LTV to ACV. Everything we do now is in service of working our way towards closed-won business. We are constantly contributing to net new customer growth or reducing attrition.

“Show me the money, right? It is that simple”, says Joe.

 

AI Navigators

For this week’s segment of AI Navigators, we’re excited to announce that we’ve created our own custom GPT called “The MOPs AI Advisor.”

Last week, we shared our template on AI guidelines and principles that people could download and adjust based on their company needs. That was a bit more of a hands-on approach, which some prefer. But we know many others will be much more excited to jump into this GPT version (you must have a ChatGPT Plus account to access it).

Try the MOPs AI Advisor custom GPT.

The custom GPT itself has been trained on that previous template we created , and it does two things:

First, it lets you generate your own AI principles and guidelines tailored specifically to your company. You can use your prompts to feed it information about your organization and the amount of control over AI you want to have. From there, it’ll give you a draft that’ll act as a strong foundation for these conversations.

Second, which Joe believes will be more interesting and more helpful in the long run, is that it’ll allow you to upload specific AI use case ideas you have and get feedback on the possible implications or challenges that you didn’t consider.

For example, one of our experiments at RP was to use AI to generate personalized content for nurture campaigns in Marketo. Now, we can put that use case concept into MOPs AI Advisor and get helpful feedback on aspects to consider as we move forward.

Lauren is incredibly excited about using the custom GPT, and comments how it’ll be interesting to see the reactions from people who aren’t used to working with an AI tool that’s been trained for a concentrated use case. She used the example of getting a “pre-trained” puppy that is already housebroken.

Joe loves this analogy and iterates that we’re definitely doing some of the work for others and we hope it makes their lives a little easier.

 

Hot Takes

  • AI-powered digital colleagues are here. Some ‘safe’ jobs could be vulnerable.
    • Artisan AI will unveil “Ava” in December 2023, an AI-powered digital worker designed to integrate with human teams.
    • It will automate the job of a sales representative, marking a significant improvement over chatbots and similar AI tools already on the market.
  • Happy Birthday ChatGPT
    • “A year ago tonight, we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on ChatGPT before the next morning’s launch. What a year it’s been.” – Sam Altman tweet, November 29.
    • Joe and Lauren reminisce on their first experiences with Chat-GPT and what a wild year it’s been.

 

Pairings

Music:

This week’s pairings are possibly our most fortuitous yet! Joe brought in a stunning record entitled “Jubilee” by the Philadelphia-based alternative band Japanese Breakfast. The vinyl itself has a lovely lime tint to it as well. The songs Joe wanted to highlight from this album are “Be Sweet” and “Paprika”.

Coffee:

This album pairs beautifully with Lauren’s “Mexicali” blend by Arbuckles’ Coffee, which also happens to have some sweet and spicy notes to it. It’s another Tuscan local coffee company with an interesting history: It was founded by two brothers at the end of the Civil War in the 19th century who initiated the concept of roasting coffee and sealing it up in one-pound packages.

 

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 13. On today’s episode, MQLs are overrated, employees can’t resist the tectation of AI at work. Question from the community, we’ll look at OKRs, KPIs, and other acronyms.

[00:00:19] Joe Peters: Our AI navigators segment, get ready for RPGPT. And in our hot takes, safe jobs might be in danger and happy birthday, chat GPT. I’m your host, Joe Peters. And today I’m joined by Lauren. Let’s get right into it. Lauren, what are you excited to talk about today?

[00:00:40] Lauren McCormack: I’m excited about it all, Joe, but I have to say you know me, I love a good KPI chat.

[00:00:47] Joe Peters: Excellent. Well, I know there’ll be a lot for you to share. Let’s move into our first segment here on MQLs are overrated. And so last week, Daniel Murray had Steve Arminetti, Google’s demand gen marketing manager on his podcast, the marketing millennials. And they talked about the future of B2B marketing.

[00:01:11] Joe Peters: And the one part that really caught our attention was the stance that MQLs are made up. So. If MQLs are a marketing created concept where leads are scored for sales outreach, and so focusing on a single individual in a buying group can lead to an incomplete understanding of the account. And it’s important to identify the entire buying group, including individual roles and functions.

[00:01:38] Joe Peters: And Lauren, you and I know a lot about that when we get into ABM. So what is your take on this? Commentary. And is it just trying to say something salacious so people get interested? That’s kind of my gut on this. That’s

[00:01:55] Lauren McCormack: a good way to put it. It’s a symptom. It’s not the disease. The reason the MQLs aren’t perceived as money in the pocket of the sales team and craved instinctually are because they’re misaligned.

[00:02:10] Lauren McCormack: And that’s a misalignment across silos in the organization. Around what a true MQL should look and feel like it doesn’t have the proper blend of demographic firmographic behavioral intent not necessarily purchased but behavioral intent to necessitate a conversation you’re likely seeing a situation where your lead scoring threshold or your High value actions are misaligned with what people actually desire from your sales process.

[00:02:48] Lauren McCormack: If they’re not ready for a conversation. You shouldn’t call them. That is the controversial hot take, I think. Yeah,

[00:02:56] Joe Peters: just because you filled out a a form to download a paper doesn’t mean you want to be called, right? Like we know, we know that, right?

[00:03:05] Lauren McCormack: You said you wanted to go to a webinar. You didn’t say you wanted a sales pitch.

[00:03:08] Lauren McCormack: And I’ve had the, the opportunity over the last couple of decades to sit in many a boardroom and do sales and marketing alignment workshops. And I frequently, having been a salesperson, I was nae. Rather, rather well compensated AE in my early days. And you know, broke a couple of commission structures myself, but what it comes down to is sitting down with your sales and marketing team and thinking about your website, like a virtual storefront and thinking about, say you own a jewelry store.

[00:03:43] Lauren McCormack: And you, you see people walking through the door every day. Sometimes you see a couple walk in hand in hand with tennis rackets on their shoulder and, you know, eyes odd and Burberry, and they walk up to the designer engagement ring counter and they’re holding hands and they’re pointing directly at what they want.

[00:04:00] Lauren McCormack: And sometimes you see a little kid come in and go straight to the cookies that are sitting on the counter. And sometimes you see You know, a woman come in with a broken watch and walk up to your service counter. You can get those same indications from behavior digitally and you handle them differently and you triage them accordingly and you don’t serve them all up and say, well, they all walked in the front door.

[00:04:25] Lauren McCormack: That means they’re all at the store and they all want to shop because it’s just not the same, you

[00:04:29] Joe Peters: know? You’re basically saying that we need to put more cookies on the table to get more people in. That’s, that’s basically. Put

[00:04:37] Lauren McCormack: cookies in front of the people that are buying the designer engagement rings instead of the little kid perhaps.

[00:04:42] Lauren McCormack: Or maybe put the right cookies in front of sales is really what I’m saying at the heart of the matter. And I think having an agreement with sales where You know, I was just talking with Adobe earlier this morning about how you handle cherry pickers in the sales process when they go in and they don’t want to wait and they want to ungate everything and get all the leads.

[00:05:00] Lauren McCormack: They complain because they’re saturated with volume. When they don’t get enough, you’ll see them go in and they’ll cherry pick and they’ll try and call leads before their time, but they’re, they’re not ripened yet. And one of the other analogies that I would use in these workshops was around the fact that you might see the level of your when you’re out and you know, it’s your human, right?

[00:05:18] Lauren McCormack: And you see them. And maybe they’re, it’s the most inopportune time, right? Maybe they’re walking out of a
gym room, locker, a locker room

[00:05:29] Joe Peters: from the jewelry store to the gym room

[00:05:31] Lauren McCormack: locker. Maybe they’re leaving, you know, a numb mouth, even if you see this human being and you’re like, wow,
this is my person. I know that it’s meant to be guess what the time and the place that you approach them.

[00:05:43] Lauren McCormack: Matters. You could completely be off putting and, and make them never want to engage with your brand again by acting too soon. And I don’t know that that resonates fully with people that are under quotas or have, you know, a rigid list of target accounts or are afraid for job security. That, that, that’s a great point.

[00:06:04] Joe Peters: That really is a great point. Timing is everything. And that is part of the art of this. Where everyone wants it to be science and very easy, very easy handoff and a hundred percent qualified hand a handoff to sales that they’re going to, you know, just you know, catch fish right out of a barrel.

[00:06:28] Joe Peters: That’s not it. Yeah. That’s

[00:06:30] Lauren McCormack: not me. It can be predictable and it can be scientific. As long as you have a method for obtaining consent. So, you know, make sure they know what they’re getting themselves into when they fill out that contact us form. Make sure they have the opportunity to hand raise and fill out the contact us form at any point in their journey.

[00:06:48] Lauren McCormack: Make sure they don’t ever have to hunt for it, but don’t make their phone ring at eight 30 in the morning out of the clear blue and expect to get a conversation. The onus is on the speaker to be understood, not the listener to do the understanding.

[00:07:04] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, hopefully we’ve made things clear, not murkier on this one, but there’s a lot to this and I think it’s.

[00:07:17] Joe Peters: You know, just an important part of our work and helping our clients really help understand and navigate this handoff is so essential.

[00:07:26] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think the BDR function might be dead or is dying or has changed radically. Not the MQL, not the MQL yet. I just think we need to question what kind of volume and quality balance is appropriate for 2024.

[00:07:43] Joe Peters: I think that’s a great way to end that part of our launch codes this week. So let’s move into our next area, which is also pretty, well, a little bit controversial in the sense that now we’re seeing some data points that half of generative AI adopters are using unapproved tools at work.

[00:08:07] Lauren McCormack: No surprise.

[00:08:08] Joe Peters: A recent survey of more than 14, 000 workers across 14 countries.

[00:08:14] Joe Peters: And this was by Salesforce, I think. Uncovered that many users of generative AI in the workplace are leveraging the technology without training, guidance, or approval by their employer. And so those numbers are 55 percent of respondents have used unapproved generative AI tools at work. And 40 percent of genera generative AI users have used BAN tools at work.

[00:08:40] Joe Peters: So there’s a lot here. And I think, you know, if this goes, we go back to our, our, our launch codes last week, we talked about this whole idea of guidelines and principles, and organizations are leaving their, their teams to either fend for themselves, or just outright blocking everything. And people are kind of working around that and the very easiest way to do that is, you know, picking up your phone and asking, asking the, the, the questions to help inform the work you’re doing.

[00:09:17] Joe Peters: So until we’ve kind of banned those from the workplace or we’re in some, we’re in a little bit of a, a challenging time where people are moving faster than organizations are responding.

[00:09:31] Lauren McCormack: It’s so easy to be misunderstood. I think it’s so easy to fear like a science fiction villain, and it’s so easy to outright.

[00:09:43] Lauren McCormack: Try and, and put your head in the sand and pretend like it’s not happening instead of embracing the change. I have to wonder if search engines were this controversial when they first came out in the workplace. Well,

[00:09:56] Joe Peters: I re yes. I remember, unfortunately, I can remember those times, and I was in

[00:10:04] Lauren McCormack: college. I hadn’t quite gotten I remember,

[00:10:06] Joe Peters: I remember Well, the very first time that Yahoo was available, I remember speaking with one of my My profs at the time, cause this is in the, this would have been in the mid to late nineties and there was no process or ability to kind of site, right?

[00:10:27] Joe Peters: Like there’s no structure for using a web search as part of your research. And then you translate that to the organizations. There was no, I remember social media being completely banned from the workplace. Interesting as well, right?

[00:10:46] Lauren McCormack: That’s right. If I think back, you’re right.

[00:10:49] Joe Peters: There’s always these times where there’s a lack of understanding, so it’s the default move is just to block.

[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Yeah. But I think we’re in a situation where it’s going to be slightly unblockable, in the sense that it Person. Everyone has a personal computer in their hand, right? That’s right. And, and unless they’re checking them in at the door and we’re, and we’re acting like the NSA, you know, people are going to be using it.

[00:11:18] Joe Peters: So I think he, he kind of have to think through that.

[00:11:21] Lauren McCormack: It’s already baked into so many different platforms too. It’s like, have you not had generative predictive texts in your Gmail at work? So I think a blanket policy shows a inherent misunderstanding of the potential. And a denial of the potential for innovation and market share.

[00:11:41] Lauren McCormack: It was interesting to me to hear, I was speaking with a friend that I’d met from a zoom kind of thought leadership event that I go to on a regular basis. And she, and I met one to one to talk about AI. And she’s in the process of going through an acquisition by a major FinTech company, and she’s struggling with her SEO and her content strategy because she’s been so heavily reliant on AI and now it’s gonna go.

[00:12:13] Lauren McCormack: Against the policy of the acquiring company. But when she presses to find out what the policy is, it doesn’t exist yet. She just knows she’s not allowed to use AI and, and it’s going to change her productivity. drastically post acquisition, and she’s really worried about it, you know? And she’s, she’s tempted to, to challenge the policy, you know, and I, I encouraged her to, to be honest.

[00:12:40] Joe Peters: Well, the politics of acquisition are, are always a challenge and, but you know what, this is, we’re in this, This state of a general fear, we’re in a state of rapid advancement, and there’s it’s really hard for organizations to keep up unless they’re they’re understanding and switching the switching the story to be.

[00:13:13] Joe Peters: This is to our benefit. That’s right. And if this is to our benefit, then How are we enabling and using and you know, creating boundaries.

[00:13:25] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, probably guardrails, but it’s early adopter advantage for sure. And I think in your session it was interesting to hear a couple different points made at MOPS Appalooza.

[00:13:37] Lauren McCormack: One around the fact that certain people within the organization have already. Probably broken through every boundary that you could imagine to set because we were waiting too long to set the protocols and parameters. But also I thought interesting that the only people really fit to navigate the policies and to create the policies.

[00:14:04] Lauren McCormack: Sit in marketing ops, you know, and it’s maybe if you have like a dev ops team, maybe if you have a really strong it and operations team, maybe, maybe, but we’re the ones I think that are most exposed. We’re just at this really interesting intersection of technology and innovation and. Business on untapped business potential that I don’t think, you know, developers or it really care to lean into.

[00:14:33] Lauren McCormack: They can choose not to yet, but we really are faced with it every day.

[00:14:39] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s a very interesting dilemma of can. I agree with you that the mops function is probably the most well equipped to think through this can benefit so much from generative AI today, and it’s whether or not there’s the ability to translate up.

[00:15:02] Joe Peters: That’s right. On what might be the appropriate. guidelines or guardrails or principles of the organization. And that that’s a really good segue into a segment that we have in a couple of right after our community question. So maybe we should go to our community question and then get to this next point, because this is a really, this is a challenge that all organizations are facing right now, but Let’s, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

[00:15:31] Joe Peters: So community question, thanks to the marketingops. com community for today’s question. And this one I know is near and dear to your heart. And what we have are, what are some good examples of OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company? This is an awesome question.

[00:15:55] Lauren McCormack: That’s an awesome question, but it’s also like, like, the most open ended.

[00:16:00] Lauren McCormack: sO, I’m gonna start.

[00:16:01] Joe Peters: There’s probably a thousand answers to this,

[00:16:04] Lauren McCormack: right? There’s a thousand and then there’s one. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, there’s one. And so I think it, it will always depend on the size of your company. Okay. An enterprise B2B SaaS is going to look different. Has a board to please, might even have, you know, public considerations depending on who we’re talking about.

[00:16:24] Lauren McCormack: Startup with very different demographics and firmographics has totally different goals. But at the end of the day, I think the most interesting part of 2023, I hope I look back in the rear view and find it interesting after all the chaos, but has been the pivot away from looking at long term customer value.

[00:16:49] Lauren McCormack: To actual contract value. So instead of saying when my cost per acquisition for a new client is X, but I hope to have them around for, you know, seven years. So that’s how I’m going to, you know, work the valuation on, on the return on my investments. I think the most interesting pivot in 2023 has been from LTV to ACV, like actual contract value.

[00:17:14] Lauren McCormack: So your North star has to be, I don’t care if you’re in B2B SaaS or you own a lemonade stand, it needs to be your contribution to close one business. Everything else, reverse engineer against how you get to close one business, right? So maybe you love doing specific marketing activities because they’re just your favorite question.

[00:17:37] Lauren McCormack: Everything fail fast and think around how each ounce of energy you expend as a marketer in a day is contributing to net new customer growth or preventing attrition. So those to me are the key levers. That when I’m client side or working with people that are trying to be more mindful and
strategic with their time, energy, and finances, it’s retention and it’s growth and everything else.

[00:18:03] Lauren McCormack: Yeah.

[00:18:04] Joe Peters: So we’re, we’re basically show me the revenue or show me the money. Right. It’s just how I’m wired.

[00:18:10] Lauren McCormack: Yep.

[00:18:12] Joe Peters: But it, it is that, it is that simple. Everything does break down from there. So I, it is, there are the flavors of the month and there are the flavors of the year and let’s see what, what we’ll get in 2024 though.

[00:18:27] Joe Peters: I think we’re going

[00:18:28] Lauren McCormack: to see a lot of account based motions. I’m seeing a lot of talk around I think it’s a reaction against the surplus of capital and the, the notion of. Building top of funnel as wide and as vast and grabbing as many MQLs as possible and shoving them through this machine and seeing what the output is on the other side.

[00:18:51] Lauren McCormack: We just don’t have that budget anymore. And so we have to be super mindful, apply it surgically, but at the end of the day, it’s still those dollars are still meant to go out into war and fight a battle to come back with revenue. You know,

[00:19:08] Joe Peters: 2024 is going to be really interesting. It almost makes me think we’re going to have to, we should have a segment on our predictions for 2024.

[00:19:14] Lauren McCormack: I’d love that. I almost wore a Santa hat today. Cause I’m just in like the 2024 planning holiday vibe these days, but a year end recap. Yeah. And, and some 2024 trends will be a lot of fun.

[00:19:27] Joe Peters: Yeah. We’ll have to put that on the agenda to work through. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks to the marketing ops. com community for that.

[00:19:37] Joe Peters: And now let’s move into our next segment on AI navigators. We just started this last week, which is each week we’re going to give a little bit back to the community in terms of some of our thinking and best practices and just really kind of enablement really of the community to take some of these conversations and some of these challenges into their own hands.

[00:20:02] Joe Peters: And so this week. We took a little bit of time, had a little bit of fun in, in the nerdiest of ways, and we created our own custom GPT and we call it the Mops AI Advisor and what, what we, what we’ve done, so last week we shared some templates, templates on guidelines and principles that People can take a massage based on, you know, where their organization is at.

[00:20:34] Joe Peters: And that’s a little bit more of a hands on exercise and an input. And I know some, some of us like to work with that, but then other, others are much more keen to hop into this. GPT era. So we have this custom GPT that’s been trained on all of that content. And it does two things. First, it lets you generate your own principles and guidelines for your organization.

[00:20:59] Joe Peters: And so you can use your prompts to outline a little bit. about the style of your organization and, and the control that you want to have. Do you want to be free and open or do you want to lock everything down and get approval for every AI use case or you’re somewhere in the middle? And so this GPT allows you to generate the guidelines and principles for your, for your, for your own organization, at least in a draft form that will help you enable you to have these conversations.

[00:21:32] Joe Peters: And then the second piece That, that I think actually could be more interesting and more helpful in the, in the longer run is it allows you to upload through your prompt a use case for it to then say, okay, like your use case, but maybe you need to think about. A, B, C and D to make sure that you’re on the right track in terms of, let’s say, privacy or use of data or any of those things that, you know, might we, we may need to temper the excitement of the community a little bit by giving a little feedback into the excitement of different AI use cases.

[00:22:20] Joe Peters: So Lauren, what are, what are your initial thoughts on our, our little experiment? I,

[00:22:27] Lauren McCormack: you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for my GPT and it would be interesting to see someone that hasn’t. Spent quality time with their GPT. Someone that doesn’t use theirs to recommend recipes or sitcoms or holiday movies, or alongside, you know, helping to work on projects and get marketing initiatives completed.

[00:22:57] Lauren McCormack: Sit down and really experience what it’s like to use AI that’s been trained. I think so many people might. You know, dabble a bit and forget the part about training the algorithm so that it can actually deliver back to you. Results that, that meet your standards. This is like a pre trained puppy. It comes to you ready, right?

[00:23:23] Lauren McCormack: It’s housebroken and it’s, it’s ready to rock. So it’d be fun to see. I love

[00:23:27] Joe Peters: that. I love that. And this has been an episode of analogies today. You’ve really outdone yourself this week.

[00:23:32] Lauren McCormack: Oh, thanks. It must be the coffee. But yeah, no, it’s, I think it’s, it’d be really fun to watch in real time as somebody explored the potential of trained AI.

[00:23:45] Lauren McCormack: Instead of just, you know expecting it to, to be pre trained. I love it.

[00:23:51] Joe Peters: We’re doing some of the work for them. We’re doing some of the work to make your life a little bit easier. Right. But I do like housebroken as a, as a concept we’ve moved from the gym to the to being housebroken. So I think we’re, we’re taking some steps in the right direction, but you know,

[00:24:10] Lauren McCormack: What I like to do in my free time, right?

[00:24:14] Joe Peters: Well, if, if we, if we think about some of the experiments that we’ve worked on here at RP with personalization and you know, our, our, as you know, some of our colleagues have done some great experimentation there on generating some personalized content for nurture campaigns and how that could work with Marketo, well, putting in that use case.

[00:24:42] Joe Peters: And having the Mops AI advisor think about that use case, it gives you great food for thought back. Oh, have you thought about this, this and this before you proceed? It’s kind of like that giving you that you know, that. Good voice at the back of your head. That’s like, Hey, maybe you should think about a, B and C before you get too excited.

[00:25:06] Joe Peters: Right? Absolutely. Just a little bit of a cautionary tale. I feel like,

[00:25:11] Lauren McCormack: I’ve often served as that cautionary tale, that canary in the coal mine in certain circumstances, and it’d be nice to have the onus on, on AI. Instead of me to, to think about all the potential disastrous outcomes, but it could be good outcomes too.

[00:25:27] Lauren McCormack: And it could be optimizations that perhaps that you, you weren’t thinking we’re within reach. I, I like the fact that when you come up against a problem, you can ask AI how it would solve said problem. By using AI, there’s a bit of a circular logic that you can use on the tool to have it define its own role in supporting you to get to your goals, which is pretty fun.

[00:25:53] Lauren McCormack: I don’t know that a lot of people have gotten that far yet. Yeah,

[00:25:55] Joe Peters: exactly. Well, this will be live on December 5th, right around the time the podcast comes out, because Lauren and I are recording this right now, just after 1 p. m. Eastern on Monday. So we have a little bit of time to get things ready for you, but we look forward to having you test it out, try it out, and it’s not going anywhere.

[00:26:19] Joe Peters: It’s going to be there. Hopefully it’ll serve some utility for at least until the next crazy AI advancement that we’ll have to rethink things. But these custom GPTs I think are going to have, I don’t think it’s a very. Risky prediction that we’re going to see a lot of custom GPTs in 2024, especially when the store opens,

[00:26:43] Lauren McCormack: where can where can, where can our listeners or our viewers access this agent?

[00:26:49] Joe Peters: So on, it’ll be in the show notes, but also. on the site our website, revenuepulse. com, or if you follow us on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to see posts on this. The way it works is you, you’re going to click on a URL. And as long as you have a paid chat GPT license, you’ll be able to use the custom GPTs.

[00:27:11] Joe Peters: That’s the limitation today. I they’re not allowing free access to if you have a free account, you’re not going to be able to ask access custom GPTs yet. Eventually they’ll probably unlock that too, but right now you’re going to need, if you have a paid account, then you can, you can test it out. And so there’ll be enough links, and that’s the way they have to work now until there’s a story, you have to actually have a link to be able to go to it.

[00:27:38] Joe Peters: In the future, you’ll probably be able to browse for

[00:27:40] Lauren McCormack: it. I found that out the hard way when I realized on Friday, when you sent me the link that I couldn’t access that my credit card had expired and I was hanging out in 3. 5 for a couple of days on unbeknownst to my own self. And so I need to go and get my new card out of out of my purse and hop in and give it a test drive myself today.

[00:27:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s fun. I, and I think that’s, that’s the part of it for us. We’re we’re. Techno technologically oriented people. We like to try and test new things. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of fun to see what we can do and just how powerful and consistent it is. That’s what, that’s what I like about it. That it’s, it’s going to be that voice of reason not only in assisting you in generating the principles and guidelines, but also when you have these ideas around AI use cases, just giving you some sober second thought.

[00:28:33] Joe Peters: Before you jump into things, but all right, well, let’s move on to our next segment, which actually we need to thank our, our sponsor this week. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Choose from hundreds of real world emails and landing pages using the Inspiration Center.

[00:28:58] Joe Peters: Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. Let’s move on to our hot takes, Lauren. We’re seeing AI powered digital colleagues are now here. Some safe jobs could be vulnerable. So artisan AI we’re going to see so many new startups but in this AI space over the next little while, but they’re unveiling their AI powered digital work worker, I think it’s sometime this month.

[00:29:33] Joe Peters: And really what they’re going to do is automating the jobs of a sales representative and making what they say is a significant improvement over chatbots or similar AI tools in the market. And so here’s a quote after a 15 minute conversation with Ava, coincidentally, my eldest daughter’s name, it’ll have the ability to build a knowledge base with that information to create prospects, says Carmichael Jack.

[00:30:03] Joe Peters: It’s like having sales software, but it comes with a manager account executive built in. She can make suggestions, edit campaigns, join meetings and take notes he adds. What do you think Lauren?

[00:30:18] Lauren McCormack: It is the future of work TBD on how well it spins up at first. And we’re going to hearken back with nostalgia for the authenticity of a human relationship.

[00:30:31] Lauren McCormack: And it’s, it’s going to be like the white glove service, the premium, you’re going to be willing to pay for a brand experience that has authenticity and human components to it. Will A virtual agent probably handle your return for your order from LL Bean. Yeah, I’d imagine. So, and we’re already halfway there.

[00:30:56] Lauren McCormack: Will it happen tomorrow that, you know within the next couple of months, we’ll see a third of the sales force replaced by virtual assistants. I don’t think so. Not quite yet. And there’ll always be a, a group of people that need to be sold to by a human being. Yeah, but the AI is getting smarter by increments and leaps and bounds that we can’t as human beings I don’t think fathom.

[00:31:21] Lauren McCormack: So I’m, I’m curious on what the timeline and the change disruptive, you know, amount of change that we’ll see and how quickly we’ll see it will become. But I do have some smart friends that I’ve been chatting about with, for this, this kind of a motion for a long time, and they have emphasized that whether or not we’re reluctant to accept it, it is the future of work.

[00:31:43] Joe Peters: Yeah. And I think once again, if we take this. I’m going to say this overarching principle that this is the worst AI we’re ever going to see.

[00:31:53] Lauren McCormack: That’s right. It’s only going

[00:31:54] Joe Peters: to get better. And if we take the next evolution of Ava and as your sales representative, and she has a video interface, it’s actually going to be a lot better than calling a one 800 number and waiting on hold and pressing a whole bunch of buttons.

[00:32:12] Joe Peters: So we’re going to have this real shift where at some point. The benefits are going to outweigh the drawbacks. That’s right. And however, you’re, you’re right. Like the in store experience is going to be so important or that trade show experience or that experiential physical touch is going to make a big difference because there’s going to be so much of this.

[00:32:44] Joe Peters: Available.

[00:32:45] Lauren McCormack: It’s like when our parents didn’t want to shop online, they were like, I’d never buy anything from a website. Now they’re ordering their groceries for pickup and they sit in the parking spot and they hold up their cell phone with a number.

[00:32:55] Joe Peters: Right? I know. I know. It’s going to happen. It is an amazing time.

[00:32:59] Joe Peters: Well, we’ll see. We’ll see where, where artisan goes which is a kind of a funny, funny, funny name for a sales representative. They’ve got some interesting positioning there, but all right, well, let’s move on to our second hot take. And that is a happy birthday to chat GPT. It’s really, really hard to believe that it’s only been a year and how.

[00:33:28] Joe Peters: Rapidly advancement has been and I

[00:33:33] Lauren McCormack: just feel like it’s it’s perfect timing to make some like Altman memes of him Just looking like kind of like like a little bit miffed at a party with a little party hat on, you know I don’t know. It’s a it’s it’s it’s an interesting milestone. They’ve hit but wow Did they just crash into the wall of their your?

[00:33:55] Lauren McCormack: anniversary of their birthday. And the weirdest and most chaos, I think you said it was like watching game of thrones. I feel like it’s been, it’s been a rocky stint here for the last month or so. And they were the golden, it was theirs to lose, you know, that, that IPO and all the beauty of the valuation that was floating about them and.

[00:34:14] Lauren McCormack: Gosh, it got weird.

[00:34:17] Joe Peters: I think things have gotten back to a little bit uh, back to normalcy in some ways. And I think with the new board there, there will be, it is going to set them up differently for the future. They were just, well, let’s, let’s not get into it. We’ve talked too much about that over the last couple of weeks, but when we look back at the year, I’ll never forget.

[00:34:41] Joe Peters: sitting, waiting for my daughter’s hockey practice to end, which is a Canadian dad is something you, you end up doing a fair bit of, and I was just killing time. On my phone and saw this GPT thing come out and went on right away. And I, it, one, I found it so amusing because it was, I love the, the generative capacity of it, but it still had a lot of inaccuracies and wasn’t as good 3.

[00:35:14] Joe Peters: 5. And once it moved to four, it was a whole other, a whole other game. I thought it was. A nice novelty, but it, and, and did kind of good things. We still had to do a lot of work and cleaning things up or refining the thinking or, but four was a whole new level. And when that, when, when we kind of looked under the hood at four in March and in April, when May came along and as a team, we decided to think through what this meant for our business and.

[00:35:49] Joe Peters: And created our little AI committee to get started. You know, it’s, it’s really funny to think back to that, that we really didn’t know anything back then. We’re

[00:36:00] Lauren McCormack: going to look back on these conversations and that task force. And even just when that code, that open source code, you know, changed everything.

[00:36:10] Lauren McCormack: And we’re going to. We’re going to have feelings, strong feelings, one way or another, you know, five, 10 years from now about how the world was changed, you know, it’s a, it’s a interesting moment in history to have witnessed at the front lines and here’s hoping it makes for a better society for us all, you

[00:36:31] Joe Peters: know, we’ll see, well, I did, I did see a trailer and I’m going to forget.

[00:36:37] Joe Peters: Yeah. The name of it now, but it was a movie where AI was not the villain. So one, one out of a hundred, or the AI could be something that. We all end up liking and seeing the benefits of

[00:36:52] Lauren McCormack: maybe it’s like Loki, like he seems like a villain at first, but by the end of everything, he’s sitting at the center of it all.

[00:36:57] Joe Peters: Right. Who knows where, well, it’s all we can say is that 2024 is going to be really interesting and the pace is not slowing. And the competition is heating up and with Google Gemini now being. Pushed another month out till January. We’ll have to, we’ll, we’ll see what what we get there. And it could be another enter interesting moment for us to.

[00:37:26] Joe Peters: To think about for for 2024. All right. Well, let’s move on to our pairing segment. And this week, I thought we’d have a little bit of breakfast to go along with your coffee. Nice. So, our Our artist this week is Japanese Breakfast. Now let me, let me just bring over the album. You and my husband

[00:37:54] Lauren McCormack: have like the identical

[00:37:55] Joe Peters: taste.

[00:37:56] Joe Peters: Too much indie music. And so for those who are watching who can see on YouTube or the Spotify video version, this, here’s the, the cover. The album art is beautiful and a really lovely kind of lime shade to this Clear see through vinyl. And they’re an interesting band out of Philadelphia, although she’s from Eugene, Oregon, Michelle Zahner.

[00:38:27] Joe Peters: I think that’s how you pronounce her name is the lead singer, beautiful voice, always really textured, layered songs, and. So this week we have a little bit, put the production team to the test. So during the intro, we’re going to have, you’re going to, you would have heard B sweet because that’s a great baseline and a good intro to, uh, to, to launch codes this week, but at the end, little spice for the end will be paprika and that’ll be at the end of the show.

[00:38:59] Joe Peters: And so for those of you just hearing this launch code as your first one, we. At the very end of the segment, we play, you know, a minute or so of the track so you can hear it for yourself as a kind of long extended outro.

[00:39:14] Lauren McCormack: That’s awesome. Have you read her book?

[00:39:16] Joe Peters: No, I didn’t even know that she

[00:39:18] Lauren McCormack: had a book.

[00:39:18] Lauren McCormack: My husband loves it. It was sitting on our coffee table for the better part of the end of last year and I
think it’s called Crying in H Mart, but it talks about her experience you know, as a first generation American. It’s super interesting. Oh,

[00:39:32] Joe Peters: beautiful. Well you’ll have to send me a photo of that so I can track it down and, and have a look.

[00:39:37] Joe Peters: I’m a big fan. Her, her voice is, she really shows off her voice in paprika. You’ll, you’ll hear you’ll hear that. But yeah. So how are we pairing our Japanese breakfast with coffee today?

[00:39:49] Lauren McCormack: So today we have the Arbuckle’s coffee. It’s the Mexicali blend. It’s their most noteworthy, I would say, and what’s interesting is it has a sweet start and a little bit of a spicy finish.

[00:40:03] Lauren McCormack: But what’s the most interesting, I think, is the history of the company. Before. This company existed. People would buy coffee green and roast it in a skillet themselves, but two brothers at the end of the Civil War in the 19th century initiated the concept of roasting coffee and sealing it up in one pound packages, so you didn’t have to do that.

[00:40:27] Lauren McCormack: And so it’s called the Original Cowboy Coffee. It’s a Tucson Local, original, you’ll even find an Arbuckle’s in the Tucson airport, which is super adorable. But yeah, it’s a, it’s perfect at the holidays. It’s got some sweet, it’s got some spice. And I had to feature it.

[00:40:45] Joe Peters: Well, it’s a perfect pairing for the Japanese breakfast because we’re starting with B sweet and ending with paprika.

[00:40:50] Joe Peters: I don’t know. Like we just, this is pretty fortuitous in terms of our, our combo today for our pairing. It could be the best pairing we’ve had. To be honest,

[00:40:59] Lauren McCormack: when you mentioned it was Japanese breakfast and that it was sweet and paprika. I’m like, these notes are, these notes are spot on. I dig it. Awesome.

[00:41:08] Joe Peters: Well, thanks Lauren. And thanks to our listeners for listening this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. And stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. See you next week.

[00:41:30] Lauren McCormack: Take care.

[Episode 12] AI Guidelines and Principles in MOPs

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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

 

Listen below

 

The drama continues at OpenAI

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

5 ways MOPs can elevate campaign planning

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

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

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

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

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

 

Track a lead using Acquisition Program vs. lead source

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

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

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

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

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

 

AI Navigators

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Hot Takes

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

 

Pairings

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

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

 

Read the transcript

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

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week, you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to Episode 12. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’ll the curtains close on OpenAI’s latest drama, how mops can take center stage for campaign planning, A community question, hot on the trail, what’s the best way to track a lead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:25:13] Joe Peters: So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Get to market 95 percent faster with Knack. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. All right, let’s move into our hot takes segment. And I love this first one on what are the mop skills for 2024.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:30:12] Joe Peters: I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Episode 11] Drama at OpenAI

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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

 

Listen Below

 

Sam Altman fired from OpenAI, joins Microsoft

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

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

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

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

 

Google and Yahoo make big changes to prevent spam

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

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

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

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

 

The platform pivot: How to learn a new automation tool

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

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

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

 

Hot Takes

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

 

Read The Transcript

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

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode 11. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, massive drama and AI. Second, Google tightens its belt on spam complaints. From our community, the platform Pivot, how to learn a new automation tool. And then in our hot takes, CMOs say the more the merrier for mops teams next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:16:11] Joe Peters: Hyper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:24:36] Joe Peters: Or no, it’s H

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Episode 10] The State of Marketing Ops 2023

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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.

[Episode 9] MOPs-Apalooza 2023

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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.

[Episode 8] Trust Issues & Privacy Concerns

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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.

[Episode 7] Marketer Optimism Rebounds

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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.

[Episode 6] Apple Fights UTM Tracking

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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.

[Episode 5] MOPs: The Next Generation

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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

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

 

Listen below

 

Episode summary

The first shakedowns in the AI industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

MOPs: The next generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Hot takes

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

Pairings

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

Transcription

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Episode 4] B2B Sales and Marketing Disorder

Posted on by Matthew Burtney

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

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

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Major announcements from OpenAI

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

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

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

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

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

 

The misalignment of B2B marketing and sales

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

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

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

The LinkedIn analysis found that high alignment can:

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

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

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

While it sounds obvious, companies are not doing it.

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

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

 

The future of process documentation

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

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

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

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

 

Hot takes

 

Pairings & Plugs

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

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

 

Read The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:33:22] I know it’s in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:36:13] Lauren McCormack: the

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

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

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

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

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