The third episode of our podcast “Launch Codes” is officially live.
This week, Andy Caron joins the show for the first time. Our CEO, Joe Peters, kicks off the episode with a special announcement that Andy is being promoted to President of RP!
They discuss some very exciting AI news, an interesting Gartner report on how (and why) MarTech stack utilization is dropping, answer some great questions from the MO Pros community, and more – including a taste test of Coke’s new AI-created Y3000 flavor!
Listen Below
Episode Summary
Massive AI Announcements
For this segment, our focus was originally intended to cover OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 announcement and the approaching release of Microsoft’s Copilot feature.
DALL-E 3’s ability to use ChatGPT text prompts to refine the image generation process is a big step forward and has major implications for other AI image generation models like Midjourney. Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, to be officially released this week, also brings a slew of AI features to Windows 11 and Microsoft Office 365.
But seemingly out of nowhere, OpenAI put out another massive headline right before we recorded this episode: “ChatGPT can now hear, see, and speak.” This is major news that became the focus for this segment. These new features, rolled out over the next few weeks, will allow us to have full-blown conversations with ChatGPT – speaking directly to it through the iOS and Android apps. It’ll also view and understand photos and videos that we show it. For example, imagine you are on vacation and you send ChatGPT a picture of a landmark. It’ll identify the landmark and give you information based on the image alone.
Joe iterates how this level of seamless interaction will take our engagements with LLMs to an entirely new level – especially after relying exclusively on text query prompts for so long. Andy also highlights how this is a game-changer from an accessibility standpoint; visually impaired people who couldn’t use the text chat functionality before can now take full advantage of ChatGPT using vocalized prompts and dialogue. Both Joe and Andy agree that it is too early to fully appreciate the potential of this new feature and the mind-blowing implications it has for how we’ll use LLMs going forward.
And if all that wasn’t enough, Spotify also announced a partnership with OpenAI that will allow podcaster’s voices to be emulated and translated into other languages. Not to mention, Amazon announced they will be investing up to $4 Billion into AI startup “Anthropic”.
It seems like every day, a ground-breaking AI development is happening. Joe closes out this segment by emphasizing how all these amazing tools are further enabling us to create higher quality, original content that will stand out from the tsunami of lower level content to come.
Martech Stack Utilization is Falling
Gartner recently surveyed 405 marketing leaders in May and June of this year and found that organization’s martech stack utilization fell from 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023. And not only is utilization low, but spending is increasing as well.
The Gartner report also included survey responses on what marketers think are the biggest reasons preventing higher utilization:
- The complexity/sprawl of our current martech ecosystem.
- Lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance business value of technology.
- Inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes.
- Difficulty identifying and recruiting marketing talent to drive adoption/utilization.
Andy expressed that, given the economic uncertainty of the last few years, organizations have reduced headcount – turning to technology to make up for it. The result has been an increase in spending on technology without the necessary internal knowledge and talent to manage and utilize it. She uses the analogy of this tech being a Ferrari you drive to the grocery store. Joe resonates with this sentiment and takes the analogy further, saying that a lack of clean data will cause further speed bumps and potholes; Andy relates the problem of dirty data to pumping unrefined, crude oil into your car and expecting it to continue running – eventually the engine will fail, just as tech will fail to be effective with poor data input.
Both Joe and Andy empathize with the reasons marketers believe are preventing increased utilization; they are all problems that RP’s clients are facing on a daily basis.
MarketingOps.com Community Question
This week’s question from the MO Pros community has two parts:
- “What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce?”
- “What is the best practice for alerting Sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?”
Andy offers her extensive experience and expertise in this domain, offering practical insights and advice in her response. One of her points was how she is a major proponent for syncing viable leads into Salesforce as soon as they’re created in Marketo – rather than the older practice of keeping MQLs in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. This allows you to keep track of campaign engagement, membership, and other data that’s going to be useful not only in having the correct time/date stamp for syncing that data out of Salesforce into an attribution platform, but also to help your salesperson understand the breadth of what that lead has engaged with.
Andy’s response goes much deeper than this, with Joe prompting her with some follow-up questions including:
How does this impact the dynamic and relationship between Marketing and Sales?
What is the best threshold scoring rule you’ve seen for MQLs?
Do you think the concept of the “MQL” is dead?
Tune into the episode for the full response to these great questions, and thanks again to Mike Rizzo and the MO Pros community for providing them.
Hot Takes:
- Andy tries the new AI-Created Coca-Cola Flavor: Y3000
- Adobe Marketo Engage September 2023 Product Updates
- Marketo Interactive Webinar Event Program
- Dynamic Chat (DC) Updates
- Compute Formula Flow Step Service (October)
- Americans don’t want AI that’s smarter than humans, a new poll reveals.
Read The Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.
[00:00:00] Joe Peters: All right. Welcome to episode three. I’m your host, Joe Peters on today’s episode. We’re covering new developments in AI and their impact on content, a new Gartner report on declining MarTech stack utilization. We’re going to take a question from the mops community, and then we have a few hot takes for.
[00:00:22] Joe Peters: For us to run through one about some Marketo updates and super intelligent AI. So today I’m joined by my colleague, Andy Caron. We have a pretty special announcement that I’d like to make. It’s going to be a surprise for. For everyone, actually. And today we have a big announcement that Andy is going to be taking a new role with us here at RP as president.
[00:00:52] Joe Peters: So Andy has been leading our consulting practice for many years now, and really is truly a leader, not only in our organization. But our space she is a beacon of insight for everyone who knows her and just a real pleasure to work with. So congratulations, Andy. How about that as an introduction to the podcast?
[00:01:19] Andy Caron: Thank you, Joe. It is a one time introduction. I have to say it’s not, it’s never to be repeated, right? Really podcast today.
[00:01:34] Joe Peters: Well, well, thanks, Andy. And congratulations. And obviously we have more celebrations to come, but it is a really great day for us here at RP. So, not that we can talk about any topic that would be more exciting than that, but of what we have on the agenda today, what are you excited about
[00:01:56] Andy Caron: covering? I mean, I’m always excited about AI developments.
[00:02:01] Andy Caron: I think things are just happening so fast. There’s always new stuff coming up and it’s always surprising to me just to see how quickly that’s happening. I, I, but I have to say just the, the mops nerd in me I’m truly always excited to answer community questions. I think the, the questions that people have and the helping people face the struggles that they’re seeing in their own, you know, instances in their own organizations that always, that’s what.
[00:02:27] Andy Caron: What gets me up in the morning?
[00:02:29] Joe Peters: Awesome. Well we’ll, we’ll have some skill testing questions coming in hot and heavy later on in in the podcast. But I think we can almost say that every single day there’s an exciting new AI announcement. And so we do just for those listening. We kind of do all of our editorial prep going into the end of the week.
[00:02:53] Joe Peters: And then we sort of look at things in the morning and then start recording. But this morning there were new developments that even trumped our AI developments from last week. So you might’ve seen last week that Dolly three is coming to chat GPT. I don’t think the specific date has come up, but the idea that you’re going to be able to text prompt.
[00:03:17] Joe Peters: GPT to generate images is just an incredible leap forward and kind of gives you the old RIP to mid journey in terms of all the messiness that there is in terms of getting image creation there, but not to nerd out too much on that. There’s a little video that they produced about Larry the Hedgehog.
[00:03:39] Joe Peters: We’re going to put it in the notes. Originally, we were going to play it, but there’s too many new things for us to cover. So it gives you a sense of just how elegant and how smooth it is to have this interaction and refinement and generation of images using the Chat, G p t interface with Dolly three.
[00:04:01] Joe Peters: So the, the, the content potential there is incredible. But before we move on to that, and before I un unleash Andy on this topic, just this morning, some major, major announcements from open AI and. The idea now that chat GPT is going to be able to see, hear, and speak. Okay. Like just mind blowing here in terms of the leaps in capabilities.
[00:04:34] Joe Peters: So within the next couple of weeks. You’re going to be able to talk to chat GPT sort of using your, your phone interface, the, the, the app will allow you to do that audio input, but you’re going to be able to upload images. Videos and have interactivity with GPT on the fly. So imagine you’re on a trip to Europe, you take a picture of some building maybe the Eiffel tower and GPT will be able to recognize and tell you something, or imagine you’re at home and take a picture of your fridge.
[00:05:16] Joe Peters: What’s for dinner tonight? What’s in the pantry? It’s endless here. So Andy, like, how do we even think about this?
[00:05:26] Andy Caron: Yeah, I mean, I just heard about this this morning, right? So I think I’m still figuring out how to think about it. And I think that that probably will be the approach I continue to take as I expand.
[00:05:39] Andy Caron: It’s applications where I can use that how it best helps me in my day to day, my work, my home life, et cetera. But I think the reality is that this is probably where we’re going to start to see a little bit of backlash. Honestly, I think people are going to be a little scared of this. They’re going to be reticent to, to dive into it.
[00:05:57] Andy Caron: A large percentage of the population, even people that have already played around with the chat GPT and other, you know, systems, I think that they’re going to kind of, I don’t know about that. Right. So that. Would not surprise me, but I think the, the, the capacity to have a system say back to me, I’m looking for clarification.
[00:06:19] Andy Caron: Is this what you meant? Or is this what you said takes the ability to collaborate? Within the framework to a new level, and it opens it up to populations of people who can’t use the text version, which I think is really cool this idea of people who, you know, are blind and they can type, but but the interaction with the voices is so cool.
[00:06:45] Andy Caron: Those capacities I think are really Awesome. And they’re very exciting for me. And also, I mean, depending on whether or not you want to unleash this for young kids, right, this takes us to a place where they don’t need to be typing yet in order to iterate and have this interaction with AI and start to understand it, which is super cool.
[00:07:06] Joe Peters: Yeah, like a dialogue. I think that’s what I find interesting here. You know, we’re so used to. You know, it’s only been a year, not even a year, actually. And we’ve been prompting and whether, you know, putting our queries in no matter how long they are, but the idea of now being able to have a dialogue for me is just such a whole new world to explore and it’s like, you know, mind blowing in terms of what this is going to be.
[00:07:37] Joe Peters: I don’t think, I don’t, I don’t think we can even fully appreciate what this is going to mean. Not
[00:07:42] Andy Caron: yet. No, I don’t. I don’t think we really have the capacity to fully explore all the applications and things that this opens. It’s going to be
[00:07:51] Joe Peters: fun. I can’t wait. I know there’s going to be those that are going to be a bit reluctant, but I’m definitely going to dive right in headfirst as soon as this is available.
[00:08:03] Joe Peters: And then, you know, if that wasn’t enough, we have Microsoft Copilot coming out tomorrow in terms of their Full integration of chat GPT and their co pilot features within all the Microsoft suite within the windows 11 operating system, this is going to be. An amazing week for, for new developments.
[00:08:28] Joe Peters: Like, and then we just saw as well this morning, Spotify has just announced that with their partnership with open AI, any podcasts now can be translated or will soon be able to be translated into other languages. And you and I, Andy, our German is just going to be spotless in a couple of weeks.
[00:08:55] Andy Caron: Just what I’ve always wanted.
[00:08:58] Joe Peters: Well, I, I think it’ll actually be pretty fun to hear our dialogue going back and forth in German and not fully even understand it. And then you know, I think the, the China, the final. Cherry was was the translation on Spotify, but if we put another few sprinkles in there, another massive announcement with Anthropic and Amazon and a massive billion dollar partnership that they have launched as well.
[00:09:29] Joe Peters: So just every day there seems like there’s something mind blowing that’s coming out and pretty exciting stuff for
us. And when we get to that idea that we talked about last week, and any, you and I have had a chance to talk about this in terms of the pyramid of content and the idea that there’s just going to be so much of this content for us to wade through, and we’re going to need to really try and focus on how do we get that content that’s original and breakthrough, we’re going to have some really fun stuff over the next little while.
[00:10:01] Andy Caron: Absolutely agree.
[00:10:04] Joe Peters: Okay now we’re going to shift gears a little bit into a recent Gartner study that just came out, and this was a study of marketing leaders going back to May, June of this year, and the key finding was that they found that MarTech utilization declined. From 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023.
[00:10:33] Joe Peters: And, which is kind of shocking because one of the quotes that came outta that study was not only is utilization low, but it’s declining year over year while people are buying more. It’s a big problem when I talk to CMOs. They all know it. They all feel it. And that’s a A A C E O quote coming from the study.
[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Any quick takes on that before we get into some of the
[00:11:00] Andy Caron: findings? Well, I think we’ve been in a year of economic uncertainty. It has definitely led to a lot of organizations reducing headcount, but they still got to get business done. So they’re turning to technology. But the crux of the problem is that they’ve purchased this technology, but not necessarily fully accounted for each tool that they’re onboarding, needing a human or a part of a human’s time to manage, optimize, and run the day to day on it.
[00:11:30] Andy Caron: And so of course, utilization is going to be low, even though they’re buying more tech. So they’re trying to solve problems with technology and then not backing up the problem solving with a human to do it.
[00:11:41] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. And when you dive into more of the data here, it becomes really apparent. So when we, the survey respondents told their main reasons on why utilizations was falling, the top one was the complexity sprawl of the current marketing technology ecosystem at 41% at 40%, a lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance the business value of the technology.
[00:12:09] Joe Peters: Next in a 40 percent as well inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes. And then the last one here in terms of the highlights at 37 percent difficulty identifying. And recruiting marketing talent to drive, adopt and adoption and utilization. So we’re seeing a lot of things that Andy, you and I, these are near and dear to our heart in terms of some of these challenges we’re seeing.
[00:12:40] Andy Caron: Absolutely. The, the reality is that for over a decade now, CMOs have been spending more on technology than CIOs or CTOs. By a large percentage. And so if the bulk of technology is sitting inside of marketing, but they don’t have the resources either in headcount or internal knowledge and talent to manage them, the full capabilities of these are just going to sit on the shelf.
[00:13:11] Andy Caron: It’s a Ferrari you’re driving to the grocery store. It’s not going to actually perform at the level that you bought it to perform at because you’re not. Driving it anywhere or with a driver capable of pushing it to its limits. It’s going to underperform.
[00:13:28] Joe Peters: And if we take that road driving analogy a little bit further and we kind of look at the road ahead, we know that when you’re not really focused on ensuring your data is in a good place and the focusing on making it sure we talk about dirty data all the time, if, Your, your, your road is only going to be bumpier ahead.
[00:13:55] Joe Peters: You’re going to need to have that data hygiene in place. If you’re going to take advantage of any of the new AI opportunities that are going to be presented to CMOs, you may want to do things you may want to take advantage of some of these LLMs and what they can do for you. But if your data is not in a good place.
[00:14:15] Joe Peters: You can expect some potholes and bumps,
[00:14:18] Andy Caron: Ahead. If I can steal the car analogy, it actually, to me, is almost like you’re pumping unrefined crude oil into
the vehicle and then expecting it to continue running. Right? Of course, the engine’s going to blow.
[00:14:35] Joe Peters: For for those, Andy and I can take analogies forever.
[00:14:41] Joe Peters: It’s literally one of our favorite things to do on calls. So there’s no, no shortage to us building on each other’s stories here, but yeah, like these. These points that are coming out in, in this study are basically our day to day life. I, I feel like our, our clients are feeling this, we’re seeing this and and so there really needs to be some focus and prioritization if these issues are going to be addressed.
[00:15:13] Joe Peters: Okay. And for those wanting to take a deeper dive into this, we’ll put a link to the show notes. Now, moving on to our next segment, and we loved this last week, and that was looking to the Mopros community for a question not that we’re going to be able to stump Andy at all on on any of these Questions, but this is a fun one from marketing ops.
[00:15:49] Joe Peters: com. And thanks to Mike Rizzo and the gang for giving us permission to take a question and address it here on the podcast today. So if diving right into it, here is the question we have this week. What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce? And then the secondary part to this is what is the best practice to alerting sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?
[00:16:21] Andy Caron: Yeah, I love this question. Or both of them, to be honest, but the first part in particular, because it. Reinforces an older practice of gating MQLs and keeping them in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. And I am a huge proponent for syncing anything that’s potentially viable. Obviously not the garbage, get rid of it, but sync anything that’s viable when it’s created from Marketo into Salesforce, because this gives you the capacity.
[00:16:51] Andy Caron: to start keeping track of campaign engagement and membership and other data that’s going to be useful not only to have the correct time date stamp and other pieces for syncing that data out of salesforce into let’s say an attribution platform but also for Arming your sales person to understand the timeline of this person’s engagement and the breadth of what they’ve engaged with.
[00:17:14] Andy Caron: If you’re only sinking at MQL, then you won’t have any of that data or the time date stamps will be wrong because they’ll represent when the person was synced to Salesforce and not when those engagements actually happened. So that’s the first piece. If you’re syncing earlier though, how do you alert sales that an MQL has been created or flagged?
[00:17:34] Andy Caron: So typically we do this with a lifecycle status value change to change that person into MQL. I love having a standing report for people that’s a call list that they can work off of first thing in the morning. So this is owner. And then status is MQL. And then any other information in that report, there’ll be useful for them.
[00:17:53] Andy Caron: Obviously you need to have a lead report and then in a contact report as well inside of Salesforce, since you can’t put both in the same report, if you are MQL in contacts, which I think you should, because there’s a lot of meat left on those bones when they’ve been converted. Right. But it is, how does your sales team work and how does your sales leadership want to.
[00:18:15] Andy Caron: Work with you on addressing dispositioning outreach to those. And what is the, the agreement between those? So are you going to be sending them a notification in Slack, which has an integrable point to say, you have a new MQL, go call them. Is it going to be off of a call list? Is it going to be generating a, an open activity for that salesperson to action on inside of the system?
[00:18:40] Andy Caron: I think there’s a lot of different ways to alert. sales, but you can’t just say, this is how we’re going to tell sales or somebody that they need to action. There needs to be collaboration there and an understanding on this is how sales works. This is how they want to hear about this. And also being prepared for if the system breaks, what happens if.
[00:18:58] Andy Caron: Somebody puts in an accidentally scores 100, 000 leads and sales gets inundated. Are they going to be pissed at you that they just got a hundred thousand slack messages? Is that what’s your volume? Right? So there has to be a conversation there on the best practice. The best practice is whatever’s going to get those leads actioned in the most expedited, efficient, and potentially sales driving way.
[00:19:24] Joe Peters: Now, how does this kind of relate when we’re thinking about the sort of positive or negative organizational dynamics between sales
[00:19:34] Andy Caron: and marketing? Yeah, this is a tricky one because organizations. Sometimes, even unmeaningly so, we’ll sort of pit sales and marketing against each other when really you are an extension of each other’s function.
[00:19:46] Andy Caron: Marketing is putting the golf ball on the tee and sales is hitting it and hoping to get a hole in one. That’s what we ultimately want. But if it’s not that collaborative, if there’s conversations around credit, this is sales Sale versus marketing’s sale, you’re working together, you’re a team. And so the data, the processes and the discussions all need to reinforce that synergy rather than the separation of the two.
[00:20:15] Andy Caron: And I find that in organizations where they’re looking at something like a rev ops team that has both under its umbrella or there’s less of the siloed effect happening, that there is a more positive dynamic. But again, you, one step begins, you know, the journey of a thousand, right? If you are taking that step to saying, how do you want us to let you know that there’s somebody that is sales ready, or at least as far as we can tell is sales ready, that begins that positive journey toward a dynamic where you’re not at odds with each other, but you’re actually collaborating.
[00:20:52] Joe Peters: Right, right. And that collaboration is really where. That that’s where the magic happens when it’s, it’s seen as a collaboration and not as an obligation or, or even worse on the adversarial side, but not to, not to really Blow the brains or have a face melting experience for the, the, the, the community member that asks this question, but kind of taking a next level thinking through MQLs, what is the best threshold scoring rule that you’ve seen for MQL?
[00:21:27] Joe Peters: Yes.
[00:21:28] Andy Caron: So. I think that having data points that point to buying behavior should set your threshold. So it’s not necessarily a hard and fast number. Oh, they hit a hundred points. It is more around the combination of are they… the type of client in your ICP that typically buys or that you see the best yield from, and then are they showing buying signals?
[00:21:55] Andy Caron: And the combination of those two things needs to be your threshold for passing people across. And the only way that you’re going to get to that refinement is by creating a feedback loop on what you passed. through as an MQL and what actually then converts and eventually turns in to a sale without doing a data analysis on what passes through.
[00:22:16] Andy Caron: You’ll never refine your threshold, but you have to draw a line in the sand and start with something and then go from there.
[00:22:23] Joe Peters: Cool. And then this is a fun one. And, you know, this is not to be too controversial here, but do you think the concept of the MQL is dead? Yes, I do.
[00:22:41] Joe Peters: Maybe we should have started with that.
[00:22:44] Andy Caron: So in the sense that there are going to be people that marketing is flagging as sales ready. I absolutely don’t think that that’s dead, but I think that we’ve moved into account based marketing, account based buying, and that there is this sort of legacy concept of the MQL that just won’t die, but it needs to, in my opinion.
[00:23:08] Andy Caron: I know that’s probably controversial to say, but the reality is… We need to be able to identify qualified accounts, or if there’s a single individual that’s really hot and heavy all over the content, the website, whatever, definitely to flag those. But the idea of the MQL is to say that somebody is marketing qualified.
[00:23:27] Andy Caron: Right. And the reality is we need to think about the funnel as a whole and take MQL out of the equation. Because if someone comes in because sales bought the lead and then they engage with marketing and then they do something with sales and then they do something with marketing. And then we say that they’re a marketing qualified lead that already puts us in a position to have a negative dynamic between sales and marketing on who owns the lead.
[00:23:51] Andy Caron: There’s an. Ownership inherent to this idea of the MQL, as opposed to following something like a serious decisions, waterfall or revenue model, right? Which looks at a prioritized individual. And it doesn’t matter whether sales prioritize them, they prioritize themselves or marketing prioritize them. They can then go through the same funnel.
[00:24:11] Andy Caron: And then you. Overlay attribution on top of that to understand where engagement interaction impact budgeting optimization should occur to repeat rinse, you know, all those things, right? But it doesn’t mean that marketing created the lead. It just means that their last touch was marketing. And I think The MQL fallacy is the idea of this bottleneck in the funnel that says that it came from marketing and stamps ownership on it and essentially tries to make the funnel do dual duty as attribution.
[00:24:47] Andy Caron: When that’s not really what we should be doing as marketers.
[00:24:50] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s more dynamic than that and you lose the dynamism by just calling it an MQL. Agree. Okay. Well, that was fun. And I’m sure the the, the question from the community, the, the, the person who asked that got a lot more than they bargained for with that response, but that was, that was amazing.
[00:25:10] Joe Peters: Thank you, Andy. And let’s, before we move into our next segment, we’d just like to thank our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is a no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. And you can use the Knack Inspiration Center to find hundreds of real world email and landing page templates.
[00:25:31] Joe Peters: It’s pretty cool. You can actually go in and browse and see some of the best templates in the world and then use them in your own environment and adapt and use that. I find that absolutely incredible. So empower your team to be more creative and bring campaigns to life faster. Visit knack. com to learn more.
[00:25:54] Joe Peters: That’s k n a k dot com. Okay. So we’re going to move into our hot takes, a segment, and this is Andy’s first time, and we’re going to talk about a couple of changes coming to Marketo and some other fun conversations related to AI. But first, for those of you that listened last week. Matt Tonkin and I explored the idea of the Y3000.
[00:26:24] Joe Peters: That is the AI flavor created drink that is supposed to give you a glimpse of what the year 3000 is going to taste like. So now that may be a good or a bad thing. We don’t know, but Andy has done a little bit of homework coming into today’s episode and got herself a can and it’s going to do a live tasting for us.
[00:26:54] Joe Peters: And describe the year 3000 for all of you.
[00:26:59] Andy Caron: We’ll see how this goes. All right, here we go. Get a good pop on it. So I haven’t tasted it yet. I have no idea what this tastes like. I have to say that the can itself is very. Sort of what I feel like this is going to be in a couple years looking at something like what we thought 30 years in the future to back to the future was going to look like.
[00:27:21] Andy Caron: It’s, it’s, it’s like snazzy, but also I don’t think that the 3000 will look like this. Okay. So here we go.
[00:27:32] Andy Caron: It’s very sweet. It’s not as full as the normal Coke flavor. It’s a little lighter, I guess. There’s sort of a berry forward and I want to say it’s like sort of a bitter vanilla. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not something I would.
[00:27:52] Joe Peters: We take a sec, a second taste just to make sure
[00:28:00] Andy Caron: it kind of reminds me of. A went to like the drive thru and got watered down vanilla cherry Coke.
[00:28:15] Joe Peters: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if that is a a huge endorsement of the year 3000 well co
[00:28:22] Andy Caron: created with artificial intelligence. It says so futuristic flavored. I don’t know. Maybe this is what the kids will be drinking in 1000 years. Or
[00:28:30] Joe Peters: maybe it’s what space unicorns drink. And that’s, that’s what we can it
[00:28:35] Andy Caron: is our colors. I will give it that.
[00:28:38] Joe Peters: It’s got some good, good branding. I listen, I think it’s, it’s fun that they’ve jumped in and are trying some things out and if the one thing we can take away from it. If they haven’t nailed the taste, they’ve really nailed the idea of experimentation, which is something that we’ve been preaching for a long time.
[00:28:59] Joe Peters: You gotta, you gotta play around a little bit, see how this is going to work for you and your organization and Coke taking this and saying, Hey, let’s, let’s create a new flavor. And experiment with this a little bit. I think it’s pretty cool use of AI in the really, really early days.
[00:29:17] Andy Caron: Well, I mean, the marketing’s on point when I got to the grocery store, the shelves were mostly full and the spot that this came in a sort of small can 10 pack, there were three boxes of it left.
[00:29:28] Andy Caron: I took the third to last, so it was flying off the shelf. I think it’s fair to say.
[00:29:35] Joe Peters: That’s cool. And unfortunately us north in the great white north we don’t get to have access till tomorrow. So we’ll be hitting the grocery stores.
[00:29:46] Andy Caron: It is quite carbonated. I’ll say that.
[00:29:51] Joe Peters: Amazing. Well, I, that was a real surprise for this weekend.
[00:29:55] Joe Peters: Thanks, Andy, for doing that. A little bit of homework for us yeah, cleanse and giving us
[00:30:05] Joe Peters: giving us the Somali a take of what the year 3000 is going to be anyway, I’m, I’m still pumped and I can’t wait to, to force my family to try it at a dinner tomorrow, hopefully. Okay. So let’s move into our hot takes. Some new releases coming out in September and the two, two that we want to just touch on.
[00:30:33] Joe Peters: And the first is on the interactive webinar event program as it pertains to Marketo. And so. And you do want to talk a little bit about the localization and user access management elements there. Yeah.
[00:30:49] Andy Caron: So the two pieces from the September release that I found most interesting for their big quarterly releases really are following this trend that we saw at summit of this do more with less.
[00:31:00] Andy Caron: And one of those is the updates to the Mercado interactive webinar event program. So this is a new program type. The Marketo has brought to the fore. Pardon me. So Marketo has brought this to the fore to essentially allow people to off board with their existing webinar vendors and to use Marketo as their actual webinar vendor at a certain scale.
[00:31:25] Andy Caron: It’s free. You don’t have to pay more for it. And so that do more with less piece is very present in this. They are adding in September localization for interactive webinars. So this idea that you can either set the desired language or the user who created the event program, if their language is specified, that can be applied is very cool.
[00:31:47] Andy Caron: It’s an automatic application. And then also they’ve added user access management for interactive webinars. So that means that you can give permission to someone to come in and manage the webinar piece without giving them access to the entirety of the system. And that’s great because I know, you know, Marketo isn’t necessarily the, the top of the, like, they’re not the best, the best with access management.
[00:32:15] Andy Caron: And so people sometimes struggle with this on who they even give access to any piece. So having a user that’s specifically set up for this function is, is really powerful.
[00:32:27] Joe Peters: It’s funny to think of this localization element and then Spotify is going to allow us to do our podcast in German in a few weeks.
[00:32:37] Joe Peters: So, but an interesting development and advancement, and I, I do appreciate that more with less element so that the other element that you wanted to. Talk a little bit about was the dynamic chat updates for conversational forms and meeting bookings and smart list targeting. Do you want to? Yeah. So
[00:32:59] Andy Caron: there’s a, there’s a whole slew of updates coming for dynamic chat.
[00:33:04] Andy Caron: And again, this is a functionality that exists. It’s for users of Marketo Engage. If you have Marketo Engage, you have access to dynamic chat, which is huge. It may mean the difference between retaining a headcount or being able to spend that budget on another tool that you really want or need if you’re using chat currently or thinking about using chat and you need to build a use case and a business case for it.
[00:33:28] Andy Caron: They’ve added conversational forms, which is really cool. They are giving you the ability now to customize the meeting booking settings. So when they’re allowing people to book meetings via the chat bot, not just a standard one size fits some approach to that, but actually having that be customized. And then the other one that I really love is this idea of being able to set the dialogue criteria or how these
[00:33:58] Andy Caron: And then I’m going to see the person based on their being in a smart list inside of Marketo. And so that means if I have my top targeted list or other things inside the system where I want to really focus on these, or if I want to give a different chat experience to customers, that I can build smart lists inside of Marketo that allow me to do that natively inside my chat tool.
[00:34:21] Andy Caron: And that’s really cool.
[00:34:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And then I know you’re pumped about this last one coming to October, regardless of the fact if it’s built on Adobe’s IO runtime
[00:34:34] Andy Caron: platform. So many of us that particularly have gotten into Matrix scoring will likely be somewhat excited to see
that October, a little mini side release outside of the big quarterly release.
[00:34:47] Andy Caron: A note about the compute formula flow step service. So if you have Adobe IO runtime or have acquired it or planning on acquiring it, you can use it or will be able to in smart campaigns to do a formula. So this plus this, this field plus that field, which simply has never been possible. You’ve always had to have a web hook that uses an Excel based formula to do that prior or purchase a service that allows you to do that.
[00:35:14] Andy Caron: This, Takes that out of, out of the play and gives you inside of the Adobe verse, the capacity to do this inside of Marquetta, which is great.
[00:35:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, some fun things coming in October and what we’re seeing now with the quarterly release. So thanks Andy, for running through those with us, our next hot take topic is.
[00:35:37] Joe Peters: One that Andy and I have chatted about a few times now the idea of the super intelligent AI. And so there was a new poll that came out by conducted by you, gov 1100 Americans asked them some questions and 63 percent of those surveyed said regulation should aim to actively prevent AI super intelligence.
[00:36:02] Joe Peters: And so we’re starting to see some skepticism growing, if not fear growing. And Andy, please give us your mission impossible take on, on this one.
[00:36:17] Andy Caron: We have fully substituted the super villain as AI in media. It was around, right? You’ve got the terminators and the matrixes of past eras, I guess at this point, but.
[00:36:31] Andy Caron: It is now, you know, Mission Impossible, Bond, like all of these, we’re seeing A. I. as the supervillain and it is permeating the culture in the same way that we used to automatically cast a Nazi or you know, a terrorist is a supervillain. Now it’s A. I.
[00:36:51] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s absolutely fascinating, right? The the pulling on the.
[00:36:56] Joe Peters: Fear and the heart the, just the phobias that we have. And, you know, it’s interesting, 63%. And what is their frame of reference for feeling that they’re worried about AI superintelligence is it. Because they saw Mission Impossible this summer,
[00:37:17] Andy Caron: I think it feeds it. I think that the cultural zeitgeist becomes a feedback loop for how we position things in media like villains and films, and they know that there’s a fear there.
[00:37:30] Andy Caron: So they play on the fear. It’s just like a horror movie, except it’s a slightly different.
[00:37:37] Joe Peters: Well, we do love good segues here. So we’re going to segue into our pairings section of the podcast and our musical guest this week is a band called waves and I thought it was fitting because. Andy is making waves in, in our organization and our mops space and they’re a band from San Diego. I, I’ve, I love them and they have some nice.
[00:38:11] Joe Peters: Pink vinyl for us today because, you know, it is slightly on brand for us. And the song that you’ll be hearing is called sinking feeling, which is a segue back to the sentiment that. Americans have now on ai. That record looks surprisingly like Joe. It could be the year 3000 .
[00:38:35] Andy Caron: The, the, the record in the can look like they could have come out of
[00:38:38] Joe Peters: the name
[00:38:40] Joe Peters: Yeah. And the sleeve is kind of like a blue too, so. Waves, waves were ahead of the game, but just a great album and super fun, really great hooks. And if you want to give it a listen, I, I, I highly recommend it. So Andy, we’re going to move over to Andy’s part of pairings, which. And I’ll let you take it away, a new segment for us on Launch Codes.
[00:39:07] Andy Caron: Yes, so I have brought in a book. It is by professor and author Daniel Suskind, and it is called A World Without Work. Have you read it, Joe? I have not. Okay, so it’s fascinating. It focuses on when humans, much like Horses in transportation potentially are no longer needed to do work of any kind and how we continue.
[00:39:37] Andy Caron: Seems
[00:39:37] Joe Peters: like WALL E is come to life
[00:39:39] Andy Caron: here. It is a little bit. It looks at that conundrum of automation and also some of the fallacies around that. So as we’ve automated, we’ve created new different kinds of jobs and work has evolved. There was always the assumption with AI that it would be, it would be used for repeatable tasks and that only jobs that had repeatable tasks would be at risk.
[00:40:02] Andy Caron: But just as we see with, you know, AI can write a kid’s book and give you the… The illustrations now, that’s not necessarily a repeatable task. And this book really dives into what it means for our identities, how tied they are to our careers, our work, and how we sort of future proof ourselves from making ourselves obsolete in the same way that Horses were made obsolete, obsolete you know, over a hundred years ago.
[00:40:34] Joe Peters: it’s fascinating. It’s a super important thinking to be done there. And I know Sam Altman has explored this in the idea of the universal basic income. That’s something we may need to explore.
[00:40:49] Andy Caron: So, fascinating, fascinating book. Highly recommend it.
[00:40:53] Joe Peters: Yeah, well that’s a great one. And we’ll make sure we get the cover for all of you to have a look at and the details in the show notes.
[00:41:01] Joe Peters: Yeah,
[00:41:01] Andy Caron: I highly recommend the Audible version. Cause Daniel actually narrates it himself. So you get to hear it from the author, which I think is always an extra layer of nuance in the content on how they think about it coming through their reading of it.
[00:41:16] Joe Peters: Yeah, I do prefer that as well. Unless they have a slightly irritating voice.
[00:41:21] Andy Caron: Oh no, he’s got a beautiful British voice. It’s, it’s nice.
[00:41:25] Joe Peters: Always sounds more interesting when, when those those Brits do the reading, that’s for sure. Okay. Well, I think we’re close to wrapping this up this week, but thank you, Andy, for being such an amazing guest and for participating this week, congratulations on your promotion.
[00:41:47] Joe Peters: But. Thanks to everyone listening. It’s been fun to put together launch codes this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. And you can find us on Spotify, Utah YouTube, Apple podcasts and Google podcasts, and as always stay connected with us on LinkedIn and by joining our newsletter. You know, coincidentally called launch codes to keep up to speed on things that are happening.
[00:42:15] Joe Peters: And as always, thanks mom for watching and listening. Have a great week, everyone.
