Shifting AI perspectives in Marketing
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Welcome to MarketG. Grab some coffee and let's talk about what's working in marketing, who these strategies are designed for, and how to be customer-centered while we do it.

Hey there, this is Leanne with Markagee. Today I'm joined by someone that you really should pay some attention to. This is Vincent and we met at the MarTech World Conference where he played an instrumental part. And so Vincent, I'm going to let you share more about what it is you do and know and all the wonderful things you've got going on.

Amazing. Thanks, Leanne. Thanks for the opportunity to speak to your audience today. Yeah, so I'm Vincent. I've been in and out of the traps, I suppose, around the marketing world. But my career kind of started in the world of data and software engineering. But I kind of progressed through marketing departments. So I've been always like the analyst or the data person in large marketing teams, and

Everything from in-house to agency and consulting to creatives to large FMCGs. And over the last few years, I've had the chance to work with telcos,

uh airlines and and just quite a broad range uh the last i suppose year or two i've been more focused actually into academia and have been lecturing in the field of applied artificial intelligence machine learning and data science and a lot of what i do is bringing in that learnings i've had in my career and bringing that to life in my essentially my classes i do this at a couple of different universities uh mit's professional education is one of them as a as a program mentor

also some of the universities here in Australia. And we met at one of the workshops that I was running at the MarTech World Forum where we essentially brought to life an entire brand concept from start to finish. So we took a concept, an idea, a problem, and we saw how we can use generative AI to essentially build and bring something to life. Yeah, which I think is a lot of what marketers want to know as far as like, how do we apply this? We know it's disruptive. We know there's a ton of applications, right?

And we know it's, you know, the next greatest thing. But what does that mean in real life, like in practice?

And I think that that was something where when you and I spoke, you know, you had some really great insights that I think that one, I agree with. But two, I think that more people need to take it from that perspective. So kind of if you could share with us a little bit more about where you think people are getting it right or where they need to kind of shift and what perspective that really would be.

So I think when we look at the intersection of marketing and data and AI and what that means together, there's a couple of key things that sort of come to mind. Obviously, if you look at the different pillars of marketing, it goes across price, promotion, products, so many aspects of marketing, right? But I think the key one that I keep coming back to, and I feel like a few people have

potentially like missed the boat a little bit is the concept of like hyper personalization and you know let's rewind a couple years uh you know personalization was like a hot topic it's like we're going to create these amazing one-on-one experiences but the reality is

Even at like the largest scale of some of the largest tech companies with the most sophisticated marketing teams, that marketing is never one-on-one. It feels one-on-one. It's predictive. It's segmented really well. It's well-researched. It's about the illusion of personalization. It's about giving me an experience that I feel like you've understood me as a brand.

But I felt like that was never actually true personalization. There was more segmentation or just some smarts around predictive modeling. Where we're moving to now and what the language models can do is actually provide a true one-on-one experience where...

even the use of the words or language and my preferences can actually be baked in. Now, is that a cost effective thing to do? Is that something we should be doing to customers and providing them that level of experience? Maybe we can unpack that in this conversation, but I think we're moving from personalization to hyper personalization, like actual true one-on-one.

And I think there's some magic in that. And I believe that that's going to take us down some really interesting pathways. Everything from MarTech to product, to even price. Imagine you're using a product and that product is priced based on how you use it, not based on some set fee that you pay each month for a service. And I think those kind of experiences is going to kind of open up some really interesting things. And it's marketers that are going to be leading that charge.

Yeah, I really like how you called it out the difference between segmentation and personalization, because I think that that's where you have to draw. It's almost like the MQL line in the sand. Like you have to draw a line somewhere and say from this side to this side, it's it's just a segment. You are literally just, you know, plugging in like a line of code that says show this segment of person, this type of product, right?

And it's different than hyper personalization to the to what you just said about the language and the pricing and how that can be operationalized, because that's that's a whole nother use for AI too, right? So so tell me a little bit more, like, spell it out for me like I'm five. If how how could this look in real life?

Okay, so I am say customer A, let's take a retail business, FMCG, customer facing. I usually find that something everyone can relate to either in buying groceries or let's just say you're buying some sort of travel, right? The selection of products I get is obviously really well sort of thought out from the recommendation engines that we can now plug into these systems. But imagine where a world where

I'm no longer interacting with the brand directly, but I'm interacting through my AI system or what we thought a lot of these home automation systems were going to do, but never did. And I go, hey, can you add, I don't know, some milk, some eggs, some toast. I need some jam, a whole raft of things right into my cart ready to arrive. And

If you're in the US, you might have used like Instacart and things like that, maybe talked up to my AI, maybe Amazon, and it just transacts for me. And now here's the interesting part. I don't specify any brands. I didn't specify the size and the shape just based on my preferences. I'm getting receiving goods that are going to work for me, or at least the business or the brand thinks is what I need.

And that becomes seamless, right? Or it becomes this sort of experience where I feel like the brand knows me and I receive those goods and services. Obviously, it might not quite get there yet. It might be more in a digital world where I can talk to an assistant and it just knows all my preferences. You know, Amazon, I haven't looked actually. I've been a customer of theirs when I was in the US, in Europe, and now in Australia for like years and years and years.

imagine the amount of data that they have on all these products that purchased over the years for absolutely everything, right? The level of personalization they can do in terms of understanding what products and services I'll need when, how often, which brands I'd probably like to buy and shop with. They can build that whole experience layer, right? And I think that's going to be the normality where,

why are we giving users so much choice when actually what I need is a search box, tell me what you need and then I'll give it to you. And I think the AI is going to help us basically act as that sort of translation agent to sort of turn your needs and requirements and understand that and essentially plug that into the machine and go, hey, actually, these are the products that we should be selecting for users.

So I think that seamlessness and that convenience is what is going to win people over. We've seen, you know, this push to like almost same day delivery. These experiences are getting more and more sort of towards this, not so much real time, but like convenience over everything. I think consumers are expecting convenience at any cost. Like people will happily pay for that, for that ease. And if AI and the way the technology is going can, can accelerate that even further, then,

I don't see why people wouldn't do that. And this is happening not only in retail, like I'm seeing this in other use cases like health, for example, right? So in the health tech space, you know, your traditional, I go to my doctor and every time I see a different doctor and it's a fragmented experience and no one has a full picture of what's going on. Imagine a world where that data was connected

And I could get recommendations that were actually based on my lifestyle, knowing what time I like to work and how I work and where I work and how I eat. And, you know, and that fits around me rather than giving me a sticker on a label that says, take this medication three times a day at these times. And, oh, you're a shift worker. You work at night, but you don't, you know, like it's fragmented. But it's just such a small things like that, that I think is going to take it that step further because it's

That's to me that true personalization where the product and the brand and experience is in my control essentially. I feel like

Some of those applications you mentioned, I have seen presented at Routers, Strategic Marketing West last spring, summer, early summer, where Albertsons has an app and they do something very similar to what you're mentioning. And it automatically adds coupons or incentives for you to buy the certain thing that they think you're going to buy. Now,

There's a couple things that make me hesitant to this lifestyle that you just described. Biases in the code, right? Because, you know, there's so many...

things about ourselves where we may perceive things one way but that's not somebody else's experience but the person who's writing the code dictates how it's interpreted and so i think that that's always a conversation worth having um on the the other side of that coin is also the data privacy um

You know, I like the idea of hyper-personalized healthcare in the sense that, hey, I've got X, Y, and Z. Like, I don't eat gluten. Like, where do you think I'm going to, like, all of a sudden have this certain thing? But, yeah.

There's also the privacy aspect of does it protect your privacy or is it sharing too much personal information between your medical record and your groceries and if your fridge weighs how much milk you've consumed. I think that that's going to be something for us to solve for.

Yeah, an interesting thing on the privacy aspect has been this concept of like more data, more data. And, you know, data was cheap, right? Like storing data was not a problem. So it's just like, let's just consume it. I've been in so many meetings over my career where I'm like, what do you want to measure?

And they're like, everything. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense what you're telling me right now. And they're like, but I want you to measure everything. I'm like, why are we having this conversation? It's because...

you hold on to this stuff and people's behaviors change and data changes. Yes, some of this data could be useful, but how many organizations have you been in where behavioral data beyond, let's say, 12 months is actually much use? Do you know what I mean? Maybe you need something to give you some seasonal pattern. Maybe you might need a year or two to say, okay, year and year, this is how it's trending. But beyond that, I really find it really challenging. Some organizations and some industries, sure, there might be some reasons why you need certain amounts of data.

And yeah, it just becomes really, really interesting. And the privacy thing in a way it's hitting, like I've got so many stories to tell here, like in Australia where we are now, it's just going through that reform through legislation of sort of like refreshing approach to privacy in this side of the world to kind of bring it on par with some of the other places around the world around sort of consent management and what we do with data.

And one of the interesting things that I'm seeing here is, okay, because we're going through this process quite late.

There's been some different ways of thinking about this process. So one of them is like, hey, I don't need to hoard all your data. But what happens if I took your data and turned it into attributes, for example? So I might say, hey, you know, if you're gluten free, I'll be like, has food allergy, right? I don't need to know your medical condition, but like, how can I take all this complexity and turn it into these attributes?

which marketers are going to be very comfortable with the concept of, right? And then enough of these attributes laid on top can actually constitute like a rich personality of information around the potential customer. But it doesn't mean that I have their medical records or their driver's license or any of this other data that I have to store. I've got like the inferred, the output of that in terms of what the meaning is for me and I'm storing that part.

So I think we can get to a point where that becomes more interesting. But sharing that between organizations, I think that whole concept of data sharing between, you know, financial providers and other companies to help us understand things like demographics and

all that aspects i think that's going to change quite a lot with privacy i think this idea of zero party data and people have to opt in and share their data exclusively that's always going to be a cat and mouse game as you know privacy goes on because you know consumers are concerned about what's happening with information it turns off marketers what they can and can't do what they can't see which i'm going to get to in a point in a second

And then what ends up happening is this constant game. Okay, we need to measure more. We need to measure more. I think a lot of this drive to measurement is because that measurement is tied to the success of what the marketing is. So I'm a marketer. If I can measure the outcome, I can prove what I've done is correct. I can get more money. And then the flywheel continues, right? So that

It's that drive to measurement that's causing this friction. And it's this constant, like, you know, tug that we have between consumers and, you know, just the general consensus of like what's right and regulators and what we can and can't measure. And I think that's always been the sort of challenge in the industry.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think there's also back to your point about how, um, like your part of the world is experiencing things versus Americans. And, and there's definitely this like cultural component to it because certain cultures are going to be, you know, more for the greater good of the whole society. And some cultures are going to be very like, I got to get mine and what's my thing and very almost narcissistic. Um,

And so, you know, there's or and there's also some distrust in the premise of how each country has their system set up. In some countries, you don't have, you feel as though, you might feel, I'm very careful how I'm trying to phrase this, you might feel

feel as though there's some level of distrust between what you're being told about how your data is used or things that you can say in certain liberties. Let's call it skepticism. Skepticism, yes. There's healthy skepticism that may or may not be based on fact, depending on where you are. And so there's that need for caution. Yeah.

So it's definitely a cat and mouse game to your point. It's what's best for this set of people, for this individual and their comfort levels. And can we get AI to predict comfort levels? That would be kind of cool. You can do some interesting things with people's behavior, right? Like even based on the words that individuals use on their social media,

um there's some interesting tools out there that can help psychoanalyze you and understand your behaviors just based on your words and your language and how you present yourself right so you can get quite interesting but on the demographic thing for just a second like just to share a bit of a personal anecdote uh i was i was obviously i've worked in marketing teams across different organizations i was in this retail organization

And one of my colleagues, she previously worked for a large global food and beverage company. I don't have to name them, but just think of any mega-sized food and beverage company.

and they'd gone through and gone let's let's wash our data against market data and figure out who our customers are right like the common sort of practice that we do and everyone in China is like oh my god our customer is like this young perfect you know this idea of who it was and in reality it was like a total polar opposite of what you could imagine so but then they're like oh this data isn't right it's not right it's like no the data has always been right it's like

your own personal biases or what you think or shouldn't be there and then when I see this I'm like well if the data affirms what you're saying you agree with it if it doesn't you try and push back on it so then my question is then do we even measure this stuff in the first place do you even need to measure this stuff about the customer if if you can segment it in the right way if you can personalize it in the right way without getting into like who the person is about their age and

gender and other things like that and we can provide an experience that works well why do we even need to capture this information right some products and services it makes a lot of sense right i'm not i'm not questioning that but where you don't see the the the impact or where there's not a driver behind that information it kind of it becomes nonsensical to me

Yeah. I mean, I, if given the choice between a psychographic behavioral pattern over a demographic one, 10 times out of 10, I would choose like the behavioral one. Like, I mean, age and gender and geography, like unless there's a, something like prohibiting them from like making the purchase because of those factors, they, they aren't drivers like sort of legal obstacles or just unavailability. Um,

Yeah, I mean, I think I love all the memes that say exactly that, too. Like, they're my favorite. Like, the Prince of Wales versus the Rockstar guy. Both same age, both quite old. No offense to them. But very different behaviors. So kind of thinking through this, I mean, there's...

As marketers, what happens if the choices made based on behaviors and brand is kind of washed out? Is it more that the leader, the owner of the AI assistant is now the new brand that has to brand? How does brand fall into all this? You briefly touched on it. There's a couple of components to this, so I'll unpack it. So the first one is brand.

When we implemented GDPR at Qantas Airlines, there was almost this fear in everyone's eyes for a moment. It's like, oh my God, someone's going to turn off the measurement. Like, hide. Scary. Throw tomatoes at us, right? And it quickly became reality that, yes, the measurement turns off. But as marketers, it's kind of like you've been used to driving...

with the windows blocked out like you're not actually looking at the road anymore you're just looking at your gps and your navigation right that's the best way i can the analogy i can use to describe this and because you're not looking at the road and you're just looking at instruments when the instruments are turned off you forgot actually how to drive by looking at the road and reading the signals and

you know, when to turn and when to cross the lights and things like that. It always comes back to creativity. It always comes back to good storytelling and sort of shaping a narrative that works, right? And I think as marketers, I hate to use the word we're getting lazy, but like it's, we've kind of,

divorced ourselves from that a little bit going oh but this machine it's like i just throw money into this platform and it just auto optimizes and finds the best segments and it just does all that for me right so it's like i don't have to go out there and try different messaging and be quite bold and i'm not saying this about everyone so don't take this personally please don't crucify me but you don't you don't test the boundaries more right and and because of that you don't find new discoveries and i think the issue i have with the current state of ai

is, let's call it generative AI, not AI, is a lot of it comes back to what we call human-like reasoning. And I'll underline the word human-like. It gives us the concept that it is, it feels somewhat human-like, it feels real, it feels like it's giving us what we need, but it's only outputting based on, I hate to say this, the garbage it was trained on on the internet, right? And yes, you can do some amazing stuff. So I've done some research work where I've synthesized

and you can talk to your customers and you can come up with ideas and strategies and think about your products and services differently and kind of stress test things. But it shouldn't be a replacement, right? I think totally immersing yourself in that is probably going to be a throwaway danger. Will it improve? Yes. But I think in this world, there's going to be an element of authenticity that I think is going to be valued quite highly.

And at that MarTech World Forum that we're at, one of the things that came out was a kind of key indicator for a lot of people was actually the fact that, hey, as a brand, you're actually no longer in control of your brand.

As a customer, as a consumer, I can take your website, your brand, your colors, whatever it is, and I can change it 10 ways as much as I like. I can shift it, edit it, manipulate it, and it's in my control now. So I think we're moving into a world where essentially...

your products and services are just a layer on top of underneath the sort of these AI services that people are going to use. Obviously the adoption is not as crazy as we thought it was going to be. It kind of peaked and it's kind of like, it's having its tourist phase. It was kind of cool, you know, seasonality is kind of dipping a little bit, but what we're going to get is, you know, some people that are embracing it, you know,

I don't use a search engine as much anymore. If I'm buying products and services, I'm happy for the AI to do the searches and find things for me as well. So I think that shift is going to change how we behave with our products and services. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's two call-outs from everything you just said besides just agreeing with it. One is that the world needs weirdos.

Like it just does. That's how we know that you're like there's a difference between AI real like weird and like actual human weird. And and I don't mean this as like an insult to any of us, myself included. But the there's a there's a quote that I'm once again going to totally botch. But it's something to the extent I've like the difference between genius and stupidity is that there is no limit to stupidity.

And I love it because I will get something wrong in ways I would have never imagined I could possibly get wrong. And then once I hear like the right answer, it's like, oh, well, that makes sense. But you can't always predict. And like the weird way is that people misunderstand something. And that's where something that's based on predictive statistics and stuff, it's just not going to know what to do with you.

Yeah, if you sit in that perfect middle bell curve, and I hate to put people on a pedestal and say that you're quote unquote normal. Yeah, you'll give an answer because that model is just trained to give a really good answer to what you want to do, right? It's trained. It's not about hallucinating. The hallucination is just a feature of these models. But it's the fact that it will just give an answer to everything.

based on all the data it has, it will give you the best possible outcome. It doesn't mean it's the right one for what you're looking for, right? And I think human behavior is an interesting one because we are, I have a strong belief that we are all individually quite unique and different in our own ways. And it's our lived experiences and the world, the way we see it shapes that, right? Quite drastically. I'm going to take a little bit of a side tangent here on this one. Like psychologists use the phrase, like your perception is your reality, right?

I see the world differently from how Leanne sees it and how each one of your audience members will see the world around them. And it's shaped maybe by other services and products I've used or something I saw growing up or,

you know maybe it reminds me of home whatever it may be right and i think that perception is what's different for me so using this collective perception or what the ai thinks i should have is not going to work same as like i have my coffee black right straight neat someone else might have that different but an ai might pick something completely different or which one is it going to agree with i think that's that's that's always thought with a little bit danger and

to unpack just one little anecdote, just to give people a flavor of this in language theory, the language that we use and the way we speak actually shapes our reality as well. So for example, and please don't quote me on this, but Japan, they struggle to differentiate between green and blue because of the words used for that. And I think in some African nations,

they can identify like more than 10 different shades of green because there's different specific words for those colors. So even by us labeling things and having words for certain outcomes and emotions, and that shapes our perception as well. So when we're using these language models and how we interact with them, even the choice of language and how we speak to them and how the information comes out is shaping our realities as well. We're basically kind of like converging into this like

this same level of output and most people will notice this you go on social media it's just like utter noise um us election season i can only imagine what it feels like i've only been on twitter for the last few days and it's just like total noise right and that noise is like the ai is just like even adding more noise but it all feels kind of the same like it nothing really feels like truly authentic

And it's conversations like this that people get drawn to because it's like, wow, there's two humans. They're going to sit down and actually talk about something. And it's original. And I think that that's what separates that sort of that world. I'm not anti-AI. I think there's a purpose for it. But I think it's overuse and it's overextension in absolutely everything. I'm talking about generative AI in the marketing space. It's kind of diluted the value of marketing a little bit.

But the beauty is the opportunity now. If everyone else is doing that and you can capitalize on the fact that quality has kind of come down a little bit or flattened out, I think the value is going to be in marketers being able to use it in the right ways, but then still do, like you say, crazy experiments and stumble on new ideas and concepts and like 10x that and turn that into something quite valuable. Yeah, I mean, I think that

There's so much... People are so complicated. And that's one of the wonderful things about being a human being is the experience of being complicated. Because, you know... Are you trying to say I'm complicated? No, no. We're all complicated. Have you seen how...

This is one of the reasons why I got so excited and got so nerdy about like in my undergraduate degrees because I would take these classes about physiology and biochemical like interactions. And when you see the things happening on a cellular level, it's bonkers. Like how are we alive? And then you think about like, you know, how we're able to maintain this like homeostasis and

And be conscious and, you know, have some sort of like self like determination or awareness or choices. People are fundamentally complicated, even the people that don't like verbally come across as so complicated.

And so one of the things that I think is really cool but kind of weird that we do is we want to blend in as a tribe, as a pack. And so I would make certain word choices for a certain platform because that's what I see all around that platform to try to fit in but still stand out being me.

And it's that weird balance we have of needing to stick in with the noise and be a part of the noise to be socially accepted and heard and given credence to while standing out enough to be remarkable. And that is the hardest part about marketing. I think you said it. It's like standing in...

Because doing something different and to kind of step away from AI and talk about human behavior for a second, doing something different is scary. Going into the unknown is scary because you're putting your neck out there, your brand or you or whatever it is that you're working on and you're trying something new can be a little bit dangerous rather than, hey, I'm going to stick to the status quo because it works, right? And I obsess over this kind of innovation mindset.

I think to innovate, you're going to have to have this like desire to want to change. And a lot of people say it's passion. I call it more obsession. It's not about, hey, I'm going to work till crazy and I'm going to punch out so many campaigns. We're going to try lots of stuff and hit our heads on the wall and we're going to smash through that. You can brute force your way to a concept and find what works with enough money and experimentation and data.

I'm sure like I'm sure that's how the big multinational companies are sort of potentially solving this problem. But if you want to be sort of bold and unique and different, you have to like obsess in your space and your product or whatever it is and really understand what makes people tick. One of the things I used to do a lot when I was consulting in the marketing space. And again, I'm a data guy, right?

I would go out and use these products and services. I got to a level of obsession. I was at a, at a telco and our NPS scores, it just didn't make any sense to me. And I was like, the only way this is going to make sense to me is if I go on the front line, I literally ask someone, I was like, how do I get in a truck?

with one of those engineers and go around to people's houses and actually like be part of the like last mile delivery just to get a feel for like what's going on. And then once I actually connected with the customer at that like human level, it all made sense to me. Obviously, I'm not going to tell you what some of the problems were. Obviously, there was problems, but...

That level of obsession, I think, is what is going to drive that value. And I think it's connecting with customers and really understanding them, I think, is going to be the value there.

Yeah. And I'm to, to, to that end, I'm the obsession about making that authentic connection is, is kind of the ethos of like this podcast and, and a lot of my peers, I'm not alone in thinking we should do this. Like, like it's astounding that for so much adoption of gen AI to, to Trevor Van Warren's point about like cold emails being like all generative AI, like baloney, you know, that, that,

we we crave it like we are built to want that connection to be heard to be seen to to to feel like there's another human with us um or you know into like a conversation and so i think that using ai to um

to support, to be in lockstep with, to facilitate that is one of the strongest use cases where we can make it about scaling, but not about faking. But then it comes back to the segmentation. Is that really just fancy segmentation? I don't know. I think it's about being smart about it, right? It's not, it's like the, you know, you've got a hammer in your head, in your hand, so everything looks like a nail, right? Yeah.

And it's, do you need to get to that level? If your customers are happy and you're hitting the targets and you've built a good product and service and the price is okay, it's okay to not continue to do more. Like less is more sometimes. There was one large retailer, huge retailer in Australia. And I worked on sort of like a digital personalization strategy work, something like that. And we were focusing on more like traditional, like A-B testing stuff.

And I did the most craziest thing. I didn't tell them, but I removed half the stuff in one category. Like the e-commerce site just had like all these features like littered everywhere, right? They've built up so much of this over time. I was like, you know what? This is just like doing my head in. I hid half the stuff on the site. I sent it out to like 2% of customers and I didn't target the area that this head office was in just so that I don't get crucified. And guess what? It worked, right? Yeah.

they'd like over optimize it to a point where they hadn't reset right and as much as i hate brand refreshes and all this sort of stuff and a lot of people say why do browsers keep changing what they're doing but i think it's healthy i think it's healthy to go okay we're going to completely reset we're going to build everything out from the bottom up what is right what do we need what do we don't need rather than just kind of staying stagnant but at the same time

It's okay to also do nothing. There's some platforms I've used that just haven't changed much and I'm okay with that. Like it doesn't need to change if it's serving its purpose as well. Yeah. I mean, I think that like you're, you're absolutely right about that. There is, there's that line, like there needs to be white space and,

But some brands really do need to do a refresh. I'm sorry. But like you are losing credibility. Your website sucks. Please refresh it. Like this is ugly. This is from if you're unironically representing yourself digitally like you're from 1990, it's time for a refresh. It just is. We're going to think that you don't understand cybersecurity. We're going to think that you don't know like, you know, that you're not a secure site, that you are lost and forgotten.

But it's interesting how you frame that because in your mind, it's like the website and all this stuff previously wasn't the brand. The brand was about the messaging and how it's positioned and the ads and all that stuff. And now brand is the product, right? Yeah.

It's all connected. The actual digital experience, to an extent, is part of that. I think brand is the manifestation of every single interaction with a customer. I don't see brand as just being fonts and colors. I see it as being everything. That's also apparently an unpopular opinion. No, I know. I said that with Throb. Yeah.

It should be more popular. So we've talked about some good uses for AI and the way to shift their perspective. And you talked about how to use it to build out your marketing department to some extent. So what are three ways that...

like tactically that you think that today's marketers should, should like implement AI, like on a easy digestible morsel kind of scale? Yeah, I think the first one is like eat your own dog food. And it sounds like a really obvious thing. But you're going to put this in front of all of your customers. I don't know how big your organization or your brand or your your platform is. But before you do that, how about you use it on yourself?

like at a personal level how about you use it internally within your organization i know this sounds like a bit gimmicky but there's been so many times where i've met c-suite and vps that are either like this thing is the devil i'm gonna ban it like get rid of it i don't want it anywhere near my organization and then i've seen the other opposite it's just like hey we're gonna like

we're going to displace our whole marketing team we can we they can be gone and we can just use ai for the whole thing right so if anyone's read the the recent articles and stories that are coming out from like klana for example had it like oh look we've there's all this stuff we've left and you know we've we've used ai there was a bit of like um what's the word

politicalness to the wording that they've used they never said that they actually reduced that head staff headcount there was already a normal sort of reduction that was going on and what's happening is that like all this mixed signal is confusing people so i think the only way to know what works and what doesn't work is to actually use it for yourself and use it for your organization so the workshops that i run and have run has been like hey let's get in the driver's seat

You're a C-suite, you're a VP. I'm sure you can type keys on the keyboard and put some sentences together and we can experiment. We can pull things together and they're like, oh my God, this is so cool. I can bring my whole concepts to life and you can start to see what that looks like. The second one as well is part of that same thinking process. It's not so much cognition or the machine is like thinking for me, but it's the whole like operational side of stuff.

it's all this like red tape-ness is it briefing documents is it scheduling is it like all that stuff that just takes up so much time and distracts marketers from actual creativity and and deep thinking work i think that's where the value is and we talk a lot about ai is going to uplift productivity and stuff it's not it's just going to free you up to actually work on the stuff you need to but to do that you need to put the work in to like automate your processes and

build your platform and things like that. And that could literally be like a library of

I don't know, like a library of creative assets and a way to quickly search through that and create new assets? Or could be, you know, like I said, the briefing stuff. So if you work with like, I don't know, 20 agencies and there's emails left behind, is there a way that an AI agent can potentially organize that for you and build out your schedules and things like that? Again, it's not removing the market, but it's just like making that whole process a lot more frictionless.

And then because of that, what you're going to see is you're going to be able to increase the velocity of your campaigns. And because you can increase the velocity and you can maintain and monitor that, you're going to be able to experiment a lot faster, learn faster and iterate faster. And that's hopefully going to lead to better outcomes as well. One of my absolute favorite platforms that I've seen this year was one that takes the digital asset management platform.

And based on what's in the graphic or the asset, labels it in a searchable way so that it knows like what it is. It's a search engine on your data. It's a search engine on my creatives. That's what I actually need it for. Like I need to be able to just type in like, you know, campaign that did this with the flowers. Right. Because I'm not always going to remember what like the special offer was, but yeah.

I am going to know that it was a campaign and it had this color and we used it for this reason. And being able to just search for those tags automatically without having to sit there and tediously write 30 tags for one creative, which I think is just a waste of time. Yeah, I wanted to do it for me. Because of this GDPR stuff, we have transparency now. So if I worked in telco space,

for example, I can go and see what ads like AT&T are running or Verizon is running in the US. Like right now I can see that the data is available for me, right? And I can use that to my benefit. Hey, AI, can you go out every day and see if AT&T have got a different campaign with different messaging that I should know about?

A human could do that, but are you going to do that every day? Do you know what I mean? Interesting things that you can do like that, they're going to be really interesting. I worked on a recent project for a new telco in the US market, just because why not? We always need another telco. And the idea was like, hey, we're going to build a marketing team from the ground up. We're basically going to go and say, hey, we want to start from scratch. No humans in the process. What does that look like?

And when you start to actually think it through, it's these little agents that will go out and do one specific task really well. Like, hey, check competitor, see if something's changed, right? And these are just workflows, essentially, right? These are existing human workflows that you can augment.

And I think kind of leading to one of your questions around, like, what is the thing that you, you know, the thing that you see a lot of that you want to change is this concept that these AI agents are equal to a human is wrong, in my opinion. We have this concept in engineering called Conway's Law.

It essentially predicates that the internal mechanics of a company and its politics and its design essentially is what ends up being baked into the code and everything like that. So you essentially engineer things in based on how you operate. And we're doing the same thing with these AI systems. We're basically saying, hey, I'm going to build a marketing analyst over here in the corner. It's going to work in this way. And is that the right way to think about this?

Are we just bringing our biases just because we had an analyst here? We're going to do an AI to do that same job when we should actually be thinking it's like, what are the tasks that we're doing? What are the bits of that that we can do better with AI? And then where does the human come into that process where it adds like the most value?

And I think once you start thinking and mapping in that direction, I think you will start to see things differently because there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of products being thrown out here. I'm sure there's another AI marketing tool out there and they're going to tell you that they can like totally like 10 X everything and sort of

let you let your VP or CMO totally relax and solve all the problems. But like, we've heard that before, right? As marketers, we like to sell the dream. And I feel like it's the same story, right? Like with marketing technology, it's just like constant, constant, constant. So it's being purposeful and it's being sort of mindful about like what thing that you want to sort of drive out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

I feel like we could talk forever about this and we probably could. I kind of want to bring it to the future. So you talked a lot about how things are coming out all the time. They're new. Where is marketing going and where do you think it should go? Are they the same thing?

I'll start with the future question and maybe somewhere in there, I'll tie it back to marketing or maybe I won't, but let's give that a go. Fair enough. I was at South by in Sydney cause we have South by in Sydney now cause it's, it's exported out of the US and yeah,

There was this amazing talk, Rohit, I can't remember his surname, and he basically spoke about this concept of how we're silent quitting. There's this culture of silent quitting that's happening everywhere. And it's because of this noise and it's this like dystopian future that's been painted for us, Terminator movies and sci-fi and just fear all over, right? And that fear kind of makes us believe that that's the reality that's going to happen. And because of that, we don't take action.

It's kind of like climate change and other things. We just go, okay, well, that's going to happen. So I'm not going to try. I'm just going to accept that as the reality. And that reality then becomes the world. So then I just, that becomes essentially the outcome, right? So we're all sort of hurling towards this world where everyone's just like, AI is going to eat us alive for breakfast and it's all going to go to crap and all this bad stuff.

And then I spoke to an astronaut, a female Australian astronaut, and she was kind of speaking about technology and what it means for humankind and how it's changing the world and how it's opening us up to all these new ideas. And I was like, this is such a fresh perspective. There's actually an optimist in the room. I think where marketing in the future and technology in the future and future in general is that

human behavior in the world and post-pandemic and everything else it's like we're not optimistic about anything anymore i'm just i'm over generalizing at the moment but you know politics and food and just the world and the way it's shaping it's like optimism doesn't really exist so then people are kind of like stagnating and thinking the worst case for everything and i think

The way the technology is going to shift or what we could do as marketers is be optimistic and be be a bit more real about choices and our customers and the world and what we want to bring to life. Right. I think we have the ability to do that. I think sometimes we forget we just accept the status quo for what it is. So.

where am I going with this? Where, what's next for marketing? I think there's going to be some turbulence with a lot of these technologies. We're going to see all kinds of crazy stuff. Um,

The cold calling, the voice, the video. I think we're going to see things become more and more real. It's becoming more and less indistinguishable from human and reality. And I think the interesting thing, and I kind of touched on this earlier, it's going to drive more human connection. I've heard people that are working in the dating industry, for example, everyone's pushing for in real life stuff. No one wants to be typing, texting stuff anymore. People just want to connect with other humans on a real level.

And I think that's going to shape things. We saw an early version of this. There was a big boom around like the aspect of community, what does community mean for brands and things like that. So I think there'll be like some iteration of this as we start to see that shift. And yeah, like I say, we're going to see all kinds of new things happening, organizations going, hey, I don't want a marketing department. I'll have an AI run that and we'll see what happens, right? We haven't seen the other side of this yet, essentially. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that

As marketers, to your point about optimism versus pessimism, is that what at first got the reaction, and we know neurologically it did, was the if it bleeds, it leads headlines and clickbaits, right? So that was a huge thing that should never have happened, but it did.

All right. But it did. And now it's become so like we're so desensitized to that type of content that that's turned into the white noise. And where I think that people can stand out is it starts at home.

So it always starts with your behaviors that you have control over, that you choose to either be aware of and be like, hey, I could do better, or you choose to ignore and be complicit and worse than status quo, status don't.

because status quo insinuates that there's some like acceptable level. People should not accept misery. And I believe this with my whole heart is that people should not accept misery. You have so much power and ownership. And whether that's just choosing to set aside five minutes and go outside and be like, holy crap, we have a son and we're alive. You know, like you can make these choices to find something

something to be grateful for, something to be excited about, something exists in your world that is not misery. And then to share that joy with just one other human, because back to the point about like community building and, you know, the, the apps is this epidemic of loneliness has a clear solution. It's get offline. It's meet other people.

You know, it has a very clear solution that is intrinsic to how we are wired and we need to allow for it. And I think that the pattern disruptions and, you know, one of the things that I love, TikTok has been mentioned a lot, but one of the things that I love about TikTok is that it's letting people connect in a very authentic, real way. And there's a lot of like,

self-help motivational or overcome or there's a lot of positive storytelling at least in my algorithm based on the content I interact with yeah like the stuff I get on Twitter is like amazing it's like Twitter innovation on like 100 times and people are like what do you got how did you get there yeah

But you said it. It's storytelling 101. Marketers have the ability to convey a concept and storytell and empower people, customers to buy, shop, change, whatever that action is, right? We have a skill. We can get people to behave in a certain way. And I think that comes with responsibility. I think we have the ability to shift people in a direction that we want to take humankind towards. Yeah. And maybe even a little bit less like we're a puppeteer is that we can just give them the option.

Right. We can make them aware of it because because that's that's also part of it is I think that, you know, there's there's so much ways that technology could help her. The astronaut who would know because they are doing cool astronaut stuff. You know, that's that's a thing that exists. You know, it's technology. All right. Last question. So I don't keep you here forever.

Behind the curtain, what is a question someone should ask you, but they don't? And this could be anywhere from, hey, everyone asked me about Pinterest for, you know, making sure their content gets seen, but they don't have a content pipeline. Or it could be something about like a hobby or something that you do that you just want to talk more about. What is a good question?

Sometimes people ask me this question and I'm probably not going to answer it because I haven't really thought about it or I've overthought about it, is what keeps you up at night? If you ask someone who works in this technology, like on the edge, if you ask them like what keeps them up at night, good or bad, I think you're going to get some really interesting responses. I feel like I should answer this now. I think I have to. I had this maybe two years ago before ChatGPT was like a public thing.

I have like this database. So all my notes basically are digitized. It looks like something out of a Matrix movie, probably is. And I can feed that into the LLM. I did this like two years ago. I started asking questions about my personality and myself. And I just had this moment where I was just like,

wow, this thing understood. It doesn't matter if it understood me or not. This is game-changing, right? And I literally on my bed just stood there and looked at the ceiling. It was all just whizzing around in my head, right? But now it's like, I'm kind of like, this is all good, but the scary part of it for me is that I'm worried that it's going to push some parts of society into further fringes because they're going to become even more isolated.

So for me, I think the key thing is about that connection and human stuff that I spoke about. So there's a couple of projects and things that I'm working on to try and like shift, shift that narrative a little bit more. So I think that's the, that's the main one. And I'm interested to see where this whole thing goes. Like I strongly believe we're right in the middle of another industrial revolution, but it's like, we're right in the eye of the storm at the moment. Right. Some people say we've reached it. We haven't, I think we'd like right smack in the middle of it because we're

The hype's kind of dead. Like, the AI hype's kind of, like, wearing off now. And it's just like, we don't know what's going to be on the other side of this. And I don't have a crystal ball. And that's kind of scary, but also fun at the same time. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, I...

don't know if i'm you know more than i do i my my skepticism says that we are just entering the eye of the storm or maybe like a little bit before and we have quite a ways to go but i'm also a couple steps behind you well of course no i think i think we're smack bang in the middle of it it's gonna get crazier you'll see some announcements from

Big tech companies will start coming out post-election. A lot of companies have been holding off because of that. You're going to see some interesting things before Christmas. I don't want to. I don't want to. There's no end.

I think it would be a lovely time to go to Australia for a holiday. You're welcome to join. It's summer over here. We're going into summer. It's going to be warm. Yeah. Escape. Yeah. I think, I think that's a wonderful place to be this time of year. Um,

Awesome. Well, I think that, you know, I'm so grateful for you sharing these perspectives. And I think that this conversation will fundamentally help us as marketing leaders, as practitioners and contributors to all of it to make meaningful steps forward, which is which is the goal is to have a conversation where someone feels like they are a part of the conversation and that they they know what to do with what we're talking about.

And if someone wants to continue this conversation with you, what is the best way for them to find you? Probably for this audience, Twitter or LinkedIn, depending on which one you're on. And I do have a public calendar link somewhere on there where you can actually book time with me. So I've got those like little 15 minute slots that I open up.

throughout the weeks um when when i've got headspace and i like to continue conversations like this with others so don't feel like i'm unapproachable i'm very approachable but um there are moments where i do get swamped with messages and stuff but i do try my best to get back to everyone yeah i i would agree you are very approachable i really appreciate that um as someone that met you at a conference because i i talked to strangers that's kind of my thing um

So, and then is there any projects that we should keep our eyes out for? Not at the moment. I think some of the stuff I'm working on is probably more on the technical side. There are a couple of concepts and things that I am working. So a lot of my people that follow me on LinkedIn, I share like projects and they're more experiments than projects for me to see different fringes of society and sort of how AI impacts. So at the moment I've been wearing, I'm not wearing it now, but I've got like an AI wearable pen, like one of those friend things. I walk around and,

take notes of my conversations i'm not worried about what it does for me but i'm worried about people's perceptions of me when i'm wearing it and things like so and i document a lot of this process as i go and i kind of share that a lot of people have said that my perspectives have been quite interesting for them to kind of think of it from it from a different way as well so um yeah nothing like big like i'm not creating some product or changing the world yet but um i am sharing things as i go on that journey same as everyone else

Yeah. I mean, the more, the more inputs, the more outputs. All right. Well, I appreciate your time. If anyone wants to get ahold of me, I'm on LinkedIn far too much. I, I stay away from Twitter. Unfortunately, it's just, that's not my platform. Yeah. Yeah. I have an account there. If you really want to try it, I just don't check it. I keep it off my phone. But,

But if you want to find me, I am on LinkedIn or I accept emails at info at Mark G M A R K I G Y.com. And, you know, I wouldn't be a podcaster if I didn't say like review, subscribe, join my newsletter, all of it, just find ways to connect and continue the conversation.