In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn about why email marketing stinks, why Flux.1 rules, fan service in Deadpool & Wolverine, and more!

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Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite

Are all email service providers horrible?

Mautic, MailChimp, Ghost, AWeber

Google Pixel 9

8:20 – 9:50 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Google Monopoly – Paying $20B to be the only choice kind of proves that

Canva acquires Leonardo AI (after 2 years – 19 M users!)

Chris’ GPT for event planners and webinar operators – generating seed questions

15:47 – 16:34 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

TikTok Partners with Amazon

Speed of response huge on TikTok

Automating the MoC Newsletter

Cobra Kai and Deadpool Wolverine

Flux 1 Image Generation

RIP Crowdtangle

Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on excercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

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Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Machine Generated Transcript:

John Wall – 00:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio. Justine – 00:10 This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:17 Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wahl. Cristopher Penn – 00:20 I’m Christopher Penn. John Wall – 00:22 And summer in full swing. July has just been crazy. We’ve had all kinds of stuff going on. The first one I wanted to start with is in the past week we’ve been kicking around email service providers a lot, talking about what’s going on there. And it was funny because I said to Katie, I was like, oh, I hate the way this is working. And she said, well, what else should we do? I was like, well, actually, I hate all the other email service providers even more. There’s none I love. One of the things I wanted to throw out there was to our audience, if you are somebody out there that actually loves your email service, whatever you’re using, I would love to hear from you. John Wall – 00:56 Because, yeah, to me, it just seems to be this endless battle of just picking the tool with the least pain, you know, the one that causes the least problems, but nobody kind of gets. Cristopher Penn – 01:05 It right for sending email or for processing email, for sending. So email marketing tools. John Wall – 01:11 Yeah, yeah. Email service provider, definitely. Cause, like, we’ve been using modic, which, modic is fantastic if you have somebody like you, because you keep it in order and keep it running on the servers. And so, like, I don’t think it can beat as far as the ability to hit huge, giant lists at an incredibly low cost. And I complain and whine about it now and then, but basically it’s, you just go kick the server and it does work. Like, the stuff does all work. It occasionally chokes now and then, but it’s not like it’s not there. And it’s like the A B testing is actually pretty good compared to some of the other vendors. John Wall – 01:45 I was on mailchimp for a long time in a couple different organizations, and the list management just got so weird and wonky, you know, having to manage segments and get the logic straight on that you literally had to specialize in that full time to get that right. And that’s something we’ve seen across the board for all these different vendors. You end up just having somebody that specializes in the thing and is doing all the tough lifting. But I don’t know, what have you been watching in the space lately? And like, what are you know, where’s your mind at today? Cristopher Penn – 02:12 Well, there’s a whole rise of, you know, these new ESPs, substack, ghost, et cetera. Beehive where they’re all going after the monetization model, they’re saying okay, paid newsletter is the way to go. And so they’ve, you know, they’ve been pushing really hard to say, okay, you can, you can have this newsletter on our platform. We’ll let you do it for free, but we’re going to nudge you to monetize your audience because of course we, you know, we take a slice for every transaction, which I mean that’s a good revenue model because it’s not advertising dependent, it’s subscriber dependent. And as long as you’ve got the content that people would be willing to pay for, it makes logical sense. Cristopher Penn – 02:48 I mean there are plenty of newsletters where people are cranking out decent money and we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars a month on their newsletters. The question really for folks is that a model that you want to go after? Whereas the way that you’re using it as you know from true marketing automation and these platforms are not that, they are not marketing automation platforms. They are strictly newsletter publication platforms. And so I think a lot of the legacy esps like Aweber and Mailchimp and stuff like that have to kind of decide what do they want to be? Do they want to be marketing automation software or do they want to be subscription revenue generating publication media software? You really can’t do both. John Wall – 03:31 Yeah that’s a great point because we’ve talked about modic but I’m using Ghost for the marketing over coffee list over there. And yeah it’s an interesting trade off in that all these headaches go away because everything is so simple as far as getting out the door. But then even just trying to run the most basic reports, I’m like oh, I can’t even get an excel file of clicks and opens. Like I can look at it and I have to roll through, you know, roll over some stuff in the interface. There’s no easy way to do that. So yeah, that idea that those in no way are pretending to be marketing automation platforms. Like yeah that’s, and that’s just completely a deal killer for a business. John Wall – 04:07 You know, like we need to have HubSpot telling us clips, clicks and opens so we can see who’s actually active and who’s into it. So yeah, it’s a trade off there. But yeah, I don’t know, the space is going through a lot of movement and then this idea that you sign on for a single CRM that includes a bunch of your email, I don’t know. I haven’t found any CRM that does a good job with the email marketing automation. We just run into spam blocking and just all these other issues that make that it should be a viable path, but it’s not. Cristopher Penn – 04:38 Yeah, I mean, if you want to maximize the outcome of any system, you need a technical resource. You need somebody who knows DNS, who knows deliverability protocols. Maybe you don’t need them full time, but certainly to get set up you need that in place and to maintain it. So there is a cloud hosted version of Modic. You can have somebody else do the server admin, but that comes at the trade off then of not having as much accessibility to the backend stuff. So for example, when we’re doing deep reporting, self hosted Modic has a SQL server on the backend. Again, if you’ve got a technical resource, you can just download straight from the SQL database. You don’t need to use the interface at all, which is good. And that’s always the trade off is how much complexity do you want? Cristopher Penn – 05:26 But complexity correlates well with flexibility. So if you want maximum flexibility comes with maximum complexity, you’re gonna have to come in. John Wall – 05:37 But yeah, as soon as you say export to SQL, that’s just like, oh yes, that’s it. You have all the powers in front of you that you can make things happen. We’ll talk about flexibility. Google Pixel nine, you’d mentioned that. That’s just dropping. Have you checked that out? What’s going on there? Cristopher Penn – 05:53 They had their big event made by Google yesterday, the day after recording this and Pixel nine. Huge surprise. No, it’s not a surprise at all. It’s like, hey, we’ve optimized this for Google, Gemini. So Gemini can run it’s smaller models on devices. Course it’s optimized for Gemini use. Google’s basically stuffed Gemini as many places as possible. They’ve got more tensor processing units on the device itself to do stuff like YouTube, rendering better and things. So it’s Google’s answer to the new iPhone. Say you have Google’s Gemini versus Apple intelligence and so on and so forth. It’s differentiation. Now the one thing that’s going to be real interesting is to see, obviously this stuff is in Android, but it’s reliant on Google hardware. Cristopher Penn – 06:42 Will the other manufacturers like Samsung and LG and all these other folks start putting in different hardware to permit that and to extend that? Or will Google’s devices be the best optimized for Google’s AI? I would obviously guess that yes. John Wall – 06:59 That’s a really interesting point, though. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that because Apple just, that’s always been their thing is they control all the hardware so they can do that. So. Yeah, well, and then it would be interesting, do you come up with this second tier of Pixel devices that are much more affordable because they skip going with that level of power. But, yeah, the having users come up short with stuff that doesn’t run well. Oh, that’s a level of pain that I don’t know anybody wants to get into, that’s for sure. Cristopher Penn – 07:26 It’s also a privacy thing too, if you think about it, because if you have one of the promises of Android is it’s an open source operating system, you can download it and customize it and stuff like that. If it’s tying into Gemini, then your data is going back to Google. You may have thought like, okay, it’s a private, secure phone. Yeah. But the moment you use Gemini, depending on the level of service and which model you use and what the API terms are, your data may or may not be private anymore. So is your data ending up for training data? Clearly, if you use Google services like Google Photos and YouTube, yeah. Your data is being used to train models. I mean, let’s be serious. Cristopher Penn – 08:05 But for enterprise customers, they have to say, should we allow this device, the Pixel to be used, knowing that employees will use the onboard AI? And do you have control over if they’re using company data through Gemini? John Wall – 08:21 All right, we just have to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. For all of our clients, there comes a point where they get large enough and they’re managing so many systems that you’re just caught up in the bureaucracy of it all, you’re actually spending more maintaining all this complexity. Smart businesses reduce costs and headaches when they get large enough by graduating to Netsuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, hr into one platform and one source of truth. With Netsuite, you reduce it costs because Netsuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required, accessed from anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you’ve got one unified business management suite. John Wall – 09:02 You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you’ll profit with Netsuite again. We’ve seen it firsthand for our clients. Instead of building all these integrations or running batch reports so that you can get inventory and the financials in order along with the marketing and sales stuff. Just get it all one platform. And of course, having it in the cloud makes a whole slew of headaches go away. By popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one of a kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com coffee. That’s netsuite.com coffee. Again, netsuite.com coffee. And we thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of the show. Okay, so running with Google, I’ve got some other stuff. John Wall – 09:52 We might as well stick with this. The Google monopoly, the case came down, said they have been engaging in monopolistic behavior. And it was funny, one of the headlines was them paying 20 billion a year to iPhone to be the default. I was like, oh yeah, that is kind of monopolistic by definition, isn’t it, really? There’s no startup coughing up 21 billion to displace Google on results. So the takeaways from that, though one, was that it just said that this is the case. Remedies will actually be addressed in future hearings. So we’re nowhere near any kind of discussion of like, okay, well, what does that mean? And then there is another case coming September 9 about ad tech, which that we’ve, you know, have said from day one, there’s no doubt that’s monopolistic. John Wall – 10:32 They’re, you know, doing everything from search to the payment at the other end and, you know, have the whole thing under their control. Anything surprising out of any of that or anything that, you know, you would tell people that they need to be doing or thinking about because of what changes may come from this. Cristopher Penn – 10:48 Here’s the thing. And, you know, this is very perilously close to licking the third rail. There’s a reason why a decent number of Silicon Valley folks are favoring one political party over the other because of tech regulation and stuff like that. Say, who of the political parties and candidates who are available within the United States, who is least likely to regulate us? Who can we get to rubber stamp our version of regulation that will let us maximize our profitability? Obviously, we’re not going to get into the politics of it, but that is an influence. These folks are taking in billions of dollars and saying we want to continue taking in billions of dollars and having something like the Department of Justice breaking up our company would be antithetical to us taking in billions of extra dollars. Cristopher Penn – 11:31 And so I would not be surprised if that is having some level of influence within where money is going in terms of what’s likely to happen. If we look back at the Microsoft antitrust case back in the nineties, essentially Microsoft had to spin off some stuff and things to go. If you look at and t back in the eighties, the Ma Belle getting broken up into what is now Verizon and a few other things, I could definitely see someone looking at a Google and saying okay, so YouTube, you’re getting broken up, you’re out. Gmail, you’re getting broken up, you’re out. And basically fracturing the company saying okay, you can have search in the search business, but Android is a separate company. YouTube is a separate company. Cristopher Penn – 12:16 And you may not collude, you may not, you know, price fix and stuff that you have to behave as independent entities kind of basically reversing the acquisitions Google’s made over the years. John Wall – 12:26 Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see. It takes a lot of understanding of the industry to be able to make those calls and draw those lines and like you said, and definitely it’ll depend on who’s in charge after November, what happens where that goes. So yeah, a lot going on that front. Some things to think about, acquisitions on that front. We had canva acquiring Leonardo AI. That was pretty interesting. Leonardo after two years, up to 19 million users and canva, I don’t know, just continuing to make kind of a strong run at this, keep the basic stuff in house and make it easy and fast. That seemed like a strong acquisition. It makes sense. They’re talking about keeping Leonardo a separate platform and at the same time integrating features into canva. John Wall – 13:07 So I don’t know, everything about that seemed pretty to make a lot of sense. It seemed like the right kind of deal. Any other thoughts on that kind of stuff? And on the image generation front it’s canva versus Adobe. Cristopher Penn – 13:19 I mean if you think about who canvas gunning for, they’re gunning for Adobe. John Wall – 13:24 Yeah. So that battle will continue to drag on and keep going. Talking about GPT models, you have got something you’re putting together for event planners. What’s going on there? Cristopher Penn – 13:34 One of the pain points of event planners, particularly for webinars and stuff is, and I’ve had this as a speaker many times, things saying hey, can someone send over seed questions? And I what event planners typically get back is like grade school questions like oh come on, this is not helpful. So I wrote a GPT and now just putting the finishing touches on it, that’s, you know, for event planners or for speakers you drop in your PDF or your text file of your talk outline and it makes the seed questions for you. It makes ten seed questions. It has a scoring rubric built in that scores them, makes refinements to, you know, increase the quality of the questions. Ultimately you get ten really good questions that would make, you know, it would make a speaker really think like, oh, huh, that’s a tough question. Cristopher Penn – 14:19 So we’re going to give it away for free. It requires you to have a chat GPT account. I believe the free ones can actually use GPTs now. So it’s available to anyone for free. But hopefully it will take just that minor annoyance off event planners plates. And for speakers. I mean if you’re a speaker and you want to use it, go for it. You can use to generate your own seed questions and things. I would recommend it actually, if you’re a speaker, because if people do use this thing and you might be confronted with questions like that’s a really tough. John Wall – 14:54 That is a good point. People know where the tough questions are. And yeah, for everybody. I know it seems a little weird to have seed questions, but it’s just, you see this in every single presentation when the first time the speaker says, hey, does anybody have any questions? There’s that awkward silence and I’ve just seen so many times, you just have a seed question, have somebody throw something to you, and then the damn breaks after the first one and the questions come pouring in. So it’s not that the questions aren’t there, it’s just that you do have to break through the ice to get that going. Cristopher Penn – 15:22 Yeah, totally. I mean that. So I, for example, I was using my talk that I’m doing for SMX coming, and some of the seed questions that it came up with. Things like how does generative AI contribute to a more personalized customer journey? And what risks should companies monitor? Like that’s a pretty decent question. We could spend ten minutes just on that question alone. John Wall – 15:43 Oh yeah, digging into risk opens up all kinds of doors. Okay, we’ve just got to take a minute. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of marketing over coffee. I’ve only got 1 minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Whether you manage ten sites or ten hundred, here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on studio set up native marketing integrations in a click. Reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites create a seamless handover by adding tutorials, guides and more to client dashboards work on the same canvas at the same time with all your team members, and leverage best in class SEO defaults like server side rendering and automated structured data markup across all your Wix sites. Times up, but the list keeps going. John Wall – 16:26 Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Check it out over at wix studio.com. And we thank them for their support of the show. I had interesting announcement, tick tock partnering with Amazon, which seems like that could open up the doors to all kinds of shopping. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just the whole tick tock landscape and shopping tied into that just gets kind of crazy. I have no idea. That’s the kind of thing I just have to watch for a couple of months and see if anything comes out of it. I don’t know, anything on the shopping front and the tick tock front. Cristopher Penn – 16:57 The TikTok front, yeah. So I was curious to see if we could find anything about TikTok’s algorithm. And it turns out you can. There actually are a number of technical papers, but they’re all published by the parent company ByteDance, who apparently reuses code from Duyen, which is the chinese version of TikTok and the american version. But there’s a lot of detail about how they think about the way content works. A couple of things that should be pretty obvious. Number one, timeliness counts a lot. TikTok, apparently from the way their data feeds work, doesn’t pay a whole lot attention as to whether or not you finish watching the video so much as do you engage with it? Do you like, do you comment? Do you do something? And how quickly does that happen? So speed of audience response is really important. Cristopher Penn – 17:43 The speed of the algorithm itself is very fast. It will adjust to your preferences in under 40 minutes. So it has a very good model internally for working with sparse data. And the one other thing that is really important for marketers to understand, because this is happening across social media, it’s a big landscape. Change has been ever since TikTok started, is the virality of individual pieces of content based on what’s in the content matters way more than the account. So having a lot of followers is irrelevant. On TikTok, having a lot of followers in general is getting less relevant. It does slightly increase the likelihood that people will see your initial content. But the tick tock algorithm takes a piece of content, understands it, decomposes it, and then puts it into a hierarchy of topics, and then shows that to a test audience. Cristopher Penn – 18:34 And if it does well, meaning, fast response, then it gets upvoted internally in the algorithm to be shared out faster. So from a strong landing perspective, you’ve got to have every piece of content be a hit. Like if you want to do well on these things, you’ve got to take the time to make every piece of content be something that people are going to engage with rapidly. John Wall – 18:56 Yeah, well, same thing on threads, too. We’re seeing that. It’s interesting how accounts that have no action suddenly have something explode and then one post later they go back to the no likes. It is completely about how much it. Cristopher Penn – 19:09 Gets engaged with threads and LinkedIn. This is very interesting about both of them seem to have a lot of weight put on the comments that you make. So to the point where your account does better if you’re commenting more than you’re creating original stuff. John Wall – 19:28 Oh, wait, it actually looks at your comments, how much you are coming. It’s not the comments on that content. Cristopher Penn – 19:33 It’S just, it’s on what you are doing to engage with other content. John Wall – 19:37 Oh, that’s interesting. So is that basically discouraging, just posting bots that are doing, you know, not ever engaging with anything? Essentially, yeah, that’s interesting. All right. Cristopher Penn – 19:48 That’s also why you’ve got all those stupid AI. Hey, great post, John. Very insightful with the rocket ship emoji, because those bots are trying to game that part of the LinkedIn algorithm. John Wall – 19:59 Yeah. And it is, it’s just ridiculous when you see three or four of the exact same comment, you know, some weird thing and everybody’s got that going. All right, I had a link product hunt was talking about gigabrain, a perplexity for Reddit. I just thought that was interesting. First of all, saying that perplexity is the king. It’s not been around that long, but that’s the first choice to go to. And then we keep seeing Reddit come up over and over again. As far as everybody’s drooling over this data pile, that’s better than the average amount of stuff. But of course, them also demanding payment to get into it. So hopefully we’ll get a chance to play with that in the next couple of days to see if it’s any good and interesting. John Wall – 20:39 But yeah, immediately a bunch of questions like, okay, are you really scanning all of Reddit and what’s going on there? So a lot of questions about that. So I don’t know. We’ll see what has to go there. Anything else on that front that you’re watching or other tools you’ve got going. Cristopher Penn – 20:53 In terms of AI tools? I’ve been spending a lot of time with Meta’s llama model, doing a lot of local stuff with that. One of the things that I’m actually going to be trying out with the marketing over coffee stuff is we built an ideal customer profile for marketing over coffee. And now we’re going to start taking episodes and trying to get a sense, a scoring sense of how well does this episode align with the marketing over coffee ideal customer profile to get more listeners and stuff like that. So that’s a project that will be underway soon. John Wall – 21:23 That sounds good. Well, and then in the trust insights live stream, which actually happened yesterday, by the time you listen to this, we’re talking about the newsletter and automating some of that. So. But we will have a link to that goes right into YouTube. So you can watch that at any time. And then what? Next week is a skip week, but I’ve got some audio that I want to put out there so there’ll still be content in the feed. I had to give a plug for Cobra Kai. I’ve just been. I got looped back into that on Netflix and yeah, it’s funny, my brother had a comment. He’s like, you know, it’s just become too much of a soap opera. And I was like, oh, yeah, it really is a soap opera. It’s like everybody has fought with everybody. John Wall – 21:58 You know, like the whole, everybody’s had amnesia once, but nonetheless, I still find it entertaining. So they’re going one more season. They’ve got five episodes out, and there’s two more five episode parts they’re going to drop all the way into 2025. But yeah, if you like it. There’s just no escaping that, if that story is of any interest to you. So I don’t know any entertainment stuff. I do, of course, saw Deadpool versus Wolverine, which I don’t think I had a chance to mention on the show that’s just delivered everything it was supposed to deliver. You know, it’s just completely hilarious. One point I have to make about that movie that was interesting. It was as if they went to all the fans and say, okay, what are all the fanboy things you would want to see in a movie? John Wall – 22:40 And they did all of those things. Like the first 200 things on the list got done in the movie, and I saw they broke a billion dollars. So it is like running like crazy. If that’s your thing. It definitely another one where not accounting for taste, it delivers 100%. Cristopher Penn – 22:57 So no, entertainment wise, I’ve been playing with a new model called Flux one, which is an image generation model. And it runs like on a laptop, runs on your MacBook. It’s incredible. It is better, I would say, than mid journey. It is way better than stable diffusion. It is better than OpenAI’s dolly, and it runs locally and free. So I’m you actually using it to put together some stuff, some content for some slides and things. And when you look at the output, you’re like, that is concerning just how good it is. John Wall – 23:28 Wow. And runs locally too. What the heck is their model? Are they just floating it out there to see how it does or do you have to subscribe? Cristopher Penn – 23:35 Well, so there’s a paid model that you can use on their infrastructures, just like the best of the best. But their developer model, the flux one dev, is so good, each image takes about 90 seconds on a good MacBook to generate. So it’s not the instant gratification of web based service, but the quality is off the charts. John Wall – 23:54 Oh, that’s interesting. It’s the dev kit you’re playing with too. Okay. So that makes sense. You’ve got something the general public might still be a little bit afraid of, but. Well, that’s cool. Yeah, well, keep an eye on that because anything that’s doing good on that front, we may want to show some samples or do some stuff with. So we will continue to move there. Yeah, I don’t know. We’re coming up on event season too. We’ve got a bunch of stuff going on. As far as marketing profs, you’ve got a workshop going with Katie and some sessions. I don’t know. We’re still talking about what might happen at inbound. You might get over there. So we’ll see what’s going on with that. I don’t know. Anything else on the road tour for you? Cristopher Penn – 24:25 Yeah, so I’m headed to LA at the end of August for client presentation. I’m going back and forth about whether I can even be at inbound or not with the inbound folks because I’m like, you know, I have another event headed to Macon marketing AI conference in Cleveland. I’m going to be doing a talk there. Plus I just got confirmation this morning that we’re likely going to be doing our music composition sort of after hours casual session, which could be a lot of fun things. So if you’re, if folks are interested in learning how to use some of the AI music tools, and we’re talking about that, then after that is I have to be the lab Products association in Philly, then going back to LA so it’s going to be conference season. Cristopher Penn – 25:06 I’m going to be basically traveling for like two thirds of September. John Wall – 25:09 All right. Yeah, we’ll be racking up the miles there. Also, we have to give a moment of silence for crowd tangle, which gets the plug pulled today. That will be the end. Are you doing running last minute exports today? Cristopher Penn – 25:21 Well, I’ve been doing last minute exports for the last two weeks. I’m basically trying to grab all the Instagram data I possibly can since 2019. John Wall – 25:28 All right, well, I’m sure that we’ll have some stuff to share about that then after the next couple months, once you get a chance to digest all that stuff. But that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. Cristopher Penn – 25:38 Enjoy the coffee. Justine – 25:40 You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspen.com read more from John J. Wall at JW 5150 dot the marketing over coffee theme song is called Melo G by funk Masters, and you can find it at musicalley from mevio or follow the link in our show notes.

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Email Vendors, Google Pixel 9, and How To Get Huge on TikTok