Speaker 1: 0:27

Hey, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newton, and boy oh boy are we happy to be back. I tell you it's been a hell of a Several weeks. While we worked to get episode numero uno up off of the ground, learned more than we ever thought it was possible about editing learning to stomach the sound of our own voice. Chris, you mentioned that was something that was going to cause you a healthy amount of discomfort. How are you doing? Are you well Terrible?

Speaker 2: 0:52

terrible. I can't stand the sound of my own voice. So Mike's been taking on the brunt of doing a lot of the editing and I've been just painfully listening to the episodes just to make sure that they're all good and I'm not going to say anything. That's going to get canceled.

Speaker 1: 1:09

The voice of a thousand harps is far too humble. Here You're doing great, man. This has been a lot, a lot of fun, and a very sincere thank you to everyone who has reached out to us with support and encouragement. There's been a suspicious lack of critical feedback so far.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Do you think that's fair to say? Yeah, I've been asking actually specifically for critical feedback and people still aren't giving it. So somebody please just email us chris at marketingqualifiedio or mike at marketingqualifiedio If you have something negative to say. You know we're actively seeking negative feedback at this point.

Speaker 1: 1:44

That's right, just gluttons for pain. Also, it's just so funny to think about. Like, maybe someone is, maybe we have a lot of it coming, but they're just writing this manifesto about why we should both just cease and desist this entire episode here, sorry, episode, entire podcast. Maybe this all just coming in one massive bulk delivery? They're going to just fucking drop box it to us. I don't know, we will see. So we have, as per usual, a loose agenda for today. Both of us have some things we'd like to air out, but before we get into some of the grievances, there's actually something interesting that you wanted to bring to the floor, chris. What is it today?

Speaker 2: 2:24

Yeah, I mean, I always like to start off with an opening question. You know, something to get the the creative juices flowing. And this is a question that I found pretty interesting that I can't remember where I where I found it, but I thought it would be a good thing to kind of kick off the conversation with on the pod today. So the opening question is what would the title of your dog's autobiography be? And I'll probably let you go first too, since you have two wonderful superhero named dogs but also to our listeners too, you know, if you have a pet or you know, dog, cat, whatever you know, what would the title of their autobiography be? We're interested in hearing as well. So feel free to email us at those email addresses that I mentioned earlier. And, yeah, we'd love to kind of share some of the feedback that we get from our listeners on what that would be. But I'll let you take this one first. If you want, mike, let's start with Loki. What would Loki's autobiography be titled?

Speaker 1: 3:17

Such, a good question. You come up with the best stuff, I swear. So Loki is a husky shepherd mix, and you think those two breeds? And you think, oh, huskies, they need a lot of exercise, right, they're known escape artists and what have you. And it must be really difficult to maintain, especially in New York, right, the level of activity that he needs to burn all that energy off and not be just this huge pain in the ass. You would be wrong to think that Loki is the laziest dog that has ever been a dog, to the point where during the height of COVID, he was just lounging around all day and my wife and I thought, you know he looks so sad and lonely, maybe he needs a companion, which is basically how we got our other dog, bucky, more on him in a minute. All of that to say. Loki's autobiography would be titled the Art of Remaining. Still, it would just be how he manages to minimally move across the various sections of our couch over the course of the day. You would be surprised to see him out on the walk, how energetic he becomes. But man, it's because he's conserving so much over the course of the day. So that's loki.

Speaker 1: 4:33

Bucky is a german shepherd mix. They're both rescues. We're not sure what the exact like mixed breed is right, but we know that he's. He's very much a German Shepherd mix. I think that his autobiography would be titled something to the tune of like help, I'm trapped in the wrong body, because this dude is a huge doofus. He's about 74 pounds. He has all the energy that Loki isn't using. I think Bucky is taking via osmosis and he still thinks he's just this little lap dog. He's perpetually happy, but he has no concept of how huge he is and we often need to be careful about where he's wagging his gigantic tail around our son. So I think those are the two autobiography titles. Now you have a dog and Callie is a golden retriever.

Speaker 2: 5:29

That's correct. Yeah, she just turned two. Uh, still has all that puppy energy and not a puppy body. Um, and similar to I, I actually really want her to meet Loki and Bucky, cause I think that she would have a lot to bring to the table there. Um, she, she loves to play. She loves other dogs. I think that Bucky have a lot to bring to the table there. Um, she, she loves to play, she loves other dogs. I think that bucky would give her a really good run for her money. But, um, yeah, I mean, she's also a huge doofus as well.

Speaker 2: 5:52

Uh, you know, typically doesn't really seem to know what's going on 100. So, um, I thought that a good title for her autobiography would be I don't know what just happened dot, dot, dot, but I'm glad it did. She, uh, she lives in the moment more than pretty much anyone else I know and uh, yeah, I just she's, she's great, she's, she's a great dog. She was a pretty difficult puppy. Um, has a thirst for life, unlike any other, and, uh, you know, doesn't typically always know what's going on, but is always super happy that it is it's amazing, right.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Just like the, the, the grandparent at the family gathering, right? No idea what the fuck you're talking about, moderately clueless on what's actually going on, but just really happy to be a part of the environment. That's terrific. Everyone out there be like Callie. Okay, live in the moment, be happy, be appreciative for what you got.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Yeah, the positivity is infectious, especially after you get done working a long day. You might have been super busy, you haven't really had time to get your thoughts together or anything. It's always good to have a golden achiever, to come up and derp around and, just you know, spread the positivity from her day where she did literally nothing other than chew on, chew on her gator toy and her antler and, you know, run around chasing her tail a bunch of times.

Speaker 1: 7:20

It's fantastic, right Coming from someone who did nothing that had a lot to do. To get that kind of positivity, that's wonderful. Yeah, something less wonderful that we should talk about is a marketing failure. So we promised this little teaser. In earlier episodes we shared some personal failures, but now we want to change the focus a bit to be on more of like a professional marketing blunder, and I know that you had one in particular that you were looking forward to shedding some light on. I don't think I had heard about this before, so really interested to be educated by you as per usual.

Speaker 2: 8:00

Yeah, so this is an older one. It's definitely much you know well before our times. But I found it kind of funny but also shocking at the same time that you know any of these marketing executives at this massive company didn't pick up on this before they actually launched the campaign. So the campaign's PepsiCo. It goes back to the 1960s when they were trying to expand outside of I guess expand outside of the US. They were trying to, you know, tap into that Chinese market. Before Chinese market before getting into China was kind of as big as it is now. Even so, the marketing failure is Pepsi was trying to expand into the Chinese market back in the 1960s.

Speaker 2: 8:35

At the time Pepsi was running a pretty successful campaign here in the States called Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation and they decided to use that same type of Worked well here. They want to use the same thing in China. So they thought because it was working here, it would work everywhere. So they brought that campaign Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation to China, where it was lovingly translated wrong, where the slogan became Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.

Speaker 2: 9:08

What Come alive with the Pepsi generation, translated to Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave in China. So, as you can imagine, there's this new product that Chinese consumers haven't really seen before soda pop, pepsi They've probably seen Coca-Cola at that point, you know, similar to Coke in that regard but there's this new product on the market promising to bring your ancestors back from the grave. So yeah, the mistranslation was due to the difficulty of accurately conveying the intended meaning in Chinese characters and, needless to say, the campaign had several unintended and bizarre consequences Lots of confusion amongst Chinese customers. You know, depending on the relationship with your ancestors, you might want to see them again or, you know, it might be a source of terror if you don't want to see them again.

Speaker 2: 9:57

Yeah, it led to a ton of confusion, a ton of ridicule amongst Chinese consumers, and then Pepsi quickly realized the error and they withdrew the campaign completely, which all just goes back to emphasize the importance of just making sure that you do your linguistic research when you launch in a new market. I'm sure that there's been plenty of times where stupid American companies tried tapping into a new market and didn't understand the cultural, local types of you know customs and norms there and just get completely annihilated when they when they try to enter these markets. But yeah, I thought that was kind of a funny one and, you know one that you know goes back to the importance of doing your research before you, you know, launch a big campaign, especially when you're a company of that size are you suggesting that adequately researching a territory that you're trying to sell into is a good idea?

Speaker 2: 10:50

I know it's, it's a shocker. You know apparently back then you know, if it worked here, it'll work anywhere, right?

Speaker 1: 10:58

Such an American take, isn't it? I mean, really, we're the worst, it's so bad. Let me ask you this, though so would Pepsi made this kerfuffle? Do you think they could have been sued for false advertising, like, if you get a Pepsi and your relatives don't, your ancestors don't come back from the grave? You told me they would. I like advertising materials. I think there's a case. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 11:25

Yeah, absolutely I think that you know, if you promise somebody to see their ancestors again and you don't deliver, then you you know, if you promise somebody to to see their ancestors again and you don't deliver, then you have some. You have some explaining to do, for sure you know. At least you know, get them a free pepsi and it might. May not make your ancestors come back, but you're definitely going to get a little bit of caffeine buzz.

Speaker 1: 11:41

At least that's the hope right, you know, there's this one disgruntled son of a bitch who has been haunted for some time and it's like oh, oh, my God, it's the Pepsi I would drink. This is what's causing my agony right now. Unfortunate fellow. I hope he's well, that's a really good one.

Speaker 2: 12:00

And I know that you have a more recent marketing failure. You want to kind of chat through this. I actually haven't heard about this one, so I'm kind of curious to hear what the failure was.

Speaker 1: 12:10

All right, yes, I'll do my best to keep the synopsis brief because I got super overinvested in this story as it panned out over the last couple of weeks here. So I confess on an earlier episode I am not a tick tocker myself, I'm a YouTube shorts nerd. But I became aware of this TikTok star, miri the Siren, I believe I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly Miri the Siren, right, and her whole shtick was she was a Chick-fil-A employee who was giving reviews on TikTok about employee-provided meals. Right, she would give reviews on different sandwiches, different combinations you may not think to put together, which actually super resonates with me.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Fun fact, I way back in the day in high school, opened up a Panera Bread and would often create these off-menu creations. I call them creations. Some of my coworkers called them abominations and would have a lot of fun putting them together. But Miri decided to put these meal reviews together and it was super popular. She got a lot of views, a lot of traction on it. Well, here comes corporate to be the fun sponge on the situation and Chick-fil-A's PR team essentially said hey, you can't do this, it violates a rule that we have in the handbook, so we're gonna need you to oh, the handbook.

Speaker 2: 13:35

You can't go against the handbook. The handbook.

Speaker 1: 13:39

If you go against the handbook, you get a hand right across the face, metaphorically speaking. So they put a kibosh on this so she's able to put together one final tiktok. That speaks situation and, to her credit, she was a super professional about it. She was like I'm not angry at Chick-fil-A. She explained in good detail the situation, why it was that she had to take it down and what have you. But at the end she made a really nice pitch to be like hey, I'm open to work. Like a little hashtag in the LinkedIn profile open to work.

Speaker 1: 14:08

So who sees this? But Shake Shack, who has already got a pretty nice competitive battle going with Chick-fil-A, because throughout the month of April I'm not sure if you knew this, but you could actually get a free chicken shack with any purchase at Shake Shack. That was, I think it was above 10 or $11 or so and I'm just going to read to you an excerpt from I think this was like a10 or $11 or so, and I'm just going to read to you an excerpt from I think this was like a Yahoo News article that I saw, or something like that and it says according to PR Week, shake Shack's brand marketing team loved the authenticity that Miri brought to the review videos and decided to make her part of the team. The collaboration initially started from a DM on TikTok that led to a phone call from Mike McGarry, the company's VP of brand marketing. So you and I harped on the value of authenticity. Here it is paying real dividends.

Speaker 1: 15:01

But the failure is on Chick-fil-A's part. You mean to tell me that because of some stupid fucking footnote, probably on page 62 of the handbook that hasn't likely been updated in a decade, that all of this great free buzz and publicity and hyping up of the Chick-fil-A menu items have to just come to an end? Crazy idea, bad pitch. Fix the fucking handbook. What am I missing? What am I I missing? And, by the way, and now shake shack, who we can debate the quality of their chicken sandwich. So I have some thoughts on that. But now they're taking, they're tapping into this great exposure from this is a huge win for shake shack and just a massive, abysmal failure. On on chick-fil-a's. And what do you think?

Speaker 2: 15:48

yeah, I mean good on her, for you know, getting uh, getting that new gig lined up, you know, and good on shake shack, for you know their team reaching out and taking advantage of this opportunity. I mean, yeah, I, I'm 100 with you on the authenticity part. I mean, if you're, if you have someone who's bringing you business, then why do you care how they're bringing that business? Like that's, that's kind of what where my mind went and yeah, yeah I mean, even if, like I don't know if it was an issue with with, uh, chick-fil-a, where they're getting all these crazy custom orders and it's taking too long and like it's backing things up, like I could kind of understand that.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Or you know, even, just you know what, just tell her you know that you can't that people to tell people that they can't get it there. But if she's doing all these like crazy types of recipes and everything, then like let them go to you know chick-fil-a, get what the ingredients that they need, and then they can like take it home or, you know, make it at home or something like that right, like I, I yeah I don't know the full story behind that side of things, but you know, I'm trying to think of like other similar, like types of viral things where people have taken like an existing product and then just like kind of made it their own.

Speaker 2: 16:57

I'm completely drawing a play. I feel like there was some like back in the 2020s, when nobody had anything else to do, so they're just like doing all this crazy shit, but yeah, I mean, that would make a lot of sense.

Speaker 1: 17:06

The one that came to mind, a similar situation for me, is remember the fucking the verizon guy. Can you hear me now, when he suddenly was in all those sprint commercials? Oh, here's a guy like a paid actor, like even this dude switched.

Speaker 2: 17:18

Yeah, that's, that's a. That's a great example. Yeah, I completely forgot about that I mean, you brought up something.

Speaker 1: 17:24

That is how to put this. It's not a trigger, it is definitely a furrowed browse statement for me. We talked about if you, if someone, is bringing in sales and giving you good marketing, why do you care where it's coming from? Dude, this is such a symptom of the money ball model and solving for attribution that was super important from like 2008. I mean, it's still important. Right, you have to know where to invest your money, where to put your resources and what have you.

Speaker 1: 17:52

But there's such an overemphasis, especially on people in roles like ours, to justify every single dollar of spend when some of the shit man you just really can't quantify, right, and so you're going to have to rely on anecdotal evidence. You're going to have to rely on ambassadors, evangelists like this. I mean, this is the way of of marketing right now. Is that third party proof that you used to have to get via some fucking review site like a g2 or something like that. Now we want to hear from like individuals, like touting about the value of whatever it is that you're selling on their own, and it's just kind of, it's just asinine to me that they wouldn't amend a policy rather than lose all this great PR. Like you, think this looks good on Chick-fil-A. They already are losing a bunch of sales by being closed on Sunday to Shake Shack I was actually going to.

Speaker 2: 18:41

Yeah, I was going to say that the closed on Sunday is, I mean, that's another thing that Shake Shack should go after. I mean you can get. You can get a burger on Sunday from Shake Shack and 100 percent should go after. I mean you can get a burger on Sunday from Shake Shack, 100%.

Speaker 2: 18:50

Yeah, I was also going to make a point on the fact that you know, think of all the not only just you know did they lose this person? Does it like not look great on them? And you know they lost this person to a competitor that seems like it's going to start coming after them pretty aggressively. Like think of all the lost opportunities that they might have of other influencers that could be doing something similar to this. They're not going to want to, you know, work with this company anymore. They, you know after they how they, they treated this, the other influencer, and you know that that downstream impact, like the damage on their brand, could be much higher than you know. Even you know you or I are thinking from this initial fallout, from just one influencer being told to fuck off.

Speaker 1: 19:29

Basically, exactly and like I get that this miri was an employee of chick-fil-a, so there's a little bit more like a formal relationship. But still, if I'm an influencer that's thinking about weighing in on chick-fil-a and I'm not liking you know. Again, miri and this extremely gracefully and was not upset about this. She understood why things happened the way that they did. But like I don't know, that kind of rubs me the wrong way. Do I want to work with a brand that is going to enforce these super old, likely arbitrary policies?

Speaker 2: 20:02

Probably not. And I mean, there's other issues with Chick-fil-A as well. Yeah, but that's a topic for a different podcast. We won't go into those. Yeah, delicious chicken, though. Delicious chicken, we'll give them that.

Speaker 1: 20:15

Yeah, I didn't mean to snub them when we had our earlier ranking of chicken nuggets or anything like that, but there's a time and a place. Yeah, time and a place for the chicken flip, but okay, time and a place for everything. Time and a place for everything. One of those things is replacing a job function, or the way that you teed this up for me was replacing an entire job, a job title, with AI. Tell me what you meant by this question and give me an example of what the hell you're talking about.

Speaker 2: 20:49

Yeah, I mean, you know AI has obviously been in the news for the better part of you know, year, year and a half, two years or so now. And yeah, I mean everyone keeps asking, you know, is their job going to get outsourced? Like this is kind of the first time that a lot of like white collar work could be automated in a way that you know, in the past, factory work was automated with machines and whatnot. So, yeah, I got to thinking what would the best job title be to outsource to AI? And with all the layoffs that are happening, you know, typically, you know more better paid employee employees will typically get laid off versus the company tries to save money. They'll try to reduce costs wherever they can.

Speaker 2: 21:27

If there's a way to kind of combine job duties to have one person doing what three people used to do, a company is going to make that decision all day. And I was thinking, if I was a company looking to automate tasks, what better place to start looking at automation with AI or anything than with a CEO's job responsibility? Because, if you think about it, what do most CEOs like? I've worked with great CEOs, I've worked with not great CEOs. What do most CEOs do all day. What do most of them have in common? Most of them are in meetings pretty much consistently.

Speaker 2: 22:01

They take data from different parts of the organization, make decisions based on that data. Like they're typically very busy juggling multiple tasks and basically their whole job is making decisions based on that data. They're typically very busy juggling multiple tasks and basically their whole job is making decisions based on data. That's kind of the crux of the job, and what else is responsible for taking data and making decisions? It seems like a perfect way to outsource the most expensive job in any company. For the most part, a CEO will be the best employed employee at any company. What better way, to you know, take away all the bias that an individual might have, save a ton of money than by outsourcing CEO work to AI? Like it seems like a no brainer to me. Like, as long as the the data coming into the AI model is accurate, then why not have CEO AI? You know, it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Speaker 1: 22:53

It's a really interesting point, especially when you think about how I forget what episode we were talking about this on, but it was fractional. The fractional marketing positions, fractional CEOs, are definitely a thing as well. These interim kind of things like why bother to go through the whole back and forth with consultant? Bring someone in part-time, what have you? Outsource that shit. Have AI analyze the trends, make the decisions. By the way, you're probably crowdsourcing that type of data analysis when you use an AI tool anyhow, so you're not limited to the brainpower of a single individual.

Speaker 1: 23:25

I think there's kind of a compelling case for this brainpower of a single individual. I think there's kind of a compelling case for this, and it's definitely more cost-effective. You need not look further than the other what's it called? I was going to say the other side of earnings calls that's for a company for just like a CEO's net worth at some of these massive companies. To know boy, if you could eliminate that overhead, you'd have a lot more money to reinvest into the rest of the workforce. I think it's compelling. I think it's very compelling.

Speaker 2: 23:52

Yeah, and nothing pisses me off more than these Fortune 500 CEOs that basically fuck up a company. They come in, fuck up the company, cause a huge drop in stock price. They basically do a lot more damage than good, and then when they get fired, they get fired with a bonus parting gift of $30 million or something. It's just crazy. That's the only role where you can suck and fail and get fired and come out way richer than you were before.

Speaker 1: 24:20

I think that's real. Yeah, the only exception to that, or the only addition I should say to a CEO that comes in and does something like that is I'm going to pick on my NBA'm going to pick on my, my NBA, my NBA, passion for me to hear you're an NBA head coach man. Some of these schlubs just bounce around from franchise to franchise, just ruin, ruin championship prospects for decades to come. That's the only other one I'd toss in that conversation.

Speaker 2: 24:46

Exactly. Yeah, that's a great point too. Me and a buddy, we actually call all these people recycled trash, whether it's an NBA coach or some of these CEOs at companies. Once you get to that level, they make it hard to break in and for other people to get promoted into that level and they just constantly recirculate. I've seen that with different C-level executive roles not just CEOs, but other C-level roles at different companies. You know they come in, they're not good, they don't know what they're doing, they haven't, like, learned anything new in the past 20 years and they come into a company, damage it, you know, work there for a year or two, get fired, leave, go to a different company, do the same thing. They bring in their same people to all these companies as well and it's just like a constant circle of just terribleness. It really is.

Speaker 2: 25:36

And the CEO AI. That would just take away a lot of that political bullshit that nobody likes dealing with. The AI doesn't care one way or another. It just wants to make accurate decisions based on the data it's given or another. It just wants to make accurate decisions based on the data it's given. Arguably, ai could probably make a lot better decisions for the company than even some really good CEOs probably could, without a doubt.

Speaker 1: 26:01

Yeah, I just think. Continue with the NBA analogy here for a minute. You think about how much power a superstar NBA all-Star Team USA player has today in terms of bringing previous teammates and trying to attract them to whatever team they relocate. To Think about how LeBron did that in Cleveland when he got Kevin Love, kyrie Irving those type of folks. If you had success in one organization doing a certain playbook, that's amazing and that should be celebrated. If you fucked it up, you should be held accountable to that as well.

Speaker 1: 26:37

And I'm all for failing forward, but it's just crazy to me that a lot of these folks will enter a different organization, try to run the same playbook, bring the same people that they had success or lack thereof with previously and think that it's just not cookie cutter right. Every organization is different. Even the tactics that you use have to be adjusted slightly. And what have you? It's a little bit of a sensitive topic presently to have other people from previous relationships come in, especially and I'm going to pick on big companies here for a minute especially if you've had success at larger companies. Those same tactics and same strategies are just not going to bring you success in a smaller mid-market or startup type of organization.

Speaker 2: 27:23

It's not going to work. Yeah, I agree 100% with that. People who have a lot of success at big companies. They come to a smaller company and they just don't really know how to work. They're used to telling other people to work and they need teams of teams of managers and people beneath them. And then they come to a startup and they're like, well, who's going to do this? It's like, well, you are boss because there's nobody else to do it and we don't have the budget to hire somebody. That you tell them what to do. It's like you got to roll up your sleeves and do it. So I've definitely seen that in a lot of cases and I saw a great quote once.

Speaker 2: 27:58

I think it was on somebody on LinkedIn or something, but the quote was along the lines of, basically, when you're brought into a big company whether you've worked at big companies in the past, or if you've worked at other companies or you're starting your career or whatever when you join a big company, your whole job is to not fuck up what was already built. And when you join a startup, your whole job is to basically build. That's the whole job of a startup. There's nothing that's been built, so there's nothing to fuck up. So you have to build, you have to do a lot of testing. You startup like there's nothing that's been built, so like there's nothing to fuck up, you know.

Speaker 2: 28:31

So you have to build, you have to do a lot of testing, you have to try a lot of different things to to see what fits for a startup, whereas a you know. If you join, like an apple or microsoft or something, you want to come in and just you don't want to fuck up anything that's already built. And it can be difficult, like some of these companies are better at it than others. But it can be difficult for some of these bigger companies to innovate and, you know, launch new things, like I see it all the time with google. Google tries to out innovate themselves, but they end up just making things worse, like google and explore excuse me, I had something stuck in my throat there. Um, you might hear my dog barking every time I mention google analytics, for callie starts barking.

Speaker 1: 29:06

We should just and this would involve a level of editing sophistication that we don't currently possess but we should just bleep that out, treat it as like it's the. It's the one thing that we won't air. Right, include all the cuss words we want to, but ga, for google analytics is not something that will allow to air a couple of months. Uh, man, by the way, though, like the reverse of that is true. So people that have had tremendous success at startups and stepping into a larger organization where there's all kinds of like teams of specialized experts and processes that need to be adhered to, because, well, that's the way it's always been done, chris, right, okay, so that's the way we're going to keep doing it. We brought you aboard to shake up and bring your new ideas to this organization, but, god damn it, you better do so within the confines of how it's always been done. Understand, right.

Speaker 2: 30:04

That's a great point. Yeah, that's a great point. And I don't know about you with your career. I think that you and I follow pretty similar career trajectories, but I got my career started at AT&T, you know, obviously, like one of the biggest companies in America, a massive behemoth, and I've just got consistently gotten smaller and smaller and smaller companies as my, my career has gone, gone on and I think I found the sweet spot between you know, start startups like between 20 and maybe a couple hundred employees, like that's. That's kind of the sweet spot that I really like to work. I'm curious your thoughts on that, you know, if, if you think it makes sense to start big and go smaller, or if you know starting smaller and then going bigger would be even possible really.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Yeah, it's interesting because I think your, your career progression is kind of like a classic marketing funnel right, start super wide at the top and it gets narrow with respect to company size. Mine's actually been kind of. It's kind of a a weird distorted funnel in some way. I've gone startup, I've gone bigger and then down to smaller and then bigger, so I think it's difficult to say what the best. I mean it's specific to each individual right.

Speaker 1: 31:15

For me personally, I really do like being that kind of player coach where I'm leading the strategy what have you? But every once in a while, dude, I just like to roll up my sleeves and build a workflow or crunch a report or something like that. And there's just. The problem is, when you get into larger organizations, you're not doing as much as maybe you want to. Maybe I'm projecting here, but there's a team for that. In my current role, right, if I want a very simple marketing email to go out, there are tickets that I need to create for the content team and the design team, each of which operate on their own two-week sprints, and you're not able to do it. So you effectively become a project manager at a certain point, more so than a marketer, and for some people that's totally cool. And for some people that's totally cool and for others that, like me, get that kind of itch to jump in the weeds again and just knock stuff out, it can be a little bit frustrating.

Speaker 2: 32:19

Right, yeah, that makes sense. And speaking of reporting, I wanted to give you some time to talk through your AI discussion around what you think would make sense to outsource to.

Speaker 1: 32:32

AI yeah, so this one came in. To a certain extent, you can do this with. You know the AI that exists within HubSpot and Salesforce already but just like the reporting and analysis of basically your campaign efficacy, right. If you are out there creating and capturing demand and then you're spending a lot of hours, I mean you and I feel very strongly in a certain type of way about like QBRs, right, or like monthly reports and things like that that need to be crunched.

Speaker 1: 33:04

I actually, like I just alluded to kind of like getting in the weeds and creating a lot of these reports, but for other folks, folks it may be worthwhile to have that just totally outsourced and automated, right, and not just the data crunching, like again, that can be kind of enjoyable. But the analysis right, similar to how you get like a crowdsource take from a ceo in in your example, if you can get like open it up to the wolves. What do you see in terms of trend here? What sticks out to you? Generic AI, that's analyzing the report that I've put together Like what would you recommend artificial intelligence to do as like a next step here and, by the way, justify that based on what you've, what you've seen here? I think that's where some of the potential value add could come in.

Speaker 2: 33:49

Yeah, I think that's a good point, too, that you made in terms of you know, ai is just it's not biased. It's just going to more likely tell you the facts based on what it's seeing. Like it's only going to be as good as the data that you give it, and many companies that I've worked with just don't have good data. So I think that data hygiene, data cleanliness, you know, making sure that you're tracking the right things, the right properties, the right things is crucial, and it's been frustrating for me to join some companies to, you know, try to figure out the data first of all and then figure out where the gaps are and just make sure that you know we're collecting everything that we need to. Like, generally, more data is better than not enough data, but sometimes too much data is also a bad thing and in a, you know, a good reporting AI model should be able to ideally, you know, take an unbiased view of how things are actually performing. Like I can't remember if it's a meme or like what it is, but like it's some guy presenting to his boss and the boss is like you know, these numbers don't look very good this month and he's like well, sir, that's because they're not. He's like let's just turn the chart on its side so that everything is going up.

Speaker 2: 34:53

And you know, you know, obviously, like people are flawed, people are biased, like you know, you want to be reaching your goals and everything. And there's if you have enough data, there is ways to fudge the numbers, to make it look good or at least not as bad as things actually might be. And in AI would just be like you know what? We don't fucking care, I'm just an AI. You know it's like this is what we're actually seeing. And you know, I think that you know taking a lot of that manual analysis and you know putting together all those reports and everything. It just you know, especially at a startup, it frees up your time to do the actual building. Because the way I look at it is like anytime you're doing reporting, you're looking back on things that have already happened. You're not looking forward to things that could happen, like you're not looking forward to like, new opportunities, you're not launching new campaigns, you're not trying to do things that might increase your conversion rate from 3% to 4%. You know all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 35:42

So Exactly, exactly. Just a quick note on the data hygiene here before we wrap like, challenge me on this, but I feel like you have a better chance of going full, nick Cage, and stealing the Declaration of Independence than you do of stepping into any organization where, like the why and the how of data, population fields that exist, custom objects, are all very cleanly documented Right, yeah, doesn't happen. Documented. Right, yeah, doesn't happen, doesn't happen. Uh, all right, man, hey, speaking of things that don't happen, we did not have a chance to get to the rest of our very loose agenda. This is very much becoming on brand for us deep dives, profanity, laden rants uh, that's all good with me. Here's the deal, folks, if you're still listening, again, a super sincere thank you. It would be tremendous if you could spread the word to your own network, email us with that critical feedback, drop us a love letter. If you want to Follow us on Instagram, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we hope to talk to you again. Talk to you, talk at you again real soon.

Speaker 2: 36:50

And we hope that you talk at us as well. Please do, and, yeah, write in, write in your your other podcasts that you like. We want to make sure that this is useful and relevant to everyone listening. And, yeah, we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for listening. Take it easy, guys. Bye, thank you.