Join Nataly Kelly, Chief Marketing Officer of Zappi and former HubSpot international marketing lead, as she shares her fascinating career journey from music to global marketing. She dives into how Zappi gathers and analyzes consumer insights, highlighting the role of AI in enhancing brand strategies. Kelly discusses the swift expansion into the Japanese market, the necessity of breaking down data silos for better decision-making, and the importance of localization in international marketing. Prepare for an insightful exploration of the evolving landscape of consumer insights!

Dive into the lively world of marketing insights! Experience the buzz from the Marketing AI Conference, complete with quirky expo interactions and AI-driven content creation tools. Discover the cultural shift needed for integrating AI in organizations while exploring Reddit's unique marketing landscape. Plus, hear about the family's struggles with digital photo sharing and smart tech frustrations. All that, plus movie recommendations and some cheeky Cobra Kai references!

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Mignon Fogarty talks about grammar, creating her digital network, writing and podcasting! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and Keeper 18 years of Grammar Girl! Quick and Dirty Tips Network Site Getting the network going right at the start Signing with MacMillian to get it all going Getting Oprah’s attention 8:37 – 9:19 – 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! Crossing the podcasting chasm Evolving the show over time What’s hot in business grammar? Active vs. Passive Better business email strategies 17:48- 19:35 Track expenses, find deductions, and get a bigger tax refund. Get 10% off @Keeper.tax at keepertax.com/moc! #keepertaxpod Join the Grammarpalooza text community! https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text “hello” to (917) 540-0876 How do you stay current on grammar? Threads is working Updated Books: Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students, The Grammar Daily Catch up with Mignon on Threads or LinkedIn Sign up for the MoC text line at 617-812-5494 Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access! Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters. The post Catching up with Mignon Fogarty, The Grammar Girl! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Now with less gall bladder and more random… Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Firsthand account of using AI in healthcare Using RAG lock for post surgical recovery Mixing business with politics and surviving 9:58 – 10:40 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! Salesforce Shopping Index says soft holiday season Temu and getting your own project manufactured Dual GPS 17:14 – 18:38 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Yelp vs. Google John complains about companies that market projectors and earbuds poorly Event Best Practices and John’s super secret Profs B2B schedule MAICON and INBOUND coming up for Chris Join us over in AfM Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494 Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access! Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters. Machine Generated Transcript 00:00 John Wall Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix studio. 00:17 John Wall Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. 00:21 Christopher Penn I’m Christopher Penn. 00:22 John Wall Last week, were joking that you got a bad taco, which was why you weren’t around, and it ended up being way more than a bad taco. So what the hell went down? 00:33 Christopher Penn It turns out that, my gallbladder died. Literally. My surgeon said it had totally necrotized, and was a dead organ inside me. And what I thought was a bad taco was, in fact, the first stages of septic shock. So had I left it untreated, I would just have died in about, in less than a week, which. Dying in a hotel room alone in Los Angeles. Not, not the end of the story that I want now. If I’m going to go out, I want to go out big. So, or at least. At least hilarious. Funny. And that. That is neither of those, but that’s. Yeah, that was found. So Friday morning, I rolled into surgery. They, removed it all. They said it was, you know, it was much worse than anyone thought. And, and now I’m on the road to recovery. 01:18 John Wall That is amazing. Yeah, it’s amazing you’ve rebounded, because I, you know, I said it’s like, look, if you want to skip this week and sleep it off, but it’s amazing how they turned you right around over the weekend, and you were back in the office on Tuesday doing your thing. 01:31 Christopher Penn Yeah, well, so laparoscopic surgery is like that, and it’s interesting. We’re doing a couple things. One, on Friday, I knew I was going to have to try, you know, recount the tale of what I thought was happening. So I fired up chat GPT, and I told it like, you’re a doctor. You’re going to ask me a bunch of questions, and I’m going to build an intake list so that I can just hand it to the doctor, because, like, as the pain got worse, it got progressively harder to think straight and stuff. So I would just, I was just foaming throughout the rambling, answering its questions, you know, repeating myself over and over again. And, and what it did was it consolidated all and put together this really awesome list. So, you know, when I rolled into the ER, I was not really coherent. 02:10 Christopher Penn And the doctor was like, so tell me what’s happening. I just hand him the phone. He’s like, read, and he goes through his and, you know, both at urgent care and the ER, the doctor’s like, wow, are you like, in healthcare? Are you a doctor? Like, this is really thorough, really comprehensive. Like, if I have, I’ve been able to speak properly, I would have said, no, I work in AI. And you’re looking at what generative AI can do to make a bunch of relatively incoherent information coherent and correct. 02:36 John Wall Yeah, that’s amazing, because you said AI and medical that you wanted to talk about because of this and that. Yeah, that’s fascinating. I was wondering, how did you get over and just handing the phone worked? Because that’s a whole other thing. It’s like, okay, you can get this great thing, but there’s no printers around anywhere. 02:50 Christopher Penn Exactly. I could have actually turned on voice mode, just had it read it aloud too. And then the second thing was on Saturday when I came home. Because laparoscopic surgery is outpatient, typically they kept me overnight for observation because of the severity of it. I went into notebook LM, which is Google’s free research tool, and it’s called a rag locked system. What this means is that it will only answer questions of data you give it, so it will not make things up. It’ll just say, hey, you didn’t provide that information, so I can’t answer it. And I loaded like 40 different papers on post surgical recovery, this, that, all these different studies. And I said, okay, let’s come up with what should I be doing to accelerate recovery as fast as possible? 03:32 Christopher Penn One of those things was a paper from NIH through pubMed, which is as credible as you’re going to get, saying the use of vitamin C, about 1500 milligrams spaced out in doses throughout the day, has collagenic effects, which means that skin wounds and tissues tend to heal faster, not with like one big dose all at once, but smaller doses spaced out throughout the day because of the nature of the way the ascorbic acid works, so. But you always have to take it with food because it can upset your stomach and things like that. So I paired it with psyllium husk fiber to slow it down through the digestive system. And then essentially I’ve been taking that. And at least in the systematic reviews that were in the papers, that accelerates wound healing by up to 40%. 04:23 John Wall Wow, that’s amazing. Well, I can use that. This weekend I had a couple mishaps. I was doing some construction on a doorway and lost a piece of a knuckle. And even worse, I was reaching for the blender and hit a knife on the knife rack on the way back. Oh, that was majorly painful. So. All right, well, so there we go. A little extra vitamin C. I will do the same thing here. 04:44 Christopher Penn Yes. We have to put up the disclaimer that we are not qualified medical professionals. We cannot give medical advice. Marketing over coffee is a marketing podcast. Please consult your health qualified healthcare provider for advice specific to your situation. 04:58 John Wall I know the list for today is like, we are not doctors, we are not lawyers, and we are not politicians. So, you know, bear that in mind with all of these topics that we go through on the rundown, because it’s all over the place today. Let’s get that one off the table, too. You had mentioned talking about, politics and business, so there’s been a lot. 05:18 Christopher Penn Of discussion about this lately. You know, different companies, getting involved in politics, sending out things and stuff. What’s your take on that? On whether a company should get involved? 05:27 John Wall I had a big discussion with that over in spin sucks. We were talking with Ginny Dietrich about that. She’s put a lot of time, and, of course, she has politicians in the family, related in the family, so she follows that. One of the big points that she had was like, unless your business is in the public realm, unless your business touches something that is politically related, then there’s just no upside to doing it, because you’re basically, unfortunately, in today’s climate, you’re making half the country angry regardless of which way you go. And so you’re risking your business. So unless it’s something that is, especially if you’re a large company that lives quarter by quarter and pleasing your stockholders. Yeah, absolutely not. 06:07 John Wall So then you get into this weird area of, okay, you’re a smaller company, privately held, or whatever your deal is that you don’t care about shareholders. Do you burn half the business because you want to make a stance on something. And that’s definitely the company’s right. But there’s also this weird thing of, yeah, you know, if you’re okay with half the customers saying, we’re out of here, that’s great. But. So, yeah, it’s. It’s, you know, like the. Unfortunately, the mess that is politics is spreading itself into other realms now is really the take I have on that. But, yeah. What made it brought it to the top of the list for you? 06:42 Christopher Penn Oh, I mean, just, you know, every. Every. Everybody and their cousin having something to say about it. It’s interesting because I see it as one of those things where it’s values based. So if your company’s values, because every company’s got them on the values in the mission state and stuff like that on the website, if you have values and you get into discussions about political things, those values have to come into play in some fashion. So I’ll give you a real simple example. I personally and our company trust insights, by extension, are very invested in things like data. Data, factual truth, objective data, as much as possible given reality, I think. 07:20 Christopher Penn So in terms of things like political arguments and debates, if you have a person or a position or a party or whatever, that is strongly invested in wrong data, like objectively wrong data, like, oh, the sky is red. Like, no, it’s this wavelength of light which is generally accepted to be blue, then, yeah, we’re probably not going to agree with that. And what’s interesting is that with those values, those might not be very good customers to begin with. So if you have somebody who’s like, I don’t believe in data, I believe in my way is the right way. Well, when I tell you that your analytics is saying this is, you’re doing it the wrong way, you’re not going to be happy with me, you’re not going to find value in my services, because you want things to be different than reality. 08:11 Christopher Penn And as a result, you’re going to last maybe a month or two as a client. You won’t make changes that make sense, that adhere to the data, and as a result, you’re probably going to be a bad customer. 08:24 John Wall Jeff? Yeah, that’s definitely. We see there’s a certain segment of the population that it doesn’t matter if they’re angry at us because we know they’re never going to be our customer. They’re not going to, they’re not following the data story. They have other things that they want to believe, and they’re going to run with that. And even we see that with a lot of entrepreneurs, too. It’s not even a political thing. We see a lot of. Yeah, and it makes sense. It’s like, okay, you kind of have to be a little bit crazy to risk everything on some kind of startup venture. And so, yeah, that’s great that you’re bold and a risk taker, but that may also mean that you have some other weird personality issues that are troublesome. 09:00 Christopher Penn So, yeah, where you see this really play out and you’re starting to see it, you know, in this, both this election and in business is when you start getting real goldfish bubbles. Goldfish bowl bubbles. You see, like a lot of there’s a good chunk of the Silicon Valley tech bros in this sort of bubble and they keep getting further and further away from reality on like literally everything. Making products, you know, that, you know, making solutions for things, problems people don’t have or not considering in the slightest what the consequences of what they’re doing is. It’s kind of alarming when you talk, particularly in AI where people are like, oh yeah, we got an AI that’s going to take away 95% of jobs, but how are people going to then buy from you? 09:52 John Wall Maybe that’s, yeah, I’ve got some other stats on buying stuff we’ll jump into. Before we do that though, we just want to take a second. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of marketing over coffee. Digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less. When you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team one canvas. Reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites, create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Times up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio to see more. 10:34 John Wall Head on over to Wix Studio.com to check it out and we thank them for their support of the show. Yeah, so its funny you mentioned shopping Salesforce shopping index, their marketing site has a whole bunch of reports that theyre doing quarterly now saying that the holiday season is going to be on the soft side, which, yeah, imagine that people been getting gouged on food for 25% over the past year. Theyre going to buy less plastic at Christmas time, I think is the punchline to that. One thing that was interesting with that was the stat they were saying that they’re expecting half of shoppers to take advantage of chinese shopping sites, which that struck me as high also as making an ugly holiday season. Some of the stuff that gets sold there is just, you know, I mean some of it is legit. 11:18 John Wall It’s the same stuff coming off the factory lines that you pay three x for. But then, you know, a lot of those hairdryer slash car charger slash tire inflators, some of that stuff is pretty, it’s not suspect. It’s just like it arrives broken. It’s like some of that stuff we get at the local hardware big box. What are your thoughts on the holiday season? Is there anything you’re keeping in mind or working towards on that, I can. 11:43 Christopher Penn Definitely see the team use of the world selling the appropriately discounted products. There’s a reason that’s 75% less than the competitor. But honestly, if you look around, you spend 15 minutes just picking up various objects in your home and looking where it was made. Like, yeah, a lot of stuff is not made where you live, unless you happen to live in, like, Shenzhen, which case it’s kind of one of those things where you have to evaluate vendors, and this is true of everything. You have to evaluate vendors based on their individual levels of quality control. One of the things I think is really interesting is there’s a lot of fab houses now in Shenzhen and the entire Guangdong province that do custom work. Like, if you got the cash, you can have a product made to your specifications. 12:38 Christopher Penn And I think there’s a boutique market there. So, for example, I was looking at rode makes, the wireless go transmitters, and they sell a microphone converter, which is a $29 piece of plastic. That’s all it is to stick the thing into it. Like, I could do that with a popsicle stick at a piece of tape. Guys, I don’t need to pay $29 for that. But I was thinking, wouldn’t it have been nice if that had, like, a power bank in it, you know, so you could just pop it right in and just have a USB C male connector. Well, I could go to any one of these distributors on Alibaba and say, hey, here’s the spec. Here’s what I want to make. Can you make this? How much will it cost me? 13:17 Christopher Penn And then if I wanted to, I could start my own business selling this particular product that was made to my specifications. One of the things that this, that generative AI allows us to do that is different today, and this is for every marketer, is, you can say, okay, I want to do this. Walk me through the steps of designing this thing. What do I need to do so that I can approach a manufacturer onshore, offshore, nearshore, it doesn’t matter, and say, how do I make this thing happen? And you may find, as many companies have, that. That one little solution that you wanted and you had custom made. Suddenly people like, where do I get that? You’re like, well, I mean, I had it made. Like, can you make me one? 14:03 Christopher Penn Like, sure, it’s going to cost you, like, $89, and then suddenly you’re selling them on Etsy or whatever. I. And I think marketers in particular should be on the lookout for this in their own companies. To say, like, what problems are we solving today that other people might want to buy? 14:20 John Wall Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on with that. And I’ve kind of been surprised that the 3d printing, you know, revolution is still kind of not moving as quick as it can. But I see a lot of things, just like what you mentioned where there’s kind of like, okay, I need a bracket to get this to that or whatever, and you can find a 3d diagram out there and just have it done. And then, yeah, this leads into, I went down a whole rat hole over the past two weeks about dual gps, which is something that I had never gone into. The impetus was I ran the Falmouth road race a couple weeks ago and my apple Watch just completely let me down. The GPS added a mile. 14:56 John Wall It said I was, it looked like I was a Wolverine on speed the way I was like, you know, running five circles around a block before I continued. And so as I dug into it, I found out, well, there’s a lot of pollution that week because of the canadian fires and then running through trees in branched over areas. That affects GPS. Well, the biggest thing in the past three or four years is that there are now like five different networks that have GPS satellites. 15:22 John Wall You know, back in the nineties when I had my first gps, and you were like waiting five minutes for it to get a lock and actually tell you where you were, now there’s tons of satellites up there, but the big thing is just in the past year and a half, they have a chipset that does dual gps that will actually grab more than one of these networks and get, you know, significantly better accuracy and if you’re, you know, really interested in that. So iPhone 15 was the first one that has this dual mode GPS and the newest ultra watch, which is like $800 right now. And they’re like, there’s no way I’m going to do that. And so Garmin, if you’re into running at all, Garmin has a ton of running watches that are great. 15:58 John Wall I, but then Koros is the third brand, which is a chinese brand, where they have this model of, they just kind of scrape off the best features that they can afford to squeeze in there for $200. And its a $200 watch and its like, yeah, you dont have to spend 500 with Garmin and you dont have to spend 900 with Apple for $200. You can get this. And sure enough, its telling me which side of the street im on. Its that good as far as lying it in. But yeah, all that to run down and get more accurate tracking of where I’m at. And this idea that, yeah, there is a space in that market for we’re going to grab the low cost technologies and bundle them all up and make it work. 16:38 Christopher Penn Preston dual gps chips are probably also in very heavy demand right now because in the Ukraine war, obviously both sides are trying to jam each other and they’re all using drones to do all kinds of crazy stuff. I saw a video the other day of a ukrainian drone, commercial drone, that was equipped with Thermite charger to drop thermite on russian positions, which very innovative use, but obviously partly is controlled by a person with a controller and goggles, but also partly by GPS. And so anything that has better gps accuracy is a win for whoever’s using it. 17:13 John Wall We do have to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts. You’ll get ten answers. Rates will rise or fall, inflation’s up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have future proof their business with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There’s one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting. You’re peering into the future with actionable data. When you’re closing the books in days, not weeks, you’re spending less time looking backward and more time on what’s next. 18:00 John Wall We have a number of customers who use Netsuite and it is that one source of truth that’s just so much easier to take action on your data when it’s all within one system. You’re not having to worry about integration, synchronization, extract, transform, load. You just go and you get answers. You can move forward. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning@netsuite.com. Coffee the guy is free to you@netsuite.com. Coffee that’s Netsuite.com. C o F F e e again, netsuite.com coffee. And we thank Netsuite for their support of the show Yelp versus Google. Just something that we’re keeping an eye on is the fact that they are suing Google because of local results. So that’s interesting to see. I dont know. Yelp has a tough reputation in the food service industry. I dont know if thats changed though. 18:54 John Wall I do as a disclaimer, Im basing that on about four years ago worth of stuff when I did some heavy research into that. So I dont know if its changed different. So watching those two fight it out will be interesting and see where that goes. I had a thing on products that I wanted to throw out there, another gear watch thing. Nebula has a new laser projector theyve just come out with. Theyve had their 4k laser projector that’s like up around the 15 or $1,700 price point. They came out with an SE version which you can get for about $1,000. But it’s just weird in that I can’t get a clear answer as to whether it’s better than the previous model. Like yes, it’s a little bit cheaper, but then the more expensive one is brighter. 19:34 John Wall And I’ve just run into this more than once. The other one was with Jabra earbuds. They have this whole line of like you can get the three, the five, the seven, the ultra, the sport, all these things and you can never get a clear answer as far as, well, which one should I buy for this? So having that stuff, if I get to the bottom of the projector thing, I will talk about that next week because I’m not really up for buying a new projector. But unfortunately, sometimes the siren call of world class picture just kind of grabs me. We have a ton of travel coming up I wanted to throw out, though. I had a article on event best practices, you know, getting prepped. And so what I’ve got for that is I’m going to give this on the show. 20:15 John Wall I’m not even going to publish this and I’m going to pull out of the transcript. But if you’re going to marketing profs b two b, I have both your session and then Katie will be after you, Andy Crestadina will be there, Ashley Zecman. So that’s my day one. If you, if you want to save yourself a lot of scheduling hassle and dealing through the pile. We also have John Miller on day two who we haven’t heard from in a while. So I want to get that. And Rand Fishkin will be there Thursday afternoon in the late session. So that’s the, oh, and Nancy Harhut is also talking about some new data stuff. I always love catching her as far as what she’s watching and running with there. So that’s the profs b two b rundown. 20:54 John Wall If you’re going to be there, definitely drop us a line. I would love to catch up with you. And then you’ve got Macon is next week, too. Anything else big on that you want to throw? 21:04 Christopher Penn So I’ll be doing a talk on open models and why they’re a good idea. The way I have it planned right now is a bunch of slides and then a quick walkthrough. How do you get started with this stuff? There’s some been some really cool new tools that have come out recently that make it easier to get started. Still not easy, but it’s easier, which I think is going to be a lot of fun. And then immediately after that I head to Philadelphia for lab Products association and immediately after that I go to inbounda and I speak at inbound. I’m going to be doing my data driven AI powered customer journey talk. That’s going to be a 90 minutes talk slash workshop. 21:37 Christopher Penn So I’m going to do a race through of the material in about 30 minutes and spend 60 minutes basically doing demos and showing like how do you actually do this stuff where you can take your data out of these different systems, put it into generative AI and get reasonably credible answers from the systems? So it’s going to be a packed schedule. September, I think I have a total of five days in the office. Yeah, five days minus the day I was in surgery. 22:06 John Wall Yeah, no, you’ve been on the run and it’s not going to stop. So there’s plenty happening there. Inbound is another good one, too. If you’re going to be over at inbound, go ahead and drop this line. You swing on over to the analytics for marketers Slack group. I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can join that or. Yes, sign up for the marketing over coffee text line at 617-812-5494 because I’ll be sending stuff live and around there and we can even, it has subgroups. I can do a on site group if you want to trade some stuff. That would be fun. 22:32 Christopher Penn PSA according to PMC forecasts this coming week, the week of Macon is going to be the largest surge of COVID for the summer and then it should start to wind down. But essentially the odds are right now one in 30 people is actively contagious around you. So if you’re at an event with 1000 people, 33 of those people are actively contagious. If you’re at inbound, which is like 10,000 people, 300 of those people are going to be actively transmitting disease. Please take care of your health. Wear a mask to get the new booster. That’s out, so that you will have, some durable immunity. Boosters require two weeks in advance, so if you’re going to inbound, get your booster now. 23:11 John Wall That sounds good. Good PSA. Yeah. Did do not get sick over the business traveling fall. That’s just such a horrible thing. You don’t want to get wrapped up in that. All right, that’s good. That’ll do it for this week, then. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. 23:24 Christopher Penn Enjoy the coffee. You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at Christopherspen. Read more from John J. Wall at JW 5150 dot the marketing over coffee theme song is called Melogy by funk masters, and you can find it at musicalley from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes. The post RAG, Politics, Dual GPS, and Road Trips! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Katie does a tour of Google Gemini writing copy trained on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Using your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to improve your storytelling ability If you want to watch the video on YouTube Ron Ploof’s StoryHow Pitch Deck NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. What makes up the ICP The Trust Insights PARE framework for writing prompts Examining the ICP to find Pain Points Starting with the ending in mind 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! Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access! Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters. Machine Generated Transcript 00:06 John Wall This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. 00:14 John Wall Hey, everybody. So between ending vacations and already hitting the road for fall events, we’ve got another week before we get back to our regular shows. But I had something really interesting this week. I was doing a session with Katie Robert, the CEO over at Trust Insights, who I work with, and were showing off how you can train a large language model to act like one of your customers. And the goal was to prove that we could use Google Gemini to create a story for our prospects that would talk to these customers and prospects in their own language and follow all the best practices of storytelling. So it’s really having AI create these rough drafts of your marketing campaigns and stories that you could use to get them to take action. 00:56 John Wall So this was a live stream, and I will throw in the YouTube link if you want to watch how it all happens. But I mean, if you’re familiar with just entering prompts and getting feedback, you don’t need to actually see, you know, the keyboard flashing. I’ve edited the live stream here down so you can follow it audio only and hear about how were able to come up with these storylines. It gets into some fascinating points on what makes a great story, and I have to give a huge shout out to Ron Plouffe here as we follow his story how framework, which is the best framework out there as far as crafting a story and hitting all the major beats you need to get your story correct. 01:30 John Wall And I thought you’d be interested in how it turned out when we started pushing Gemini, you know, to come up with the story points and see how accurate it came back. So thanks to Katie for letting us grab this session and throw it in the feed. Also, I’m going to be at marketing prosp b two B in November, as Will Chris and Katie. So give a yell if you’re coming to Boston for that. We would love to see you and catch up with you. And next week, we will be kicking off the fall season and back with the regular show. And so with that, let’s jump right in. 01:56 Katie Robbert This week, John and I are talking about leveraging your ICP, your ideal customer profile for data storytelling. We’re going to cover which data points your ICP can help with, the tactics to make the most compelling stories and how to check your story for clarity and effectiveness, both in your copy and visuals. Now, data storytelling is one of those things that we think is easy, but it’s actually really challenging because we’re like, oh, the data tells the story, but that’s not really true, because the data, a lot of times, is just a lot of numbers, and you have to pull out the story, but you also need to figure out from your client or whoever you’re working with, what story they need to be told. 02:38 Katie Robbert And so, John, you and I very likely would want different stories from the same data because of our roles, because of our responsibilities. Where would you like to start today? I always ask Chris, but I’m going to ask you today, where would you like to start? 02:53 John Wall Where do we want to start? Well, there’s a bunch of stuff. It’s funny, when you came up with this topic, went down a list of, like, okay, what can we talk about? And you said, storytelling and fitting into the data. And I was like, oh, this is perfect. Because I know the framework for this. I’d worked years ago with Ron Plouf, and he has his story how framework. And so the big thing with this is that everybody has these story frameworks. Like, when you go do the research on advisors who do this stuff, everybody has their own framework. But the thing that Ron had done is that he came up with 60 elements. He, as an engineer, broke it down into everything it can be. And so his breakdown is completely comprehensive. So we have a list of everything you need to do. 03:32 John Wall And I was like, this is going to be fantastic, because you can outline all the stuff that’s going on with the Icpenna, and then we can layer that into these story how points, and it will put together a bulletproof story that can’t miss. Basically, once you’ve covered all the key points, a good place to start is with ICP, as far as bringing people up to speed with that and talk about the kind of data that you pull when you’re getting that together. As you prep to get the story, before you start working on the bones of the story, you’ve got to get all your research and everything in order if you want to dive into that. I think that’s where we need to kick it off. 04:07 Katie Robbert What we’ve been doing with our methodology for an ICP is we’ve been using minimal data sets, because here’s the thing. We know that the data collection is the thing that holds up a lot of people from moving things forward. The idea that I had was if you could find the minimal amount of easy to access data, then you could build an ideal customer profile, which is basically a proxy for your actual customers, because doing that kind of market research, the focus groups, that’s also a lot of overhead and a lot of resources. And so how could we make something really efficient, really detailed, really on target that didn’t take a lot of time and resources? 04:55 Katie Robbert And so what we’ve done is we’ve built basically the methodology for creating an ideal customer profile that covers your firmographics, your demographics, your psychographics, your pain points, how people make decisions. And it’s from your standpoint, from you, the end user, what we ask of you is very few things. We want to know who your competitors are. We want to know who you are. Basically just your, we’re basically just asking for some URL’s and maybe a snapshot of your website analytics, if available. It’s a very low bandwidth type of activity. So from there, what we can do is we can then use the ICP in this instance as a proxy stand in for our clients. So the first thing we want to do is set the stage. 05:43 Katie Robbert And so using the trust insights pair framework, which you can get from our website, trustinsights AI pair, you can start to prime the model. That’s the whole purpose of peer. So what I’ve written in so far is today we are working on data storytelling for our client. We’ll have an ICP to stand in for the client and a lot of data points for review before we get started, what are the best practices of data storytelling? And the reason we do this is so we can start to prime the model so it’s given focused direction. We’ll do that and let that run. And so it says, absolutely. Let’s review some of the best practices before your ICP session. So, understanding your audience, what do they care about? What do they need to know? Starting with compelling hook, having a clear beginning, middle and end. 06:32 Katie Robbert Choose the right visuals so this all makes sense. And the nice thing is that these first few pieces are covered by the ICP. And so this gives you a really good foundation for being able to use your ICP as a proxy for your client. Or let’s say you’re doing a new business pitch and you want to be able to say, these are the things that we can do. You have to be able to tell a compelling story. Your ICP can stand in for whoever it is you’re pitching to. This is where we’re going to introduce the ideal customer profile. So first, let me upload the file. We’ve already gone through the process of creating the ideal customer profile. Here is the ICP for your review. So what we’ve done so far is we’ve primed the model. 07:20 Katie Robbert We’ve said we’re going to do storytelling, we’re going to use the ICP as a stand in for a client. What are the best practices? What are the things you don’t recommend we do? And now here’s the ICP. So you’re saying, great focus in on the pain points of this ICP. This will become the purpose, the why and narrative of our data storytelling. So the reason I want to focus in on the pain points is because what we want to do with the data is solve those problems. That’s why people are coming to us. But we have to know what those pain points are before we can sort of put the narrative together. So what we have so far is the pain points. Difficulty in aggregating and utilizing large datasets from multiple channels and platforms. 08:12 Katie Robbert Inability to measure true impact of marketing campaigns across different channels. Fragmented customer experience due to lack of integration between customer data and marketing technology. Difficulty in aligning marketing initiatives with broader business goals. Do those sound like solid pain points? Do we want to dig deeper? 08:29 John Wall That’s the classic marketing challenges. Yeah, you’re doing the campaigns and you can’t prove what’s working. You’re not aligned with the sales team. All that stuff is. Yeah, right on the bullseye. 08:42 Katie Robbert This is a great summary. Our next step is to review the available data. I am now going to upload the data that the client has provided. All right, so, John, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the storytelling techniques that we’re going to be digging into as I painfully upload these one by one, finish the load? 09:11 John Wall Yeah, sure. We can talk about that. As I had mentioned that there’s, you know, 60 points that are covered that, you know, if you’re crafting a full on story, you want to hit all of those points. But as a getting started point, there’s really just eight main categories that you need to hit and get going. And so as we go through those cards, the first one is the audience. The most important thing is exactly on the mark with ICP of who needs this message? What do they need to know today, what do they need to know tomorrow? What are their biases, what are their strengths, and what are their limitations? With these questions, you basically create the person that you’re going to convince with the story. 09:49 John Wall The idea is that as a business writing a story, you’re doing this to convince somebody to end up somewhere else, to take a journey and get to another point. So this one is solid. As far as ICP, we know who needs the message. We’re able to dig in and get a profile of who they are, what they’re doing, what their job is, and then it is really interesting to get into that. What do they need? What do they know today, and what do they need to know tomorrow? That’s really the pain points come to light right there. You’ve got the situation of what they see for today, where they’re at, and you want to get to where they’re going and help them get in a better position for tomorrow. For biases, that one is. That’s a challenge. 10:32 John Wall And this I’d be interested, as we run ICP more, to kind of find out more about the biases of the audience, because that one’s a kind of a black box, but it definitely flavors the way you create your story. You know, you have to work around their biases or play into them as you go. What are their strengths? That’s basic profile, right? We kind of know what they can do or can’t do, and then what are their limitations? That’s right up there with biases. When you get to the core of where their limitations are, you’re defining where the pain points are and the places they can’t go. And that’s usually a great place for you to jump in and play the hero and get them to where you want to be. So, at least with audience, we’re strong. 11:16 John Wall We’ve got that one pretty much covered, so we’re good. And then the second, as far as roles, is the protagonist. Right. We want to find out who this person is. You really want to. And every storytelling framework gets into this, right. You want to get in there and outline who the hero is, where they’re going. The biggest mistake with this one, and Ron dives into this heavy. But the biggest mistake people make here is that, as business people writing stories, they come up with the idea that their product is the hero, and that’s. That is not the case. That’s completely wrong. In fact, he basically says, look, if you said that, you need to go back to the drawing board and. And do your work again, because in most situations, when you come up with a hero story, the product is usually a tool. 12:00 John Wall A good example is always, in today’s Marvel superhero world, the hero is Thor. Your product is the hammer. You know, the hero is there and is the customer and is the one having the adventure. But your product is what unlocks new doors for them or gives them powers that they don’t have or, you know, gets them somewhere. So, again, this one is a dead match with ICP. We get an accurate view of who these people are and what tools they need, because that’s where your product will jump in as we jump down next. So the second part of the story, as you’re crafting it, is the events, what is actually happening in the story? Where are you trying to go to? And the first one event is initial impulse. 12:42 John Wall There has to be something that kicks your story off as far as, okay, the protagonist is doing something and life is going okay, or average or whatever, but now something happens that upsets the status quo. So what is that and where do we go? That is a dead match for what were talking about as far as pain points, right. You’ve got the. Basically, the protagonist hits these pain points and now either has to come up with answer or do something to save their job because it’s, you know, causing trouble with where they’re trying to go or making them unable to prove where they want to go. And so, yeah, we’ve got that initial spark as far as the pain points. So, yeah, that’s basically three for three so far. I see you’ve got. 13:23 John Wall Have you reached the point where you want to get as far as getting the pain points on ICP aligned? 13:28 Katie Robbert Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that overview, John. I mean, I think that’s incredibly helpful. The thing that really sticks out to me is that we make the assumption that our product is the hero. And that’s where I think a lot of us get into trouble. And this is why I think a tool like the ICP is so great, is it takes us out of the conversation and really refocuses it back on the needs of the customer. It’s not what we want them to have. It’s what they actually need. And so what I’ve done is I’ve uploaded a variety of. Because we’re using the trust insights ICP, I’ve uploaded a variety of our data sources. 14:05 Katie Robbert So it’s screenshots from our marketing automation system and screenshots from our Google Analytics system to give a sense of what we’re doing from a marketing standpoint, since the pain points were around all of the different marketing campaigns showing Roi, getting alignment between the different systems, I started with saying, I have a bunch of data points. Please don’t start analyzing until I let you know that I’m ready. So as I went through, I’m like, here’s the next one. I have a few more here. Here’s the next one. I have a few more. And then I was like, okay, here’s the next one. I have three more here’s the next one. Two more. Okay, this is the last one. Now let’s go ahead. And so one of the. 14:42 Katie Robbert One of the reasons I kind of like the one by one is that it gives me that instantaneous feedback that, yes, the system can read the data. And so, as I was going through, and I know this is a little harder to see, it was saying, this is what I see. These are the things. And so that was a good indicator for me, like, okay, this is good data to be giving the system, you know, this is where John, so you mentioned that you have, you’ve worked with Ron Plou, if you really like his structure. And so now I know you have the playing cards with all the different questions on them. 15:12 John Wall Yeah, yeah, we can jump into those. Now, one of the other critical points is ending, right. You have to have the ending of the story mapped out from the very beginning. You don’t just kind of start hacking away and see where it goes. The idea is you want to go somewhere specific, and then you can actually test different routes to that finish line to see what, you know, where you come up with the best story. A good question point to start with this, is that ending in mind for us? So, something as far as saying, okay, what is the best way for us to convince the ICP that we can resolve these pain points? 15:48 Katie Robbert Let’s see what happens, because I feel like now we’ve given the model all of the data, we’ve primed it knows that we’re doing data storytelling. So now this is where you can really start iterating and interacting with the model and asking these questions. And so what it’s saying is the best way to convince the ICP that trust insights, resolve pain points is but to present a compelling narrative that combines the following. Empathy and understanding. Data driven proof points. Thought leadership and expertise. Tailored solutions. Clear value proposition, collaborative approach. Call to action. Is that the kind of answer that you were looking for, John? 16:26 John Wall Yeah, it’s interesting that it’s given us a list of which points to go down as we hit. And it’s funny, it’s really struck me that the first one was actually empathy in framing the story. It’s getting our message, acknowledging their specific challenges, and that we generally understand the struggles. That’s interesting to me as far as setting it up and beginning at that point. And then, yeah, as far as the finish line, I think what tailored solutions is at number four, how far down does it go? Is there anything else that’s even. 16:59 Katie Robbert It goes down to seven. So call to action. Collaborative approach, clear value proposition, tailored solutions. They’re all, you know, they all relate to each other. I like that it suggests empathy and understanding first, because I know I’ve been on the receiving end of someone saying, here’s all the things you screwed up and here’s how you need to fix them. And while you might be fully aware that these things are broken or not working as well, hearing it does not make you feel great about it. And so when someone’s presenting it to you in that way, you’re like, well, now you’re just insulting me, and I don’t want to work with you versus someone who’s like, you know, I noticed. 17:39 Katie Robbert And when that happened to me, and sort of sharing that, those relatable stories, sort of, it helps you make those human connections a little bit deeper so that you can then have that. All right, well, so here’s what I’m seeing. It’s all in the delivery. 17:54 John Wall Yeah. And I think the key to that is the tailored solutions. Right. I mean, because that is the ending point for working with trust insight. So that gives us the place to start with as far as. Okay, so most of our customers go with this consultative approach where we manage some of the analytics for them, we take care of some of the integrations and build out this system so that the endpoint is they have somebody who’s got their back, is making sure those analytical systems are working. They’ve got the monthly or quarterly reports that they need, and they have us on call for anytime, anything. Lights on fire. Right. Like, those are the big three points of the engagement, and that’s great. 18:30 John Wall So then starting from there as the end point, when we go back up to the empathy and understanding, we hit all those points as far as, like, hey, do you get crucified every quarter when the, you know, the board comes around? Or, hey, are you not able to get the budget you need for marketing programs because you’re unable to prove what the existing programs are doing and what kind of success you’ve had? So, yeah, the story, the kind of the bones of the story are definitely all filled out now in that we’ve got where you want to end to go with that tailored solution. And we can start off with, yeah, the empathy of painting that story of. Okay, so here’s the pain points that ultimately lead to that. So that. Yeah, that’s great. 19:07 John Wall It’s a good way to make sure that it is all in alignment. And now you can kind of figure out, okay, how deep can we go with that story? How crazy can it get. 19:16 Katie Robbert All right, so what’s the next question based on the framework? 19:20 John Wall Yeah. So now we start to get into the influence section. So jeopardy is one of the cards, right? Every good story has the hero kind of come into some kind of crisis or problem. So what is the biggest risk for our ICP in trying to get to this solution and trying to get to the clear value proposition? 19:43 Katie Robbert So what I’m writing, and let me know if this is incorrect or not. I said, what is the biggest risk for our ICP when trying to get to their solution? Is there a clear value proposition? 19:52 John Wall Yeah, yeah, let’s throw that. I mean, because really it’s just like, what is the biggest risk? That’s all that really matters. So we’ll see what it comes back with. 19:59 Katie Robbert Okay. So it says that the biggest risk for the ICP when trying to get to their solutions lies in potential for wasted resources and missed opportunities due to the complexity and fragmentation of their data landscape. So the challenges they face, such as difficulty in aggregating utilizing large data sets, inability to measure marketing ROI accurately, and fragmented customer experiences can lead to ineffective marketing campaigns, suboptimal customer experiences, missed growth opportunities, and operational inefficiencies. And so, you know, these are all the things that basically, as you’re telling the story, you can say, you know, you can sort of lean into that. If you don’t fix these things, this is what’s going to happen. And it really start to paint that picture of this is why you need to be paying attention. 20:47 Katie Robbert And when people start to hear like the doom and gloom or really when you break it down into you’re going to waste a lot of money, you’re going to waste people’s times, then you have their attention, especially if you start with the money piece. So that goes into the clear value proposition for trust insights lies in its ability to mitigate these risks and empower clients to overcome their data challenges. Trust insights enables clients to unlock actionable insights from their data, measure the true impact of marketing campaigns, deliver personalized customer experience at scale, and align marketing initiatives with broader business goals. Okay, so that all makes sense to me. So we know what the risks are. So do we want to dig in further to that? What’s the next step? 21:28 John Wall Yeah, I think we’re good with that. I mean, it’s just good. The thing that really hit me with that is, you know, the complexity and fragmentation of the data landscape. Like, that’s what we run into all the time. It’s, you’ve got, you know, these five different systems and the data is not coming across. And I. Yeah, when you get down to it, you pretty much have to make a decision. You’re like, okay, we’re either going to hire somebody full time whose whole job is going to be able getting this data in line and order, or you go find somebody who has already done it 50 times, and it’s going to take them one 10th of the time because they’ve called, you know, they’ve climbed the learning curve. So, yeah, that. These are great storybones here, too. 22:01 John Wall This is, you know, we are laying out the jeopardy of somebody who’s, you know, not able to figure out what’s going on, and then we have, you know, them putting their hero to, you know, hero product to work to get them where they want to go and actually get out of jeopardy. So that one’s solid. The next one after that is emotional choice. You know, every protagonist kind of has a bunch of emotions that affect them as they go through. You know, they. They feel like they’re going to fail or they’re at risk of getting killed or coming up short or whatever. So the question with this one would be, you know, what emotions is the ICP going to have to deal with as dealing with these problems and these pain points? And I love this one, too, because. Right. 22:44 John Wall This goes right back to that first one of empathy. Right. You know, by getting this list here, this allows us to address all those empathy points at the same time. 22:52 Katie Robbert So what I captured, and to give the large language model a little bit more direction is said, great. We want to really focus in on these risks and how solving the problems can make the ICP the hero. What emotions will the ICP experience while going through these pain points? So let’s see what happens. The ICP, primarily composed of cmos, vps of marketing, and data focused leaders. This is incredibly helpful. Will likely experience a range of negative emotions as they grapple with the pain points outlined. Frustration and overwhelm, anxiety and uncertainty, dissatisfaction and concern, pressure and stress. Isn’t that truck? 23:31 John Wall Yeah, we have some customers that have all of those. The single customer. 23:36 Katie Robbert They’re just multifaceted human beings. 23:39 John Wall Well, you know, it’s. The good news is that, you know, the pain points are all real, that’s for sure. But, yeah, I don’t know. That was. That hits me pretty hard. I was actually not expecting such an ugly list, and yet. 23:51 Katie Robbert But that. Your very, like, visceral reaction to this tells me that we’re on track, because you’re like, oh, my God, like, you want to get that emotional reaction, because that’s what gets people to pay attention, you know? And so now you’re like, okay, great, where is this going to go? You know? And that’s exactly what we want to do with good storytelling, is really like, draw people in and be like, oh, my God. Yeah, I see myself in this. And so, you know, it concludes by saying, by addressing these pain points and showcasing how trust insights can alleviate these negative emotions, you can position your company as a trusted partner who empowers marketers to become heroes within their own organization. 24:29 Katie Robbert This is an important point because the large language model, based on the minimal instruction that I’ve given, picked up on exactly what it is that we do for our customers. We are not the heroes of the story. They are the heroes of their own story. We’re just there to support them and give them all of the tools and techniques that they need to go from point a to point b. So now I’m hooked. Now I need to know what’s going to happen. Tell me more of the story. 24:58 John Wall Yeah, its interesting, too, isnt it? Because each of those kind of have different buttons to push, right? Like pressure and stress. Well, thats usually pressure from above or financial, the anxiety or uncertainty thats unable to get results. And youre waiting on results to come in that you have no control over. And then frustrated and overwhelmed, like, thats usually technical complexity thats youre not able to get to the bottom of. So every one of those have a different set of levers that you can work as far as. Yeah, talking about this customer’s adventure, which can get crazy. The last two are pretty much in the same boat. The first is purpose. And why are we telling this story? And the big thing with that is it’s the combination of both our need and the audience’s action. So it’s our need. 25:44 John Wall Now, we know we’re talking about clearly outlined services, but the audience action is we stack this up so that is the answer to where they’re going. So that’s fine. And then it’s. I had to laugh. Cause I had not dug into this framework in like, three or four years. And when I got to the last card is meaning, you know, it’s, what is the, where does it go? And he asked a very simple question, which, as you put it right on there is so what. Yeah, which fits right into today’s show. So that closes it up nicely. Obviously, the purpose is obvious, right? Where we’re using this to get somebody where we want to go. But as far as meaning in the. So what? Where else do you, land with that? What else are you thinking about? 26:26 John Wall Oh, yeah, we can throw it to the model, too. Let’s look. 26:28 Katie Robbert I’m going to throw it to the model. That’s the whole point. Because the model, theoretically now has all of the same information that we do. It has the data. It knows the customer, it knows the pain points. It knows what they’re trying to do. It knows the emotions. So now we actually have to turn it into a story. So it says, great. Keeping in mind everything we’ve discussed so far, what do we do with all of this information? What is the so what of this narrative? What data story can we tell our ICP that addresses their pain points and makes them the hero of their story? All right, let’s see what happens. You ready? 27:13 John Wall Pull the lever. Here we go. No whammies. 27:15 Katie Robbert No whammies. All right, so let’s see the. So what of this narrative is to empower the ICP to become the heroes of their own data driven success stories. The data you provided reveals a landscape where many marketers are grappling with fragmented data, struggling to measure ROI, and facing challenges in delivering personalized customer experiences. That’s a big sentence. The emotional journey for these marketers is one of frustration, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and pressure. I mean, that sounds pretty on the nose. So far. The data story you can tell your ICP is one of transformation and triumph. I don’t know. The visuals are already coming together in my head. It’s going to be, John, I think you’re going to be riding a tiger or something. 28:01 Katie Robbert It’s about shifting the narrative from one of the struggle, from one of struggle to one of empowerment, from uncertainty to clarity, and from missed opportunities to measurable success. I would say that’s pretty good. So what this does is it gives us the structure. So let’s say we’re putting. We’re going to take this, and putting it together is like a PowerPoint presentation. This is our outline. This is our structure of how we deliver that information. I know. What do you think so far have? Are we accomplishing the data storytelling? Ask, or is it just kind of getting, are we going too far off? 28:35 John Wall But I think the thing with this is it does, you know, the ugly first draft is done. Like, you can basically take this and like you said, frame your PowerPoint tech and you’ve got it built. You know, you’ve got it ready to go. And the key is that it’s in the language of the ICP. Right. It’s not written in how we think about these products and look at it from the service provider’s perspective. It’s how the customer is living through it and going with it. So, yeah, no, I think this is great. This is the kind of thing, because now you just cut and paste this and you can kind of get down to work with the ugliest, most grunt work part of it done. 29:10 Katie Robbert So, number one, I think I am going to include some of this information on our website because actually kind of good. And then I’m saying, great. Can you outline this narrative with the assumption that we need to pull to put all of this information into a slide deck? And so ideally it would be like, okay, slide one. This, slide two this, because you can ask for those directions and it should give it to you. And so here we go. Slide one, title, slide two. And it actually gives you the bullet points. Slide three, and so on and so forth. And so now I’ve taken all of our ICPS data. I’ve taken all of their marketing data. I’ve taken, you know, we’ve gone through, John, you’ve gone through the questions of what is the story we’re telling? What are the risks? 29:53 Katie Robbert And now the language model is outlined, a slide deck for us based on all of this information. So what we would do to your point is we would just copy and paste it in, make sure it makes sense. And like, here you go. These are things that you can do over and over again. And, you know, it’s funny because people are like, oh, I use generative AI. It’s sort of like cheating. All we did, like, it was still our data. We still had to do the legwork. All it did was expedite how you get from I have a lot of data to what’s the story I need to tell my client. 30:23 John Wall Yeah. And the big thing, though, is it’s correctly trained, right. It was trained on the ICP. It was trained on our marketing campaign data. You’ve got a bunch of stuff that keeps the, keeps it on the rails and makes it effective, because otherwise you’re just kind of turning the crank on whatever’s out there on the Internet, which isn’t the same thing. 30:43 Katie Robbert So what do you think? I’m tired after the hero’s journey. 30:46 John Wall Yeah, this is it. No, we’ve reached the finish line. I think we’ve got the story we want to tell, and we would love to hear if people have any other comments on that or want to play more with any of this stuff, because we’ve had a lot of success with clients who take the ICP and, you know, start changing the way they’re doing business. And again, it can take a lot of the pain out of this process. So it’s worth doing. 31:07 Katie Robbert Yeah. So if you want to learn more about getting your own version of an ICP or some sort of data storytelling narrative like this based on your ICP, you can give us a shout trustinsights AI contact or, and or you can join our free Slack group analytics for marketers. Every day we’re asking questions, we’re helping people, just having general discussion. It’s free to sign up. And so I think for this week, John, I think we have concluded our journey. 31:35 John Wall Our hero’s journey is complete. Safe to go. Go grab a iced cold beverage. 31:41 Katie Robbert Sounds good. Till next week, John, you’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. 31:47 John Wall Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspen.com read more from John J. 31:53 Katie Robbert Wall at JW 5150 dot the marketing over coffee theme song is called Melo G by funk masters, and you can find it at musicale from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes. The post Hands On Using an LLM for Storytelling appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

This week features an inspiring discussion about community changemakers and the power of impactful storytelling. The host shares insights from their recent vacation, emphasizing a new project aimed at interviewing remarkable individuals. Listeners are invited to contribute suggestions for these change agents, promising an engaging and meaningful collection of stories. It's a thoughtful exploration of how personal narratives can inspire positive change in society.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about why email marketing stinks, why Flux.1 rules, fan service in Deadpool & Wolverine, and more! Direct Link to File 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 Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access! 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. The post Email Vendors, Google Pixel 9, and How To Get Huge on TikTok appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Katie Robbert, an expert in ideal customer profiles and the 5P Framework, dives into the importance of using AI in marketing strategies. She discusses evolving Ideal Customer Profiles and how to create models that guide decision-making. Katie emphasizes the need for thoughtful AI integration over aimless adoption, sharing insights from her experiences. The conversation also touches on her upcoming talks at industry events, and practical tips on using technology like Google Keep to enhance productivity and creativity in daily life.

Snoop Dogg, the iconic rapper, and cultural figure, speaks about his surprising role at the Olympics, carrying the torch and captivating younger audiences. Flava Flav, legendary rapper and TV personality, shares insights on supporting Olympic water polo. The guests delve into groundbreaking AI developments, including the launch of the Llama 3.1 model and its implications for brands navigating AI-driven search. They also touch upon data accuracy in Google and audio innovations like Dyson's new headphones. It's a lively discussion of culture, technology, and branding!

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Before he became the most popular author on stoicism, we talked with Ryan Holiday about his marketing books! Direct Link to File We put this episode together as part of some exclusive content, the feedback was so positive we’ve decided to put it in the feed for everyone! You can still check out Growth Hacking here and Trust Me, I’m Lying! Thanks as always to our sponsors: 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! NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access! Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters. Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. — START OF FILE QqZHuXVTDmR2e3eI_MoC830A-mp3-st.txt — John Wall – 00:00 Hey everybody. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some backend plumbing with the website and some other stuff and playing around with some exclusive content. And rather than just sending out a blank file, I dug into the archives and got an interview with Ryan Holiday, who you may know from his books on stoicism. But before that, he actually had done a couple of marketing books, one called Growth Hacker Marketing and before that, a big hit, *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, which I still recommend to anybody in marketing as something to dig into. Only went out to about 300 people of all the subscribers because it was just out there for kind of a split second and got grabbed. Well, I got feedback, and everyone was like, “Yeah, this is great.” And so I thought, why don’t I just throw it in the regular feed for everybody now that it’s been out there. This was just before Ryan hit it huge on the bestseller list with his books on stoicism. So it’s fun to hear where he was at that time. And also, it is amazing to me. I was surprised how this interview is almost 10 years old. The tools are so much better. The show actually sounds different. But this is one of my favorites from over the years. And so here we go. Speaker 2 – 01:10 This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 01:17 Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today, we have a special interview with Ryan Holiday, the author of *Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising*. He’s also the author of *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, a great book that we’ll probably talk about a little bit, too. But Ryan, thanks for joining us today. Ryan Holiday – 01:35 Thanks for having me. This sounds fun. John Wall – 01:37 As we get started, I mean, give us the elevator pitch on growth hacking. What’s the idea here? Ryan Holiday – 01:41 Yeah, so the idea was, one morning I’m sort of going about my day as a traditional marketer and I sit down and I read this article. The headline is, “Growth Hackers Are the New VPs of Marketing.” Now, I’m a VP of Marketing, I’m Director of Marketing and American Apparel, and I’ve never heard of a growth hacker, and I have no idea what it is. But I look at the companies that growth hackers are responsible for: Groupon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, a handful of billion-dollar brands that were built right in front of us, within the last five years, and they didn’t do any traditional marketing. They used a strategy they call growth hacking. And so I thought, what does it mean that these people built billion-dollar brands using none of the things that I provide, or I, the services that I provided, I pride myself at being good at? Maybe they’re better marketers than me. And so I sat down to study what growth hacking is and how it works. The book is a result of those interviews and that research and trying it myself. John Wall – 02:49 Right. And I thought one interesting point was talking about more about what it isn’t than what it is. Like you said, you were kind of doing VP of Marketing, so you had the book of business that you provided. But really, it came down to stuff that was testable, trackable, scalable. That was big three that you threw out there. So basically, the case studies, everything that you’re talking about in the book are people that have taken kind of this minimalist approach. Is that right? Ryan Holiday – 03:12 I think so. I think what growth hacking is at its essence is, let’s say you’re an engineer in the Silicon Valley, and so your whole life is designed around sort of rules and languages and sort of what you see is what you get. It’s sort of coding mentality, this right-brain mentality. Don Draper is not a hero to them. That’s the opposite of what they do. But they still have things they have to promote, and they still have to launch startups and get millions of users. And so what I think they did, right in front of us, is basically reinvent marketing because they didn’t like the things that marketing sort of held to be dear. And it turns out that the way of doing it that they came up with may, in fact, be more effective, more trackable, more efficient, and better than what people like me were trained to do. John Wall – 04:07 Yeah, that’s true. And I noticed at the front of the book, you quote David Ogilvy. For this audience, folks that are heavy into marketing, I’m sure we have some listeners that kind of get that whole idea of, even Ogilvy back in the day was kind of like, it’s all about sales and it’s about driving the numbers, and he was so huge on direct marketing as being where the future was. And I think that’s because he, just like everyone else, had no idea what was going to happen with the web and the fact that we would be applying all this stuff in email and where we go there. So right out of the gate, though, there’s one thing, and you really focus the argument because I think myself, like yourself, as a VP of Marketing, kind of hear this growth hacking phrase. Ryan Holiday – 04:46 I think it’s a buzzword. John Wall – 04:47 It’s a buzzword. And worse yet, though, and then finally, you put your finger right on it, which is it ties into product marketing because you have to have a product fit for it to work. The buzzword and the hatred came from the fact that I’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh yeah, what we really need is a growth hacker.” But, at these companies, they’re never going to change the product, and, in fact, they’re even going to have a problem with, they would never be doing kind of some of the stunts you talk about, and especially, in *Trust Me, You’re Lying*, of setting up fake profiles, or kind of really getting to the edge of marketing. They’re just way too conservative for that. So it kind of has a stigma around it and a buzzword around it, but again, like I said, by hitting on product marketing, you grabbed me immediately as you were right on the mark with that. So talk about that a little bit, about product fit and how that gets into it. Ryan Holiday – 05:33 Marketers see themselves as being only responsible for marketing. “My job is to take your product once it’s finished and get attention for it. That’s how the relationship works.” But growth hacking comes from the people who, in often cases, designed or made the product, are now responsible for launching it. That’s sort of the startup mentality of, there’s no job titles, just everyone works, everyone tries to make this thing a success. So they sort of came to it from the other side of the table. And I think they were able to see something that I experienced over the course of my marketing career too many times, which is, you can’t market a broken product, and that oftentimes the best marketing decision that you can make is a product development decision. So Instagram is an amazing example of this. It launches as a social network, like a geotargeted geolocation social network called Burbn that you happen to be able to add some photos with filters to. It turned out that one tiny feature was the overwhelming, sort of got the overwhelming response. It wasn’t the social network that anyone liked, they liked this feature. And so they pivoted, they changed the entire company to zoom in on this one feature. That’s what made them a billion-dollar company, not what their marketers did. And so I think what a growth hacker does is they go, instead of trying to do all this external stuff, what if the best marketing we can do is change and improve and iterate our product until it has that explosive potential? John Wall – 07:13 Yeah, right. And so you start with product fit there. And then in the book, you kind of jumped, okay, step two is finding the growth hack, which is just what you’re kind of talking about, finding. John Wall – 07:21 The thing that makes it spark. John Wall – 07:23 But so there is, there’s like no recipe for this. Now I’m kind of, it’s kind of interesting in that, in the past, you could just get a marketing professional, and you’d be all set, whereas now you need somebody that kind of understands the product and the audience and, maybe can code around what needs to be done. I mean, it seems like it’s a lot more difficult to find people who can do this. Now, you could talk about that. Ryan Holiday – 07:43 Well, I would say, I would say the old model was: Make a thing, hire a marketer or a publicist to get attention for that thing, hope that it’s successful, rinse and repeat until it is. But the growth hacker mindset, I sort of go through these steps in the book. It’s tweak and iterate your product until it has explosive potential. Then, instead of some major blow the doors off blockbuster launch, it’s, “How can we find the core early adopters for this product?” I think Uber is a great example of a company that said, “We’re not going to launch nationwide. Let’s start small. Let’s start in San Francisco. Let’s launch it at South by Southwest where we bring in our core customers.” It’s how do you find a small, contained group of people or a platform that you can use to bring those people in? So another great example of this is, PayPal didn’t say, “Hey, how can we replace credit cards or become the dominant online payments platform?” They said, “Look, a lot of people are using eBay to sell things. What if we insert ourselves into that transaction and add value?” They sort of took advantage of that platform. Upworthy is another great startup that’s doing millions and millions of pages because they figured out how to master Facebook and the Facebook feed. So it’s all about figuring out the platform or the initial trick. By trick, I don’t mean like deceive people. I just mean the unexpected or unusual way to bring people through the front door. And then, from there, your other things. So if you’ve built in viral features, like, you have a good referral program, you have a way that encourages the network effect. So if your product is better, the more people use it, if you bring in people through a growth hack, well, then the product is going to get bigger virally because those people are going to want to bring more people in. And then, the final step that I talk about in the book is this idea of, look, focus on retention rather than acquisition. So it’s like, okay, I brought in 1000 people, but only 100 of them signed up and became customers. Well, what’s wrong with my landing page? What’s wrong with my product? Why are my users leaving? And then, how do you improve and iterate and tweak the product until that problem goes away? That sort of four-step cycle is the way that growth hackers think about the world, and I think that’s so much more effective and efficient than just hoping that an article in The New York Times makes you a success or hoping that ten articles in The New York Times will finally make you a success. John Wall – 10:29 Right. Right. They’re going to land TechCrunch, and that’d be great for the first month and then dry up and go, “Okay, we’ve.” John Wall – 10:35 Just got to take a minute. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of Marketing Over Coffee. I’ve only got one minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Whether you manage 10 sites or 1000, 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. Time’s up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. John Wall – 11:16 Check it out over at wixstudio.com, and we thank them for their support of the show. The interesting thing is, although at first, people might feel, “Hey, this is,” well, it’s like any technology shift, too, that people will feel it’s threatening. But the reality is if you’re doing this right now, it’s going to tie you right into both customer service and product marketing and sales. It actually makes you a lot more valuable as a marketer in the mix here. Ryan Holiday – 11:39 Yeah, totally. John Wall – 11:40 One question to throw back, you were talking about at certain scale, awareness and brand building makes sense, but for the first year or two, it’s a waste of money. That was a quote that was in the book, talking about how it’s all about this acquisition and making that happen as a repeatable process. But I mean, do you ever feel now that there’s a point where brand awareness does make sense? Or is that just something like. Ryan Holiday – 12:02 Of course, look, I guess what I’m saying is so much of the marketing advice that people get and study is designed for really big companies. It’s like you read something like *The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing*, which is a fantastic book, and I definitely recommend it. It’s like giving you advice on how one airline beat out another airline. But that’s so far from the reality of where most of us live. And even my first book, I’m talking about getting attention and doing marketing stunts for, a company that did $700 million in sales and has stores all over the world. It’s not hard for us to be newsworthy because we’re a big company. But what growth hacking does? Growth hacking is designed for a startup to go from zero users to 10 users to 100,000. Right. It’s designed to take a project from nothing to something. And that’s so much more similar, or more like the situation that most people coming to marketing are in. We’re trying to launch a restaurant, or a podcast, or a blog, or a book, or a startup, like, we’re trying to take, or even, we’re trying to just get more attention for ourselves or our personal brand. We’re trying to go from nothing to something, just like these startups are, although the startups try to do it on a much larger scale than, than we do. But I think their lessons and their innovations are what we should focus on because there’s a lot of value there. John Wall – 13:39 Yeah, absolutely. That’s funny. I’ve often said that the biggest mistake a lot of companies make is trying to ape Coca-Cola, or, like you said, an airline, that’s perfect. Those are not the decisions you need to be making. You’re playing in a different arena completely. Ryan Holiday – 13:56 Right. Yeah. It’s total apples and oranges. And yet I’m trying to launch this book or do this project, and the thinking of the person who’s giving me advice was, “How to, how to make Visa’s sales 2% larger, or how Johnson and Johnson can spin off one brand into another brand.” Their thinking and what they judge to be success is so, is so drastic. And it’s not like, okay, they spent $10 million, I should spend $10,000. It’s not a matter of scale, it’s a fundamentally different approach. Whereas the startups are, we’ve got to get people in the door, we didn’t exist yesterday, and now we’re open for business, how do I get people to come? And that’s what I wanted to write this book for, and I wanted to take their lessons because, look, Facebook went from zero users when it launched in 2004, 2005, to a billion users in less than 10 years. A billion users, that’s insane. And they did it without a marketing team. They had a growth team instead. And I wanted this book to be the lessons from those growers and those growth teams, and growth hacking is the philosophy that came out of those experiments now. John Wall – 15:20 And interesting, too, it’s a Penguin imprint. It’s actually a shorter book. It’s like a 50-page read. Is the book itself an experiment? Are you trying anything different with the marketing of this? And how’s it all going? Ryan Holiday – 15:32 Totally, look, so my first book, and actually I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May, both of those were sort of the traditionally published book. There are 300 pages they took a year to write, and then they took a year to publish after that. That’s how traditional book publishing is done. But I didn’t want to sit down and write a book about growth hacking, which is this thing that’s changing all the time and improving, new factors are introduced, and whatever. I didn’t want to go out into the woods for a year working on this thing. I wanted to get something out quickly. I wanted it to be short, and then I wanted people to be able to receive it digitally and not have to wait for a printer to spit back many tens of thousands of copies. And so what we did with the book was we kept it short. We priced it really cheaply, it’s $3. We got it out there fast. And then, hopefully, if we do a paperback, or if I do an expanded edition, I can improve based on their feedback and based on that reader feedback. And that is very much the growth hacker mindset, for sure. John Wall – 16:36 All right, that’s cool. And then, of course, we get the bonus, too, talking about *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, which had come out earlier. So the great thing about this book is that, and we’ve talked for years on this podcast about the way you make arguments and shades of meaning, talking about the difference between persuasion versus manipulation. That’s a very big deal. But you basically, with this book, just went right to the other side and said, “Look, now there’s a whole realm of dirty tricks and interesting things going on here.” And you’ve explained everything that goes on. It’s amazing to read some of the stuff that you’ve done. The crazy part is I remember seeing some of that stuff that you did in American Apparel go down, and it’s like, now you get the backstory and how it all happened and everything that went into that. But I guess, set it up for us first. Kind of tell us where that book came from and what it’s done for you. Ryan Holiday – 17:24 Yeah, sure. So what I wanted to do in that book, sort of being a marketer for a big, successful company, and then a handful of other really controversial clients, that tends to be who I represent, I felt like I was not so much given access, but maybe when I wasn’t supposed to peek behind the curtain. And I really saw how the media works, and I saw how vicious and competitive and unscrupulous it really was. And look, I’m not going to lie, the book is about how I took advantage of that system, thinking that sort of all is fair in love and war, and how I benefited my clients accordingly. But also sort of understanding what the costs are of a media system that will print anything and publish anything, and doesn’t care if they’re sort of incorrect, where it’s sort of this self-interest rules the day rather than ethics or the truth. And so the book is a very blunt, honest guide to operating in that environment. I wanted it to be a tell-all. I didn’t hold any of my sort of secrets back. Anything that I had done that I thought other people could do, or might want to do, I showed exactly how to do it. It was a tell-all, for sure. And naturally, that was a bit controversial, both with marketers who didn’t want me to disclose this information and the media who was fairly embarrassed by a lot of the disclosures that I made. John Wall – 18:54 Yeah, no, that’s. You never look at Huffington Post the same way again after you’ve read. Ryan Holiday – 18:59 The reality is, I haven’t looked at The Huffington Post or Gawker or Business Insider the right way in many years because I’d sort of seen this stuff before. It was like I just realized, why am I the only one who was worrying about this, and has to feel, why am I carrying this burden alone? And I wanted everyone to see it. I hope that exposing this stuff would lead to some change. I’m not sure that’s happened, but I feel like I did my duty blowing that whistle. John Wall – 19:33 Yeah, no, I would agree for it. And it’s required reading for anybody in marketing. If you’re dealing with the press or market, you’ve got to. You may never want to even be involved with any of this kind of stuff, but it will, you’ll greatly benefit from understanding what’s going on behind the scenes and why you were ignored, to be honest, is what you’re going to learn from that. All right. So that’s the books. How about, before we wrap, just like what’s up in the future? Kind of what’s on your radar right now that you’re looking at, and what’s coming up next? Ryan Holiday – 20:00 Yeah, so I have a marketing company that represents authors and brands. We just worked with Mark Eco, who did a book, and he has Complex Media, who we may be advising. So I represent a variety of really interesting people that are sort of eager to try new things. It’s going great. I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May 2014 that will actually be about stoicism, the Roman philosophy. And then, I try to write every day. I write for my site at ryanholiday.net. I’m the media columnist for The New York Observer, and I write for Thought Catalog. So those are all places you can check out my stuff if you want. And I look forward to talking to everyone. John Wall – 20:43 That sounds great. Again, the book, *Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising* is available over on Amazon. I’ll have links to that in the show notes. And of course, *Trust Me, I’m Lying*. You can check that out there, also. Ryan, thanks for stopping by and talking to us today. Ryan Holiday – 20:56 Yeah, no, thanks for having me. This is great. John Wall – 20:58 That’ll do it for this week. And until next week, enjoy the coffee. Speaker 2 – 21:02 You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. More from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters, and you can find it at Music Alley from Mevio, or follow the link in our show notes. — END OF FILE QqZHuXVTDmR2e3eI_MoC830A-mp3-st.txt — The post Ryan Holiday on Growth Hacking – From the MoC Archives appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.