In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about possible new email standards, targeted CRM attacks, the ongoing saga of John’s running tech stack, and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Email Changes to be aware of – Expiring email? Unsubscribe prompt after 30 days The future of GA4 7:22 – 8:13 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! Dynamic Pricing vs. Surge Pricing Targeted CRM attacks 12:27 – 13:55 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Google pauses opioid painkiller policy update Apple Watch Workout can’t handle audio cues? Anne Lamott Bird by Bird 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 What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. John Wall – 00:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio. Speaker 2 – 00:10 This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:18 Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wahl. Christopher Penn – 00:21 I’m Christopher Penn. John Wall – 00:22 Okay, we had a bunch of stuff this week. The interesting one was email changes to be aware of. Martech had an article talking about some things changing in the inbox. The lead one was the Apple inbox mail privacy protection program changing and things going on with that. But the interesting one for me was expiring email. Having email with expiration dates that will eventually leave your archives. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that stuff? Is expiring email feasible? That seems like just more headache than it’s worth to me. Christopher Penn – 00:51 It’s interesting because it also presumes that the receiving mail server will comply with those instructions. I don’t know that it’s built into SMTP servers. If it is, it’s probably provider by provider. So perhaps the big ones like Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail could and would, and it would make sense to do it because obviously if you have self-destructing emails, that will restore disk space at scale. But your Exchange server, your Postfix server, I have no idea if they would even support that or not. And if you are relying on the data deletion feature to clean up your mess, I don’t know that that’s something I wouldn’t necessarily want to rely on. It also is interesting because when you get email, you kind of have the presumption that you have that email in terms of things like digital chain of evidence. Now that might be relevant if, for example, a vendor sends out an email and says, “Hey, this thing’s on sale”, and they get into a class action lawsuit later. The lawyer is like, “Well, we need the emails that prove that.” And if they are self-destructing emails, that may or may not be a helpful thing. So there’s a lot of — there’s technological hurdles and there’s legal hurdles to that. John Wall – 02:02 Yeah. And I don’t know, it just seems to me that over time the technology is always to the point where it’s like — now we have — anybody could have the whole internet from the first five years on a flash drive lying around. I mean, there’s — enough storage is not an issue, especially with email. Seems to have done a good job in, limiting. Yeah, I don’t know, we’ll keep an eye on that. Another interesting one was unsubscribe prompt after 30 days. So if somebody’s doing a newsletter and they’re not publishing monthly, kind of automatically opting people out of that. I don’t know. That was another weird one to me. I didn’t see — I mean, I guess that makes sense in some ways, but it just seems like — John Wall – 02:38 I don’t know. That just seems like way more possible headache than it’s worth. Christopher Penn – 02:41 It does. And I have to question with a lot of these proposed changes and things, who benefits from all this stuff? Like, who would benefit from self-destructing emails and things? It almost, in some ways, it strikes me as the sort of thing that, say, a consortium of large technology companies who make their money on ads would be pushing to try to reduce the effectiveness of other channels to compel marketers to spend more money on their ads. Call me — call me a conspiracy theorist. John Wall – 03:09 But I know that’s straight up tinfoil hat territory there. That could not happen with Google. Christopher Penn – 03:16 Well, it’s funny you mentioned that, because this week I had a chat with some friends who work at a certain very large technology company that manufactures a product called Google Analytics four. And they were saying that there have been — and you’ve seen this in like Reddit forums and stuff like that — but my colleague was saying it’s true a lot of what you’re reading, that Google has essentially been decimated over the last 10 years by having a bunch of senior management who are all top tier consulting firm execs as opposed to technologists and engineers, and they have essentially gutted most of the company to the point where product teams and lines just don’t make sense anymore from a — what is Google good at? The example that they were talking about was Google Analytics used to be its own division. It had its own building, it had its own team, its own P&L and stuff like that. And it was aligned with Google Ads, but it was an independent product. And then GA4, as part of this — this major change really was about aligning it more closely with Google Ads to have it be more helpful to Google Ads. Well, apparently in the last few years, outside the public eye, Google Analytics, the division, has been moved into Google Ads. And the people responsible for the product itself largely — now this is, from someone who is on the inside — largely are not there anymore. And so Google Analytics is being managed by Google Ads. The product development is entirely around data collection. They said one of the things that is the highest priority right now is using AI to infer and backfill missing data from all the privacy protections that are taking place. They’re now using machine learning more and more to essentially guess what happened on your website because things like Apple’s browser is no longer showing up and blocking that data. And Google Analytics has really just turned into a data collection mechanism for Google with no benefit to the consumer. They were saying that the Google Analytics four team has absolutely no discussions about small business or midsize business. They are only focused on enterprise because 360 is still a product that’s for sale and they’re only focused on GA4 as it assists the ads business, nothing else. So any of the innovations that you are expecting to see are not there. Christopher Penn – 05:42 And you can tell this — you and I can tell this as external folks — because Google, if you look at what happened to I/O this year, they showcased, “Hey, we’re putting Gemini in this. Gemini’s in Google Slides now. Gemini’s in Google Docs. Gemini is in Google search.” Gemini is not in Google Analytics, which is the one place where it would actually do some good. John Wall – 06:01 Right. Right. Where it would help. Yeah, that tracks with everything we’ve seen because there was another article with one of the product managers of GA4 talking about, and yeah, he just slid right into “this is all about making your ads better and more targeted”. The only other interesting one — and we actually, I saw this in an article, I’ll have a link to it — but in Gmail, in the client actually having images and emoticons and a bunch of other stuff showing up, kind of new formatting, which is interesting and does give marketers some opportunities as far as having a graphic on the inbox page as opposed to opening the message. I hate to have a bad attitude about it, but I just see that getting ugly real fast unless — I will have to look though, too. John Wall – 06:40 I don’t know, maybe this is one of those things where you have to be approved as a partner and it’s going to be a really high bar to entry to start doing this stuff. Christopher Penn – 06:48 Yeah. A lot of the changes that you’re seeing from the big technology companies are all about — in many ways, it’s just concentrating the power of the folks who have the deepest pockets, unfortunately. So for the independent marketer, there is not a lot of opportunity. This is something that I was actually chatting about with Katie this morning, is like for small to mid-sized businesses, all of the big technology plays out there really are not meant for us. They’re meant to put us out of business. John Wall – 07:23 Okay. Well, fighting back for all businesses of every size, of course, is Wix and Wix Studio. We want to thank them for their support of the show. 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 1,000, 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. Check it out over at wixstudio.com and we thank them for their support of the show. Oh, there was a lot of press this week about dynamic pricing, and that’s been an interesting thing. I wanted to get your take on that. The news item that dropped this week was Walmart testing out some on-display pricing. Instead of having printed-out price tags on every item out there, it being a display that could be updated. And, the angst-grabbing headline was 12 times a minute changing the price, so, as if you would throw stuff in your cart and by the time you got to the register it would cost twice as much and you’d be really angry about that. I don’t know. John Wall – 08:43 I just feel that this is the future and the way it’s going to go, and it’s not like — well, I don’t know. I say it’s not like there’s going to be surge pricing at Walmart while you’re shopping, but I guess that is possible. Christopher Penn – 08:53 We already have it if you’ve ever tried to book a flight. John Wall – 08:57 Oh, yeah. Well, and everybody points to Uber, surge pricing is like — this is what you don’t want to do because everybody’s going to hate you. Christopher Penn – 09:04 Right. But with Uber, there’s a bit more transparency compared to booking a flight. Like, you have no idea why this ticket 20 minutes ago was $126, now it’s $1,700. What the heck is going on? It’s interesting because dynamic pricing — you know what? I actually need to get a tinfoil hat because I need to go upstairs and make one because it clearly is tinfoil hat territory day. In the last two years, there has been a lot of discussion about consumer inflation, about the price of groceries, the price of this, price of that, etc. Dynamic pricing makes that very difficult to prove, because you can walk through the store and use your smartphone to take pictures, but the price could change in seconds. And suddenly any argument you have — or it’s kind of like, when the food inspector is coming to the restaurant, you clean extra. Well, that day, I could totally see someone from Bureau of Labor Statistics stopping, and all of a sudden, the prices are all really low. Like, “Oh, look! In the aisle this guy’s in, the prices are really low” while he walks by. And then they go back to normal. John Wall – 10:11 That is crazy. I hadn’t thought about that. You could go that far, couldn’t you? As far as if someone’s a frequent buyer and they’ve surrendered all the data, you could give them specialized pricing on everything. Although — yeah. I don’t know, that’s — I now see these mobs of shoppers, like, following certain people around to get the pricing of the day. Christopher Penn – 10:30 Yeah, I don’t think it would be that instantaneous, but it’s certainly a lot — the infrastructure allows for it. At the end of the day, what’s going on there is — I mean, it’s basic economics. You’re basically trying to match your pricing to keep the supply demand curve as profitable as possible, and whatever that looks like, balancing that somehow with customer retention. But in a lot of places, particularly for retail stuff, in a lot of places, Walmart’s the only game in town. All the other stores are closed, so they may not have a national monopoly, but in, like, a 50-mile radius, they may have a monopoly on things. Christopher Penn – 11:08 And so in those situations, an algorithm can optimize the pricing and profitability of that specific retail location, store by store, and make life very expensive for people within a 50-mile radius of that store. And so this is — this is the challenge with a lot of these algorithms, is that they are — they are balanced for bookkeeping purposes and accounting purposes, but they are not balanced for the human beings, and it can make life very difficult for people. John Wall – 11:38 I don’t know. Not enough attention has been paid to what you were just talking about, because I was out buying clothes for my son last night. We were shopping for some stuff, and I was thinking about how when I shop for clothes, there were all these stores. You had all these choices. We literally have one choice, unless we’re going to drive more than an hour to a major metropolitan area — we could drive an extra 20 to Target. Otherwise, Walmart is the store in the area. So it’s just amazing how that has changed the whole face of retail as far as what’s going on. Christopher Penn – 12:08 Yeah. And the irony is the only thing that may be stopping absolute monopoly pricing pressure is Amazon, because like, “Oh, it’s too much here at Walmart. I’ll order from Amazon.” John Wall – 12:18 Yeah, right. It’s actually — it becomes convenience is the thing. It’s like, if you have to have it tomorrow, well, now Amazon’s not an option, but otherwise you’re going to go through them. 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. 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 on 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. John Wall – 13:43 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. I had an interesting piece about a CRM breach, a major vendor who we’re not going to call out because they’re people we like, but had — it was funny — a small subset of clients that had been hacked, literally less than one 10th of 1% of their clientele. But it was interesting going back and looking. I noticed that there are these breaches, but the thing is that they’re specifically targeted. Like a previous one, it was all cryptocurrency companies, they got breached as part of the CRM thing. So that just struck me as really interesting, this idea that somebody would take a certain vertical where they know they can do social scams or scrape data because of what they do, and then being able to attack them over on the CRM side. I just thought that was kind of fascinating as far as — and obviously, all CRM vendors — I mean, yes they get breached — but I have to say they’re probably the most vigilant and have the best defenses against this kind of stuff, because that’s their model and that’s what they’re doing. That’s just interesting. Have you come across anything similar as far as specific types of — well, of course, we always see — unfortunately, it’s normally the senior citizens that get scammed with this stuff because they’re the easiest target, and so I guess that’s just what it is. Christopher Penn – 15:10 So there’s part of that. One of the things that cybersecurity folks are wrestling with right now is it turns out that generative AI tools, particularly tools that are capable of both regular AI and coding, are extremely good at breaking into things. Because unlike a human hacker, they just continue to write and rewrite their code until they get something that works, that gets past the security measure. And when you have a GPU cluster of your own, or you are sponsored by a hostile nation state, you have better hacking tools today than you have ever had in the world. And so this is a real concern for pretty much every digital business, is — Christopher Penn – 15:51 — is making sure that you’re doing your best on your front, making sure two-factor authentication is turned on everything, making sure that your employees know how social engineering works and what scams are going to look like. And, scams going to look like, “Hey, that sounds like my CFO’s voice on the phone. What’s the internal password that we have for — to avoid transferring money?” But generative AI allows everything to be faster and better, and that includes bad actors. John Wall – 16:17 Yeah, so there’s more opportunity to take advantage of that. I can see that. Christopher Penn – 16:21 Yep. Here’s the thing is, it requires less skill than ever. If you have a really capable model, you can just give it a super stupid prompt like, “Hey, here’s the login page to this — this website, Wells Fargo bank. Find me a working login”, and then let it do all the heavy lifting of writing the code and trying to solve the problem with an — with agent-based networks. It enables skill-less hackers to make progress, and it makes skillful hackers really talented. John Wall – 16:51 Yeah, that’s the real — script kiddies are one thing, but real hackers having even more powerful tools, that’s definitely a frightening prospect across the board. So an interesting article — this is — I — I have nothing on this, but Google pausing its opioid painkiller policy for advertising. That’s something that we’ve never actually run down the — on the topic list as far as opioids and how that works into advertising and pharma. I was actually just going to throw that out there, if anybody out there is a specialist in that area and can talk more about that, we would love to hear more about that because that just seems like such a dangerous area to wade into with so much going on. Even with all the money in pharma, Google is not ready to just jump in there and go with that. I don’t know. John Wall – 17:37 Any thoughts on that as far as, like, where that could end up or what that should be doing? Christopher Penn – 17:41 I have no idea. I mean, this is the thing is all this stuff is going in so many different directions. It’s really — I have no idea. John Wall – 17:52 Yeah, that was the thing going down the rundown for this week. It was like, we kind of joke about how, like, every week it gets more insane, but this was one of those weeks where there were just like 20 things where I was like, “Oh my God, these are all different buckets on fire.” That — Christopher Penn – 18:05 Yeah, everything’s on fire. John Wall – 18:07 Yeah, yeah, it’s — it’s always moving, always changing. Totally random. Oh yeah, okay. So something also changing and different is Elton John at Dreamforce. I had mentioned that earlier, I don’t know how the heck that happened, but here we are with that on gear watch. I had the — I had been encouraged to try the Apple Watch workout. I have not been able to get the audio cues to work with that, and I have a support call into Apple about that to see if they can work that. But the good news is actually, Rungap, the app that I use to synchronize all that stuff, has finally got Adidas Running working. So it’s insane, I have a whole tech stack that I have to keep maintained for running, which seems totally ridiculous, but here we are on that also. John Wall – 18:52 That was the story with that. Yeah. July, normally we expect things to be slowing down, but it’s been total insanity, too. On the business front, there’s all kinds of stuff that’s been moving and we’ve got a lot going on. Yeah, there’s a chance — it’s not locked in stone, so we’re not going to talk too much about it, but you may be doing a tour of Israel coming up soon, which is a big load of travel for you, but that’s going to be — that’ll be a new one to check off the list, at least. Christopher Penn – 19:19 Exactly, that’s all I’ll say about that. It’s always interesting places. John Wall – 19:23 Okay. And two more before we go out the door. Just on the media front, Anne Lamott’s _Bird by Bird_ is a fantastic book on writing. If you have not read that, it’s a classic, actually, but I just got around to it. I had not read it on its first run through, and so I can heartily recommend that, and so I wanted to put that out there. And then Rick Rubin’s _The Creative Act: A Way of Being_ is another great book talking about the creative process and how to get things done, how to get content out of there, and what you have to fight through to make things like that happen. So I wanted to give a plug for both those, we’ll have links to those in the show notes. John Wall – 19:57 And of course you can sign up for the Marketing over Coffee newsletter over on the website. And don’t forget the text line at 617-812-5494, but that’s going to do it for this week, so until next week, enjoy the coffee. Christopher Penn – 20:09 Enjoy the coffee. Speaker 2 – 20:11 You’ve been listening to Marketing over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw51.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. The post Dynamic Pricing, Expiring Email, The Future of GA4, and Bird by Bird appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about the Art, Business, Culture of GIFs and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite John is always using Ted Lasso And Robert Downey Jr.’s Eye Roll Gif versus Jif? (It’s all good, but the company is not Jiffy) They did the Peanut Butter Jar Neil Patrick Harris for Buble GIPHY Stickers The first GIF creative agency 7:25 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! Getting her start in Infographics! Then to BuzzFeed in 2012 GIPHY reflecting the changes in the culture Avoid “How do you do, fellow kids” Kindness is on the rise NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Media recommendation! Problemista written and directed by Julio Torres Find Alix on LinkedIn and learn more about GIPHY Ads here Her webinar July 18th at 1pm! Make Your Brand Part of the Actual Conversation 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. Speaker 1 – 00:07 This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:14 Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today, we are talking with Alix McAlpine of Giphy. I’m just thrilled to talk with you today because I have just taken GIFs for granted my whole entire life. I’m using them all the time. It enriches everything that I do, but I’ve never dug in to say, “What’s the business behind this? What does Giphy do?” And so I’m just excited to learn everything about all this stuff here. Alix, thanks for joining us. Alix McAlpine – 00:39 Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here and to talk to a GIF fan. I want to hear if you have a favorite that you’ve been using a lot right now. John Wall – 00:48 Oh, well, *Ted Lasso* has kind of cornered the market, so pretty much everything Ted is always big. And then, another one is Robert Downey Jr. eye-rolling. That gets a lot of play in our Slack group. Alix McAlpine – 01:02 Amazing. John Wall – 01:02 So that’s another big one. Okay. And so we do have to talk about — I’m sure you’re completely sick of talking about this — but GIF versus Jif, and how does that fit into, and especially as it’s part of the company name. Alix McAlpine – 01:14 Yeah, that’s a great question, and we get this question a lot. The answer is that both are correct. So there really is, you just pick which side you want to be on. I think we have people who prefer to be kind of a language purist, so they side with GIF, as in gift, like a gift that you send to your friends. And there are those who align with the creator of the GIF who did pronounce it Jif. And I find that people are really locked into the side that they’re on. So if you’re having a conversation with someone, we call the company Giphy, so we use GIF at the company. But we’ll have meetings where people are using Jif, and they are not budging. So I feel like people are very passionate about the side of the pronunciation debate that they’re on. But we accept both because both are right. John Wall – 01:58 You’re okay with both? I could totally see being okay with GIF or Jif, but if I was running the company, I’d be like, “No, it has to be Giphy. It can’t be Jiffy.” Are there any employees that call it Jiffy? Alix McAlpine – 02:12 No. I think it is kind of a red flag if you call it Jiffy Giphy. I don’t think I’ve encountered any employees, but it’s certainly — we had a campaign a couple years ago, I want to say in 2020, we ran a campaign with Jif the peanut butter, where we made like a jar that said Gif on it to kind of play into the debate. That’s been a really fun thing to point back to when this conversation comes up. The jars, if I remember correctly, sold out on Amazon right away. We made actual physical jars, and they became kind of collector’s items that day. It was a really fun moment. John Wall – 02:45 Oh, I’m so excited to hear that because, yeah, I knew about that. I had seen those jars, but I didn’t realize that was a campaign that you guys hacked. That was you? Alix McAlpine – 02:52 Yeah, it was in partnership with Jif. John Wall – 02:54 Okay, so, yeah. And those are still — that is still lore that you can buy those for premium dollars on Amazon or wherever you can find them if they’re still on auction. Alix McAlpine – 03:03 Yeah. John Wall – 03:04 Tell us about the company. I mean, I have no idea how this fits into the whole scheme of the internet. Alix McAlpine – 03:10 Yeah. So, Giphy is about to be 11 years old. It was started in 2013, and it kind of just came from this idea of powering visual conversation. And at the time, people were using GIFs. I think people were finding them on other platforms, but there wasn’t kind of a centralized way to index them and discover them and really kind of accelerate this notion of GIFs as a visual communication tool. So that was founded then and then kind of grew over time. I joined in 2016, so by then, there were quite a few people on the team: editors kind of curating the library, partnerships staff that was working with media companies and artists and musicians to make sure that everything that was created in video, kind of throughout the web, was funneled into Giphy as bite-sized pieces. When I joined, we started a studios team to create original content and really kind of make Giphy more of an entertainment and communication platform by creating all this original content with these amazingly talented animators. From there, we’ve developed talent. Shoots became a big thing where people would come through. We used to work — maybe giving you too much background — but we used to work out of this home in LA. When I first moved here in Hollywood, it was like off Melrose, just one of those kind of new builds with a pool. We turned one of the bedrooms into a green screen shoot room where people would come through on their press stop. So, new musicians would come through, and we would create reaction GIFs of them, and so kind of filling the library with all these great pop culture figures and really kind of helping accelerate how much people were using GIFs in their conversations. And then, I can get into — in 2018, we launched our advertising business. And so that is what our focus is on right now again. But back then, we were very lucky to partner with Pepsi. It was our first big advertiser. We helped them launch Bubly, which was their sparkling water that launched in 2018. That campaign was based on creating 1000 GIFs of their spokesperson, who was Neil Patrick Harris, and that really helped us take off at the time. But right now, Giphy is Giphy. We’re still growing the library. We’re in — I want to say 14,000 apps — we’re just everywhere, powering communication. So, it’s a really fun place to work. John Wall – 05:28 Okay, so then the big idea is that it’s the library, that’s the content that you’re building the whole company on. And it’s that content that gets shared and used in other places. You create custom content. Do I have that right? That that’s the primary business model? Alix McAlpine – 05:41 That’s correct. It’s the library. And then, the special thing about the library is the distribution. So it really lives everywhere that people are communicating in this visual way. It’s in messaging, social media, and commenting platforms. We also have a product called stickers, which are GIFs without the background, and you’ll see those kind of in stories and video apps. People use those to ornament existing pieces of content. So really, anywhere that we can — I think you used this word — enrich conversations, or existing media, you’ll find Giphy. John Wall – 06:12 Is usually there. As far as working with clients, obviously, so then advertisers must come to you and say, “Hey, we want to get a whole bunch of GIFs for whatever the launch is, or whatever this product is.” Is it basically like you guys are a creative ad agency, and they just come to you, and you start building things? Alix McAlpine – 06:28 Exactly. That was the vision for the studios team back when we started in 2016, was to make it the first GIF creative agency. And so, we work, we have a creative strategy team in the advertising department that kind of works with the data and makes sure that brands are building campaigns that really align with not only what is endemic to their brand — so, things that they can really own, areas of conversation that might be a little bit more niche and less competition in the search — and also align with great tentpole moments to make sure that they take advantage of moments in pop culture or in sports and, holidays and such. And the last element that we really try to advise on is also leaning into popular searches, so making sure that they take advantage of the amount of traffic and engagement that those popular searches get. So we kind of sprinkle in three areas to make sure that brands have, like, great coverage in terms of the conversations that they can be a part of. John Wall – 07:25 Okay, got it. It’s like as we open the box, there’s a million other things I want to ask you about that we can get into. Before we do that, though, we just have to take a second. 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. Check it out over at wixstudio.com, and we thank them for their support of the show. Yeah, you’ve kind of blown my mind in that — okay, so it’s a flavor of ad agency. And yet, you guys have this distribution channel that no one else has. You’re in all the social media channels. You’re baked into all these different apps. I mean, I see you over in Slack, and we’re over in messaging, and it’s over here in the channels. Is that even a fully established part of the business now? Do you even have a team that sets up the channels and works with integrations and stuff like that? Or how does all that work? Alix McAlpine – 08:44 Yeah, I can just say we have a business development team, and we have dedicated engineers that make sure that everyone that integrates Giphy has a great experience and access to the content that’s the best for their users. John Wall – 08:57 So with the advertising product, is the idea that it would eventually be self-serve, or are you guys always kind of doing bespoke campaigns and a more white-glove for clients thing? Alix McAlpine – 09:08 Right now, we’re just focusing on direct sold campaigns and really trying to lean into this custom content and making the experience really fun and seamless for the users. So one thing that we do, obviously when you’re in search, it’s all contextual targeting, and we know that contextual targeting can be most successful when your content is really good and really eye-catching. So we advise brands on how to use their existing content. So we work a lot with entertainment brands to cut down trailers or episodes from shows and kind of adapting them into these pieces of visual communication, little pieces of self-expression if you will. Or we do kind of like soup to nuts full productions. We have a facility in Chinatown in LA with a really big green screen if we want to do a green screen, or we’ll build sets. And we also have a great, very talented animation team that I mentioned earlier that can make little custom vignettes, 3D animation, anything that really is eye-catching and very expressive for the brands to get their message across to our users. John Wall – 10:14 Okay. And I do have to rewind just a little bit here, too. Tell us about your career and how did you end up at this company doing something that’s totally revolutionary to the ad industry? Alix McAlpine – 10:25 Well, thank you. What a great way to put it. I’ve worked in branded content since 2010. So, since the hot new thing at the time was infographics, I worked for a creative agency that was doing a lot of infographics and some stunty stuff. We’re the people responsible for the first Foursquare check-in in space, working with NASA back in the day, doing some — I’ve always been kind of fortunate to work in this delightful kind of like internet space. Because after that, I went on to join BuzzFeed in 2012 when they were just kind of accelerating their branded content business, and I was one of the first members of the creative team. I helped them build their US teams and also their teams abroad and really kind of ride that wave and pushing, sponsored posts and quizzes at the time, but really working with all this young talent that really helped bring such great creativity and uniqueness to the offering for all the brands that we worked with. After four years at BuzzFeed, I was asked to join Giphy, and it’s been — I’ve been there for a long time, eight years — but it’s been, I think, every couple of years there’s been a new challenge or a new exciting thing that we’ve worked on. So it’s been really fun. But I’ve always kind of straddled creative and business. And so, right now, I’m a little bit more heavily indexed on the business side but still really advising on the creative piece to make sure that the experience is really fun for brands and users alike. John Wall – 11:53 Okay. Yeah, that is just an amazing checklist when we think about — because we’ve been doing the show for over 15 years now — and so, yeah, I remember there was a time where infographics were just, that was everything. There were entire agencies that did nothing but infographics. And then Foursquare, isn’t that a Boston area company? I mean, they’re still around, they still do some crazy stuff, but that’s — yeah, that’s amazing, too. Now, tell me if I have the right feeling here. I just get the feeling that you are an artistic slant. Are you, do you have a lot of graphic design training in your past, and do you come from that angle? Alix McAlpine – 12:25 I cannot draw to save my life, but I do think I have a good eye, and I am creative. I think I index more on the side of — I was a writer, I went to journalism school and worked in the music industry before I worked on all this stuff. But I kind of got my start on the internet because I was a blogger, and so I was kind of a creative director for copywriting. And then, of course, been fortunate to learn the ropes at Giphy, working with a lot of visual artists and flexing that muscle. So I have a good eye, and I call myself the optimizer. I can just — because I think I’ve worked here for so long — I can really tell when something is going to function or not in a conversation. And that’s the value I bring on the creative side. John Wall – 13:06 Yeah. Okay. So that writing, storytelling skill, editing, and being able to get to the point — that is huge when it comes down to getting the story out there. And I do have to ask about BuzzFeed, too, because that’s a whole nother area. That was just insane. Do you have anything from your profile as far as interesting stuff that happened there, things that you can talk about? Alix McAlpine – 13:24 I mean, every — so we were in New York. That’s where the business started. I think we launched the office in LA in 2013. And it was — I don’t know how to describe it. It was so fun. It was like college 2.0 for a lot of people because the staff was very young, and there were happy hours every Thursday. There were always kind of celebrities stopping by. It was unreal. We had so much fun. And on the business side, it was just a crazy time to be there because we doubled year over year when I was there. So, as someone whose job was dedicated to hiring and training new creatives, I was kind of the growth person. I ran a fellowship where we hired kind of fresh talent that didn’t necessarily have copywriting backgrounds but had kind of like a promising sense of how to work a BuzzFeed post. I just got to meet a lot of people and grow the business, and just — I hate saying, like, I was on the rocket ship, but it really was an exciting time. And it was such a moment in culture, also, to see video start, BuzzFeed Video and all those people, all the talent become celebrities. There are so many crazy days. I remember one day I was getting lunch — we had this catered lunch — and I went to get lunch, and the only other person in the cafeteria was E-40, who was like a really famous Bay Area rapper. And I was like, “Why is E-40 in the cafeteria?” Stuff like that would happen all the time. It was really fun. John Wall – 14:48 I knew you would have some interesting tales about that because that was, it was the classic internet rocket ride — how things went crazy. So what was actually the switch to Giphy then? Did you know somebody there? Or had you already done some work with somebody that pulled you in? Alix McAlpine – 15:02 I actually had a relationship with someone — I think through Twitter at the time — named Nick Weidenfeld, who ran this animation studio called Fox ADHD. They had a segment on Fox, and they did little animation shorts, and they also had a GIF presence. They did GIF the news. And when Fox ADHD didn’t get renewed, they were acquired by Giphy. Part of that team is what started Giphy Studios. And so Nick remembered that I worked in branded content, and he had come to actually give a talk to the creative team at BuzzFeed while I was there. I would bring in people to talk to the creative team about their creative careers and how they balanced being a creative at work and outside of work, and how to keep your sanity — it’s always a balancing game. And he just hit me up and was like, “Hey, I think you might be good for this job.” And I applied and flew out to LA to meet the team, and I was fortunate enough to get hired. John Wall – 15:56 Aha. That’s great. You passed the test, made it through the screen. That’s great. As old man Gen X, I just consider GIFs to be a miracle. I come from an age where you didn’t have access to video. So the fact that I can put a three-second video to share a joke or make a point, that’s just a pure miracle to me, and I love doing it all the time. But how about for the rest of the marketplace because we hear about Gen Alpha burning out on tech, or the way millennials look at things. What’s the company’s stance on that? Or how do you guys profile everybody across the board? Is it a matter of that just X percent of the whole world uses this, or is there any other story that you tell about this? Alix McAlpine – 16:35 That’s an interesting question. I think there’s this notion that young people don’t like GIFs or find them cringe. And I’m here to dispel that rumor. We really see kind of an even spread in each kind of age group. Gen Z is there, millennials use them, Gen X is there. We don’t have data for people under 18, but I know that we have users from — everybody uses Giphy. I mean, the reach is unbelievable, so you can really imagine you can reach anyone in all these different types of apps that we’re in. We’re in a lot of workplace apps, so maybe that audience is a little bit older. We’re in dating apps, we’re in social media apps, so every app has a different user profile. But what I will say is one thing that I find really interesting about Giphy is how it reflects culture and language as it evolves. One of my favorite things to do, if I see an article — there will be, like, a New York Times trend piece about a new piece of slang that people are using, or I’ll run into a new expression on TikTok — and I love to go in and see, “Are people really searching for this?” And I can see this. Gen Z — I think Gen Z is having a moment right now where we’re all kind of more aware of these new phrases that they’re using because of TikTok and kind of the access that we have now to youth culture through TikTok — and I love to see “rizz,” “delu,” all of those words that kind of surfaced last year, they are rising and continue to rise. And so we find it really exciting to see that and to offer advertisers an opportunity to kind of be part of those conversations. I would say tread lightly when it comes to, working in Gen Z slang because it can very easily be — what’s that meme? — “How do you do, fellow kids?” Tread lightly. But we know the users are there, so we can align in a really organic way with the way that people are talking. John Wall – 18:26 Right. And so how about for the future? What kind of stuff is on the product roadmap for you? Obviously, now that I get the idea of you’re doing content for everybody, so it’s basically anyone who has a story you could come up with something around. But is there anything that you guys are talking about or showing off as, like, here’s how we think this is going to go forward in the coming years? Alix McAlpine – 18:45 The thing that’s interesting is, GIFs are a form of self-expression. So I think as self-expression adapts, new apps are built, new ways of expressing ourselves grow, I think Giphy kind of follows that as it follows culture, like I just said. But in terms of the ad product itself, I think we’re right now at a stage in our business — since we just relaunched our advertising efforts last year — where we’re really learning from our advertisers, and what they’re looking for right now is really different than last year or two years ago. And so we’re really spending a lot of time listening to what makes the offering more appealing to them and making sure that it’s also appealing for the users. So one thing that we just launched this week, we had a premiere for a TV show, and we sponsored the search bar, which we’ve never thought of doing before, but it’s this, it’s the most engaged with piece of the website. And so you can have a little bit of branding in the search bar, and it looks fun and colorful and dynamic. We also have a new banner — you know, if people are really into homepage takeovers still for these big tentpoles — and we really do see the user behavior for Giphy around holidays, or something like Mother’s Day, where people are really connecting one on one to talk about certain occasions. Our user engagement goes up, and the traffic goes up. So those are really good times to be a part of Giphy, and I think we’re discovering those every year, there’s a new one that pops up as user behavior changes. That’s how we are evolving and hopefully providing something fun and new as we go along. John Wall – 20:20 Yeah, and you had said something, which I had never thought of, was actually plugging into dating apps. That’s just kind of, that must be an interesting thing to track and follow. Are there any other things like that as far as channels where you never expected to see it or trends pop up, just things that the average public would never know about? Alix McAlpine – 20:38 You know, one thing I’ve observed in the last couple of years as we kind of shifted to work from home, there’s a lot of behavior that’s kind of risen to the top of, like, our top 100 keywords centered around marking the passage of time. So, “Happy Monday,” “Happy Tuesday,” “Happy Wednesday.” People are greeting each other in the workplace or in their group texts about days. People are really celebrating seasons, and it’s really interesting. We knew — “Good morning.” “Good morning” has always been one of our top, top keywords — but I found this really interesting, and more positivity. I want to say connecting GIFs, the side-eye is important. The eye-roll, I think, is the one you mentioned. But a lot of positivity rises to the top. Telling somebody “Happy Monday” is about the most wholesome thing you can do, and we find that people are doing that. Millions of people are doing that every. John Wall – 21:29 Month through Giphy. Usually, going out the door just to get a personal touch, we always ask if you have any recommendations for our audience as far as media, books, news in the marketing space. Just anything that you’ve caught recently that you could recommend. Alix McAlpine – 21:43 I don’t have something closely related to Giphy, but I just — when you said movie recommendation, I just thought of this movie I just saw on a plane a couple of weeks ago, *Problemista* by Julio Torres. And he is — do you know Michel Gondry? John Wall – 22:01 No, no. This is all the director. Alix McAlpine – 22:03 I think Michel Gondry did *Eternal Sunshine*, and he makes these movies that are really kind of dreamlike. This movie really reminded me of Michel Gondry. It’s beautiful, lots of magical realism, a lot of heart and humor. And it features Julio Torres, the director and writer himself, but also Tilda Swinton, who just feels like a very otherworldly person, and RZA, a member of Wu-Tang Clan. So I just love that. And if anybody just wants to, like, take a break from reality and have just a dazzling film, I thought that would be my recommendation to anyone. I’ve been telling all my friends to watch it. John Wall – 22:40 Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, well, I’ll include a link to that, and we can put the trailer over in the show notes so people can check that out. That’s — always appreciate a good. Yeah, a distraction from reality is a wonderful thing. Alix McAlpine – 22:51 Definitely. John Wall – 22:53 So you’ve got a webinar coming up next week, too. Tell us more about that. Alix McAlpine – 22:56 Yeah, we’re doing a webinar with Adweek on Thursday, July 18. I believe it’s at 1:00 PM Eastern. It’s called “Make Your Brand a Part of the Actual Conversation,” talking all about being a part of pop culture and conversational media, how to really activate on those tentpoles as they’re coming up for the holidays, and hopefully, we’ll have a little fun, too. John Wall – 23:18 All right, that sounds great. We will plug that in the show notes so you can click right through. Alix, if people want to find out more about you or Giphy, what’s the best way to get in touch? Alix McAlpine – 23:27 Best way, I think you can find me on LinkedIn. I do have a hard-to-find name, Alix, not Alex, McAlpine. But I think if you look for Alix Giphy, you’ll find me. And ads.giphy.com if you want to find out more about our ads business and how you can plug in. John Wall – 23:43 That sounds great. Yeah, well, we can put your LinkedIn right in the show notes so people can click through over there. And that’ll do it for this week. So, until next week, enjoy the coffee. Speaker 1 – 23:52 You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read 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. The post Alix McAlpine with the Inside Story on GIPHY! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about Customer Data Platforms, Virtual Event Content, Luxury Apple Watch Bands and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Customer Data Platform – a single customer record is maybe not required? What are the 3 functions of a CDP? Gemini showing up in Google Office and Email Google stopping continuous scroll 7:18 – 8:47 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Toys R Us AI Generated Ad has come a long way since Pepperoni Hug Spot! Lawn Mowing Death Knight Chris’ first AI Generated single on Spotify 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 AI CEO on using GenAI for A/B Testing Using virtual events to fill the content funnel OpenAI and Reddit – Do we need more sarcasm? Are upvotes the key to better data? The Acolyte, Speidel Watch Band, Lawrence Vanishing Comedy Central and MTV 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 What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. John Wall – 00:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by NetSuite and Wix Studio. Speaker 2 – 00:10 This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:18 Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Christopher Penn – 00:20 And I’m Christopher Penn. John Wall – 00:22 Summer is here. We’re just getting ready to wrap up. Yeah, actually this is going to go out the week of 4 July. We’re recording the week before, so we’re kind of taking next week off. And I had that as a skip week, but NetSuite wanted to be in your inbox for 4 July. So here we are, and we thank them for their support of the show. Yeah, a ton of stuff going on this week. We have some fun stuff to kick around, some possibly incendiary topics that we want to go and went. Let’s jump in. First one was an article in MarTech about CDPs. We’ve talked about these customer data platforms where you try and grab all the info. The article said, well, maybe this isn’t the right way to go. Maybe you don’t always need one record for an individual person. Like, if you have somebody, there’s people who are always having different personas. They have multiple email addresses. In fact, they have shared email addresses depending if it’s a work thing. They have their persona of them as a VP of marketing at whatever company. But on the weekends, they’re proclaiming that the Earth is flat and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. So maybe do you want to have multiple records in your CDP? And I don’t know, what’s your gut on that? Christopher Penn – 01:27 Well, it’s interesting. So the CDP has three functions. We call them the, we literally call it AAA: authenticate, augment, activate. Authenticate means you resolve the person’s identity so that you know John Wall on Twitter is the same as John Wall on Facebook, on LinkedIn, in your email, just that you know that’s the person’s sort of federated identity. So you authenticate. That’s who they are. Second is augment, which is where you start bringing in extra data. So on the weekend, John goes skiing, on the weekend, John rides horses and all this stuff. Because that can help inform things like your creative and stuff if you’re going to do really good AI personalization. The third is activate, to be able to push data to the right downstream systems like a DSP, to say, okay, this ad for our thing should go out on these channels. And here’s the unique identifier that we had that we could pass to an ad system if you have multiple records. A, that kind of defeats the point of authenticate. B, it makes augment very hard because now you’re augmenting multiple records. And C, activation’s a real pain in the butt because you’re like, okay, am I sending the right people to the right list for the right ad? I understand conceptually wanting to have a multi-dimensional profile. Like, yeah, if you have a creative that happens to have horse riding in it is like the main image, then you’d want to know that’s more likely to appeal to John Wall as than, say, Christopher Penn. But you still want that in one unified record. So the idea of multiple records kind of goes against all three main purposes of a CDP. John Wall – 02:58 Yeah. And it’s funny, my note just was failure to authenticate. So this is a vendor basically, like, trying to spin. Yeah, it’s difficult to do as well. It’s okay if some of the records are messed up. Christopher Penn – 03:11 That makes a lot of sense. So they’re basically saying, yeah, our software can’t do the job, so just accept it. John Wall – 03:16 Well. And I think there’s some weirdness. Like, shared accounts is a really weird corner case where. But again, that’s failure to authenticate. Like, you just don’t know which people are on that. So that’s not, you don’t throw the model out just because there’s some corner cases that don’t fit the thing. Okay, so that’s good. We’re on the same page as far as that goes. Another big one now. And I’m like crusty old man. I’ve got Gemini showing up in the Google Suite all over the place, and I’m already annoyed because it’s like every time I open up a doc, it’s like, “Hey, how about some Gemini stuff over here?” And I’m like, “No, I’m going back to work on what I’m doing.” But no doubt, and you’ve been on the cutting edge of this stuff. How about this additional rollout of stuff? Is there stuff that you found useful in there and kind of what should be keeping our eyes out for as far as this? Christopher Penn – 04:03 I think it certainly has some useful basics. For example, in Gmail, you can say, “Show me all the emails I sent to this client that I, that this client sent me that I haven’t responded to yet.” Unearthing, like, “Oh, I forgot to do this.” So some pretty basic clerical stuff. The way I use Gemini within Google’s development and programming environment, so I’m using the raw model itself and not the friendly interface. It’ll be the same with Apple’s AI onboard iPhones and iOS, where they want to make life convenient for a lot of people. And these tools absolutely will. If you’re sitting in a Google Doc and you say, “Hey, Gemini, I don’t know what to write for this week’s blog post.” It will fill that purpose. It’s not how I use it, but that’s how I think how many people will. Honestly, I think that will be of benefit to people because if you’re staring at that empty page or that empty slide deck, one of the hacks of AI is have it create something that’s awful because that kicks your brain out of create mode into edit mode. You’re like, “Oh, this sucks. I can do better.” And then you’re done. John Wall – 05:07 Yeah, yeah. You jump up. That’s like that old trick that were saying as far as going into user forums, and you put your question in there and then the first thing you do is you get another account and you answer it wrong. And then 20,000 people will come up to yell at that person who gave the wrong answer if you just answer the question or may not get answered. So yeah, that is very true. Yeah, my use case is the opposite. I always already have a bunch of stuff that I need to clean or shape. And so if you have the blank page problem, I can see that and can run with that. Also from Search Engine Land, interesting Google stopping continuous scroll of results, which I guess doesn’t at first I was like, why would they do that? Because that seems like a great use case. But what the article said was that it’s, they only want to serve up in batches, this idea of like having to continually throw data at the page. And I would see that where in situations where somebody just starts scrolling like crazy, now you’re having to do ten or 12 calls, and they would rather put the brakes on that and manually do that. So I’m seeing that as they just don’t want to be serving as much data. They’re trying to trim bandwidth. But I don’t, what is your, what’s your take on that? Christopher Penn – 06:14 I wonder how much the AI answers factors into that. Like the more that loads in results said, I wonder if it’s making subsequent calls to their model, which would dramatically increase the cost of running that internally. So if they’re, if they do it in batches, like, okay, here’s the first ten results, and the AI answers will generate an AI answer for that batch of ten and not have to have a streaming like, “Oh, here’s a hundred, 2131, 140 results just keeps coming in.” And the machine’s like, “All right, I’ll keep recompiling this.” And I could see that being very computationally expensive. John Wall – 06:46 Yeah, right. The server just lighting on fire as people are just sitting there scrolling away like mad. So that makes sense. Christopher Penn – 06:51 The other thing I wonder is, here’s the thing with Google in particular, it always has to come back to ads somehow. Maybe the continuous scroll isn’t serving up enough ads. John Wall – 07:04 Yeah, right. No, and that would just making sure you’re really forcing those ads every time at the top. And maybe, like you said, more processing time to retarget them, too. Yeah, yeah. That’s always in the mix for them. All right. We just want to take a second, though. We do want to thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of Marketing Over Coffee. You know, 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. 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. We have a bunch of stuff coming back from Cannes. All the ad folks are talking about that. Again, I don’t know. This is one thing we have not been able to work. We need to get the full-on boondoggle going over there, so we get to hang out in France for a week and, like, wander around. And I don’t know, hang out on yachts and stuff or whatever. I don’t understand why we’re missing the boat on that. Well, I know why we’re not missing the boat because we’re not, like, making TV ads, which is where all that stuff goes. Christopher Penn – 09:11 Toys “R” Us had its big OpenAI debut at Cannes. They debuted a one minute fully generated ad made entirely with OpenAI Sora. And you can tell it’s still definitely AI generated. There’s still little artifact stuff, but it looks much better than Pepperoni Hug Spot did a year ago. John Wall – 09:32 Pepperoni Hug Spot is still classic, and we will include a link to that because if you have not watched that, it is still fantastic. Yeah, it was that, I don’t know. That was just so weird to me because, I don’t know. The Toys “R” Us brand has just, like, been through so much insane. In fact, they got Red Lobstered. If you don’t know the Toys “R” Us story, they were earlier, Red Lobster was their deal. They just got, like, carved up and sent to side. Yeah, it definitely proves what’s going on with that and what they’re with Macy’s now. I guess they’re in stores as far as their thing. But yeah, it definitely shows that these things can work and can, like you said, when you look at the gain made in a year, it’s insane. Christopher Penn – 10:07 Exactly. I posted that on Threads, and boy, did that generate a lot of very angry comments, mostly from creative folks saying, “Oh, this is yet another way that private equity is destroying the world. And Toys “R” Us couldn’t find a budget to make this so they had a machine do it instead.” Ignoring the fact that the agency they used to make it probably charged just as much. But to their point, when you build an ad like that, there’s no set, there’s no props, there’s no costume, there’s none of the folks that work on a set like that. It’s just a bunch of geeks in a server room putting something together. So there definitely is that angle. But the reality is, it made headlines. And now, in a year’s time, it may be, in another year’s time, it may be to the point where you’re like, yeah, you will have to look real hard at a video to tell whether it is machine made or not. John Wall – 11:00 All right. And. Well, so we have another piece, too, talking about creative jobs disappearing. You had an interesting piece. The CTO of OpenAI was talking about creative jobs, and what’s the story there? Christopher Penn – 11:12 So on June 19, Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI was at the Dartmouth College’s School of Engineering, and a Dartmouth alum asked about creative jobs and AI’s impact and creative jobs. And Murati said, “Yeah, of course, AI can do these things.” And she said, “AI tools will lower the barrier for anyone to think of themselves as creative.” And of course, the alums like, “Well, what about the creative industry, the jaws people that are in the employee?” And she goes, “Well, some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” John Wall – 11:42 So, all right, how to make friends and influence people there. Christopher Penn – 11:47 I can see both sides of it because we’ve both been in companies where the creative team is cranking out yet another PowerPoint deck with, the same 58 slides. “Here’s our awards we’ve won. Here’s the lake in front of our building.” And yeah, that definitely is not the height of creativity. Our machine probably should do that because I remember we’re back at the old agency, our creative team hated putting together PowerPoint decks. They’re like, “This is the most useless use of our skills possible.” But the other side is like, yeah, there’s some stuff that a company that’s focused on profitability above all else, they’re going to pick the machines. That’s kind of a given. John Wall – 12:30 Yeah. Right now, if you’re making, unique stuff, if that’s part of your strategy or your brand or whatever, that’s one thing. But yeah, for so many brands, it’s like, well, we just need some kind of image. I did, I have to give an award, too, though, for Threads. I should have saved the link. One fantastic proven use case for generative AI images is for playlist images. And so the guy had his Death Metal for Lawn Mowing playlist, and he had a perfect image of, like, the Death Knight using the push mower. And I was like, oh yeah, all right, this is. Yeah, I give that thumbs up. That’s the right way to play that. Christopher Penn – 13:09 Speaking of which, my first AI-generated John Wall – 13:12 singles on Spotify, the Ann Handley song. Is that the. Christopher Penn – 13:17 No, no, that one’s. That one’s in process right now. But I’ve actually got a catalog of stuff that I’ve been processing and using AI to generate and then if it sounds decent trying it out and stuff. So I’m doing this as an experiment to see what does it look like to publish this stuff. Because, and this is a part where there’s a lot of confusion, a lot of people think that because AI content can’t be copyrighted, you can’t put it up for sale. You absolutely can put it up for sale. What you can’t do is enforce your sole right to sell it. So, for example, if you take the Mona Lisa, you put the Mona Lisa on a t-shirt, you sell that t-shirt, you can sell that legally. That’s totally fine. But if your next-door neighbor sells the identical t-shirt, you can’t do anything about it. So if you make a great song via AI and you put it up on Spotify and it gets a million hits or whatever, and then a record label’s like, “Oh, that sounds great. Let’s grab it.” And it’s AI generated, you can’t stop them from doing that because it’s public domain. But you can absolutely monetize public domain content. People do all the time. There’s a gazillion and a half copies of books on Amazon that are, “Socrates and Plato” and stuff that’s thousands of years old, and people are, charge $0.99 for it. John Wall – 14:28 Yeah, right. They just show that. It’s funny, I’ve had, because Spotify is like, “Yeah, we want these AI-generated songs because they don’t have to pay for those as part of the stream.” And I’ve had playlists where it starts inserting songs, when you get to the end of your own list, it’ll just randomly match stuff up, and every once in a while I hear our song, I’m like, “Oh my God, that has to be generative AI, because that song is so horrible. Those lyrics are so rotten.” And then I go and dig and look and it’s like, “Oh no, this is really a band. People thought this was a good song.” That’s really unfortunate. So yeah, I haven’t, maybe I am already being fooled by better stuff, but it is just funny how I’m kind of like, “Oh, that’s got to be generated because it’s so horrible.” But no, there are humans who can make horrible stuff. Christopher Penn – 15:12 I’m working on, like, one release a day because it takes about 14 days for it to go through the process of the system, get up there. So I hope by the end of summer that we have a couple of albums. John Wall – 15:24 I have a few tracks, get ready to go. Some other stuff. I had to laugh at this. Salesforce actually has an AI CEO who was doing a keynote, and she was talking about using generative AI for A/B testing and ads. And I was like, “Man, you should just be listening to Marketing Over Coffee. We’ve talked about that for like two years already.” Christopher Penn – 15:41 So we’ve talked about that for way longer than that, too. Yeah, I talked about that back in 2020. John Wall – 15:47 But I guess what else are you going to throw out there as the easy one for the ad crowd? It was my take on that. But so yeah, and AI CEO is a position, so there’s something you can shoot for if that’s what you want to go with. Another interesting one, MarTech had an article about virtual events. And we see these where a company is like, okay, on X day, we’re going to have seven webinars running throughout the whole day. But it was interesting. The take on that was that you use that to fuel your content calendar. It’s not like, “Hey, let’s throw an event.” It’s more like, “Hey, we want to have seven recordings that we can roll over the next seven months. Why don’t we just do them all on a single day and so we can make an event out of it?” But then the money quote of that was, “We would never, ever run an event without a post-event distribution strategy. It’s all about how we can use the content that we just created.” And that’s just that. I love that because we’ve talked tons of times about there’s all these shows where they go and create all this great content and then the videos just kind of never see the light of day. It’s like, why the heck aren’t you rolling that six months later? I mean, it’s half out of date, but it’s still fantastic stuff that people could get for free if they couldn’t go for the show. Yeah, I wanted to give a quick plug for that. Another one here, a heavy discussion topic, OpenAI scraping all of Reddit. My first thought with that was like, yeah, we don’t need generative AI to get more sarcastic. Like, that’s not what we’re looking for. But the flip side was this article did mention upvoting as being able to validate and get correct data. I was like, okay, yeah, as much as it’s a rotten neighborhood, upvoting is for real. Like, that is, I could see how people could use that as data quality. So I don’t know, is it worth the trade for the sarcasm? Christopher Penn – 17:27 I guess it depends. Reddit is a series of communities. It’s not one entity. So there’s, yeah, there are some communities that just crap. They’re, flat Earth and all that stuff. There are some communities where there’s decent content, and it depends on that community’s individual moderators as to how strictly they enforce rules and things. So the other day, I was getting ready for a webinar I’m going to be doing for real estate agents, and I went to the Realtors community, which is very heavily moderated. There are folks in there who do a good job keeping it clean. So pulling all that data out, it became very straightforward to say, like, these are the things that realtors, actual realtors care about, real estate agents. Okay, the market’s shifting, the pricing of people being priced out of a market, all this stuff. So it really depends on the community. And I think the bigger lesson there for everyone is that you have to have some source of data. If you want tools like generative AI to do really well, you need to have some source of data, ideally something that difficult to access or is not available to the general public. What do you have? So, for example, we have the Analytics for Marketers Slack group. As an administrator, I can go in there and export the entire thing. No one else except an administrator can do that. But I could then take that to train a model or to build content from that based on all the responses that people have given over the last five years in there. Think about Marketing Over Coffee. Marketing Over Coffee has more than 800 episodes. Yes, it’s all in public, but you would still have to take an enormous amount of time to download them all, transcribe them all, and then process them all to turn them into a data set that you could use. So if we did that, we had that data set, it would be an advantage over someone who didn’t. Like, you could write a book using just the contents of Marketing Over Coffee as a way to have your own data store. So you’ve got to have some form of data that a machine can use because these tools are good at making stuff, but they’re great at synthesizing and reorganizing stuff you already have. John Wall – 19:31 That’s interesting of choosing the targets because, yeah, like I said, some communities are absolute circuses, but then there’s also some really high-quality neighborhoods that you can get decent stuff out of. It’s funny, a couple of weeks ago was talking about apps I use for running. I’m always tinkering, trying to find the right magic app for that. And like, the big one for me is running and getting heart rate audio cues. “Hey, you’re slacking. You gotta pick it up a notch.” And to get that in my ear so that I can go. And over in Thread, somebody was like, “Hey, you listed all these apps, you’re actually not testing the Apple Fitness watch app, the one that comes with it.” And the guy was right. The thing is, it’s actually come a long way. It’s actually very good. So that actually could be the magic one. I also wanted to give a shout-out for the Speidel watch band. I got a brand new Apple Watch band. They’re out of Providence, Rhode Island, a company that’s been around for over 100 years. So that’s kind of cool. I have one of these old-school watch bands that I picked up, and I’ve been enjoying that. And then going out the door to media recommendations, I have to give a plug for The Acolyte. If you’re a Star Wars fan, if you have not watched that yet, that is very cool. And it’s kind of like a, it’s got a detective slant to it. It’s kind of a whodunit story, which has been great on the media front. Christopher Penn – 20:45 This is on the flip side. So Paramount, which owns a bunch of media properties, has been removing stuff for a variety of reasons. They removed the entirety of the Comedy Central backlogs, like 20 or 30 years worth of The Daily Show and all that stuff is just gone now. And they removed all of the old MTV back catalog. So everything from our misguided youth is just gone now. John Wall – 21:12 Really? Do they talk about why that’s all? Because I have heard a lot of people saying just cost-cutting is killing the back catalog because it doesn’t have traffic. Christopher Penn – 21:21 But anything else, it’s not that it’s traffic, it’s royalties. John Wall – 21:24 You have less options out there to make payouts on. Christopher Penn – 21:28 Exactly. Because if you’ve got Kurt Loder’s whatever and people are watching the back catalog of Madonna’s concerts from the ’80s, they still got to pay royalties on that because it’s a performance rights thing. So if it’s gone, then you don’t pay royalties on it anymore. John Wall – 21:43 Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a tough call. Is it? Because I mean, it’s long-tail stuff. So you’re going to be paying not what you’re paying on the big stuff. And now you’re forcing, I mean, the viewers are either going to go to different content on the same thing or they’re going to leave, which is worse. Christopher Penn – 21:57 Right. John Wall – 21:57 So I don’t know. That seems to be a bad idea to me now. Christopher Penn – 22:00 Well, it’s a bad idea. There is some aspect of cultural significance to that content. Having the early seasons of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s first time around, there’s value to that content. But they’ve decided it’s not worth paying for that. But you’re right because if people don’t have access to that content and they don’t find anything that’s compelling in your new content, because I think one of the worries is it cannibalizes viewership from new content, and new content is how streamers judge the profitability of their services. Are they attracting new subscribers, and is the new content getting views? And if you’ve got 50 years of old content, people like, “I’m going to go watch the Tiffany concert from 1989 instead,” your new stuff may not perform as well, which means that you’re going to have a harder time justifying the investment in it. John Wall – 22:48 Yeah, no, that’s interesting because that does sound like a roll of the dice if somebody’s got three other options to get the new stuff. All right, well, that’s interesting. I’m going to give a plug for Lawrence, the band. I had found them through Jacob Collier. I’ll put a link to them in the show notes. They had a new album come out Friday, which was really some good stuff. Yeah, we’ve got 4 July, so I’ve got traveling on the road, but nothing for business stuff. How about for you? Have you got stuff going on the next couple of weeks? Christopher Penn – 23:16 Mostly just holiday stuff right now. July, I think, for the moment, is relatively quiet, although I did just send out a promotion to my mailing list for keynote talks and stuff like that. And I can already see that you’ve got some stuff on your calendar, so I may not be all that quiet anymore. John Wall – 23:35 Yeah, and just for anybody doing events, whether virtual or live, your AI deck has been through a ton of revs, and it’s just rock solid. And we’ve already been booking up a bunch of stuff. So if you have a fall event that you want to have somebody show up and give us a ping, but get it done because everybody’s like, “Oh, July’s wide open,” but September, not wide open. September is mostly locked down. And yeah, we got a bunch of shows coming up in the fall, but we’re going to deal with that after the 4 July here. So that’s going to do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. Christopher Penn – 24:09 Enjoy the coffee. Speaker 2 – 24:11 You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters. You can find it at Musicale from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes. The post CDP Functions, AI Creatives, Reddit and The Acolyte! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn the best way for agencies to manage websites, especially if you offer SEO as a service, and how to move fast enough so that you never miss opportunities. Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: NetSuite and Wix Studio She’s been on both the client and agency side. Working with a team that designed sites and provided SEO services set her up perfectly for Head of SEO Communications Organizing clients by CMS and the joy of fixing something for marketers when it goes out to millions of users Taking advantage of the efficiencies of scale when managing multiple sites 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! Templates and included APIs make it easier to increase velocity, and for agencies to service their clients quickly Template marketplace opens up new opportunities 12:38 – 14:15 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Streamlining the setup too, domain name, SSL, hosting, CDN Simplifying all the best practices SEO SEMrush, Wincher, SE Ranking tools included, Alt text fix tool AI Tag Generators, AI Title Generators, Video eligible for rich results Integrations with Salesforce, Amazon, Google Ads Follow Crystal on LinkedIn Wix Studio Hub and the SERPs Up Podcast Media Recco: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Pivot Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on exercises 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 What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. John Wall – 00:01 Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio. Speaker 3 – 00:10 This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:18 Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we’re talking with Crystal Carter. She’s head of SEO communications at Wix. She’s an SEO and digital marketing professional who’s worked with clients like Disney, McDonald’s, and Tomy. She speaks and writes about SEO and is a regular on the SERPs Up SEO podcast. In fact, we’ve talked over there. Crystal, welcome to the show. Crystal Carter – 00:38 Thank you so much, John. I’m really pleased to be here. Big fan of the show and, yeah, big fan of the work that you do at your team. John Wall – 00:44 Thank you. It’s been so long, I actually had to dig in and it has been far too long. We normally try and check in and talk about hosting, and of course SEO is always a topic, but I wanted to get you in so we could talk to you about what’s going on in the state of folks who have to manage a bunch of websites and, people who are getting things set up. But before we dig into that stuff, tell us about your background first. Like, what happened in life that ended up bringing you to Wix? Crystal Carter – 01:10 So I am the head of SEO communications at Wix. And in my marketing life, as many other marketers I’m sure have had this experience, I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s one of the things I love about marketing is that a lot of times, the principles are the same. You know, the cash cow and the star and the dog and like all of the, all of those sort of classic marketing things, they’re the same. But your day-to-day tends to be really flexible and really different. And so I’ve worked in a freelance capacity. I’ve worked in an agency capacity. I’ve, been very close to management in the agency capacity. I’ve managed clients in both those spaces. And I’ve also been in-house, and I’ve worked for public facing entities. I work for private businesses, small businesses, large businesses, all of that sort of stuff. And when the role for communications SEO person came up, I thought that it would be a really good fit because the team that I was with before was an agency where we’re building websites, but we’re also providing SEO services. So we’re able to see the website from the inside out and able to advise on the digital strategies for that. And that I really enjoyed. Even in that space, one of my favorite things was to be able to fix the CMS. To be able to sort of say, “This is something that we can fix, and this will fix all of the CMS.” And the way I was handling my clients, I was thinking about it that way as well. So I would group my clients by their CMS. And I always say, people say, “Oh, what’s your favorite marketing tool?” I’m like, “Your CMS?” And I’ll say, “What’s your favorite marketing tool?” “Samuel Wooks website.” That’s, that’s it. Because honestly, it’s like a guitar. If you’ve got an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, you need to know the difference. You need to know how to use them. And what the sound you get out of it will depend on how good you are at using that particular guitar. A Fender Stratocaster is different from a resonator. These things are different. And it’s important for you to know the differences so that you can get, you know, make beautiful music. So one of the things I love about working at Wix is that, I’m not a hands-on engineer fixing SEO things on that side, but we work really closely with that team. So if I see something and I’m like, “This would be really useful for marketers who are using our platform,” I can put that forward and we can get that implemented. I can think of one thing in particular that I was really pushing for. And seeing that implemented makes me so happy because it helps all of our users, and we’ve got over 250 million users worldwide, and that’s helping all of them. So to be able to bring the firsthand experience of trying to do marketing on a website, trying to do SEO, trying to grow your website presence, and of having managed clients who are going to come to you and say, “Why can’t I do this? Or why can’t we do that? Or how come this is this way?” And being able to bring that into the sort of SaaS environment is really a dream come true. And plus, I get to talk to lovely people like you and I get to go to fantastic conferences and things like that. And so, yeah, it’s been a great journey and it’s one of those things where I get to bring all of the knowledge that I’ve gained throughout my career to the four every day. John Wall – 04:19 Yeah, it’s funny. So it seems like you were the ideal customer for Wix Studio. And we love to see that because there’s so many times where the product marketing team doesn’t actually come from the world that had lived in that pain, and it makes it so much easier. I love that idea of bundling your clients by CMS. I hadn’t thought about that. But that does make so much sense because that’s the customer experience that you’re in. Crystal Carter – 04:43 Yeah. And I think also the way I would do that, so we have custom, we’d have, we’d have some of the off-the-shelves. So things like that when I was working agency side. And the thing is that normally if you find a solution, and this is true with Wix as well, but if you find a solution one CMS, chances are you’ll be able to roll that out across every single client that’s on that CMS. So it gives you incredible efficiencies to bundle them together because also sometimes you can see, you can spot problems ahead of time for a different client. So maybe one person who’s on one CMS is having trouble with something and you dig into and you’re like, “Oh, it’s that.” And then you look on the other ones, you’re like, “Oh, that has that as well. And I hadn’t even noticed.” And you can fix them all and then you can move everyone forward and it just saves you a lot of time. So you can sort of have one day where you’re looking at one CMS and digging around on all of the different things and then roll them out in sync. And that can give you great boost across the board. It can also help you test theories really quickly as well if you’re looking at them by CMS. John Wall – 05:43 Yeah, and it’s, you totally nailed that thing that we see all the time where, some of these companies are like, “Oh, we’re going tough it out and create our own thing.” But you find these situations where something breaks and it takes them two days to fix it or whatever. And it’s just what you said, you guys can go in then and go to your 35 other clients and even proactively, maybe they don’t even know they have the problem. We see that all the time. They’re not even, aware that it’s there. But talk to us more about templating of stuff and, how that makes life easier. And if you have any use cases, specific things that people maybe don’t think about, that could really help them out. Crystal Carter – 06:17 Yeah. So I think one of the things that we really pride ourselves on at Wix is velocity. So I’ve definitely had it before where I’ve had folks who had a project idea and they were like, “I want to do this project.” And I can think of someone in particular who, a good friend of mine, she saw me at an event and she was like, “I want to start an event program like this for a different community.” And within a week she was like, “I want to do this.” And she had a website up within a week. She had a Wix website up within a week and was able to book it. And within a month she had a sold-out event. And within a year she had been acquired by another larger team and was the salary as part of that. And that’s the kind of velocity that we’re able to give that you’re able to see some, to have an idea, to action that idea and to move it forward. And I think that when you’re thinking about clients, sometimes people think, “Oh, if I have a template, maybe that won’t be as good.” But I’ll tell you what, the thing that clients will appreciate is that you can test something out really quickly with a template in a way that you can if you’ve got to build custom. Because if you have to build custom, let’s say you have somebody who has a general, sort of like a restaurant, right? What is a restaurant? And let’s say they want to see if they can sell some merch, some T-shirts, some tote bags, some mugs or something like that. With a Wix website, or Wix Studio website, what you could do really quickly. And we have something called Printful, which is a drop shipping tool or, sorry, print-on-demand tool. And you can connect it really quickly. You can upload all of your graphics and you could have a shop set up within a couple of days, and you could test whether or not a shop is actually a viable thing for your company before you start doing lots and lots of exhaustive dev things and lots of exhaustive design on it. You can have something that’s testable and ready to go and then find that this is viable. Then you can reiterate and you can make, you can add more bells and whistles, you can make it look wizzy or all of that sort of stuff, but you’re able to get that velocity while and strike while the art is hot because we have those templates. And what happens with Wix, for instance, and Wix Studio is that when you get a Wix website, you’re able to add in all of those additional features. So everything is an API. So if you decide “I want to add a blog,” you just add a blog. It doesn’t cost you more to add a blog, you just add a blog. If you want to add in a shop, you just add a shop. It doesn’t cost you more to add a shop. You have to pay for fees if you’re selling things or whatever, you have to pay for that sort of thing. You have to sort that out for taxes and all that sort of stuff. That’s up to you. Then shipping and all that sort of stuff. We don’t ship things for you for free, but you want to add that on. That doesn’t cost you more. That’s not, that’s not another thing that costs you more. And if you want to add forms, let’s say you’re a consultant and you want to add online consultancy, you can add that to your website really quickly and you can start selling consultancy slots. You can say, “Book a consultancy slot with me for half an hour” and you can book that in as well. And that’s all included in the one fee that you pay. So in terms of templatizing, it allows you to get velocity and get velocity for your clients. Because sometimes, and John I’m sure you’ve been here, you have a client and you say, “Hey, we should do this great thing.” And they’re like, “Wonderful, let’s do it now.” And then you talk to your dev team or you talk to whoever or whatever, and it’s like, “We’re going to do that six months from now,” and they will lose steam, they will lose interest. People will change jobs, their financial things will change. And by the time you come back around to it, they might even, might not even have the budget approved for it anymore. They might have spent it on something else. So what you get with the template is the ability to not leave money on the table if you’re servicing clients, the ability to move things forward at a pace that is viable for you and for your client. And it also gives you the flexibility to try things at a sort of low level of input and then iterate on them. So you’re going to go back, you’re going to update it, you’re going to get things going. But you can see, “Is this something we should invest in, yes or no?” And you can test that straight away. Additionally, what we’ve built into Wix Studio is the ability to templatize sections of your website. So as you’re building a section of your website, you might say, “Oh, this section is really great. I’m going to save this and I’m going to put this across every single page.” Or if you are somebody who’s managing clients and let’s say you have, like, a mortgage calculator, or I had a client who was like, they built marquee tents for weddings and stuff like that. And we had one where you could see how many people would fit in a certain marquee. So there’s one set that was like if you had long tables, if you had round tables, if you had a dance floor and round tables, that sort of thing. And so you could sort of gauge how many people would be able to fit in the tent, whether or not you’re able to invite your grandmother or whether or not she’s going to sit that one out, that sort of thing. So let’s say you build a tool like that, you can make that into a widget that you could roll out to multiple clients. So let’s say you had multiple mortgage clients or multiple marquee clients or whatever it was, let’s say you were specializing in something, then you could roll that out, that particular widget out to other clients as well. So that’s been built into the Wix studio as well, where you can code your own apps, you can create your own replicable apps and put them on different sites. The other thing we’ve looked at is the ability to duplicate sites. So let’s say somebody looks at my website for, I don’t know, nail polish or something, I’m just looking at things on my desk, and they say, “Oh, I love that. I’d like one in…” You say, “Great, you can go into Wix Studio and you can press duplicate and within seconds it will duplicate the entire website,” which allows you a lot of flexibility and again, allows you velocity. So it means that you have templates. The other thing that we’ve introduced recently is the ability to sell your templates. And this is something that we’re really excited about. And this gives people, particularly developers, designers, website agencies, gives them a lot more flexibility in terms of how they use Wix. And it gives people a lot, gives you a lot of great opportunities to showcase your abilities as a web designer and as a marketing team. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of benefits. John Wall – 12:40 Okay. I’ve got to pick your brain about that a little bit more. But before we do that, we just want to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. In our consulting, we come across a number of companies set up with different infrastructures. And one thing that we’ve seen over and over again is you do reach a point where you’ve just, you’re carrying so much IT infrastructure that you’re no longer able to get ahead and accelerate. The quick math is that the less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you get to keep. So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses graduate 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. 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. John Wall – 13:44 Yeah. Speaker 1 – 13:44 Even with everything getting more expensive and the challenge of managing your budget, it just makes sense to find proven ways to cut costs and boost performance at the same time. So check out Netsuite by Oracle. 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. netsuite.com/coffee. Again, if you want to reduce costs and cut the headaches, check them out. And we thank them for their support of the show. John Wall – 14:15 Yeah, that’s amazing. I did not know that you guys will be, have templates that could be resold. That’s kind of cool if you’ve got something that’s, and to have a marketplace too, from the other side of that, while you’re at an agency to be able to just go search and say, “Hey, show me some templates for auto dealerships or like you said, restaurants.” That’s a classic one where they want the specific features, but kind of everybody wants their own look. They, they do want it to be for them. But yeah, if it’s somebody that’s 15 states away, nobody’s going to care if they’re very similar, everybody, right. Crystal Carter – 14:44 And I think that the great thing about Wix templates is that they all come with all of the relevant apps already installed. So let’s say you have the Restaurants app, or let’s say you had a restaurant website, it would also include the Restaurants booking app, and it would also include, like, the sales app, and it would also include all of the apps that you need in order to make a restaurant function in the template. And that means that pretty much as soon as you download it, you’re ready to go. And as soon as you download it, as soon as you get, you know, input your data and all of that sort of stuff and get yourself ready to go, then you can get yourself online. And we try to maximize velocity and efficiency at all stages. So, you know, you can get your domain name, you can get your hosting, you can get your SSL all covered, all within one thing. And it also includes all the CDN setup and all that sort of stuff. And I know that there’s, those are some of the tiny little things that, for somebody who’s a pro, not a big deal. They’re like, “Yeah, I just set up my CDN and I set up my SSL and I do…” and it takes them no time at all. But for folks who are maybe more marketing focused and less infrastructure focused, then it can be a great, great opportunity to just have all of that stuff covered and all of that stuff sorted. I had someone online the other day who tweeted me and they were trying to be disparaging of Wix. And then I went to their website and I saw that I couldn’t go to their website because they hadn’t set up a redirect from their HTTP website to their HTTPS website. And though I felt the need to, I did not tweet them to say that “We do that automatically for you on Wix. And if you were on Wix, you wouldn’t have that trouble, isn’t it?” John Wall – 16:19 There’s so many gotchas. People just don’t realize that there’s just all these tiny little things where if something’s not configured right somewhere, you’re going to end up, you’re just like, “Wait, why are we not getting any traffic today? What’s going on with that?” And again, you go down the rat hole. Whereas yeah, if you can just have that wrapped up for you, that saves you so much hassle. Now we do have to talk about, you actually do with Wix, the SERPs Up podcast, talking about SEO stuff. So we got to ask you about kind of what’s going on over there and even talk about just, like, SEO stuff that’s baked into Wix too because that’s a whole nother thing. People kind of like, “Okay, I finally solved the website problem, and it’s up and running.” And then they’re like, “Oh, maybe we should do some of this SEO stuff.” And there’s headaches and problems that go around with that lack of strategy. So, tell us more about what’s the best practices and stuff that you guys have. Crystal Carter – 17:08 So what are the things we do at the SERPs Up SEO podcast? And one of the things that we do at Wix overall, it’s really at our core, is that we want to make sure that we are accessible to everyone and accessible with a lowercase “a” and with an uppercase “A” as much as possible. We try to make sure that folks who are, like, super professional can access our information and our platform and that folks who are maybe learning or just starting their journey can also access that as well. So for our podcast, we talk about some very complex topics with some really interesting experts like yourself. We also tried to cover them so that if you are coming completely new to that topic, then you can also be up to speed. So we like to have a lot of fun with it as well to make sure that it’s completely accessible for whatever topic we’re talking about. And I think that’s really important. Personally, I know that people say, “I’m an expert and you’re a digital marketing expert,” but I’m not an expert on GA4. I’ll tell you that right now. I was very good at UA, but I’m not an expert on GA4 because it’s new and it’s clunky and it’s not my favorite thing. And there’s lots of people who are experts in one thing and noobs at other things. And so we try to take that approach with SERPs Up podcasts and try to make sure that everything’s really accessible to everyone. And that’s how we approach, that’s really at the core of what Wix does. So with our SEO, we have the Wix SEO Setup Checklist which can guide you through optimizing your website. If you are somebody who’s an SEO pro, you can ignore it if you want to, but it also has some benefits. So, for instance, if you go onto it, it will say, “What are the main keywords for your website?” And it will also let you search for the search, the search volume of those keywords in SEMrush, in Wix. So you can choose from SEMrush. There’s something called Ahrefs, and there’s also SE Ranking and you can pick from one of those to check the search volume of your core keywords before you even get going. You add in your business details and it automatically adds in the local business markup for your website on the appropriate pages. Every time you add a blog, it also adds up structured data, or adds in structured data for your blogs. And when you go through the SEO Setup Checklist, it reminds you that, “Oh, you need an H1 on your homepage. Oh, you need to make sure that you know, you have some links to your homepage.” We have things like, “We can see that you’ve missed alt text, you should update your alt text.” And then we pull up all of the images and they have little fields and you can see where you can add in the alt text. You don’t have to go back to the page, you don’t have to navigate to each individual image. We make sure that it’s really available there. And we do that because we can see how users are using the website. And what we found was that two things: One, when we set, told people, “Hey, you should update your alt text,” people would contact our help desk and go, “What is that? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what you’re talking about or why I should do it.” And number two, we found that when we added it in the checklist that we saw a massive uptick in people and people using this and people accessing this. And this also meant that the websites became more accessible as well. Now, if you are a super whizzy SEO expert, then you could do it the other way. But it’s also easier to just do it that way. Similarly, once you complete the SEO Setup Checklist, we will submit your homepage to Google as you connect to Google Search Console. So it will say, “Would you like to submit your website to Google?” And if you click “Yes,” then it will create a Google Search Console profile for you and it will submit your homepage for indexing to Google. And I tested this right on my own personal site. So when I joined Wix, I saw this and I was like, “No way, John. This is not, this is not a thing.” So I tested my site. I went to a site, the search modifier or their search operator “site:crystalcarterseo.com.” I sent tested that in and Google was like, “I don’t know, you have no links. I don’t know what this website is, you’re not online.” And I was like, “Good. Okay, great.” And so I did that and then I submitted my site to Google via the Wix SEO Setup Checklist and I went back the next day and it was like, “Yeah, you’ve got four pages on Google.” Based on the links that were coming off of my homepage, I only had 12 pages on my site overall, but I had four pages within a day on Google. Now I have definitely, definitely on my agency side and working with clients, had people go, “Are we on Google?” Like, “Yeah, you know, you just got to wait. We’re just going to, you know, see how it goes. Maybe if we just, like, send some tweets, maybe if we, like, light some incense and say a prayer, like maybe we can hope that we might get indexed the next day.” So with the SEO Checklist, it’s really consistent and can really get you indexed in a couple of days. And like that is the honest truth. So, yeah, so that helps you do that. Once you’re set up on that, we also give you lots of live data from Google Search Console. So as soon as you log in, it will tell you your impressions and your clicks for some of the top keywords as soon as you log into your Wix website. And we have the ability for you to search your index pages within Wix. So for people who like to geek out, we have lots of those tools as well. We also have a bot log report, which you do not have to ask a developer for, you can just see. And if you’re adding code to your page, if you’re adding because we also have a Velo suite where we have JavaScript and stuff that you can use, you’re adding code to your page, then you can also run the code and see if it works, and then you can check your bot logs and see if you got the response that you were expecting and all of that sort of stuff. You can add API things or you can just coast, you can just coast and enjoy all of the SEO things that are already built in. We have AI meta tag generators, we have AI title tag generators, we have structured data that’s built into every single event. Every time you make an event, it has event markup on it that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you add in you use Wix video, it has video markup that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you do, you know, every time you add in a blog, it adds in the image for your blog, it adds in all of that sort of stuff. We have all of these things that are built in to make life easier for you. And no matter what stage you’re on. And the structured data, for instance, that’s built into Wix is also editable. So you can add in your own structured data, you can update it however you like, and it really gives you that flexibility. So really what we are really about is making sure that people who want to be, super advanced can do that. People who want to just chillax can do that too. But that everybody is serviced in our space because we really want everyone to thrive and we really want to help the Internet be a better place. John Wall – 23:46 And so AI, of course, is, like, everybody’s talking all AI all the time. I mean, if you’ve got AI stuff that you guys are talking about as far as features and interesting stuff, and you talked about already auto tagging and things like that, which save you a huge ton of time, but also, kind of what else is on the horizon? Is there other stuff, maybe that outside of the AI bandwagon? Crystal Carter – 24:06 Yeah. So we’ve got tons of AI built in across the Wix ecosystem. And this is something that we have had for ages. So our CEO, I think about a year ago or something, someone was like, “Oh, Wix is at risk because of AI.” And our CEO was like, “What? What are you talking about? We’ve, we’ve had an AI web builder since 2016. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had AI all over Wix for, you know, for years.” We’ve been at this for a very long time and we work with regularly with different AI folks. And we’ve got some great tools. We have AI text, and the way that we have our AI text creator is that, like, you will say to it, “What are the keywords you’re interested in? Where is this going? Is this an about page? Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to, describe, this location or something? What are you trying to discuss?” Then it will generate a couple of different examples and then you can pick from one of them, like it’s pretty good. And we don’t have it in the blog to write you a blog. We have it in the webpage builder to sort of help you with their sections because I know from working client side that clients hate writing their own biographies. They cannot stand it. They all just go, “No, but I couldn’t possibly write about myself.” And I go, “Yes you can, Susan, you can do it. You just write about yourself in the third person. ‘Susan is wonderful and she knows lots of things.’ That’s what you should write.” People really struggle with that and it can really just get rid of that blank page thing really quickly. And you don’t have to go off to some other tool and you can just use it there, which is really useful. We also have some great AI image generators and some of the things that other tools make you pay for, like removing the background on an image. We do that for free and that’s built into the Wix CMS. Beyond that, we are working within the Wix Studio space to really supercharge integrations. So we have lots and lots of integrations across Wix. We have a Salesforce integration, we have integrations with Mailchimp, with Amazon, with Google. We have Google Ads integrations, Google Search Console. I mentioned Google Analytics. So GA4, you can just add the code and you don’t have to go through adding the tag and all of that sort of stuff. You can literally just add your code and then you’re on Google Merchant Center, for instance. You can add in your Google Merchant feed and it will update and pull everything through. We have collaborations with LegalZoom, we have collaborations with lots of other tools, and we’re continuing to build on that. And that is an initiative that we’ve done constantly, but it’s something that we’re pushing forward within the next little while as well, to make it easier for marketers to market. As a marketer, you have things that you like and they’re the things that you want to use. And sometimes you’re like, “I don’t have time to learn this other thing. I already know how to achieve this with this thing, so I would like to do that.” And essentially this allows you to do that. So we also make things like, for instance, like Facebook or not Facebook, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel and things like that. We make it really easy to install tags like that and things like that. And we’re constantly adding more of those as well. So the connectivity is really at the fore, both within things that we’re cooking ourselves and also things that we’re allowing you to add. One of the other things that’s really great, and a lot of people are really surprised at is that within our coding framework, Velo, there’s a full connectivity to NPM libraries, so you can connect pretty much any API that you want into Wix and go forth and do lots of cool stuff with that. And we have a really easy way for you to manage all of your keys and all of that sort of stuff as well. So there’s lots of things there. And also there’s an AI coding assistant, which is really cool that I really like. I was suspicious, I’ll be completely honest. It was like, “I don’t know about you coding assistant.” And then I said, “Can you spin me up this code like this?” And it said, “Yes.” And I checked it and I was like, “That’s actually pretty good.” And the thing that I like about it is that in the places where it’s filling in the blanks where I’ve had ChatGPT just make up some URL that looks right but isn’t quite right, it will just say, “yoururl.com, your image.jpeg, address 123,” like that sort of thing. So it’s very clear that it’s a placeholder rather than you assuming that’s the thing that you did and then having to go back so it can make it really useful. And so yeah, I think there’s a lot of things around connectivity and a lot of things around AI are really probably the next phase of Wix and Wix Studio. John Wall – 28:39 That’s great. I’m glad we had a chance to really do a deep dive because so often people just kind of give the overview of what the thing does. But it’s great to actually talk about specific features that kind of light things up and make things happen. If folks want to learn more about Wix Studio, what’s the best way or to get in contact with you about speaking or the podcast, whatever. What’s the best way to do that? Crystal Carter – 28:57 So I’m online all over the place. So I am on TikTok with a host of 200 very exclusive followers. We are an elite group. I also on LinkedIn with a lot more people and also on Twitter a lot as well. I do not mess with Facebook. It’s not really my thing. I occasionally post pictures of trees on Instagram if you would like to follow that as well. And then if you want to find all things Wix and Wix Studio, we have our Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about features on Wix and Wix Studio and lots of things SEO. And our podcast comes out weekly on a Wednesday. So you can follow those. I’m also going to be speaking at Brighton SEO in San Diego, and I’m speaking in Mascon, and I’m speaking in various different places. So, you know, find me in one of those places as well. And Wix Studio has some great, great information on the Wix Studio website and you can find that online as well. John Wall – 29:55 That sounds great. And then going out the door, any media, books, movies, articles, anything you’ve read recently for marketing folks that you can recommend for our audience. Crystal Carter – 30:04 My favorite marketing go-to is Beyonce. I think she’s a marketing genius and pretty much following anything that she does is really fascinating. Her cowboy Carter pivot has been fascinating to me, how she’s pivoted from that. So I feel like pick someone and follow them and study what they’re doing. So I’m a big student of Beyonce, but like Kim Kardashian would be a very interesting person to study as well. Taylor Swift, lots of other folks. So yeah, that’s my marketing school of marketing is Beyonce. John Wall – 30:33 That’s an easy plug. Can’t argue with success like that. Crystal Carter – 30:36 She’s the other Ms. Carter. It’s all good. John Wall – 30:38 All right, Crystal, thanks for spending some time with it. We really appreciate it. Crystal Carter – 30:42 Thank you so much, John. John Wall – 30:43 All right, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. Speaker 3 – 30:47 You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at JW5150.com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funkmasters, and you can find it at musicale from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes. The post Crystal Carter on SEO, Multiple Site Management, Wix Studio and More! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about what came out of WWDC, how to market better on LinkedIn and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Apple WWDC Entering the age of on device AI 7:04 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! iPhone mirroring Apple has such great UX, why is Apple Music on the Mac not there? But they are paying artists… Transitioning from SK Ad Kit to Ad Attribution Kit iOS 18 to add RCS – Rich Communications Text Services 14:28 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Updated Unofficial Guide to LinkedIn Algorithm Gear Watch – Owala, the new best in class Water Bottle, WorkOutDoors for Running SparkTogether coming up in Seattle 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 What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Speaker 1 – 00:07 This is Marketing over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:14 Good morning. Welcome to Marketing over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Christopher Penn – 00:17 I’m Christopher Penn. John Wall – 00:19 And we have all kinds of stuff this week. It’s been crazy, there’s a bunch of things happening. The biggest one we’ll lead off with is Apple’s WWDC, their Worldwide Developers Conference. They roll out some new stuff, but then there’s a bunch of stuff on AI and all kinds of stuff going. So what’s — what was the biggest thing for you? What were you like, “Oh my God, this changes everything?” Christopher Penn – 00:37 So it’s interesting. They had the big keynote, right? And everyone’s like, “Oh awesome, flashy stuff” like that. But that’s not where the details are. The details are actually in the session because it’s a dev conference, it’s a developer conference. It’s not for the general public. I mean, a lot of people tune into the big keynote to see the stuff, but all the — the really cool/very subtle things are in the individual sessions. The big one to me — and this is very nerdy — the big one to me is the way Apple has architected its AI, which they have cleverly branded Apple intelligence in a couple of different ways. Most of it, from the system architecture diagrams, looks like it runs on the device itself. So we’ve been seeing, really since like iPhone 13, the number of neural cores in the neural engine on iPhones and Macs and stuff has been getting bigger and bigger. In fact, the new M4 chips that just came out for the new iPads, the previous M3 had the — the neural engine was able to do 18 trillion operations per second. The next generation, the M4 chip, the baseline is 38 trillion operations per second. So they have effectively doubled — more than doubled — the amount of processing these things can do that allows Apple’s custom models to run entirely on the device. So all the cool stuff they’re showing — summarize this document, make a silly image and stuff — all that’s going to run locally, which means that your data is not leaving your device, it’s not going to some unknown cloud provider. Christopher Penn – 02:10 They announced the integration with ChatGPT, which I thought was very interesting because the way they implemented it is super clunky on purpose. Every time you want to use ChatGPT, you have to confirm like, “Yeah, you’re about to send data to a third party, do you really want to do that?” Which I think is so smart because, A, it allows them to easily swap out another provider — and they’ve said Google Gemini support will be coming at some point — and B, it reminds people, “Yeah, when you send your data to OpenAI or whatever, it’s in most contexts, it’s not private.” So I thought that was really cool. What was interesting in the Core ML session is they were showing you directions on how you can load your own — how you can convert your models from floating point 16 tensors to Core ML, which is their architecture, and they showed how you prepare it and all this stuff. And then said, as part of your app, you can load this model into the phone or the device and run it locally on device. When you think about it, as long as someone’s really good at model making, that’s huge, because such a big part of the cost of AI these days for a lot of these companies is you’ve got to pay the OpenAI tax or the Google tax, or whatever, to send your stuff to their hardware to process it and come back. Christopher Penn – 03:33 If your model could fit inside of Core ML, if you can be really efficient and smart about it and make a very dedicated-purpose model — you pay nothing in technology fees because you’re just using the existing Apple hardware. John Wall – 03:46 Yeah. And we’ve talked about this, even like you said, back when 13 came out, we had said that the idea with this is that it could run these models locally. But, yeah, it’s just kind of crazy now that it’s here. I mean, so is this — the idea is you have — it’s nodes. I mean, you have machine learning running at every single point out in the field, distributed like you said, it doesn’t have to phone home at all. And just a side note too, I did — Elon Musk, went crazy and said that if ChatGPT is baked in, he’s not going to allow Apple devices in the factory or anywhere. John Wall – 04:19 And the article made clear the point that — well, obviously he missed the idea, which is that it has that button that screams at you saying, “You’re sending this data to a third party,” which, yeah, that is really interesting too, kind of sowing seeds of discontent there. You’re basically telling the world that — think about what you do before you push that button because it’s leaving the device. Christopher Penn – 04:38 Yep. Generally speaking, Elon Musk is such a petty sore loser that anything that’s a good idea that he craps on is probably going to do really well. So like, it’s like the — I guess, the opposite indicator. If he loves something, like, yeah, that’s garbage. John Wall – 04:56 You’ve got to stay away from it. Christopher Penn – 04:57 Yeah, I mean, to be fair, when you look at the design of the Cybertrucks, and you’re like — and they look at like an Apple device, like, okay, one of these things is not like the other. And I thought this was really interesting about the market opportunity for companies with on-device AI. Again, if you are good at building or — you know someone who’s good at building a small, very finely tuned single-purpose model, and you can cram that into — you know, maybe a one billion parameter model, maybe a 150 million parameter model, maybe you have a model that is just trained on your podcast and nothing else. It can’t even tell you what color the sky is, but boy does it know your podcast. Christopher Penn – 05:40 You would integrate that model into your app in the App Store and have conversational AI in your app that is specifically focused, that gives someone the generative AI experience. I can talk to this podcast app and get, “What is Marketing over Coffee done with mobile marketing?” And because it knows the index, and you have the data and stuff like that, it will do a great job of that. If you ask, “What do you know about the In-Ear Insights podcast?” “I have no idea. I’ve never heard of that podcast and I’m not going to go look because that’s not what I’m trained on.” This gives people the ability to create rich AI experiences that are baked into the app, baked into hard — run on the hardware, need no Internet other than the data that’s there, and could do really well. So if you have at a shopping guide, and you’re like, “Maybe this guide really knows women’s blouses and nothing else.” You could have a really rich shopping experience using generative AI that’s so tightly focused and never needs the Internet. And so I think there’s a reasonable possibility that an app developer skilled with making AI models will be able to create a huge billion-dollar company app for the iPhone ecosystem that has a server AI cost of $0. John Wall – 07:00 Alright, yeah, there’s a bunch of other stuff too. We’ve got to peel out of this too, but before we do, we just want to take a second. 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 1,000, 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; John Wall – 07:26 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. Check it out over at wixstudio.com and we thank them for their support of the show. iPhone mirroring was one thing that I saw, that’s something that — on the Android side is not a concern. But, yeah, that was very cool as far as — especially, you made a point about marketers that have phone apps now being able to do it on the desktop. John Wall – 08:03 I mean, that is game-changing as far as making headaches go away and being able to type and cut and paste and all that kind of stuff. Christopher Penn – 08:09 Oh, yeah. I was blown away by that, where you have the virtual iPhone on the desktop, and you drag a file from — from your desktop into the social media management app on the iPhone, as it was — as though it was a local file. Stuff like, okay, that is — because phone mirroring has existed for a while. You’ve had the ability to mirror phones, but it’s always just like, “Okay, there’s the screen of your phone on the desktop, but now you’ve got to pick up your phone and use it.” This is making it a true virtual environment where you can control every aspect of that device from the desktop, and it does not have, like, the crazy lag of, VNC or — you know, the many other things. Such a cool — Christopher Penn – 08:49 Here’s the thing about Apple, and I’ve been saying this a lot lately, they are not first to anything. They did not have the first personal computer. They did not have the first smartwatch. They don’t have the first smartphone. They did not have the first anything. They have the best. They spend so much time obsessing on the customer experience and making sure that it is flawless and polished that even though there are other market entrants, they simply do a better job having a smooth experience so that someone like our parents — there’s no friction. Like, you don’t have to explain to a parent or a young child, like, “Here’s how you do this, and you’ve got to do the step and open this DLL file and all this.” No, it’s like, “Okay, just follow the on-screen instructions and it will do it.” Christopher Penn – 09:33 I mean, you’ve — you’ve had that experience with relatives. John Wall – 09:37 Oh my God, yeah. I have transitioned everybody to Apple just because — to make it all go away. It’s a walled garden that can — can hold them well. But so this does — I had this further down in the notes — but this brings up a sore point of why is Apple Music this redheaded stepchild of this whole thing? The desktop version of Apple Music is just missing so many features and just doesn’t — has so many things going wrong. It’s weird — it’s a cord enough — but I had — over on Threads, we were kicking this around a lot, and there was a wise observation that somebody made that, like, look, Apple Music is just there to sell more phones. Like, it doesn’t compete with Spotify or Tidal or any of those things. John Wall – 10:13 It’s just that they know that’s one more piece of lock-in to sell more phones. And when you’re selling billions of dollars of phones, then that’s fine. So yeah, I’ll throw that out to the crowd. If anybody else has Spotify versus Apple Music opinions, I’m sure everybody does, we’ll hear that. But yeah, I took it for a test run for a week, and after a week I was like, “Well, I still like the Spotify interface better.” Christopher Penn – 10:35 Marcus Brownlee did an interview with Tim Cook, which is, like, the first time, I think, a lot of the social media influencers have been doing CEO interviews. I saw Justine Ezarik did one as well. And Tim Cook says something very interesting, which is obvious and true, but you don’t think about it in today’s environment. He said Apple’s business model is not contingent on making you spend more time on your device. Apple’s business model is to sell these devices, and — and yes, the services that go along with them, but it is not to make you an addict to your device the way that Instagram, like, literally has to make you an addict for their business model to work. The more time you spend scrolling, the more time you spend consuming ads, the more money they make. Apple doesn’t do that. Christopher Penn – 11:12 And so for those services, yeah, it’s not — you don’t need to spend as much time, but also, Spotify is kind of a one-trick pony. It does one thing, which is play music and audio, whereas Apple does many things. So yeah, every individual app probably is not going to be as perfected as a company whose sole focus is that thing. It took Apple, what, five years to get a decent map app on their phone? Right now, Apple Maps is good, it’s very good, but it — you know, they ceded a lot of territory initially to Google Maps because the original Apple Maps sucked. John Wall – 11:45 Yeah. And then if you want to go full audio geek, Apple has a bunch of stuff in Atmos, so if you’re — you know, top-end audio stuff, you can get that. But that opens up a whole ‘nother audio file door of, just because it’s a new format, does it sound better, yes or no? And it really all comes down to individual listening, like, you have to just go listen to all these tracks and figure out which one is better. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution as far — and the equalizer is the other one that goes in there. Spotify does have an equalizer even on the phone app, which iPhone doesn’t have yet, but they do have on the desktop. Christopher Penn – 12:19 Yeah. The other big thing for marketers is they’re moving on from SKAdNetwork to their new ad attribution kit. So this is new software within the iPhone, the iOS ecosystem, to help advertisers understand better how the ads are working and things. But it’s very interesting, all the data is aggregated, so you get no user-level data whatsoever in any way. So this makes it compliant, obviously, with all of the major regulatory requirements for advertising. But it’s also interesting the way they positioned it in the tech session on it. You get less data, the smaller the audience is that you’re advertising to. You get more data as your audience gets bigger because there’s less chance of being able to re-identify someone from the ad data you get. So they were showing off, as your audience gets to really big sizes, yeah. Christopher Penn – 13:08 Now you can have more things like gender and age and stuff like that, whereas you have a very small audience, like, “Nope, you had people, but you had people download your app.” John Wall – 13:16 Yeah, they blocked that off. That makes sense because that is so easy to game. You can just start to individually tag people, that makes sense. Oh, yeah. Another interesting thing on the tracking side too, is with iOS 18, they’re going to be supporting RCS — this Rich Communication Services — which Android has had forever and Google has put forth as a text message set of standards. And so the idea is now we won’t have this weird gap between you’re sending GIFs and emoji responses that are tied to the bubble and all that kind of stuff via Apple that you couldn’t do on the other side. And they’re saying that there’s actually more tracking data on that too, you’ll actually get analytics as far as what’s happening with text. John Wall – 13:57 So they’re saying this is an opportunity for brands to be doing more relevant texting and make that as a better channel. But I don’t know — I don’t know enough about — I know that Community, as a text provider, has some workarounds for some of that stuff that can do it, but now it’ll be weird that it’s baked in. How will that change the tools, and what will the toolkit look like? So that’ll be one — of course, it has to show up first. We’ll see if it actually is delivered and then go from there and pick that up. Yeah, I just had to take a second, too. We want to thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of Marketing over Coffee. John Wall – 14:31 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. 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. John Wall – 15:17 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 in 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. I did want to get in there — you put out a new, updated _Unofficial Guide to the LinkedIn Algorithm_. What’s going on over there? What are the changes in the latest round with that? Christopher Penn – 16:05 So that is something our friend Amber Naslund, who’s a sales leader at LinkedIn, frequently posts that people ask her and other LinkedIn employees — people ask her, LinkedIn employees, “Why isn’t my post showing up in the feed?” Or, “How does this work? What are the secret hacks that employees get?” And she’s like, “None of that’s real.” And one thing I find myself pointing out in the comments an awful lot is LinkedIn does not make a secret of how it works. You just have to do some detective work to put all the pieces together. The same is true, by the way, of Apple. People would say, “Oh, Apple’s got all this brand new AI stuff. No one had any idea they were working on.” No, if you read Apple’s Machine Learning Research hub, they’ve been publishing about what they’ve been working on for years. Christopher Penn – 16:50 Some of the stuff that was announced at WWDC this week is in papers two years ago — you know, looking at something on screen and how you compress language models to fit on a device, they’ve been giving this information away. It’s just buried in tech stuff. And so with LinkedIn, it has a fabulous engineering blog. LinkedIn has execs like Tim Yerke who go out and do interviews on podcasts and stuff. And LinkedIn has dozens of academic papers on various services. “Here’s the paper we’re publishing on this, that, or the other thing.” Well, it turns out if you were to gather up all that information, they each contain pieces of how LinkedIn works, how the newsfeed works, how things get — how the decision process happens that allows a post to be seen or not. It’s, like, I think 13 different components. So there is no such thing as *the* LinkedIn algorithm, it’s 13 different services together that take a data stream and process it. And if you, as we did — if we took all that content, we stuffed it inside Google Gemini, the language model, and said, “Okay, we’ve got all this stuff, now turn this into a coherent single work. What happens when you post a piece of content on LinkedIn?” “Well, step one, you hit post. Step two, follow feed eats it. Step three, it’s scored. Step four is then passed to the trust and safety systems. It’s — it’s embedded, it’s vectorized, it’s passed different storage nodes. There’s proactive and reactive classifiers.” This is all the stuff that happens. And then finally, at the very end of this thing, it spits out, like, “Yes, your post is going to show up.” Christopher Penn – 18:31 We took all that, we said, “Okay, now that we know what technologies are involved in the order of events, now let’s write a set of three guides — beginning, intermediate, and advanced — for what marketers can do to essentially follow directions. Like, don’t put garbage in your posts and things, don’t put stuff that are low-engagement features in your posts.” And so now we have this unofficial LinkedIn algorithm guide, that’s about a 20-page ebook that has step-by-step — if you’re a beginning LinkedIn marketer — here’s what to do to improve the likelihood that your content’s going to show up. And then there’s an intermediate, and then there’s an advanced one. It’s all in the same guide. John Wall – 19:15 Alright, that’s cool. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes because people can go grab that. There’s no charge for that, just go pick it up off the site and get rolling. That’s easy enough to do. I’ve got a gear watch. I had my water bottle die — I had this Contigo water bottle I used forever — and I got hooked on this Owala water bottle. So I wanted to actually give it a plug because it’s great in that it has a sealable top, it has both a straw and the ability to pour from the nozzle. So that’s kind of unique because I love — you know, when I’m driving, I want to have a straw so I don’t have to put the canister in front of my face as I’m driving, and — but the ability to pour too is great. John Wall – 19:52 And yeah, I just solved a bunch of headaches that I had on that. So I’ve got that on there. And then the other one is running apps, too. I would talk about my running stack every once in a while. I’m using an app called WorkOutDoors, which is totally configurable and has a million things in it. I was on Adidas Running, and long story short, the API has changed and broken. Now I’ve lost a bunch of functionality with that. It’s pushed me to try some new stuff. I’ll take a couple more miles on that and then report back on how it goes, but so far that’s pretty promising. As far as — yeah, even — it’s simple toggle of ducking versus muting. John Wall – 20:26 When you’re getting feedback on how many miles you’ve gone or how fast you’re going, to be able to say, “No, I want you to pause the music” or my book — I don’t want my audiobook running in the background when I get a 10-minute speech on my pace, that — that’s not helping. So, yeah, that’s my grumpy old man plug there for that. Alright, that sounds good. We’ve got a bunch of other stuff coming up. I have Spark Together, SparkToro’s event is coming up in the fall, so I have not been to Seattle in forever, so I’m thinking about — maybe that’s a reason for me to go out there. But we’ll have to see if we can squeeze that in on the calendar. Have you got any — what’s next on the travel log for you? Christopher Penn – 21:02 There’s a bunch of stuff where we are — you know, from the final stages, getting paperwork together and things. The next thing for sure, yeah, will be in Cleveland, the Marketing AI Conference, a couple of months, but I know there’s other stuff that is pending right now. John Wall – 21:15 Alright, sounds good. That’ll wrap it up for this week, so until next week, enjoy the coffee. Christopher Penn – 21:18 Enjoy the coffee. Speaker 1 – 21:20 You’ve been listening to Marketing over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw51.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. The post The Future of Onboard AI and The World’s Best Water Bottle appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about how they shop, what they think of brands, who influences them, and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite What inspired the Gen Z Parent study? All Gen Zs are not broke and stressed out about money They will pay for value that aligns with their principles, and they love store brands 65% of Gen Z Dads doing the grocery shopping 11:11 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! Where do Gen Z parents go when their peers aren’t having kids? They still don’t have the Go To source The era of the frenemy Instamom is over Parents are less sad, less worried 20:42 – 22:10 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. The rise of the trades and doing better as homeowners If you back an issue, you have to go all the way Gen Z parent celebs are starting to show up, will they align with brands or start their own? Kasi on LinkedIn or at Culture Bureau Book Recco: Bird by Bird, the beloved book on writing by Anne Lamott 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 What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. John Wall – 00:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio. Speaker 2 – 00:09 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 Wall. Today I had a pitch come in talking about Gen Z and millennial parents so often. I mean, I’ve complained on the show all the time about how people have all these segments, and it’s basically just an excuse for people to complain about, employees. And so I usually ignore all this stuff, but this was some very interesting stuff as far as. And it was funny, too, that Gen Z parents, which is great because, you talk about Gen Z, but, okay, what are their parents like? Where do they go? And so Cassie Bruno is here with us this morning. She’s going to talk to us about this study and everything else that she does. Cassie, thanks for joining us. Kasi Bruno – 00:53 Thank you for having me. John Wall – 00:54 Okay, so tell us about the origin of this study. What drove you to do this, and what’s the story behind the story? Kasi Bruno – 01:01 I’ve always been interested in researching groups that marketers are ignoring a little bit. Looking ahead at what’s coming. Let’s find out more about what’s around the corner. And so I was in a meeting five years ago, and one of the clients, she was the head of, a baby category for a really big brand. And she said, “Well, we’ve got millennial parents cracked. What are you doing about Gen Z parents?” And it sort of. It was almost like the record scratch in the room where everybody was like, “Sorry, did we hear that? Right?” And she said, “One in five, 15% of my baby category buyer is already Gen Z.” So this is five years ago. And she said, “There’s no information about them. No one’s talking about it. What are you going to do with that?” And that was a bit of a wake up call for me. And I thought, “Okay, Gen Zs are a little young, but that’s a really interesting thought.” And so I kind of parked it in the back of my mind for a couple of years and then decided to. It was always kind of nagging at me in the back of my head. I was like, “Oh, that is really the next. That’s really interesting.” And I’d just done a really big study on marketing to millennial dads that was really overlooked. And in terms of that group was really overlooked by marketers and misunderstood. And so I started digging into Gen Z parents that became this study, in the end, was the more we learned about Gen Z parents in the early days, the more it was different than millennial parents, and the more it was different from what we understood about Gen Zs without kids. And so I guess I just kept following that thread because there was so much that was so interesting and just challenged beliefs about parents and Gen Zs that were like, “Okay, this is a really interesting place to dig.” So this research, for a few years, people looked at me like I was crazy, because a lot of the clients I was speaking to have children who are Gen Z. So kids who were between the ages of roughly 12 and 27 years old. And they were like, “Wait a minute. Gen Z parents? Like my kids having kids.” And so people looked at me like, “What are you, what are you talking about?” for a while. And then, we started studying this a couple of years ago, properly. And in those two years, it’s really. I’ve noticed a shift. People don’t look at me so much like I’m crazy, but now they’re pretty interested in the topic because, one in five births in the United States is to a Gen Z mother. And we see that Gen Z parents are going to be the majority of parents in the next few years. So that is really interesting to me. The fact that nobody’s paying attention to it yet, that was really interesting to me. And I think the fact that people thought I was a little crazy may have also made it more interesting to me, because when I look back at a lot of my work, it kind of pushes against headlines. I try to find the provocative angle, the thing that maybe no one’s talking about or no one wants to be talking about. And so when I trace things back throughout all my work, I think that kind of storytelling and making people kind of simultaneously surprised, but also going, “Oh, that makes total sense now that I hear about that,” is exciting to me. John Wall – 04:29 The first thing marketers are always interested in is money shopping brands. So what kind of stuff did you find out from digging into these groups? Kasi Bruno – 04:38 So it’s really interesting, right? All of the headlines would have you think that Gen Zs are completely broke and are totally stressed out about money and flailing financially. And while we found in our research that they are incredibly stressed about money, Gen Z’s are stressed about money. Gen Z parents are stressed about money. Millennial parents are stressed about money. It is no surprise that they’re all stressed about money. But what we did find that was really interesting is while they’re stressed out financially, they are really uncompromising when it comes to buying. So it’s important to note, in our research, we have been researching not only Gen Z parents, but also millennial parents. So people 28 to 40 with children, and also Gen Z’s, 20 to 27 without children, because that’s where you can find some of the interesting differences. So if we didn’t have the millennial data or the Gen Z, no kid data, we couldn’t really tell what was surprising, what was different. But when you actually compare those three groups, you find things about Gen Z parents where you go, “Okay, this is not what I have been reading about for the past five years across the media, the story is a lot more nuanced.” So in shopping, for example, number one stressor, we ask people, “What are you stressed out about?” The number one thing is money. But then when we start asking people questions about shopping and what’s worth paying more for, you see that Gen Z parents in particular, are not compromising. They are far more likely to say that they will pay more for something that is new and different than what is currently available. They’re far more likely to say that they will pay for something that aligns with their political beliefs. That one’s not so surprising. But it’s interesting that they’ll pay more. They will. They say, “I will pay more for brands that I think are best, and I won’t worry too much about price.” So, of course, like intention and what people say they’ll do, and then what they actually do is always a little bit different. But it’s just so funny how off the charts the parents agreement to those statements are the Gen Z parents compared to Gen Z’s without kids and millennials without kids. The other really interesting thing we see with the money is that when we look at store brands and we look at store brands versus national brands, this is kind of a crazy story here. It’s so fascinating. When we look at Gen Z parents, they love store brands. And what’s funny about that is, I did a study almost ten years ago about millennial dads, and marketing to millennial dads and store brands for millennials were like, so, okay. And even in this research with the millennials, what we see is they’re like, when you ask them, “Store brands are just as good as national brands.” They’re kind of like, “Yeah, a little bit.” Gen Z parents are like 85% like, “Yes, store brands are just as good as national brands.” And when you dig in and you look at the data, I mean, we can slice it 100 ways here. There are just so many interesting findings around this affinity towards store brands. So your private label brands, if you will. John Wall – 08:08 Yeah, that’s interesting. Was there anything that gave you an indication as to why? And it is. It’s very interesting that, yeah, we hear so much about money being the problem. So you think they would just be bargain buyers of everything, but they are actually giving more thought to what they’re supporting with their money being more discerning about their purchasing, which is interesting. So did you find anything that made? Is it because they know the store brands are the same as the regular brands or they don’t care about the cache of the. Whatever you’d get from the conglomerates? Where did that come from? Kasi Bruno – 08:36 It’s funny, it’s. I don’t think they see the distinction as much because Gen Zs have grown up with store brands being really solid. I think for those of us who grew up before Gen Z’s, store brands were really the sacrifice discount, not necessarily the highest quality products. But now you look across the board and store brands aren’t always priced way differently or much lower than national brands. The store brands can have status and cachet. And, this is also a generation that loves a dupe. And from personal care, cosmetics, fashion, we are seeing that Gen Zs love to find, like, to your point about being discerning, they’re like, “Where can I get the exact same quality and maybe pay a little less? How can I outsmart this?” And so I think it’s a number of different factors. But what we find that’s really interesting in the store brand conversation is the dad angle on store brands. So back when we did millennial dads and when we studied millennial dads, and we do have millennial dads in this study as well, for comparison, millennial dads don’t want anything to do with store brands. They’re like, “Nope, national brand innovation comes from national brands. Quality comes from national brands.” And with Gen Z parents, it’s actually the reverse. Gen Z dads love store brands even more than Gen Z moms, which is really interesting. And so when we looked across categories and said, “How often do you shop store brand in all of these categories, from personal care to diapers to clothing?” And Gen Z dads, almost in every category, said they were more likely to buy store brand than Gen Z moms. I mean, millennial dads were the least likely, and they were the more likely to say, “I almost never buy store brand.” So it was just a really interesting flip on how millennial dads felt about store brands. So that’s kind of, if you’re a national brand, that’s, I think, something to pay attention to, especially because Gen Z dads, like 65% of them say they’re doing the grocery shopping for the family. John Wall – 11:06 That is interesting. A bunch of stuff I want to dig into further with this, but before we dive into that, 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 ten 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. Check it out over at wix studio.com and we thank them for their support of the show. Okay, you mentioned information and influence. You had a, it said that many Gen Z parents can’t go to their friends for brands and product information. Talk about that. How, how is the way they’re deciding to make these purchases and who influences them? How has that changed? Kasi Bruno – 12:10 Yeah, it’s interesting because if you think about it, a lot of these young parents, what we see is they are right now, at least often, the first and only of their friends to have children. So they are, and we did a whole bunch of interviews and some qual with a few dozen Gen Z parents. And sometimes we did them as couples, sometimes we talked to them when they were alone. And this idea of “I can’t go to my friends” came out in some of those conversations. And it was really interesting because we had one young woman say, “There was this woman at work and I kind of call her, I call her my fairy godmother because she has three daughters and she really kind of showed me the ropes and she gave me some hand me downs and she was great because I couldn’t go to any of my friends.” And so when we asked people, “Where do you go for information about products and brands?” What was really interesting is Gen Zs without kids, friends were in the top five. “Yeah, I go to my friends.” And millennial parents had friends up there. Not quite top five, but, call it top seven. “Yeah, I can go to my friends.” Gen Z parents: Friends are nowhere to be found on the list. And so when you look at where they’re going, it’s quite decentralized, which we found really interesting because Gen Zs without kids, you ask them where they go and what they trust, and it’s kind of concentrated in a handful of things. Not very surprising. Like, Gen Zs are going, they’re going to TikTok, they’re going to YouTube, they’re going to Amazon. And this is for brand or product information. And then millennials are pretty concentrated in a couple of places, millennial parents. And then when you look at Gen Z parents, it’s so spread out across the board, new school platforms, old school information sources. They’re saying things like, “It’s like a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Yeah. Magazine ads, okay? Brand video.” And, and of course, they’ve got YouTube and they’ve got Amazon reviews. And so what we just see is that what that tells me, and when I pair that with what we heard from a lot of these young parents was like, “I’m discerning, so I can figure stuff out.” We had a mom say, “There’s nothing much out there for us young moms, but we are catching on fast.” So they have confidence that they can figure it out. And it also tells me that they haven’t found their go-to places that get them as parents. And they told us as much. They said, “Yeah, nobody gets it yet. Nobody’s talking to me as a parent yet.” And so when we see that decentralized, spread out set of information sources, I think that just tells me they think they can navigate it and figure it out. And also, they are not quite landing their places and platforms for parenting yet. John Wall – 15:15 Yeah, that’s interesting. And this does make sense now, because when I first read that, I was like, “Well, why don’t they have anyone to talk to?” And now I get it. It’s like that group is in the middle of transitioning, like you said. So it’s, yeah, you could be around, and none of your friends are trying to figure out what the right stroller is. And that’s a whole huge, giant thing to go through. You mentioned, you said another thing, talking about the era of the frenemy Insta mom influencer is over. What, what does that actually mean? Do I get this right? It’s like, you see these moms on Instagram and they’re doing everything perfect, and you hate them, but you’re still taking their advice. Is that the idea there? Kasi Bruno – 15:48 That was definitely the millennial vibe for influence, for sure, for millennial parenting. And it’s interesting, right? Because we have seen this shift overall influence from this picture perfect Instagram aesthetic to TikTok being far more authentic seeming and natural and a little bit messier. And that is also reflected in parenting. So, for Gen Z parents, we also see a huge decline instagram as a trusted source for information, which is really interesting. And TikTok is up there. And again, that’s, that falls in line with just generally Gen Z patterns. But Gen Z parents in particular, it’s kind of interesting to look at their idea of influence, and they really want influencers who are authentic and who aren’t trying to sell them on something. They’re quite pragmatic in many ways, which is really interesting. And, I think you see influencers of all different kinds and styles and with different backgrounds and different stories and even of all ages, I think. We talk about Gen Z parents are really relying on this decentralized network of information, influencers of all ages and stages. They don’t have one person that they are just going to as the authority on parenting. When we talked to these parents, they were like, “Yep, I can watch ten different TikTok videos and kind of figure out what works for me.” And so it’s, it’s very interesting when you look at the aesthetic, even of parents, Gen Z parents on TikTok, it is not perfect. They’re not sitting in a pristine kitchen telling you how to cook something incredible. They’re holding a baby, brushing their teeth with, a pile of laundry behind them. And so it’s, it’s quite interesting. That’s going to change the face of parenthood quite a bit. John Wall – 17:50 Yeah, that’s really interesting, because that tracks with some stuff that I’ve been doing some other research on talking about, this youngest generation of the same thing, them having so many sources. And they do have to hit multiple sources and arrive at the truth themselves because they no longer trust any one specific source. And that’s just kind of the state of media today. But so talking about that, you know, mistrust and emotions, too, I mean, dig into that a little bit, because you’ve had a whole section talking about emotions and outlook and how the headlines, what we think their emotions should be versus what their emotions actually are and where they think things are going. Kasi Bruno – 18:25 This is another one where we expected one thing and got entirely another thing. So we asked people the emotions they feel most and gave them a range of emotions, like two dozen. And what was really interesting is you expect the things to come out that you hear and read about all the time, anxious and lonely and unhappy and stressed out and worried and all these things. We actually didn’t get tons of that stuff. We got a little bit of that, of course, from Gen Z parents. But what was interesting is when you looked at Gen Zs without kids, against Gen Z parents, with parenthood came more positive emotions. And that’s not surprising, right? That if you’re a parent, you might have feel more love and more happiness. But what was really interesting was with parenthood came fewer negative emotions. So things like loneliness went way down when people were parents. And again, you can say maybe some of these people started out less lonely and began like. We don’t know the exact reason why, but we just found it interesting that even worry goes down for Gen Z parents, sadness goes down for Gen Z parents when you compare Gen Zs without kids and Gen Z parents. And so we just sort of found that really interesting because as marketers, we talk about this young group is very lonely and isolated, and we may have to think a little bit differently about them as parents. Now, sure, they’re not all feeling less lonely and less worried and less sad, but it was a really marked pattern in the data. And so we just found that to be really interesting that maybe this narrative of negativity may not be the right one for parents. John Wall – 20:35 Okay, I want to talk about dads, too, because you mentioned some differences between the Gen Zs and millennials. Before we do. 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 access to from anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you’ve got one unified business management suite. 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 you mentioned Gen Z dads being the primary grocery shopper, which was interesting to me. And then, and you said that they are markedly different from the millennials as far as the millennials hating brands, store brands, and Gen Z being okay with that, what other stuff do we need to know about that Gen Z grocery buyer? Is that an opportunity that brands need to be jumping on, or what’s going on there? Kasi Bruno – 22:33 I think the Gen Z dad is really interesting. Every time we fielded research, we are like, “There is something happening here with the Gen Z dads that we are constantly surprised by,” the dad data. So really, Gen Z dads, they’re very much like a principled and pragmatic shopper. So we look at things like 65% of them say that they are the primary grocery shopper. And that is up from millennial dads, who are pretty groundbreaking at 50%. And marketers were really late in speaking to millennial dads. And marketers, until ten years ago, were making fun of dads in their advertising and obviously suffered a lot of backlash for that. And so hopefully, what we get to is a place where people are now really considering dad being thoughtful about dad. So 65% of Gen Z dads say that the primary grocery shopper. We know that Gen Z dads have the best opinion of store brands across every single category. Across every single category, Gen Z dads are far more likely to say that they always are, mostly by store brand. That’s compared to millennial parents. That’s compared to Gen Z moms. I think it’s a really big rethink if you are a national brand. I think what’s also interesting is this principled side. So we asked, obviously, about things like political and social issues and brands that believe what you believe and things like that. And Gen Z dads are more likely than Gen Z moms, Gen Zs without kids and millennial parents to agree that it’s important to know what political and social issues a brand supports before I buy. They’re also way more likely, almost twice as likely to say that they’d pay more for brands that take a political or social stand that they agree with. So they’re quite principled, which is really interesting. And by the way, when you cut this for, we ask people, “If you’re forced to vote today for Trump or Biden, who would you vote for?” And when you cut the data with, that doesn’t really change it all that much, which is fascinating. So again, it doesn’t mean that it’s one set of beliefs that people are going to buy to, but what’s important is you tell me what you believe and then I make my choice. John Wall – 24:55 Yeah, yeah, that’s funny. That was the line that I was thinking on, polling on, was that their beliefs in what they’re actually buying matters. But it doesn’t change the fact that as a brand, you’ve got to be putting out what you stand for there, because either side will make a decision based on that. Yeah. And that’s really interesting. That goes to another thing, too, then. So from the stuff that you’ve seen here, what other kind of advice would you give to brands as far as based on this data? What should they be changing that is maybe not intuitive or what mistakes are they making and where do they need to go? Kasi Bruno – 25:25 This group is really nuanced. We’ve been kind of referring to them as these radical traditionalists because, we’ve been talking about them, Gen Zs, as if they’re going to blow up every institution to a certain degree. We do this about every young generation. They’re going to reimagine all the things, family, government, education, all these things. There is a really dominant narrative about this group, but it’s far more nuanced than that. Gen Z homeownership is in better shape than millennial homeownership at the same age and stage. So we look at the rise in trades and going to trade schools is really important because when you look at why a lot of young people are going, “I want to make money. I want to buy a house. I want to be stable.” Meanwhile, the narrative we get is like, “Oh, they don’t want houses.” It’s like, that might not be all entirely true. We actually asked people some quite traditional questions just to see how much they agreed and disagreed with it. And things like “Home ownership is a sign of a good parent.” “Small towns are better than big cities in terms of raising a family.” “Two parent households are better for children than single parent households.” Gen Z parents, there are a lot of parents who agree with these statements. So I think this narrative that everyone is very anti-establishment and anti the way things have always been, it’s not always the case. And so I think there is a shift that, marketers need to remember that there are a lot of young parents for whom traditional markers and milestones still do matter. I think we hear about the financial piece and how stressed out they are about money, which is true, they are stressed, but they are also savvy and very non compromising. So it’s about value, it’s not just about price. We didn’t get into this too much, but when we look at brands being allies to different communities, we definitely do see that Gen Z parents say, “Don’t be an ally in advertising only. If you are going to support something, support it. Support it behind the scenes, support it financially and be a really stable ally, if you say you are.” John Wall – 27:47 Right, yeah, that’s true. Because a lot of brands will, whether you call it greenwashing or whatever they’re doing, they go on certain things. And so you’re saying that identify, and it’s amazing because once they make that mark, they usually tend to lose the other side. Like, they actually drop. But so you’re saying that they also have to follow through and go 100%. Kasi Bruno – 28:06 And we asked a lot about that in our latest round of research. And again, no matter the political belief, people said, “Walk the talk.” If you say you’re going to support it. We asked people, “What about testing the waters and supporting a little bit and then pulling back if there’s backlash?” And that was the, like, least chosen response. It’s like, believe it and stick with it and at least you’re clear about what that is. John Wall – 28:35 That’s interesting. Now, always when you dig into research and you start doing some stuff, you have the problem where it raises more questions. Were there other things that came out of this that you want to solve and will that go into a next study for you or what will you do with that kind of stuff? Kasi Bruno – 28:49 Oh, for sure. In this case, every time we looked at answer, it gave us a dozen more questions. And so each round of research, we dig into those things. We share the rounds of research with clients, and then their questions inform the next round. So for us, this is ongoing. We’ve been at this for about two years and fielding surveys and studies for every about, I would say, seven or eight months, going to field every seven or eight months, and also having conversations, conducting interviews, that sort of thing. And it’s really interesting because we’re starting to see some really cool patterns, but also really interesting questions every single time. So, yes, we are constantly learning. And you know what’s going to be interesting now? We’ve got some Gen Z celebrity parents starting to join Kylie Jenner, right? Because she was sort of the most popular Gen Z mom and one of the few. But now, we’ll see Haley Bieber. Sophia Richie has just had a baby. So it’ll be interesting. The more celebrity, young celebrities start parenting, how that shifts the influence piece, I think that’s a big question for us. John Wall – 30:08 Yeah. And do you think it’ll run the same route of they’ll start to just line up with brands, or will it be something different? Kasi Bruno – 30:13 They’ll start to line up with brands. I’m sure they will create their own brands. Yeah. Create their own communities. We’ll see. It’ll be, I mean, many of them already have their own brands, but it will be really interesting to see. It’ll be interesting to see if parenthood retains that kind of natural and messy TikTok aesthetic or if it starts to get a little more polished and a little more curated. And if we fall back into that, okay. John Wall – 30:39 If somebody wants to learn more about the research or talk to you about doing other stuff, what’s the best way to get in touch? Kasi Bruno – 30:45 LinkedIn is great. Find me on LinkedIn or cultureburo.com is also great. John Wall – 30:50 That sounds great. We’ll include both those in the show notes so people can find out more as we go out the door. Any trade mags or entertainment media, books, anything that you’ve picked up recently that you can recommend for our audience? Kasi Bruno – 31:03 Oh, gosh. Does it have to be marketing related? John Wall – 31:06 No, absolutely not. This is a chance to kind of just. What the heck’s going on? Kasi Bruno – 31:10 I just finished Ann LaMott’s book, *Bird by Bird*, and it is about writing and storytelling and life, and it is fantastic. I highly recommend it. John Wall – 31:25 Oh, that sounds, that actually came up in Ted Lasso. That was part of that whole story, but I’ve never actually picked the thing up. So that’s a great recommendation. I’ll go ahead. That’ll be in the show notes for everybody who wants it. All right. So Cassie Bruno, thanks for joining us. Kasi Bruno – 31:40 Thank you so much for having me. John Wall – 31:42 All right, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. Speaker 2 – 31:46 You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at JW 5150 dot com. 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 Kasi Bruno with The Inside Story of Gen Z Parents appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about Rand Fishkin’s Pulitzer Bid, SERP Hacks, Burst Mode, and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite 60 hours in planes over 2 weeks Google Gemini Upgrades including AI Answers Rand is sent some leaked Google API Documentation – he then sent it to Mike King for further analysis Using Gemini to decode it! Keeping in mind your site level radius Priority to the first 200 tokens (150 words) 10:00 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! Erik Deckers sends a SERP hack Google Marketing Live showcases AI powered tools Rise of the Virtual Team Members NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. iPhone Photography – lens choice, burst mode, and Live shots Blackmagic for Video from DaVinci Resolve 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. The post How Google Works, Building Your Virtual Team, and Taking Better Pictures appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about creating great content, getting more Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared impact, and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite Previous interview on PESO Major changes with AI and how Earned Media has changed Adding EEAT to the strategic plan (4:32) Massive changes in staffing in journalism 8:21 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! New people and new channels for Earned Getting your news via TikTok Why you have to work on all fronts 15:08 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Measuring it all – Outputs vs. Outcomes (17:35) PESO Model Certified Guides Guys being jerks Strava, Runtastic, and Run Gap Learn how to work with Gini at Spin Sucks  She’s reading Demon Copperhead, The Anxious Generation, and Kara Swisher’s Burn Book is fantastic 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. The post PESO Update From Its Creator Gini Dietrich! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about GA Key Events, AI for Agencies, Smart Lights and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite German 4 Test pack (Covid, Influenza A & B, and RSV) Google in front of the DoJ – Slides if you want more GA4 Conversions are now Key Events, maybe time for Matomo? Google Disavow link will probably go away. Gone from bing because it’s "not needed" 7:44 – 8:52 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth. Google AI Answers Biometric Informaction Privacy Act – Watch out for "Virtual Clothes/Glasses Try On" Scott Brinker’s New State of Martech over 14k! Why You’d Want To Use Synthetic Data Sets 15:10 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! Check out the GenAI for Agencies Webinar Recording Here, for Associations Here Gear Watch! Chris switches to the Elgato FaceCam Mark 2 Light Stick including Flim Making Modes John complains that it’s hard to find bright SmartBulbs New Apple iPads with M4 chips 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! Gearwatch: Chris’ New Webcam, Rogers Amps, new iPads M4, Water Filter Video: Unfrosted 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 Google AI Answers, Synthetic Data, and M4 Chips! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Former Hubspot employee turned Fractional Chief Customer Officer Consultant, Christina Garnett discusses the importance of having a CCO, defining the ICP, understanding customer love languages, and balancing quantitative and qualitative feedback for a holistic customer-centric approach.