From Art to Science: How AI is Revolutionizing the Marketing Industry

[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: We are live.
[00:00:02] Jess Bahr: Welcome to another episode.
[00:00:04] Jess Bahr: I always am pulling it also up on my phone when we launch to make sure that it's, like, working.
[00:00:11] Jess Bahr: We can see comments, so don't mind that I'm not logged into my phone.
[00:00:15] Jess Bahr: Cool.
[00:00:15] Jess Bahr: Not happening today then.
[00:00:17] Pavel Konoplenko: So we just trust in the system working.
[00:00:21] Jess Bahr: You have to faith in the tools, right?
[00:00:22] Jess Bahr: That's what it's all about.
[00:00:23] Pavel Konoplenko: You got to have faith in technology.
[00:00:24] Pavel Konoplenko: Be.
[00:00:25] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I was on a call with someone earlier, and I was, you know, I got to wake up.
[00:00:30] Jess Bahr: I look a little dead.
[00:00:30] Jess Bahr: And he's like, well, you're talking, so you're clearly, like, alive.
[00:00:33] Jess Bahr: And I was like, I don't know.
[00:00:33] Jess Bahr: How do you know I'm not an AI?
[00:00:35] Jess Bahr: How do you know this isn't a deep fake?
[00:00:37] Pavel Konoplenko: Deep fake deep voice, everything.
[00:00:41] Discussion on Meta's New App, Threads

[00:00:41] Jess Bahr: Pavel, what are you excited about this week?
[00:00:44] Pavel Konoplenko: So I got threads yesterday.
[00:00:47] Pavel Konoplenko: The new Instagram Twitter killer.
[00:00:49] Jess Bahr: Did you download it?
[00:00:50] Jess Bahr: Like midnight?
[00:00:51] Pavel Konoplenko: No, it came out earlier.
[00:00:53] Pavel Konoplenko: It was like 10:00 p.m..
[00:00:55] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know when it was officially out, but it was like 1030 or something.
[00:01:00] Pavel Konoplenko: Loved it.
[00:01:02] Pavel Konoplenko: Super smooth.
[00:01:03] Pavel Konoplenko: It's connected to instagram.
[00:01:04] Pavel Konoplenko: I think it's interesting that it's billed as an Instagram app as opposed to, like, Facebook or anything.
[00:01:10] Pavel Konoplenko: It's coming from it, but it's not in Instagram.
[00:01:14] Jess Bahr: It's like a separate standalone app.
[00:01:16] Pavel Konoplenko: It's a separate standalone app.
[00:01:18] Jess Bahr: Okay.
[00:01:19] Pavel Konoplenko: But you could reshare any threads that you see onto your Instagram stories, onto your Instagram feed.
[00:01:26] Pavel Konoplenko: So it does have that collection.
[00:01:28] Pavel Konoplenko: You can import automatically your Instagram bio, your profile photo.
[00:01:33] Pavel Konoplenko: You can follow any of your followers on Instagram when they join threads.
[00:01:38] Pavel Konoplenko: So you can make this waitlist for following, which is pretty cool.
[00:01:44] Pavel Konoplenko: The whole UI UX feels real smooth.
[00:01:48] Pavel Konoplenko: I'm curious which way this is going to go, because obviously we know Facebook, Meta, this is their strategy of growing and innovating, is to copy people.
[00:01:57] Pavel Konoplenko: Except that this is slightly different because Twitter has been around for like, 15 years or something now, and I've known anytime vine came out, and the Instagram and the stories, the reels, they're always trying to innovate in that way from stealing the features.
[00:02:16] Pavel Konoplenko: In this case, it's a little different because this is an established model that they're now releasing.
[00:02:22] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think a lot of it has to do with the chaos that Twitter is going through.
[00:02:29] Pavel Konoplenko: But yeah, I'm excited about threads.
[00:02:31] Pavel Konoplenko: I'm excited to keep using it, see what's up there.
[00:02:34] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's another new channel.
[00:02:36] Jess Bahr: I think there's definitely and I believe I can't remember who it was, but there were executives at Meta who had said, Twitter is just chaos.
[00:02:44] Jess Bahr: Right?
[00:02:45] Jess Bahr: Let's as little finger in Game of Thrones says, chaos is a ladder climate.
[00:02:50] Jess Bahr: He might not have said climate with it, but I think they definitely saw an opportunity.
[00:02:55] Jess Bahr: I'm trying to think, okay, if you had to name the top place that you see Tweets outside of Twitter, I think where I see them the most is Instagram posts when they're screenshotted.
[00:03:07] Pavel Konoplenko: I would say Instagram is the place where I see all other channels.
[00:03:11] Pavel Konoplenko: Like, I see Tumblr posts on Instagram, I see reddit's what are they called?
[00:03:17] Pavel Konoplenko: Comments posts.
[00:03:18] Pavel Konoplenko: Reddit posts on Instagram.
[00:03:21] Pavel Konoplenko: Instagram is like the place where everyone goes to hang out and to share their stuff.
[00:03:27] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, it makes sense for them to do this.
[00:03:33] Pavel Konoplenko: And the timing couldn't have been better.
[00:03:35] Pavel Konoplenko: I also love their focus.
[00:03:37] Pavel Konoplenko: When you sign up, they give you the three features or whatever, and the second thing that they list is the Fediverse, which is the open source social networking infrastructure.
[00:03:50] Pavel Konoplenko: Mastodon is probably one of the biggest Fetaverse networks.
[00:03:55] Pavel Konoplenko: Funny thing about the fetaverse I came across it like, I don't know, five years ago maybe Fetiverse, and it kind of blew my mind in the paradigm that it's looking to build, which is kind of this open source social networking in a way.
[00:04:11] Pavel Konoplenko: So it's interesting to see Meta continuing its open source push as a way to distinguish themselves from their rivals.
[00:04:21] Discussing Discoverability and Community Building in Threads App and Comparisons with Twitter

[00:04:21] Jess Bahr: How is discoverability within threads?
[00:04:25] Jess Bahr: Can you find other people to you.
[00:04:28] Pavel Konoplenko: Could there's like random people in my feed.
[00:04:30] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know how they got there.
[00:04:33] Pavel Konoplenko: I wouldn't say the discoverability is that great, yet I think it's still centered on your own feed from Instagram.
[00:04:40] Pavel Konoplenko: So I think that's something they definitely have to improve over time.
[00:04:44] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think that may be one of the biggest downfalls that will prevent threads from being successful is the lack of finding conversation, because that's what Twitter was great.
[00:04:56] Jess Bahr: So yes, Twitter discoverability because people really, I mean, listen, you and I met on Twitter in a marketing chat and people would really kind of build community around these hashtags and you could easily engage in conversation with others in a way that felt very mean.
[00:05:13] Jess Bahr: Even live tweeting, you know, you may reply about something else you see that a person shared, but you're kind of bonding over that hashtag with it.
[00:05:22] Understanding the Impact of AI and SEO

[00:05:22] Pavel Konoplenko: What are you excited about?
[00:05:23] Jess Bahr: This week?
[00:05:25] Jess Bahr: Little news got acquired, which you know about because you were part of it.
[00:05:34] Jess Bahr: Yes, I came back shocked.
[00:05:36] Jess Bahr: Shameless plug.
[00:05:38] Jess Bahr: Welcome to the CEO CMO co founders here.
[00:05:41] Jess Bahr: But I'm really excited, I mean, obviously about that.
[00:05:43] Jess Bahr: It's a huge announcement, but just having more space and time to focus on AI solutions because I feel like we really were on this hype cycle upward curve.
[00:05:55] Jess Bahr: Everyone's talking about AI, super excited for it.
[00:05:58] Jess Bahr: And then we saw just like a trillion fear mongering headlines.
[00:06:02] Jess Bahr: And now I think some of that's dying down a little bit and people are starting to realistically, like, how is it impacting us?
[00:06:08] Jess Bahr: What are we doing?
[00:06:09] Jess Bahr: We saw Twitter start to limit the tweets you can see.
[00:06:13] Jess Bahr: I mean, I remember when Twitter killed firehose access and they limited the API calls to still a ton, but you couldn't go know, five years in the searches.
[00:06:23] Jess Bahr: You can only go back a certain amount of time.
[00:06:25] Jess Bahr: I think it's interesting how some companies are trying to almost safeguard against AI, but I think the ones who are embracing it and learning to work with it are the ones who are going to win and the ones who are trying to fight it or work against it are ultimately going to alienate users too.
[00:06:43] Pavel Konoplenko: I think this battle against the AI, one of the fear mongering battles of AI is the job replacement displacement.
[00:06:51] Pavel Konoplenko: That's like one category, but the other one is it's more like tactical intangible is what you mentioned with Twitter limiting the access.
[00:06:59] Pavel Konoplenko: Also recently, OpenAI temporarily halted web access because people were using chat GPT to get around Paywalls, because they were able to put the link in and get the summary and get the news from the Paywalled article.
[00:07:16] Jess Bahr: Hopefully they won't kill way back when.
[00:07:18] Pavel Konoplenko: Machine don't tell them about it.
[00:07:24] Pavel Konoplenko: Don't let the internet know.
[00:07:25] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, but yeah, I think it's interesting because there's the real concern of AI of like, if you're a marketer, you're trying to drive your revenues and subscriptions, and then you find out AI is like the leaky funnel and the leaky bucket for subscribers, and you're like, oh damn, AI strikes again.
[00:07:43] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's not job replacement, it's not any of these things.
[00:07:47] Pavel Konoplenko: But AI kind of becomes this tool that other people are using to get around your own marketing.
[00:07:55] Pavel Konoplenko: So then is AI a friend or a foe?
[00:07:59] Jess Bahr: Well, even the fear of AI can cause a big impact where even maybe AI wouldn't be as detrimental, but people acting out of how they're predicting the future to go.
[00:08:11] Jess Bahr: There's a phrase I'm looking for that I can't think of, but it's similar to the stock market, where if people think a stock is going to crash, it'll start crashing because they'll start selling it.
[00:08:21] Pavel Konoplenko: So like a self fulfilling prophecy, sort of.
[00:08:24] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:08:24] Jess Bahr: And so I think even if know, if you start a media company with a Paywall, it doesn't mean AI is going to destroy your monetization model.
[00:08:32] Jess Bahr: But out of fear of that, people may use different types of paywalls or have more gated content or just try and be more restrictive with it.
[00:08:40] Jess Bahr: And that could cause your customers to spend less with you and be with you less.
[00:08:44] Pavel Konoplenko: Right.
[00:08:45] Pavel Konoplenko: And that then calls into question SEO in the world of AI too.
[00:08:50] Pavel Konoplenko: How do we give just enough access for the bots so that AI knows about you and knows what you're writing about and who you are and what you do, versus giving away too much of what you're looking to hide behind?
[00:09:07] Jess Bahr: I just want to know how to get found in Chat GBT.
[00:09:11] Jess Bahr: If someone is searching for what is the best marketing podcast about AI, how do we get found?
[00:09:16] Jess Bahr: That's what I want to know.
[00:09:18] Jess Bahr: I just want to like, how do I optimize?
[00:09:21] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, that's going to be an interesting development.
[00:09:26] Pavel Konoplenko: Because it's similar to the conversation that people know.
[00:09:29] Pavel Konoplenko: How do you get ranked on Google?
[00:09:31] Pavel Konoplenko: Except Google was as much of a black box that it was when it comes to the ranking signals, it was this, I forgot the guy's name who is their SEO head.
[00:09:42] Pavel Konoplenko: He would do the announcements.
[00:09:46] Pavel Konoplenko: He would answer questions.
[00:09:50] Pavel Konoplenko: There was like this whole industry that had insider knowledge and was able to.
[00:09:54] Jess Bahr: Share they gave you or you could even infer it.
[00:10:00] Jess Bahr: Right.
[00:10:00] Jess Bahr: It's like, we know Google wants to serve the most relevant content and how do they rank relevancy?
[00:10:05] Jess Bahr: What are things they can look at?
[00:10:06] Jess Bahr: You kind of infer and almost test out to see what works and what.
[00:10:11] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, with Chat GBT, it's way more of a black box.
[00:10:15] Pavel Konoplenko: Open AI.
[00:10:17] Pavel Konoplenko: The company itself doesn't have full view of how the model works.
[00:10:22] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's part of the complexity of this large language model is it's way less deterministic than Google's algorithms where they can say, hey, we're changing the algorithms and this is how it's going to work now.
[00:10:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Here's the press release.
[00:10:37] Pavel Konoplenko: Boom.
[00:10:38] Pavel Konoplenko: Then the SEO consultants can take it and run with it, but they don't have such a thing yet.
[00:10:42] Jess Bahr: We know that you guys are keyword stuffing, so now we're going to start penalizing it.
[00:10:46] Pavel Konoplenko: So I'm curious what the first breaks are going to be, because there's I'm sure many people trying to break into this black box, understand how it works, and we're going to have a whole new game of the cat and mouse.
[00:10:58] Jess Bahr: Yeah, that's what I most, where I think there's a massive opportunity.
[00:11:02] Jess Bahr: What I'm really excited for is when we start seeing SEO agencies that are not even SEO.
[00:11:09] Jess Bahr: I don't know what the acronym is.
[00:11:10] Jess Bahr: AIO AIO AI SEO.
[00:11:16] Jess Bahr: Whatever it is, there's going to be people who are going to start saying like, hey, I can get you a connection of ours.
[00:11:21] Jess Bahr: Mark Schaeffer.
[00:11:22] Jess Bahr: Right.
[00:11:22] Jess Bahr: Got a speaking engagement through Chat GPT.
[00:11:26] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, and I'm sure he know do something specifically for it.
[00:11:32] Pavel Konoplenko: But then it also makes me think how much of it is just related back to the SEO.
[00:11:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Like, if you have good content that's discoverable by Google and is structured well, those same Google bots that are crawling your site, that's the predecessors to the AI bots that are going to be crawling your site.
[00:11:52] Pavel Konoplenko: You know, maybe we just follow the basic SEO guidelines and maybe that's enough.
[00:11:56] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know.
[00:11:57] Jess Bahr: I'm just picturing all these people who I think don't even follow, don't even have good SEO.
[00:12:03] Jess Bahr: I think ultimately, if you're doing good and you're putting out good content and you're getting linked places and people are talking about you, that should be the thing that gets you found.
[00:12:12] Jess Bahr: But there's always little hacks or things you can do to I don't want to say hacks.
[00:12:16] Jess Bahr: There's things you can do to ensure that your content or message is shared in a way that's most easily consumable by the robots that are reading it.
[00:12:24] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, and the goal of the robots is to try to understand what humans are reading.
[00:12:29] Pavel Konoplenko: And I guess I think it's easy for marketers to kind of lose sight of that.
[00:12:34] Pavel Konoplenko: The reason the Google bots exist is they try to replicate the reading experience and how does it load on mobile.
[00:12:43] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's why page speed is one of the factors for like all of these things are done in mind with how humans are reading it.
[00:12:53] Pavel Konoplenko: So maybe the AI just does a better job of understanding how humans read.
[00:12:59] Pavel Konoplenko: And if you just have great content for humans, that's all you really need.
[00:13:03] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know.
[00:13:05] Pavel Konoplenko: I am excited about that.
[00:13:06] Pavel Konoplenko: I'm also interested.
[00:13:07] AI in Marketing Analytics and its Limitations

[00:13:07] Pavel Konoplenko: I think the other thing with AI is like analytics.
[00:13:10] Pavel Konoplenko: So that's something I hear often of like, how do we use AI for analytics and big data?
[00:13:19] Jess Bahr: In the nicest way I can possibly say it, it kind of annoys me because I feel we did a poll recently, actually in the Demand Slot community and asked people about their excitement for AI and the biggest thing they said was analytics.
[00:13:33] Jess Bahr: They want to know more about how AI can help them with their analytics.
[00:13:38] Jess Bahr: It's the same thing that I've told like a million people by now.
[00:13:41] Jess Bahr: Maybe not a million, maybe a couple hundred thousand.
[00:13:43] Jess Bahr: If you don't have data, none of this shit matters.
[00:13:47] Jess Bahr: Look at healthcare, right?
[00:13:48] Jess Bahr: All of healthcare data is almost all of it's unstructured, and especially because of HIPAA compliance, often strip out important things.
[00:13:55] Jess Bahr: And so you can have these massive, massive data sets.
[00:13:58] Jess Bahr: But if your data is not structured in a way that it can be parsed, if it's not together in a way to actually be analyzed, and if you're not collecting the data you need, you're never going to get there.
[00:14:06] Jess Bahr: And yes, I think AI could come in and structure unstructured data in a way that maybe gets you 80% of the way there.
[00:14:12] Jess Bahr: They can get you partway there.
[00:14:14] Jess Bahr: But if you don't have a good data collection practice, none of that matters.
[00:14:18] Jess Bahr: And I'm just foreseeing this whole movement of people going to AI for analysis.
[00:14:23] Jess Bahr: Which Salesforce bought Tableau a long time ago.
[00:14:26] Jess Bahr: They rolled out Salesforce Einstein like four or five years ago.
[00:14:30] Jess Bahr: I don't know anyone using it.
[00:14:31] Jess Bahr: And the idea was you could type in like, how did my sales do last year?
[00:14:34] Jess Bahr: You could type in these really human questions that you would ask your data.
[00:14:39] Jess Bahr: Tableau has an integrated too where you could just ask it questions and would give you the answers.
[00:14:43] Jess Bahr: It never took off.
[00:14:45] Jess Bahr: I feel like if people really were going to embrace it, they would have done it with these tools versus now I think it's going to be overhyped and I think it's not going to solve the underlying issue that people do not have good data most of the time.
[00:15:00] Pavel Konoplenko: And I think part of it too is even with this Google migration to Ga Four, first of all, how many companies still have not migrated, haven't set up Ga Four properly?
[00:15:10] Jess Bahr: I mean, we haven't, we are in Ga Four, we're early adopters, but there's a lot of people listening who don't have any Google data anymore.
[00:15:18] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's a learning curve too.
[00:15:21] Pavel Konoplenko: Ga Four is structured differently than UA.
[00:15:26] Pavel Konoplenko: They're structured differently.
[00:15:29] Pavel Konoplenko: The reporting is great on Ga Four, but you have to know how to use it, how to set up the dashboards, and I bet at least 50% of the companies don't actually set up their data.
[00:15:41] Pavel Konoplenko: So it's like all of these things that you're talking about, like you have access to it, you can set up dashboards, you don't need AI, but if you don't do that work to set it up, then you can't have the insights.
[00:15:51] Pavel Konoplenko: And then the second thing too is what are you going to do with that data?
[00:15:54] Pavel Konoplenko: Because it's one thing to ask, how did my sales do last year?
[00:15:58] Pavel Konoplenko: Okay, let's say you get the answer.
[00:16:00] Pavel Konoplenko: Now what you still have to do the marketing, you still have to understand trends, you still have to understand, you have to believe it, you have to believe it.
[00:16:10] Pavel Konoplenko: It has to connect and you have to convince your boss or any of the stakeholders in what you're going to do with this data.
[00:16:19] Pavel Konoplenko: It all comes back to the human marketing element.
[00:16:22] Jess Bahr: Yeah, there's so many dragons out there that are just hoarding data, just sitting on in their layer, doing nothing with it, and they look at it and they go, oh, we don't know if it's actually right.
[00:16:32] Jess Bahr: Why are you spending so much money collecting it then?
[00:16:35] Pavel Konoplenko: I think it's just if we take a step back, it's like, how do marketers use data?
[00:16:43] Pavel Konoplenko: Because a lot of times data can lie.
[00:16:46] Pavel Konoplenko: Like, you can use data to support whatever narrative you have, and it takes a skill to understand data, to find insights out of it.
[00:16:55] Pavel Konoplenko: And maybe the promise of AI is that it can find these insights that you wouldn't.
[00:17:01] Pavel Konoplenko: But yet, to your point of, like, how do you believe it and how do you implement it?
[00:17:06] Pavel Konoplenko: I don't know if AI is going to save anyone that and even if it does, if everyone is able to have now the analytics and gets all these insights, you're still back to square one where everyone has insights and then the company that succeeds is the one that has better insights or better implementation or faster.
[00:17:29] Pavel Konoplenko: You still will have to then do the extra work of better marketing and.
[00:17:35] Jess Bahr: There'S going to be someone, there's going to be a conference and someone's going to be like, we built this huge AI driven model and here's our data collection and we have like 20 analysts and blah, blah.
[00:17:44] Jess Bahr: And then someone will come and be like, yeah, no, we said like, fuck it, yolo.
[00:17:48] Jess Bahr: And just test and see what works and kill what doesn't.
[00:17:50] Jess Bahr: And we don't do anything, and they're.
[00:17:52] Pavel Konoplenko: Successful, or companies that say, we just follow our gut.
[00:17:57] Pavel Konoplenko: We just do customer interviews with 20 of our top people, and that's what we're driven by.
[00:18:02] Pavel Konoplenko: And maybe that becomes that distinction, because now your marketing looks different because it's not driven by the same model that everyone else is driven by.
[00:18:11] The Challenges of Trusting and Justifying Marketing Metrics

[00:18:11] Pavel Konoplenko: And then the other last thing with the data, too, is when it comes to trusting data.
[00:18:16] Pavel Konoplenko: I think Facebook had a class action lawsuit or something where it was like they literally lied about their views.
[00:18:29] Jess Bahr: I called this in 2015.
[00:18:32] Jess Bahr: I was at a panel.
[00:18:33] Jess Bahr: It was me.
[00:18:34] Jess Bahr: I was the only woman on the panels.
[00:18:35] Jess Bahr: Me and, like, four white guys.
[00:18:37] Jess Bahr: And we're talking about the panel was getting very boring.
[00:18:41] Jess Bahr: Everyone was agreeing with themselves.
[00:18:45] Jess Bahr: It was a panel for a bunch of investment firms.
[00:18:50] Jess Bahr: They sound like their junior analysts to go hear what's trending in marketing.
[00:18:53] Jess Bahr: And so it was like an investor panel.
[00:18:54] Jess Bahr: There's like maybe 50, 60 people in the room.
[00:18:56] Jess Bahr: And so I just thought I was like, I think Facebook data is all a lie.
[00:18:59] Jess Bahr: Because we would see at the time, I was running like 14, $15 million a quarter, and a lot of it was Facebook video.
[00:19:06] Jess Bahr: And we would see that we would have video views when the video hadn't been live yet.
[00:19:10] Jess Bahr: How do we have impressions served on a video that's not live?
[00:19:12] Jess Bahr: You could say in theory, it's getting checked internally.
[00:19:15] Jess Bahr: Should that count as users that we're paying for?
[00:19:17] Jess Bahr: No.
[00:19:18] Jess Bahr: But we would find that things that didn't go live and you know what happened on Twitter, too, things that were not live yet, that were just in staging, would have impressions, engagements already earned on that.
[00:19:28] Jess Bahr: Like, how is that even truthful?
[00:19:30] Jess Bahr: There's no reason to have it yet.
[00:19:32] Jess Bahr: It's not live, but you're already starting to incur things.
[00:19:35] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I called it.
[00:19:36] Jess Bahr: Everyone got pretty shocked, and I was honestly just trying to be more controversial because it was getting boring.
[00:19:42] Pavel Konoplenko: And everyone woke up after that.
[00:19:44] Jess Bahr: They were like what?
[00:19:45] Jess Bahr: But, yeah, it's advertising fraud.
[00:19:47] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:19:48] Pavel Konoplenko: So at multiple levels, the question of trust for data comes.
[00:19:53] Jess Bahr: Did you see YouTube?
[00:19:58] Pavel Konoplenko: No, I mean, I have seen YouTube.
[00:20:01] Jess Bahr: YouTube is under a bunch of heat because Google has been violating its own advertising kind of rules.
[00:20:06] Jess Bahr: And so YouTube will syndicate your ads.
[00:20:09] Jess Bahr: If you're running on YouTube, on any of the networks, they typically have, like a third party network expansions.
[00:20:15] Jess Bahr: They do.
[00:20:15] Jess Bahr: And they were running YouTube video ads on YouTube.
[00:20:19] Jess Bahr: Videos that were embedded on sites that would traditionally be blacklisted or sites that would go against a lot of brand safety measures.
[00:20:29] Jess Bahr: And sometimes it was just like, frivolous.
[00:20:33] Jess Bahr: We Pavel and I were actually doing a press release yesterday, and we were looking at a few of the newswires, and some have additional options for distribution.
[00:20:40] Jess Bahr: And you click and look at all these like business News of Azerbaijan and it has the same exact same website as Business News of Turkey and they're clearly a bunch of fabricated sites that they just exist to publish press releases on and they have no traffic, they're not ranked for anything.
[00:20:58] Jess Bahr: But you're paying additional to get published on them when there's nothing on them at all.
[00:21:02] Jess Bahr: But it's supposed to somehow help you with your rankings.
[00:21:05] Pavel Konoplenko: It's like fabricated inventory, I think marketers like metrics.
[00:21:11] Pavel Konoplenko: So to be able to say, hey, we got syndicated in 28 different publications or outlets or something, and it doesn't matter that 22 of them were like fake and bullshit, but it's like, hey, you can give that metric.
[00:21:25] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's why I think Facebook was able to get away with the view count.
[00:21:28] Pavel Konoplenko: Because if you're the marketer and you have to report your performance and you can talk about the numbers you're getting and the increases, and you're like, wow, look at these numbers.
[00:21:41] Pavel Konoplenko: Marketers have this weird relationship with numbers.
[00:21:45] Jess Bahr: I have a theory on that because I think it's very true.
[00:21:48] Jess Bahr: I think it's driven from the CFO seat because oftentimes finance, they see marketing as a cost center, not a revenue center.
[00:21:57] Jess Bahr: And they're saying, we're giving you a million dollars, what are you going to give us in return?
[00:22:00] Jess Bahr: And when it comes to straight attribution like just straight click through, especially on the B, two B side, that's pretty hard.
[00:22:08] Jess Bahr: And you might be spending a lot of money if you're running an ABM program, especially on display ads that really aren't going to be driving click through conversions, but you're trying to get in front of the right accounts.
[00:22:19] Jess Bahr: Enough time that they recognize your brand.
[00:22:20] Jess Bahr: And they pick up the phone when your seller calls or they reply to the email or they inbound on your site.
[00:22:25] Jess Bahr: And when you go to finance and say, hey, I know we're spending $100,000 a year on display advertising, it has zero return, but really it does have a return, and here's where it is.
[00:22:34] Jess Bahr: And so they try and massage these really soft things that are hard to directly measure into a financial metric because your CFO is accustomed to having one system, one tool that gives them all the data they need.
[00:22:47] Jess Bahr: And when they go to marketing, you don't have that.
[00:22:50] Jess Bahr: Google analytics, how many times have we ran into this where we'll see a certain amount of web traffic in Ga and that will differ from the number of purchases or conversions that we see in Facebook's tracking pixel?
[00:23:02] Jess Bahr: Yes, your data never matches.
[00:23:04] Jess Bahr: And so on the finance side, they're like, hold on, we're giving you $100,000 for this thing that has no direct return, and you're telling me that the metrics you are giving me don't even match up between your systems?
[00:23:14] Jess Bahr: Holy shit, you guys are stupid.
[00:23:16] Jess Bahr: Instead of recognizing marketing is really complicated to measure, it's really hard to measure it.
[00:23:21] Jess Bahr: And there's no buyer journey that's directly linear, even like I bought something at a garage sale the other day.
[00:23:27] Jess Bahr: I drove by twice.
[00:23:29] Jess Bahr: I didn't just drive by, go directly to the item and pick it up and leave.
[00:23:33] Jess Bahr: I saw a garage sale sign.
[00:23:34] Jess Bahr: I drove by, looked like they had some good stuff, did another drive past, double check, said, yes, I think I'm going to stop.
[00:23:41] Jess Bahr: Went peruse the inventory and bought.
[00:23:44] Jess Bahr: There's not one touch point.
[00:23:45] Jess Bahr: So am I buying because I drove by and it looked good aesthetically or am I buying because I saw a yard sign?
[00:23:53] Jess Bahr: I did it.
[00:23:54] Jess Bahr: It's a combination of all of those and finance doesn't like that.
[00:23:57] Jess Bahr: They just want to know, if I give you a dollar, how much are you giving me in return?
[00:24:01] Jess Bahr: And that's really hard.
[00:24:02] Jess Bahr: So marketers are put in almost this corner where they have to have metrics to justify their programs.
[00:24:09] Jess Bahr: But those metrics are often not actually they don't mean shit.
[00:24:13] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah, I know a lot of marketers who've spent a lot of time doing reports, not lying on the reports, but the whole goal is to try to not get your budget cut or something.
[00:24:26] Pavel Konoplenko: How many hours have went into bullshit reporting that aren't even true?
[00:24:32] Pavel Konoplenko: But it just keeps the internal stakeholders happy.
[00:24:34] Pavel Konoplenko: This actually reminds me of the rift in the social sciences between economics and other social sciences, like sociology and anthropology and whatnot, where economists view the other sciences as bullshit, basically because economists like to view themselves.
[00:24:54] Pavel Konoplenko: We have rational sciences, they believe and this is like I'm projecting or something, but they believe that they're aligned with the hard sciences where you have very measurable things.
[00:25:05] Pavel Konoplenko: And economics economists love to put themselves in that category of like, hey, we have measurable things and humans are rational beings and here's how one cause creates this effect.
[00:25:17] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's like that's not the case at all.
[00:25:20] Pavel Konoplenko: And when it comes to marketing, all of the other social sciences play a huge role in how marketing gets done.
[00:25:28] Pavel Konoplenko: It's not just an economics question.
[00:25:30] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I study industrial engineering as an undergrad, which people called imaginary engineering because a lot of it is it's designing production lines and some of it is math, right, where, you know, your people can do so much, you can get so much output.
[00:25:45] Jess Bahr: But a lot of it is, how are we designing a layout so that someone is going to be enticed, like takes certain actions?
[00:25:50] Jess Bahr: It's a lot of cognitive engineering.
[00:25:52] Jess Bahr: It's a lot of the soft side of things.
[00:25:55] Jess Bahr: And they would always when I was in physics courses, they would like, shit on the psychology students because it wasn't a real science.
[00:26:03] Jess Bahr: I heard that so much and it's frustrating because I think, do we need engineers?
[00:26:10] Jess Bahr: 100%.
[00:26:11] Jess Bahr: 100%.
[00:26:11] Jess Bahr: We need people who can do a bunch of math to make sure all their forces equal zero and shit doesn't fall over, totally needed.
[00:26:17] The Importance of Systems and Processes in Marketing

[00:26:17] Jess Bahr: But when you go into something that's really nebulous, that's not as clear, I think it's harder to navigate it often.
[00:26:23] Jess Bahr: And so sometimes they'll be like, oh, that's just like a distraction.
[00:26:28] Jess Bahr: That's not really that hard, that's not really like blah, blah blah.
[00:26:31] Jess Bahr: They just write it off.
[00:26:32] Pavel Konoplenko: Well, that's why I'm like a fan of workflows and marketing systems.
[00:26:36] Pavel Konoplenko: Not even because it's like good marketing per se, which it is, but more so because I believe most marketing campaigns fail not because of a lack of tools or knowledge.
[00:26:47] Pavel Konoplenko: It's like the human thing.
[00:26:48] Pavel Konoplenko: Like someone is overwhelmed by something, someone isn't communicating internally with the team properly.
[00:26:55] Pavel Konoplenko: Something falls through the cracks and some campaign falls flat or something doesn't get done because there's no system for it.
[00:27:03] Jess Bahr: You don't have lead routing set up, so your lead doesn't even go to your seller and then your seller doesn't have a process for calling on the lead if they do get their information.
[00:27:11] Jess Bahr: And so the person wants to buy, but it's totally disconnected from being able to actually make a purchase.
[00:27:17] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:27:18] Pavel Konoplenko: And it falls prey to human frailty.
[00:27:25] Pavel Konoplenko: You know, you need to eat right or something.
[00:27:28] Pavel Konoplenko: But it's hard.
[00:27:28] Pavel Konoplenko: It's hard to do the things you know you need to do.
[00:27:31] Pavel Konoplenko: And when you don't have systems that are set up in the company that make it easy to do the right thing and to follow a checklist or a process, then the human marketing team and the marketers will have to battle their own psyche all the time to try to remember stuff and not be overwhelmed.
[00:27:52] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's where it comes down to a human development problem rather than even marketing knowledge.
[00:28:00] Jess Bahr: I think one of the challenges is that people think and now we're just going on like a little bit of a rant here, but people think of marketing as an art, not a science.
[00:28:12] Jess Bahr: And there is definitely a science to it.
[00:28:14] Jess Bahr: If you are going to send an email nurture campaign, there is a ton of data on how many touch points you should have, length of emails, how frequently to send them out.
[00:28:26] Jess Bahr: You can always make up your own and start testing it and collect the data to adjust it to your audience.
[00:28:30] Jess Bahr: I think it's similar to the creative world where people think it's just you get hit by the feeling and you.
[00:28:35] Pavel Konoplenko: Just go and make inspiration.
[00:28:37] Jess Bahr: Yeah, but if you have structure and process, it gives you a foundation to do so much more.
[00:28:42] Jess Bahr: Social media used to be the same thing and I think we used to do the same thing too, where it's like go and create evergreen content so you always have something going out every day and then you don't have to think about it.
[00:28:53] Jess Bahr: But when you have those one off things that happen, you can go and start sharing that.
[00:28:57] Jess Bahr: So schedule 80% of your content and then leave space for the.
[00:29:00] Jess Bahr: Stuff that's timely for the inspiration yeah.
[00:29:03] Jess Bahr: Versus having to every morning be like, what am I going to tweet out today?
[00:29:08] Jess Bahr: And then you're like, look at this burrito.
[00:29:10] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:29:11] Pavel Konoplenko: And then you're going to fail because you don't have that system.
[00:29:14] Pavel Konoplenko: And then your human weakness kind of comes into play.
[00:29:17] Pavel Konoplenko: And that's where maybe AI helps marketers it's this idea of you have this marketing copilot with you who is able to set up a lot of these things that you know you should be doing, but you just haven't done.
[00:29:32] Pavel Konoplenko: And again, just thinking back through my marketing career, a lot of times when things didn't work, it's because of my own weakness and I didn't do something or I didn't get to something in time.
[00:29:44] Pavel Konoplenko: And it's rarely the lack of knowledge or the lack of information or the.
[00:29:49] Jess Bahr: Lack of analytics, the lack of desire to do it.
[00:29:53] Pavel Konoplenko: Yeah.
[00:29:55] Pavel Konoplenko: And maybe, again, that's where AI saves marketers.
[00:29:58] Pavel Konoplenko: Not like in the analytics part, but more in the hey, I'll help you, I'm your assistant thing.
[00:30:05] Discussion on AI in Modern World

[00:30:05] Jess Bahr: Well, I think this is a perfect spot, actually, to end today's episode.
[00:30:08] Jess Bahr: It's a very optimistic well, a little bit of a ramp, a very optimistic view of it.
[00:30:15] Jess Bahr: If you have anything you want us to chat about, any questions, any thoughts on AI and how you're using it, let us know in the comments below.
[00:30:22] Jess Bahr: If you are listening to the replay on Spotify, our YouTube, check us out live every Thursday on LinkedIn, 115 Eastern Time.
[00:30:30] Pavel Konoplenko: Bye, everyone.
[00:30:31] Jess Bahr: Bye.