Drew’s Takeaways: Augmenting CMO Productivity with GenAI

 

Drew Neisser:  Hey, it’s Drew. I’m excited that you’re here to listen to another episode of Renegade Marketers Unite. And if this is your first time listening, then welcome. This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Yeah, well, a group of these curious, adaptable, and problem solving birds is called the Huddle. And the B2B marketers and CMO Huddles are all that and more huddling together to heat up the coldest job in the C suite. And now that CMO Huddles has three membership tiers, we’re ready to inspire B2B greatness at all levels. To learn more, check out CMOhuddles.com. Now before we get to the episode, here’s a shout out to the professionals at Share Your Genius. We started working with him over a year ago to make this show even better and have been blown away by their strategic and executional prowess. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want to turbocharge your current show, be sure to talk to Rachel Downey at shareyourgenius.com and tell her Drew sent you. Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

Narrator:  Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew Neisser:  Hey, it’s Drew and I’m excited because this is episode 360 and it is a another Drew on Drew episode. It’s been a while since I did those, but you may remember, the last time I did it, it’s a bit manic because these are the episodes where I ask and answer the questions that I think are really, really important. I do my best and sometimes I’m self critical. First thing I want to tell you is this episode is 100% human made, yet we are going to be talking about generative AI. Yep, I think it’s possible that generative AI is under-hyped. I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you. Did you say under-hyped? Yes, that is why I want you to pay special attention to this episode. Because the opportunities for generative AI and AI in general are really going to blow all of our minds far more than we are really anticipating.

Drew Neisser: Okay, Drew, we got a question here for you. Generative AI has been the buzz for the last nine months or so—let’s just talk about how marketers are using it.

Drew Neisser: So I would say that in our Huddles community and probably on a much broader basis, that at least 50%, up to 75% of the B2B CMOs are looking at generative AI as a way of improving productivity for content.

Drew Neisser: Okay, can you be a little more specific than that?

Drew Neisser: Sure. When I talk about content, I’m talking about the very basics of creating copy, as in writing, and design. Most of the CMOs I know are quite comfortable getting their writers or their agencies to use these tools to speed up the process so writers are going to be able to write faster and produce more. Okay, so let’s stop on that for a second. Are they firing writers because suddenly, they don’t need as many that hasn’t happened yet. I do anticipate, however, that you are going to lose some writers but not the good ones. Because here’s the amazing thing. If you’re a good writer, a tool like chatGPT just makes you better. Now, I need to do a caveat, because if you’re a bad writer, it’s going to make you worse, I want to point out a couple just simple things. I noticed when I use chatGPT and I asked you to write something, it chooses words like “utilize” instead of “use”. It’s an exact opposite of what a good writer does to try to simplify language tends to sort of get a little fluffy and so forth. So if you’re a poor writer, it’s going to make word choices that probably a better writer wouldn’t make. So it’s going to make good writers better and it’s not going to help the ones that aren’t so good. So going back to your earlier question, are some writers going to lose their job? Probably, but are other writers going to get even more appreciated? You bet.

Drew Neisser: Okay, so far, you’re only talking about writing. Can we talk a little bit more about the main uses that CMOs are seeing in their department?

Drew Neisser: Sure. The next area is really design in using it to generate graphics for social media and so forth. And while there is controversy around this, and we can cover that in a bit, a lot of them are playing with tools like Bing Image Maker, Midjourney, to develop some really sophisticated, and I’m going to call it originaleven though it’s computer generated—some pretty stunning content. I’ve also seen some of those tools also for creating video.

Drew Neisser: So some better writers get better output, better designers get better output. Can you give a specific example of a way that you’re using chatGPT to create content for CMO Huddles and renegade.com?

Drew Neisser: You bet. And I love this. And this is why the emphasis is on augmentation, not replacement. Augmentation, helping me to write faster, not even necessarily better, just faster and more with speed. So I’ll give you an example. Every month, we send out a Huddle Up newsletter to our subscribers of CMO Huddles, and also a company newsletter for folks that have been subscribing to Renegade’s newsletter for, I don’t know, 15 years. So I used to write these by hand, it would probably take me about three hours, including a half an hour figuring out what the heck, I was going to write about a half an hour to do an outline, a couple hours to write the copy, and then maybe half hour of proofing because I always need a lot of proofing. I forget words, it just happens I think faster than I can write.

Drew Neisser: At least that’s what you’re telling yourself. Right?

Drew Neisser: Yeah. Okay. So let’s take that how I do a newsletter now. So right now for CMO Huddles every week a Huddler gets a recap. Those recaps have meaty bullet points with the topic and usually quotes underneath it, maybe a summary. Now what I do is I go through a month’s worth the recaps, I grab six bullet points with quotes that I think are going to be turned into a very cohesive story that I think the subscribers to our newsletters will find of interest. I take those say six bullet points plus the quotes and I say to chatGPT, “Turn this into a newsletter for B2B CMOs using quotes. Don’t make up any content. Keep it pithy off you go.”

Drew Neisser: Okay, so that sounds cool, what happens then?

Drew Neisser: So I get a pretty decent draft at that point. However, it’s not very interesting. So then I start to think of a story that I can use as a metaphor to summarize it. So for the last newsletter, what I did was I was thinking of a match I had watched the weekend before on Wimbledon, where the young player beat the old player in a five set really dramatic match. So I used tennis as a metaphor. And I wrote the intro myself talking about the match and then I fed that into chatGPT and said, “Take the newsletter that you’ve already written, now apply the metaphor of tennis using this introduction to the piece.”

Drew Neisser: So how’d that work out?

Drew Neisser: Well, it was kind of amazing. 30 seconds later out came a much more polished, much more interesting outline. Now, I still needed about 15 or 20 minutes to edit it, to tighten the language to work on some of the hackneyed metaphors, but at the end, what used to take four hours probably took an hour and a half. That’s a pretty big time savings.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, that’s a pretty big time savings. And is this the method that you’re going to continue to use?

Drew Neisser: You bet. Like everybody else using these tools that continue to refine and find new prompts and find ways to track my particular brand voice so that I can use that as an input into chatGPT.

Drew Neisser: Okay, so that’s a pretty good example, probably about a 60% time savings. And what are you doing with that time?

Drew Neisser: Well, I’m using it to create more content. Now I can create maybe one and a half to two times more content.

Drew Neisser: Okay, fair enough. So let’s move on to the next search big bucket that I want to cover in this show, particularly while we’re on the topic of content creation. What about the fears that some folks had—this was very early on—that Google would ignore or downgrade websites that became heavily dependent on bot created content?

Drew Neisser: Great question. And let me try to come up with a great answer for you. So we were concerned about this at the very beginning, so we talked to Michael Brenner from Marketing Insider. Michael has a content firm, and said, “Hey, Michael, let’s do a test.” And so we did a test where we posted every week, three blog posts, one that was 100% human created one that was hybrid, and one that was 100% bot created. And we did this for 20 weeks. So that’s 60 pieces of content.

Drew Neisser: That’s an interesting test. Have you announced the results yet?

Drew Neisser: Well, we have a Bonus Huddle on this topic for the CMO Huddles community and then we’ll be sharing the results wider later.

Drew Neisser: So what else happened with this test?

Drew Neisser: At first First, it looked like humans were going to win all the way. And then a particular piece of content came out, that was something like five major ways that CMOs can improve their productivity. And it was about time management. And of course, that topic, that headline, it was a listicle, just seemed to resonate. And while the content was 100%, bot created, the headline was human created. And that was the number one performing piece over the 60. In fact, it accounted for almost half of the site traffic generated by all of this content. And the goal, by the way, in measuring this content, was how many keywords did it help. Did it change our rankings, did it drive organic site traffic as a result of it.

Drew Neisser: So just pausing for a second on this research, any surprises in it?

Drew Neisser: The biggest surprise was that human-generated copy did not win outright. The best performing piece of content was one that was generated by a bot. The cumulative best is the hybrid content, which kind of makes sense, right? And that’s what I was talking about earlier is, this is about augmentation, not replacement. While you can create 100% bot created content, there’s a lot of risks associated with that. And so our recommendation from this test is really to move forward fast with your hybrid approach, where you work with it to create an outline, you fill it with your own thoughts and your own metaphors, but you use the tool to help string words together between your ideas.

Drew Neisser: Okay, really interesting test. Anything else that you want to mention about the test and content creation moving forward?

Drew Neisser: Sure, I do expect a backlash. And I think that some marketers with non GMOs are going to have #HumanMade.” I think this is going to be a really interesting area and I like #HumanMade. The problem that I wrestle with this is, I use Grammerly for my emails. So it’ll change a word, sometimes it’ll change the structure of a sentence, because I missed a word or something like that. Is that still #HumanMade? If I have spellcheck and it changes the spelling, or I had “two” when I should have had “too”, is that #HumanMade? So I think there’s some fine lines here, in terms of the #HumanMade, and I imagine there will be some abuses to it. But I do think it will be a trend we’ll want to know, was it human made? Or was it computer made? So I think moving forward that marketers are going to need to think about that.

Drew Neisser: What are some of the other emerging uses for generative AI? You’ve talked about copy, you’ve talked about design, what else you got

Drew Neisser: I did a podcast with Cathy McPhillips of the AI Marketing Institute, she talked about how they used it to dramatically improve the speed at which they were creating emails, dramatically improve the speed at which they were creating podcasts. At every single stage, they were using AI including for editing. You can expect all sorts of video tools to come up I think, just in terms of editing and that’s going to happen at a rapid pace, maybe even going through clips and picking takes, there’s all sorts of good things that are going to happen with video, particularly if you have your own source material to begin with. Podcast setting, we have already covered, music, there’s all sorts of things going on there. This is an area I can’t speak to or don’t even want to touch, given rights issues. So let’s focus on copy, video, podcasting, email, anything to do with writing. And I think you’re going to be in relatively safe ground, although there are 20 to 25% of marketers out there who are not touching these tools, because they are afraid of pending lawsuits. I get it. I think that cats out of the bag, and I feel bad for them, because I think they’re missing out on a lot of learning that’s happening right now.

Drew Neisser: But you’ve talked about this before. There’s a bigger idea here, right? In terms of generative AI, it’s got to be more than just creating copy and creating better or faster videos?

Drew Neisser: Yes, you’re right. And first I’m gonna quote George Colony of Forrester, who talked about AI is going to change the world. And he described generative AI as taking a massive amount of data and making it accessible to be able to transform it into something else. If you think about chatGPT, it’s a massive amount of language, and then you were able to transform it into anything else you want. On a very simplistic basis, we did that with BECCA, and I think I’ve talked about that on the show before. BECCA is a bot that we created with Noah Brier. BECCA sits on top of chatGPT and includes hundreds of pages of notes from CMO Huddles. These are the recaps I mentioned earlier. You can ask BECCA, “As a B2B CMO, how did you handle this situation or that?” And she’s amazing. She’s really, really, truly scary in terms of her ability to assess a challenge and provide an answer, pull it from the data that we inputted from all the Huddles recaps. But this is so much bigger than BECCA. You’re an insurance companyand you have silos and silos of data about your customers and their policies and when they’re going to renew and who their beneficiaries are, and where their ages are. And all of these things that would enable the extraordinary customer experience, the kind of experience, frankly, you’re already getting on amazon.com, when you go in there and say, hey, people who like this book, also like this book, or you’re getting it on Netflix, but that’s going to come to everybody. And that’s where I think generative AI is gonna get so interesting

Drew Neisser: Do you have any other guides in terms of how to be thinking about generative AI, from a broader perspective than just content creation?

Drew Neisser: Borrowing liberally, I’m going to quote—I think this is from a McKinsey article—but it was talking about ways that marketers are going to be able to apply generative AI. Number one is, know your customers or lose them, and I’m quoting here, “Use AI technology to tailor customer service experiences and marketing to what users prefer.” That’s really what I just described as the Amazon and Netflix experience brought to bear for everyone. And I think this has huge implications for B2B, not just B2C not just B2B, you have an opportunity, so much data, there’s third party data, there’s first party data, particularly if I’ve been a customer for a long time, you should be able to help me and serve me better as a result of using these tools.

Drew Neisser: Okay, what’s the number two on that list?

Drew Neisser: So number two is, “Hit your target. Use AI sorting capacities to determine the ideal audience for your offer.” I was writing up some notes for a CMO Huddles recap, and one of the Huddlers was describing their experience of looking at their total addressable market, and expanding their ideal customer profile. And they talked about this taking six months sorting through all sorts of data. And the idea here is we’re not trying to narrow it down to our target is so small that there’s only 10 people in it. But we’re trying to make it large enough so there’s some reach involved, but not so large that we’re boiling the ocean. What McKinsey talked about is, you want to be able to do this with AI really, really quickly. And to me, that’s pretty exciting. Because if it takes you six months to do that, manually, it would be nice if you could do in a few minutes. “See through the hype.” Here it is, “How to discern what your business needs to choose the most effective AI solution. Don’t let the whistles and bangs fool you.” One key point on that is, you gotta get in there and use it. And I’d like to see here when CMOs are using it on their own, even for their own personal things, just play with it and see where it goes wrong. Have it write your bio and watch it make stuff up because it hallucinates it. Have a plan a trip for you and then make sure that the places that it was planning actually exist and you can get there. Try it for an outline, the next time you go in for a meeting, ask it to prepare an agenda for the meeting and see what it comes up with. Get used to using these tools, and then you’ll get a much better idea of the art of the possible. The hard part of this is we don’t know what’s possible. And we got to keep pushing ourselves to remind ourselves to ask questions. What else can it do?

Drew Neisser: Fourth point on McKinsey’s list, “Demystify AI.  View All AI technologies by grouping them into five proprietary business useful categories.” And of course, in my notes, I don’t have those, so I’m not going to be able to share them on those episodes, but ping me if you want to know what those are.

Drew Neisser: All right, what’s number five, because that wasn’t that helpful.

Drew Neisser: “Improve the forecast.” Now, this is less about marketing but the fact is that once you embed some of these tools, you should be able to predict credit risks and potential fraud and medical costs for banks and all sorts of different ways of improving your forecasts. There’s no doubt that AI is going to play a role in all of that.

Drew Neisser: So is there a bottom line here?

Drew Neisser: Well, yes, at least when we’re thinking about AI for marketing, you gotta be in it. That’s it, you gotta be using it.

Drew Neisser: Okay. Now, you did a show recently, where marketers who are marketing to marketers are all baking AI into their products and services, right?

Drew Neisser: Yeah. And I think that’s going to be the interesting sort of race here. There’s going to be the independent tools like the open.ai is in the Midjourneys, and then there’s going to be Outlook, which is going to have chatGPT embedded into it, or PowerPoint, which is going to have Bing Image Creation embedded into it. The tools are seamless. I just noticed that Zoom has now the ability to help you create, what Loom does, these little short videos with screens. But the next step will be for them to suggest backgrounds and slides, all sorts of optimization tools that exist. If they’re AI assisted, maybe you need fewer staffers, because we know that right now with MarTech, the biggest challenge is that marketers have more tools that they need, and they don’t have enough staff to get the information that they need. Well, maybe with bots sitting on top of them, these products will actually deliver on the promises that they brought to the table to begin with. Lots of exciting things that are happening that will be baked into it. And I don’t think there is a problem if you pursue the chatGPTs, get to know those, while all these other creators or all these other providers are looking to integrate it in it because you’ll just be able to use them and you’ll be caught up.

Drew Neisser: I’m curious Drew, what are your go to resources to stay on top of generative AI?

Drew Neisser: Alright, first, let me answer this by saying that it is impossible to stay on top of generative AI. However, I do try. And I try with a very specific lens, which is what do CMOs need to know? I’m going to name a few folks that I think are just terrific. And I would encourage you to follow on LinkedIn. And I know that the folks in the CMO Huddles community have gotten tremendous value from so first up is Nicole Leffer for practical usage, guidance and training. We had Nicole on a bonus Huddle for CMO Huddles back in May that was really well attended and really well received. And several Huddlers actually engaged with her afterwards to come do a training program for her team. We loved her so much and the speed at which things are changing is that we’re bringing her back for a Bonus Huddle, not just to revisit what we talked about but just leaps ahead, because if you follow her on her feed, she’s now creating video. She did a video trailer for a movie completely from scratch with generative AI which I got a huge kick out of. So Nicole Leffer is one. For design, I would follow Kenny Friedman. He’s got a couple of accounts on Instagram, he is constantly creating images. And then once you start following him on Instagram, you’ll get into his world because he has a whole bunch of fantasy worlds. We had him on a Bonus Huddle and what really occurred to me as a result of his being on the show was that these tools aren’t going to make you a good designer. But if you are a good designer, they are going to open up a world of possibilities. And Kenny Friedman was just great in terms of showing us how to use Midjourney and just to get in there and play with it. Okay. I’ve already mentioned Noah Brier and I think we’re Noah’s perspective is unique is he’s a product creator, he built Percolate, he helped us make BECCA. Follow Noah for  what’s happening in the unique application development. We did a podcast with Noah back in March and also is really happy to attend his brand.ai conference in New York. He is surrounded by a number of interesting people doing interesting things. So yeah, Noah Brier, follow him on LinkedIn. I get a daily newsletter for years and years and years from a gentleman by the name of Shelly Palmer and Shelley is just always right on the cutting edge of almost any technology application. But AI is obviously been on his radar for quite a while he now runs a course for executives on generative AI, I went through the outline of the course that looks really good. But I follow his newsletter because it’s broader than just, “Hey, create content.” He’s thinking about the industry implications, whether you were a movie creator or an author or a company, and he keeps a big picture and I think that’s extremely helpful.

Drew Neisser: Anybody else?

Drew Neisser: Sure. Marketing AI Institute is a great resource. We had Catherine McPhillips here. She’s the one who shared how she saved time with her podcast. I already mentioned an article from McKinsey. Definitely worth subscribing to their blog.

Drew Neisser: Okay, that’s pretty good list, great. And what about conferences? What conferences have you gone to or planning to go to?

Drew Neisser: I’m back on the road. The next one up is GAI as in Generative AI world, which is September 12 and 13th in Cambridge. I’m excited to join this one is focused on real world enterprise applications for generative AI, should be fascinating to see what they come up with. Also happens that I’m going to be having lunch with some Huddlers near the conference on the 12th of September. If you’re in town for that conference and B2B CMO, hey, ping me, because I’d love to see you there. Let’s see, I mentioned the Brandx Conference, which we did in New York in May. There was MAI World in Cleveland for the Marketing in AI Institute. I was sorry to miss it, a number of Huddlers did go they said it was great. I look forward to catching that one the next time. And then when we are going to the B2B Brand Expo in Los Angeles on the 20th and 21st of September, and in both the case of the B2B Expo and GAI World we’re really happy that CMO Huddles is a media partner and promoter of these two conferences, just in full transparency. We’re a partner and it’s cool that we’re doing that. So I’ll be at both B2B Expo and GAI world and I’ll be the guy wearing the CMO Huddles hat.

Drew Neisser: Oh, yeah, it’s a nice hat, don’t you think? Okay. I think we’re getting to the end here. Is there anything else that you want to add about generative AI at this point in time that we should talk about?

Drew Neisser: No, I think we got it covered. Just keep this in mind—if you have people on your team that are afraid, tell them to get over it. If you have people that are afraid that it’s gonna replace their job, remind them that this is about augmentation, this is about helping them do what they do better, faster. If you just use it to create content without doing any editing, I think you’re going to end up with mediocre stuff. You have to have a standard you need editors and good editors, or good designers more than you ever did. If you think this is stuff that you can now delegate to interns and downgrade your staff, I think it’d be making a huge, huge mistake. And I’ll tell you why. Anybody can create content with ChatGPT, which means there’s going to be a flood of mediocre content out there. It is up to you to make sure that your content rises above the mediocrity, it’s the only way it’s gonna get found. So you’re gonna need really good people. And maybe you don’t need quite as many as you have now or maybe you can redeploy. I know that a lot of companies for years have said we struggled to get content to create enough content to keep up with the content. Well, now you should be able to do that. And to me again, that’s exciting, assuming you create better and better work.

Drew Neisser: All right, Drew. That’s a pretty good summary. I appreciate another Drew on Drew episode. And until next time, I guess we keep those renegade thinking caps on and strong.

Drew Neisser: For more interviews with innovative marketers visit renegade.com/podcast and hit that subscribe button.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!