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CMO Confidential
The AI Application Layer - The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly | Jim Lecinski, Northwestern-Kellogg
00:40:26
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The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential.
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The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of Marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.
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In marketing, everything must work seamlessly. If not efficiency, speed and ROI all suffer. That's why Quad is obsessed with making sure your marketing machine runs smoothly with less friction and smarter integration. Better marketing is built on Quad. See how better gets done at www.quad.com/build better. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being that of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buyer, ebay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest Jim Leczynski. Today's topic the AI Application Layer, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Jim is a professor at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern, where he has been named professor of the Year. Prior to teaching, he worked at Google as Vice President of Customer Solutions for the Americas. He's written a bunch of books, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth and the AI Marketing Canvas, which has just been updated and released in its second edition. This is Jim's second time on the show. Welcome back.
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B
Hi Mike, Thrilled to be a Boomerang guest.
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C
There you go. Hey now. Now Jim, just to give everybody, our listeners a background before we dig in the topic at hand, you teach classes on marketing strategy and AI in marketing. Tell us about your teaching philosophy and how these two topics intersected for you and for your students.
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B
Yeah, we've touched on this a little bit in our past conversations, Mike, but I tend to think about what students need to take away from mine or any business school course or a business school education is a combination of durable and temporal knowledge, right? There's some constants like they need to know segmentation, targeting, positioning 50 years ago today and 50 years from now. So I try to bring some of that durable permanence, frameworks, concepts, strategic thinking into all my courses. And at the same time, yes, and there also are some kind of things of the moment temporal or maybe we might even Say, perishable kinds of things. You know, if we were going to do a marketing education in the 1950s, you'd certainly need to know about radio. Right. That's sort of the new media then. And so here we find ourselves in 2025 as we record this. And AI, right, is, you know, certainly the rage, but it's having strategic as well as tactical and executional implementations, functional process people, implications, cost implications for marketers. So, you know, to have a really complete marketing training, I believe, you know, durable as well as temporal. I've got to cover both in my courses, AI and strategy.
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C
Yeah, I think that's great. Hey, in an earlier chat, you know, you talked about a GARTNER Report on CEOs and CFOs, and I know this goes into your teaching, so tell us about what you learned from this report, like the key takeaways between, you know, CEOs, CFOs and things they're thinking about.
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B
Yeah, I think it's really, really important for all educators and marketers and students to really have their finger on their pulse of kind of like, what are our bosses thinking? Our bosses said broadly in air quotes, right, but like CEOs, CFOs, chief product officers, head merchants. Right, the, the people who we interact with. And so Gartner does a tremendous job of this. They do a great conference every year where they're sort of, you know, sort of doing some forecasting along the way, and they do quantitative research every year. And so one of the questions that they ask that I keep a close eye on is what is your top priority? They ask that, you know, your top priority for the business. They ask that of CEOs, CFOs. And every year, year in and year out, this current survey results, 20, 25 answers, no different. By far, the number one priority for Chief executive officers and chief financial officers is growth. Right. As my, my, my old boss, Eric Schmidt at Google used to tell us, revenue growth cures all known business problems. Helps, right? When revenues. Yeah, when revenue's growing, things are good. We have off sites, we have promotions, we have fleeces and embroidered mugs.
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C
Like how fleece it's got in there, you know? Yes, because then you got. Yes, in Silicon Valley, I still have a million fleeces.
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B
You gotta have a fleece. Right. On the other hand, when revenue is not growing, things get ugly fast. And so this is like the CEO's number one priority. At the same time, you know, lots of marketers that I talk to, lots of marketers that you talk to have this Notion like doing more with less cost cutting productivity, efficiency like that has to be the top priority. Now don't get me wrong, right, like all marketers, and you know this better than, than most, Mike, are expected to run a tight fiscal ship, right? You have to be responsible with the money that your cfo, the company money. Um, but here comes the famous cliche. You can't ever just only cut your way to greater glory and profit growth. At a certain point you need more shoppers, you need more customers, you need more revenue. And so you know that that's something that I point to often to my students is to say like, look, never forget the job number one of marketing is to drive profitable incremental revenue growth.
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C
Yeah, I think that's a really key point that you just made, which is it's not growth at all costs, it's growth that makes the company money over.
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B
Time and growth that, that, that but for what we're doing would not have happened anyway.
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C
Exactly, exactly. So, and so this is a massive disconnect in your mind, this study between the CEO and the CMO who works for the CEO and then the peer group, which is what they say, led by the cfo and then in the office where they're all talking to investors and everything and thinking we got to grow the business and the marketer is sometimes thinking, oh, I got to do great marketing. Is that, is that what you're saying they're thinking?
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B
Yeah, I think that's right. Now, you know, I'll refer to one of your terrific former guests, Dr. Kim Whitler, when she was on and she very eloquently talked about the different types of CMO roles.
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C
Yes.
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B
Right. So if, so if we're talking about a CMO and a marketing team by her taxonomy, who really is a Marcom group who's given a budget and expected to make ads and that's full stop what they do. Well then you're always going to be in sort of that do more with less cost cutting because your work has no sort of straight line or direct link to revenue. So then you're a cost center and you're always going to be under that productivity cost cutting pressure as your foremost KPI. But the flavor of marketing that we're talking about here today, Mike, that you've practiced and preach on this show is, you know, marketing as a, as a, as a growth driver, a value creator. Okay? So in that case, we have to have a growth mindset first and foremost, not a cost cutting reductionist mindset first and foremost.
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C
And Let me just push on this a little bit because when we talked earlier, you said a lot of marketers, not just the ones that are, let's call it agency type marketers or brand build, just brand only, focused on, on the marcom stuff. You said they're focused on the wrong thing. Tell us what you mean by this.
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Well, so now we talk about, you know, the famous means and ends conversation.
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C
Yeah.
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Right. So, so there are business outcome metrics. Revenue, profit share, customer count, footfall. Right.
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Retention.
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Yeah, yeah, those kinds of retention. Average order value, average basket size. And then there are means metrics. We'll call these activity metrics. So this is time spent on site per session, bounce rate, click through rate, cost per click. Right. So so much of like when I ask marketers to show me their dashboard, it's these sort of intermediate means or activity metrics right now, I mean, I guess all things being equal, I probably would like to pay less rather than more for a click. But you don't take click through rate or CPCS to the bank and you don't talk about that in a shareholder meeting or your board. Right. Those are means to driving revenue, profit share. Right. The business outcomes. And so I think it's just important, you know, to not forget tail and dog or dog and tail and confuse the two.
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C
I see what you mean, but. But I do like the. I do think there's a lot of false precision in that, which is we are. We can't measure maybe everything or we don't, but we can measure this and we will just tear it apart and do false precision and make it better every time. While we might be missing the big story, there's also other things that marketers are doing on culture front. Everything else where they're trying to tell us about that too.
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We are taking a quick break from our discussion for a word from our sponsor, Quad.
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Marketing is all about high performance. Everything has to fit together and work together. Exactly right. Or efficiency, speed and ROI all suffer. That's why Quad is obsessed with making sure your marketing machine runs as smoothly as possible. We help you achieve a seamless marketing experience with less friction and smarter integration. Better marketing is built on Quad.
- [10:50]
B
Now back to our discussion with Northwestern Kellogg marketing professor Jim Lecinski. Yeah, so I mean, again, we say if marketing's role first and foremost is to drive profitable incremental growth. You know, at Khan, we've got lots of marketers kind of sitting there saying our job is to be part of the culture, right? To be, you know, water cooler talk, top of Mind these kinds of things and you know, I would take some friendly or not so friendly issue with that mindset. Again, means and ends. Right. Like if being more top of mind, I mean we all measure like aided and unaided brand awareness, attribute awareness. Right. So like sure, I'd rather be more top of mind than less top of mind, but I don't take, you know, cultural insertions to the bank. I take revenue to the bank. So, you know, when I hear marketers say either our job is to cut costs or our job is to be popular, you know, maybe. But you know, on all of these things, you know, during my time at Google, we would regularly see marketers who actually counterintuitively by increasing their cost per click, we're actually able to find more valuable customers with a higher customer lifetime value and actually drive higher profitability. So you know, got to be careful, not just get caught up in, as you say, the things that we measure because we can.
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C
Yeah. The easy things to measure and the things that you can control at this level. And the other thing that always has bugged me about a lot of those dashboards you talk about is all those things really stack on each other to drive sales and profit. By maximizing one, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to do anything to the others.
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Yeah, that's right.
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You want a lot of traffic, you can buy traffic. If it doesn't buy anything, it's worthless metric.
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That's right. Now there are some linkages that we well know, right. Like you know, increasing, well as it's famously called mental and physical availability, but like increasing distribution. Acv, pcv. Right. Points of presence. Like we know that, that typically has a pretty straight line.
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An ACV is all commodities volume, which would be shelf space.
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Right.
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I like how you just throw in all your, all those consumer goods acronyms. You just popped them out there, Jim. That's right.
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It's good.
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So how many, how many marketers percentage wise in your mind? Whole. All the marketers in the country or you can go to the world. We have, we have actually a pretty big international audience are missing the mark on this.
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Right. So if we set aside, you know, the portion of marketers who are doing sort of the marcom marketing equals advertising task. So now we're looking at, you know, by Kim marketers measure, I don't know, half two thirds of all marketers that are in the revenue growth mindset, kind of a function of marketing. You know, I, I would say again, not, not a poll, not scientific research, not academic research that I've done. But, you know, in my consulting, in my conversations, in listening to these marketers talk, I. I would say probably we've got maybe a third of marketers who get caught up in these kind of activity. Intermediate metrics, cultural kinds of things, not the revenue kinds of things. So, you know, I mean, curious, Mike, what your take would be, but, yeah.
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I think a third is even generous. I think there's actually more. And I also think you would not see this in the CFO thing where people would say, I don't care about forecasting or I don't care about reporting. I only care about this part of it.
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Yeah.
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C
So I think that is a good call out to marketers. Let's talk about the topic dominating business for the last couple years. AI. You think there's a good story and a bad story here. The good is that marketers and companies are embracing AI, and the bad is that they're focused on just the efficiency and time savings and cost cutting. Tell us what you mean by that whole little run of words I just put out there.
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B
Yeah, so this sort of just flows from a previous part of our conversation where we were talking about how many marketers are focused on, you know, doing more with less cost cutting, productivity, efficiency and saving. Like minimizing yourself.
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Yeah. Versus Trans.
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Yeah. Versus the means. Versus the transformational value creation, the growth and the ends. So now is it a surprise that when sort of this amazing new technology comes along, marketers would carry that mindset that they had with them. Am I a, you know, productivity minimizer, or am I a value creator maximizer? They're going to carry that mindset with them when it comes to AI. So, business school professor. So we think in two by two. So, you know, a way to think about this then is like, what's the use case for AI? Well, we could think about the benefit on one axis and the beneficiary on the other axis. Okay. So the benefit could either be, hey, why are you using AI? I'm using it to be more productive and more efficient, as we've been discussing, or I'm using it for value creation, for transformational growth. That's sort of the benefit on the horizontal axis, and then who's the beneficiary? Like who? Who is seeing the benefit of this? It's either internal, something just for my marketing team behind my firewall, but in my physical office space that's never seen externally by my customers. Or is it internal? Sorry. Or is it external, something that my customers see? So now if you sort of look at that two by two in the bottom left hand corner, we have internal productivity. This is using AI to summarize, zoom calls. This is using AI, right? Yeah, did that before. It's the same output.
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It's just automatically doing the charts for me. Automatically doing this. Yeah.
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Right. The first draft of my creative brief, still the same creative brief. It's just done in six minutes instead of six months. Right. So so many marketing teams that I talk with start and are anchored and many of them frankly sort of see that as the limit. The end game of AI is just this internal productivity. Same stuff we did before. Same way we did it before. It's just cheaper. I mean, this is Henry Ford's faster horse, right? Yes. On the other hand, if you go to the upper right hand corner of that two by two, this is sort of the optimal axis. This is value creation, transformational growth by using AI to do, enable and empower your customers, your users, your consumers to do amazing things. Example, weirdly, a lot of the apparel companies are doing a really good job here that you normally might not expect. So Stitch Fix, Ralph Lauren, doing some amazing things here.
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What are they doing? Tell us what they're doing.
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Yeah, so Stitch Fix is doing some cool things here. So they have obviously E Commerce company, they have a lot of data. So they know every single page I've ever looked at, every single sweater or pants or top that I've ever browsed. They know everything I bought and they know everything that everybody like me has ever looked at. And you fill out a style quiz as well. So I give it some like, direct training, we call that training data right along the way. So now what they're able to do with that is to create a virtual or synthetic personal style consultant. Much like, for example, the human if I walked into Nordstrom, right. Who walk from section to section and help me find what I need for a job interview to wear or a wedding. But now I'm able to then interact with that. It's an app. And Stitch Fix and Ralph Lauren's case, that one's called Ask Ralph. Your listeners should all just try this to sort of see what this looks like. But now I can go in there and say, I just got this wedding invitation for a wedding in Hawaii and it says casual to semi formal beach attire.
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C
Oh, I love that. Or casual business resort wear.
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Right. And I like, I have no darn idea what that is, but I'm pretty sure I don't own that in my closets. Right. So, you know, now what do we do I can ask it to help me out. It knows all of this zero and first party data information about me and people like me, it can go and assemble a personalized, customized, real time recommendation on the fly. That's adding value to me as a shopper, increasing csat, increasing customer lifetime value. I mean, you can see, Mike, how this is like more money for the brand.
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Oh yeah, and, and I'm just, I have a vision of you in customized Bermuda shorts right now. Yeah, that's actually what I got. Send us a picture if you want to send us a picture of what you're wearing to the receipt. Beach resort casual wedding.
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B
Right?
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Well, we will absolutely post it.
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Yeah, but you see like, so this is, so this is sort of the two poles. So if I'm a marketer who's in that cost cutting, productivity reductionist mindset pre AI, and I bring that mindset with me, well then sort of the vision, outer limit of my vision for AI is just like, you know, maybe we could use it to save some time and fire a few people versus Right. Oh man, look, this can actually help me grow the business. Not 5% next year, but 6, 7 or 8% next year.
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C
Right. And then the first people doing this get all the experience too. So behind this statement is that there's a lack of vision from a lot of folks out there or that people just aren't thinking about this. Right. And how do you, how do you fix that? Like is that a person thing or is that a cultured thing or what is that? Like what, what, what do you say you need more vision or you're thinking about it wrong or how do you, how do you fix that kind of problem?
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B
Yeah, I mean, kind of all of the above. Right. So I mean, what did Malcolm Gladwell teach us whenever any disaster happens? It's not one thing, it's a things. Right. So we have to sort of unpack for each brand. And I, you know, I do this kind of consulting work outside my teaching. I work with brands to help them, you know, transform, we call it from zero to superhero with AI in their marketing department. And so, you know, first is we have to do some actual computer science training and education. Most marketers didn't come with a comp Sci background. And so to really help them understand how these tools work, what they're capable of. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean, although sometimes we write Python code, but it always doesn't mean that. It's just helping to understand that these are prediction machines. They can either predict or they can Generate, they can handle probabilistic questions very well. But deterministic questions where there's only one right answer, not so well. Right. So if I ask it, what's the population of Portugal, it's not going to do as good a job as I say what might be. Three good new business ideas. Right. Like those are probabilistic questions. So we got to help them understand like the technology of how this works. Then from there we help them understand the four use cases in those two by two that we just talked through. Show lots of examples of lots of brands, good, bad and ugly. Right. That are doing these kinds of things to expand their understanding and imagination of what's possible. And then, you know, from there, and we can talk about this a little bit. You know, we have to help them understand some of the risks and avoid the bear traps along the way. And then the last piece is, okay, how do I get started? What's a due on Monday, due next month, due the month after, due next year. Kind of a maturity ladder.
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C
You said you think there's five risks that are in the way of the vision thing. Privacy, accuracy, regulatory personnel, and reputational risk. Tell us about these and how marketers should manage them because it's almost always easy to see the risk. Managing it is another thing.
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B
Yeah. And I think it's, it's, I'll unpack these. But I think it's because of these risks is why a lot of marketing teams limit themselves to these internal productivity things. Right. Because, well, if I try something and it's not quite right for my team, I'm not going to get fired over that. Right, Right. On the other hand, if I put a chatbot out there and it hallucinates and goes crazy, right now I got like my board and my CEO calling me at home on a Sunday. Yeah, so. So, yeah, I mean privacy risk, Right. Data privacy. So if you think about, I've used this term before, zero party and first party data. Right. Either things that your customers volunteer to you or you are allowed to gather throughout the course of a transaction. I need to bring that context to any of these large language or multimodal models. They know everything that's out there in the world, on the web, on Reddit, in the New England Journal of Medicine. But they don't like know my customers and my business, so I have to give them that context. The challenge or the problem here though is unless I'm using sort of an enterprise class enterprise grade model like ChatGPT, Enterprise for big business, ChatGPT teams for medium sized businesses, Right. If I've got my employees just going home at night using what's come to be called gray market AI consumer chatgpt, because my team and my CIO has not given them state of the art tools that are safe to use, guess what happens? They go home, they lob all this stuff into regular chatgpt, and then the data leaks. Right. At worst. The other problem is it trains the underlying model on my ip.
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C
Right.
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So this is this weird thing where lots of CIOs are rightly moving cautiously, right. To say we have to be very careful with our data, we have to vet all these tools. But the longer the CIOs wait to empower their teams with state of the art tools, the more they're using gray market AI and actually exposing the risks that the CIOs were trying to prevent.
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C
And falling behind in the market, not.
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To mention falling behind. So that's the first one. The second one is sort of a legal or regulatory risk. So lots of questions about, you know, the intellectual property of what, what was used to train these large language models. In fact, just in the news this morning, I don't know if you saw this one, Mike, but you know, Sora 2 is now out and the Motion Picture association has sued them because now you can ask it to create a Mandalorian, Right. Which is Disney ip. So if I do that as a brand, if I use these tools to create something, am I actually at risk of getting sued because I use the output and then part B of that is, can I actually copyright it? Right. Because we always, you know, copyright 2025 Best Buy Incorporated. Okay, well, in the US and I know we've got a lot of global listeners, so different rules in different countries. But in the us, the US Patent and Trademark Office and courts have ruled that unless something is substantially created by AI, us substantially created by humans, you can't copyright it. Right now, we don't know. Does that mean 90%, 51% that hasn't been tested yet?
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C
Yes, but substantial feels like it has to be 50.
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B
I would agree with that, but we don't like, we don't know yet. Although I would say I've had this conversation with some Fortune 500 chief legal officers in a friendly way. And I say, Mike, if there's just a little lifestyle image that's going to be used one time, once in an email, do we really care if that's copyrightable? Yeah, you know, my pack shots, my product, my store photos. Sure. But I don't know, like if this is just an ambient side thing in an email once, maybe we don't care. But that's the second risk. Third risk, of course, is now personnel risk. This is the who. Move my cheese. You know, Jim. Jim Farley, CEO at Ford, has come out and said the quiet part out loud. That he expects half of all white collar jobs will be severely disrupted or eliminated in the next decade.
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C
I love that word, severely disrupted.
- [26:59]
B
Well, I mean, we've seen this in the world with blue collar jobs over the. Yeah, blue collar jobs over the last 25 years. Again, it's technology, it's not AI that's disrupted those blue collar jobs. It's robotics and automation on assembly lines and factories. But that's common, right? So that's coming here. So you need to know, as a cmo, if you stand up and say, hey, guys, we're doing a big AI project, half the employees will say, oh, you're just trying to fire me.
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C
Yes.
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B
So, you know, that's an issue. You know, reputational risk is now hallucinations. Air Canada very famously put a chat bot out there. A poor soul said, right, hey, do you have a grievance fare? Because I want to fly at a discount for. To a funeral. It hallucinated because that's a probabilistic problem. Most airlines probably have such a fare. Yeah, so it assumes. So when he went to book the ticket, the human agent said, sorry, we don't have this. Went to court. The court said, guess what? You know, you own it. You own it. So that's a hit to their reputation. And then the last one, of course, that we talk about here is sort of deep fakes. And now, you know, so many brands are using influencers and micro influencers. Well, the micro influencers are now famously using AI to generate images of themselves in the VIP seats at Wimbledon. And they were never even there. Okay, so you're paying them to be an influencer and now they're sort of fake influencing. Right. And not disclosing that. So what does that mean for you as the brand team then? Right, that'll flame back on you. So there's mitigation paths for all of these. But, you know, what do they say? Awareness is the first step to change. It's okay to change, but you just got to be aware of these five bear traps and, like, have human in the loop to avoid each of them.
- [28:42]
C
But your vice beneath all this is still, in spite of all these risks, get going.
- [28:48]
B
Trains leaving the station.
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C
Right, so I'm going to ask you, since you Have a great view of this. There's all the AI innovation, there's new companies, there's new apps, there's new models. How does this play out in the long run? You talk about frontier models, horizontal platforms. Tell us how this is going to work out so that our listeners are not chasing the shiny new thing, they're chasing the fundamental core thing.
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B
Yeah, please don't chase the shiny new thing. And by the way, so many marketing departments are like trying to find this AI startup in Bulgaria that no one's ever heard of that only we've discovered that, like, does this one little thing really well for marketing.
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C
The Bulgarian Wedding beach resort AI app is killing it. I Vibe coded it.
- [29:37]
B
There you go. You got all the, you got all the lingo in that. So yeah, don't do that. Right. Because first of all, all those little tools, they won't integrate. Right. So now you got to bring Deloitte in to write seven figure integration code. So that tool A talks to tool D. So that's not a good idea. Not to mention half of these will like burn out of their VC cache and not not be around next year. So. Yeah, I mean, my advice is always for most companies, center yourself around one of the three big Frontier models. Frontier models here, meaning ChatGPT paid version 5, Gemini 2.5Pro at the moment, and as we speak, Anthropics. Claude 4:5. Right. We're putting these models through IQ tests, MENSA tests. Now those three consistently score significantly better than Copilot or Deep Seq or Perplexity or any of this other stuff.
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C
Yeah, Grok, Grok is in. Grok is still. Yeah.
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B
So those are horizontal models, meaning we can use them for market research kinds of things. We could use those for campaign generation, asset creation. Your kids can use those for their homework. Right. So they, they're, they're, they're broadly functional models. So I'm going to come back to that in a minute. But then of course there are some narrow functionality models and I'll do a shout out here to Adobe their models called Firefly. It does one thing, it does it really well. It takes photos and does generative infill. Right. So if I want to widen the frame a little bit, it'll magically fill in outside of what was in my lens when I took it. Okay, that's great. But that, I can't use that to write blog posts. Right. It does one, that's a narrow model, does one thing really, really well. So now we center on one of these kind of three models. My Advice is always again, use the enterprise version of this where it's safe to use your company data, your training data for that. But of course it comes pre trained. So now that's get it, get a state of the art frontier model. Figure out one of those four use cases I talked about. Train the heck out of your team on how to use them. And where is it going? Mike? I think Monday at the developer day that Sam Altman and the OpenAI folks held, I think we got a big clue on this. He announced the ability for ChatGPT to now have interaction with embedded apps. Chat with apps. So let me just give you a parallel on this for all your listeners who are used to using Salesforce for CRM. Salesforce has long had an app exchange. So you log into your corporate CRM and then there's a bunch of these like little plugins or apps that do really narrow, specific things that the horizontal build of Salesforce was not optimized to do. Yeah, but an app builder in Bulgaria made it right. So, so, and they make money off of that. So this is essentially what was announced on Monday. So I think where this is going to go is these thousands and thousands and thousands of sort of front end AI rappers that do one thing like write blog copy for marketers. Those are going to move from being freestanding companies that I have to now buy as a marketer to they will just show up as plugins or extensions or apps.
- [32:47]
C
So they will either get bought or obliterated is what you're saying?
- [32:50]
B
Yeah, I mean I, I well bought obliterated or the functionality will just be copied by one of the big three guys.
- [32:58]
C
That's what I meant by obliterated, which is we do this really great. No one does it. And then the big guys say now we do it and you're, you're gone.
- [33:07]
B
That's right. So don't chase the shiny objects, don't chase the startups.
- [33:10]
C
But a lot of times the shiny object doesn't come from the marketer, it comes from the board, the CEO or somebody that said, you know, I was reading this weekend or I watched this post and how come we're not using this? Yeah, how do you manage that?
- [33:30]
B
Well, okay, so you know, if we're in a, you know, Fortune 500 global One 2000 marketing team that's got a little bit of heft, like, you know, some of the places where you were formerly the cmo. Mike, how do you manage it is, you know, you would call, call up your contacts at Google Gemini or you call up your contacts at ChatGPT and say, hey, you know, my board's asking me about this. Can you work with them to appify them so it shows up in chat GPT? Like you would have the, the heft to do that to bring it into the ecosystem as opposed to like, you know, one more like little tiny planet orbiting around your center.
- [34:10]
C
Or you need to be managing your board so that they know you're doing all this other stuff and they're, you know, take this into the learning.
- [34:18]
B
Yeah, yes, yes.
- [34:19]
C
And okay, so that's good. You know, we, we touched on it earlier in the show about can. I know you have some opinions on can. Yeah, we ran a show called why Can Can't? And I think that actually lit you up a little bit when we were talking. So I, I, I must hear from the Northwestern professor on his opinion of can.
- [34:45]
B
Look, I'm not a fan of agency self indulgence, right? Like, we're awarding ourselves awards for creativity. I am much more of a fan, for example, Mike, of the EFFIE Awards, where we're actually recognizing profitable incremental growth. Right? That's our reason for being our raison d'. Etre. Like, I love that. And by the way, you know, the great Mark Ritson has done a lot of work on analyzing all of the FE awards and like, what are some of the learnings all marketers can have as to what drives profitable incremental growth. So there's great value in that kind of an award. But, you know, I know, you know, I spent years at DDB and the great Keith Reinhardt Advertising hall of Fame, you know, former Worldwide chairman, has done some work years ago kind of looking at a correlation. I'm not saying it was a causation, but like, yeah, the work that tends to win at Congress might maybe also drive better business results, but it's sort of a loose connectivity at best. So I sort of have a problem with awarding things that are back to our earlier conversation, means and not ends. I want to award outcomes, right? Not means. That's the first, the second that I would say around, around what's going on here is, you know, it's come to light and there's been a number of good people leading the charge on this, that there's been some, shall we say, maybe not full intellectual honesty in the award applications. You know, we've seen some awards being kind of right. Pulled back this year and it's, I mean, it's been in the press this year more than in previous years. But I mean, this has been going on for a long time. So now we're sort of awarding means and not ends. Pull back.
- [36:21]
C
Because of why, Jim, Everyone will want to know that's listening.
- [36:24]
B
Because of fraudulent commentary in their entry. Right. They were saying things that just weren't true. They were making things up. So now we're awarding means, not ends. And the way we're rewarding it is based on lies. Like, that's just weird to me. Right. Like, how is that a big thing now? That said, I mean, I will grant that there's a. The people who go there and the ability to network and connect and have good conversations and stimulating dinners. Right. I mean, I think same as at CES in Las Vegas. So if you think like January, June, as those two anchors, I think there's a lot of opportunity to meet your colleagues, your peers, other smart people, learn what's going on. But that's not the show. Right. That's what happens around the show. So, yeah. So the show itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Plus, just again from, you know, marketers have to have some self awareness here. For a lot of companies that are, you know, in tough business situations, just the optics of like, I'll be gone for the next 10 days in the French Riviera, good luck everybody else. It's just not like good optics.
- [37:29]
C
Yes. You know, maybe you can pick up some fashion tips though, from some of the photos people have posted for your. Your Hawaii wedding.
- [37:37]
B
Yes. Or. Right. Or you can ask Ralph what I should wear to the beach dinner and con.
- [37:41]
C
There we go. Okay, this brings us to our traditional last question, which, you know, practical advice for our audience we haven't yet discussed. Or the funniest story you can share on air. You can pick one or both, but you must pick at least one.
- [37:55]
B
Yeah. So I'm gonna, you know, we're recording this here in October. We've got whatever, 10 weeks left in the calendar year. I'm gonna give a piece of advice here, which is make sure by the time you come back to work after the holidays, January 5th, or whatever, it's going to be that you personally have made a resolution. Not a next year's resolution, but a remainder of this year's resolution to build something yourself with AI. Not necessarily for your brand, for your business, for your company. Right. But like order a pizza through chat GPT, have the chatgpt agent orcur order a pie from your local shop. Right. Have it plan a vacation for you.
- [38:41]
C
It's been great for planning vacations. I'm just going to tell you, right? Yeah.
- [38:46]
B
But again, like to just read LinkedIn posts about what it can do or watch PowerPoints at a conference. Like, that's not good enough, folks. You know, like, if you want to be a competent surfer, at some point, you get it. Got to get on the board, in the water, right? And fall off a few times. So. So that's my advice here would be like, build something with, like, have it build a Spotify playlist automagically for you using its agentic powers. Like, have it do something for you as opposed to like thinking I'm a senior executive and I don't have to get my hands dirty. And my IT guys and all my Kellogg recent grads who know this tech stuff will handle it.
- [39:28]
C
All right. I think that's good advice. I like that you got surfing in there, Hawaii, and you see, you know, Romania. So thank you, Jim, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, hit the like button and subscribe. Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, which includes Colonel Mustard in the study with the job spec. How poor design shortens CMO lifespans. Why can can't dissecting comp A primer on understanding and negotiating pay. And of course, Jim's first show, the insomnia cookies case, the ghost model taught at Northwestern. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. In marketing, everything must work seamlessly. If not efficiency, speed, and ROI all suffer. That's why Quad is obsessed with making sure your marketing machine runs smoothly with less friction and smarter integration. Better marketing is built on Quad. See how better gets done@www.quad.com. build better. You.