← Marketing Against The Grain
Marketing Against The Grain
Marketing Tactics You Need to Learn in the AI Era ft. Morning Brew Founder
00:48:13
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- [00:01]
Host
Hey, everyone. On today's show, we got the crystal ball. We're talking about the future of marketing. Every convo I have with a marketer these days, is that how marketing isn't working as well, especially online marketing the way it used to? We're going to talk vibe marketing. We're going to say, what is the marketing methodology of the future? What are the steps, how you organize your marketing team? What do you do to win at marketing in 2025 and beyond? That is the full show. We are joined by our very special friend and guest, Alex Lieberman, who's going to talk through all this with us. Let's today's show. Here's a quick word from our sponsor. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help you grow your business. All right, hey, everyone. We're here trying to answer a question that's on every marketer's mind. I don't get on a call with a marketer these days where they're not like, oh, man, I'm getting less traffic from Google. Nobody's opening my emails, nobody's downloading my white papers. All of this stuff just isn't working like it used to. What's going on? What should I do? What is this vibe marketing thing I keep hearing about? And we're joined by the one and only Alex Lieberman, friend of the pod, great marketer, great entrepreneur. Alex, welcome to the show.
- [01:59]
Alex Lieberman
Great to be here. Thanks, guys.
- [02:01]
Host
Alex, going to be our third presenter here where we're just going to talk about what marketing is going to look like in the future. We've got some ideas. This all started with Alex and I going back and forth on Twitter on, like, the idea of vibe marketing. And vibe marketing is kind of the early term for marketing in that AI era where you can just kind of have an idea, work with some AI tools and go from my idea to an initial, like, marketing campaign marketing asset, what have you. So, Alex, I want to start off because I know Kieran hates the term vibe marketing, so I want to hear from him in a second. But I want to get your take on, like, what the is vibe marketing? What should people be thinking about when it comes to like the next generation of marketing.
- [02:42]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, for sure. So I think when I had originally posted about vibe marketing, I feel like that was a few months ago at this point.
- [02:48]
Host
Totally.
- [02:49]
Alex Lieberman
I actually think we're very aligned on kind of our views of vibe marketing. But I'm happy to take a side and argue for it because I think definitionally I basically define vibe marketing as something different than I think what you guys would define as vibe marketing. So I'll give you what my original definition was, please. So my original definition of vibe marketing was less about like a direct connection to vibe coding, which is this idea of like prompting some idea. You have one shotting it with whether it's, you know, cursor, Claude, GPT, perplexity, whatever, and then that's it. Like you've kind of like created the workflow you want to build. My original intention behind vibe marketing was actually like more about the vibes of your business and marrying your marketing strategy and kind of like the way you market externally to what's happening in your business. So actually when I originally wrote about vibe marketing, the way that I was thinking about it is that every company I'll use an example of like Beehive, is going to have to market in the way that Beehive did their marketing and still does their marketing in order to become relevant and earn mind share on the Internet. And the way I would describe the way they did their marketing strategy was originally when Tyler was building the business. Their product was very crude. They lacked a ton of product features that other email service providers had. And so in Tyler's mind, he was like, the only way that we are going to get customers for Beehive is to create this feeling of momentum where it feels like we're moving faster than everyone else. Otherwise no one's going to have any incentive to use our product because every other product has way more features. So at least he had to get to a place where he's like, okay, someone will become a Beehive customer because they have the confidence that a month or two from now we will be at feature parity with other products on the market. And so the way I originally thought about vibe marketing is literally just this idea of as a software business or any business, you have a product roadmap. And that product roadmap should literally be matched to a marketing blitz package that you are doing on the Internet with a variety of tactics on a weekly or bi weekly basis. So we could talk about this in a little bit. But like that is the first marketing strategy I'm doing for distro, one of my businesses is we have a product roadmap that my co founder has for the business. On a weekly basis, we are marketing our new features on Twitter, on LinkedIn, we're doing product hunt launches. And it's kind of a repeatable package that our intern who runs go to market at the business has built himself. And so the reason I think that's just an important thing to understand as a marketer is my view is as software becomes more commoditized, like software feels more like content than ever before. Where there's oversupply, differentiation is harder than ever before. The only way to stay relevant or one of the only ways is through speed of shipping. And so that's why I think my original definition of vibe marketing was basically based on the vibes of your business and the vibes of what your users want that informs your product roadmap. And your product roadmap is then used as a marketing vehicle on a weekly or biweekly basis. I think that's different from how you guys define vibe marketing. So I'd love to hear your definition and then we can go back and forth on, you know, whether aligned with using this term or not.
- [06:11]
Host
All right, Kieran, give us your definition. Yeah, I obviously have one that you've seen, but give us yours and tell us what you dislike or like about the term vibe marketing.
- [06:19]
Kieran
Well, just to be clear in what you're talking about, Alex, is that product marketing and speed of execution really matter because product is a core part of your marketing strategy. Because actually all of the informational content, content is going away into LLMs and so product is your marketing strategy. The problem I have with vibe marketing is vibe coding really meant a thing, right? So for anyone who has coded on cursor lovable all of these different platforms, which I have, vibe coding is basically, you can be much more spontaneous creativity. And let's see where the AI can take you. One of the original posts was the tab, tap, tap and cursor, right? You can tab and the AI will create the code, create the code, create the code. So it's much more of a creative, spontaneous feeling where you let the AI go wherever it wants to go and you kind of vibe with it and then you kind of don't really follow the processes. What I have seen online about vibe marketing, what people have taken for vibe marketing is basically just automation with agentic workflow.
- [07:08]
Host
Workflow automation. Yeah.
- [07:09]
Kieran
And so it's just like normal marketing, but it has agentic steps. So it's like crawl Reddit, get all these things, enrich them, do some agentic work and then send email. That is just automation, right?
- [07:21]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah.
- [07:21]
Kieran
The equivalent of vive marketing is saying to AI, I have a campaign idea to reach Alex, create with me. What should we do? And you're like, hey, that's a great idea. Try this, try that, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you end up with something. I think vibe coding really means something. So you can't just like take the term and then say, well, that's something completely different for marketing. I think that's why there's no real one definition for marketing, because everyone just interprets it differently.
- [07:43]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah.
- [07:43]
Kieran
But it really does make sense if you code with these tools. Vibe coding actually made a ton of sense.
- [07:48]
Host
Totally.
- [07:49]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah. There's a few things that I'll share, but one thing, and it speaks to what you were saying, Kieran, about like, what people are really just talking about is like workflow automations that have existed forever.
- [08:00]
Kieran
Right.
- [08:00]
Alex Lieberman
Is one of my other businesses, which is called 10x. And basically what we're doing is we're going into businesses and parachuting in and understanding their business deeply and then helping them do AI transformation. And the most interesting learning I've had, as we do interviews with executives at these companies is, is they don't necessarily know the difference between AI from other technology. A lot of times what they are asking to do to become more efficient actually has nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
- [08:30]
Kieran
It's automation.
- [08:31]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, exactly.
- [08:31]
Host
It's just automation.
- [08:32]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [08:32]
Host
Workflow automation deterministic.
- [08:34]
Alex Lieberman
Exactly.
- [08:34]
Host
So I think that's interesting and I think that's the biggest problem most people have with where marketers going is they're kind of too in the weeds of the technology and not enough in like the changes that that technology is having on humanity and like kind of the playbooks to take advantage of that change. Right. And I wrote a big memo that Kieran has seen on this topic and like the kind of, I think defining sentence or point of view that I have on this is like that the next era of marketing, whatever the heck you want to call it, will not be defined by who can publish the most content, but by who can express the most taste, act the fastest, and establish the most like resonant identity with their audience, which a lot of what you were talking about about Alex. Right. Like, I don't think that's that far off from what you were talking about, but that's very different than like AI workflows. And I think that's what I'm Trying to like really anchor everybody in this discussion in the show today is that the world of just like publishing a bunch of content is gone. Yeah, that is not going to work in the future.
- [09:32]
Alex Lieberman
What's interesting to me is, you know, I was just talking a minute ago about software and this is actually why I think there's so much similarity now in software and content, is because if you were to ask me like, what are the moats in software today, I would say there are four moats and you guys are going to have a strong view on this. But just bear with my lack of definitional rigor. The first is what I would call brand, and wrapped in brand, I would say it's UX taste and customer obsession. Yeah, okay, so I'm wrapping up in there.
- [10:02]
Host
We're buying that.
- [10:03]
Alex Lieberman
The second is speed, speed of putting things out into the world. The third is unfair distribution. And the fourth is data. Having data that actually makes you better at doing basically everything in one through three. My view is that is what's going to make the next kind of like generation of software businesses build sustained advantages. And what I'll say is there are certain software businesses that truly do have a technological moat now, but I would say that is like small, the vast minority of software businesses. If you were to ask me what does differentiation in content look like, I would argue there is some difference properly that we can argue. But they look very similar in terms of moats and content.
- [10:47]
Host
Yeah, I like your list of four. Kieran, you may or may not agree with what I would say. I would swap speed for learning. Learning is actually the benefit of speed. Speed is how you learn and how you learn faster than everybody else. But it's like learning loops and basically iterating and making faster progress. I might swap out speed for learning, but I don't know. Kieran, you buy what Alex is saying there.
- [11:10]
Kieran
I also think that's generally right. Like I think distribution is always a moat companies had. But it's really hard to have a kind of moat around distribution because of the way things are collapsing. I think the biggest moat a company will have is always going to be network effects. But like network effects are very dependent upon the product you build. I think if I was in the product building game, I would want to figure out how to build network effects into my product because I think that is like the hardest thing to disrupt. And maybe switching costs, but even switching costs, like one of the crazy things to think about is like switching costs were definitely a moat. Right. It's like really hard to like pull all my stuff out of this software and bring it over to this software. But actually if LLMs become the interface to software. Right. We saw Zapier has launched in OpenAI's latest response API. It's available in Cloud 4. So now you can actually access and do work in 8,000 apps via just sitting in OpenAI, sitting in Claude. So if that's your interface, switching costs actually may not be a mode either, because you can probably tell the AI to switch a lot of your stuff over to one of those apps. But I think network effects, which is like the product becomes better each time another customer joins. So every customer that joins actually enriches the experience for the customers who are already a part of that product. That, to me is a really hard thing for anything to disrupt.
- [12:21]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the only thing I would add to Network Effects is I totally agree with like the historical definition, which is every new user makes the product better for the previous user. And I think that's always going to create sustained advantages in businesses. But I would say the other thing that creates network effect now is data, because the quality of your data is the quality of the output of an AI tool. And so just again, using a quick, small example with distro, it's like in a distro studio, the quality of the interview you're getting with the AI interviewer is going to be dependent on your previous studio sessions because it's using all previous knowledge of every conversation you've had with it to ask your questions in the next session.
- [13:01]
Kieran
Right. I think there's a playbook for companies to build tools because the cost of code has become so low that even if their core product doesn't have network effects, that they can build tools that acquire data that enrich their product. Right. Like, I would actually build tools with the only objective to get unique data sets.
- [13:18]
Alex Lieberman
Oh, yeah.
- [13:19]
Kieran
Into my product.
- [13:20]
Alex Lieberman
When I think about what Dharmesh has built with agent AI, like, I just think about basically because the cost and complexity of building software is almost zero now. Like lead magnets, as we've historically known them are just like software tools now.
- [13:35]
Kieran
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [13:36]
Host
We're going to get into that. That's part of the show today. I want to talk about that.
- [13:38]
Alex Lieberman
Okay, perfect.
- [13:40]
Host
The other thing I would just say before we go to the image I'm showing here is all those things you said, especially data, UX and usage. Right. You kind of had UX bundled in. But like, people have to use the tools. If you don't use distro in your example, Alex, it's not going to have the context.
- [13:55]
Alex Lieberman
Exactly.
- [13:56]
Host
Going to be as good of experience. Right. So usage and the user experience to drive usage becomes very, very important. Even more so in technology companies. Okay, I made this image and I want to test it on both of you in terms of what I think has changed in the world. So we had this like inbound marketing era for the last 20 years and in that like awareness was kind of hard. You had to spend a bunch of money to ad agencies and stuff and place those ads and it was like kind of hard, kind of expensive. But visits, like visits was pretty good. Like you could get a lot of visits because Google was a really great tool for attracting high quality visits. Your lead conversion of those visits was okay. You could use marketing automation and get some of those. And then you had an okay customer conversion rate. Now I actually think awareness is a lot easier because you have these AI tools that allow you to create really compelling social videos. You have tools like icon and capsule and captions. You have influencers that if you're a niche company, you can actually get pretty big awareness in your market relatively cost effectively relative to what you could have done like 10 years ago. This is one of my pitches. It's way, way harder to get visits. Visits for everybody are shrinking. Visits have gotten much, much harder to come by leads. The conversion rate of those visits actually getting a lot better because you have AI personalization. We've seen huge success with like AI generated one to one onboarding emails, nurture emails, SMS, WhatsApp, whatever. We've seen the conversion rate of the people who do express interest to be a lot better. And we've seen the customer conversion rate be a lot better too because we're able to deliver really bespoke AI led sales experiences. And I think most companies are going to be able to do that outreach, engagement, sales process way better with AI. And so I just think the fundamental shape of, of how a business funnel works and how businesses grow is changing and has changed a lot from what it used to look like. And I guess my question for both of you is like, do you agree with this? Do you disagree with this? What's your take?
- [15:54]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, well, one question I would have that kind of is informing whether I agree with this or not is like basically this new funnel that you're describing is enabled by like new tooling, AI automation that makes the ability to like do more and work faster with less. It accelerates that. And the reason I'm saying it in this way is because my question is, is this is what we've seen happen with content over the last, you know, five to 10 years. And I think it's going to accelerate. I think it's what's going to happen with software is like there's just more noise than ever before. Like to me, noise is going to continue to go up. So what I'm curious about is how you think awareness grows when noise grows exponentially.
- [16:44]
Kieran
Can I throw in something else there as well, please? I'm actually like, I'm trying to do something here to see if it's because it's related. So the awareness phase isn't just like hard and noisy, but it's far easier to grow awareness in that space if you're a creator or individual than if you are a brand. So it's not just that it's getting noisier, it's not just that there's less channels. The reason I'm kind of like on my laptop here is because I'm really curious if, you know, Substack is like one of the few sites that has actually grown in organic traffic. But I do wonder how susceptible they are to chatgpt. And I was just trying to figure out if I could actually access substack articles in ChatGPT and I don't think I can. Maybe they've actually blocked it. But things like substack, things like podcasts, things like YouTube, they are much better for individuals and brands. So brands don't just have to deal with decline in channels in that awareness space or additional noise. Because if you use AI correctly, you can go from subpar content creator to above average content creator. So everyone is creating much more content. But they also have to deal with the fact that channels are not great for brands in the first place. These channels that are actually working are not great for brands in the first place. And so I think that there's going to have to be a change in the way brands even think about how they acquire attention and awareness within those channels.
- [17:56]
Host
Well, the point I'm trying to make here is that like the cost to create the content to drive awareness has gone way down. The cost of some of those channels has gone way down. Influencers are way less expensive than Facebook cpc, Google cpc, TV ads. Like if you are the average small to mid sized business, if you're the average 100 person business, it is way cheaper to go and get in front of the hundred thousand possible customers you have in the market and help them understand your brand and your like core benefit to them than it it was 10 years ago is what I fundamentally believe. Yes, it's going to be more complicated. Yes, you have to take different routes to market there. It's going to be noisier. But I do think there is some advantage there because you have all these marketers who've kind of the last 10 years gave up on awareness marketing. Right. Like most mid size businesses are just like, I don't care about awareness, I'm just gonna siphon traffic from Google and Facebook and ads and like that's going to be what I'm going to do.
- [18:56]
Kieran
You should say why they give up an awareness. Like this is the big problem. They didn't give up on awareness, but they can't equate awareness into revenue.
- [19:01]
Host
It's harder. Yeah.
- [19:02]
Kieran
And so like the missing part is like what is A marketer is still going to go through this messy middle phase where the CEO and the boss and the manager and the company, they don't realize that marketing has drastically changed. And they're going to show up to these meetings and they're going to be like, where's my clicks that turn into revenue? And the marketer is going to go, I'm going to get your awareness that actually causes buys to happen elsewhere. And the people are going to say, you're fired, bring me in the next marketer. And I think that it's the disconnect between awareness and revenue that is going to be really, really hard.
- [19:31]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah. I mean look, even I would say our biggest challenge even with story arb is showing the connection between creating what I would call more editorial content and driving revenue.
- [19:44]
Kieran
Right.
- [19:44]
Alex Lieberman
And I think we are getting better at showing that connection. But to me, like basically what happens is we talk to head of marketing at a $10 million plus B2B company and they're like, guys, if you want me to sign on for a six month commitment at $12,000 a month, I need to be able to go to my CEO and say how they're going to get multiples of revenue out of this content investment. And I don't think that necessarily changes the funnel you've created. But like, is there anything to suggest that most businesses skittishness to awareness marketing is going to change at all?
- [20:18]
Host
What alternative do they have? There's two things I do think AI and neural networks are going to make attribution from transaction marketing better. I fundamentally believe that over the next five years that's going to transform a lot. The second thing is like, what alternative do they have in a world where AI search is not Going to be very attributable. Right. Like if they lose Google Ad effectiveness, Facebook ad effectiveness and Google search effectiveness, what's the alternative?
- [20:46]
Kieran
We have lived in this era pre like the Internet age.
- [20:50]
Host
Yeah. People bought billboards and yellow page ads.
- [20:52]
Kieran
And I also don't think it's a huge like OpenAI could build a true analytical model for like the Internet in a way that has not been done before because they're able to grab a lot of the data in the terms of people are searching for something and then they can see people visit, they can actually do some cool things to connect things together. But like we're a ways away from that. I think they released their ad platform long before they released the analytics. But once they release ads for freemium tier, which I suspect will come pretty soon because they hired the ex CEO from Instacart, they are going to have to have analytical tools. And I do think there's something that may actually help us piece together these different interactions. But I actually do think I'll posit this Alex and I think marketers have to create some sort of awareness. But maybe the change is we have had to create awareness at a kind of grander scale. We have to say here's content that we think appeals to this whole cohort of people because the unit economics wouldn't allow us to create individual pieces content for each person. But I do think one of the changes that brands could go through is we could have these micro audiences. So instead of marketing to like 200,000 people, you're marketing to 200 people. I don't know what's the math is like 10,000 times. And the pure example of this is in B2B you have these kind of segments and then you do dynamic web personalization. Right. Someone comes to your homepage, oh, you all look kind of like this segment and so we change the headline. Dynamic web personalization has never been that good. It's never worked that well. No, the difference in micro audience is you could take 20 companies who all have very similar characteristics and actually create websites like microsites for each company.
- [22:24]
Host
Yes.
- [22:25]
Kieran
Because the cost of code is like free. And so I do think that you could still drive awareness but in a far more precise way. And you probably don't go after half of the people you used to go after. But you have to be much more precise and targeted.
- [22:39]
Alex Lieberman
I guess my one pushback on that is not about if that will work, but how long in the future it's going to take for that to work. Because what I would Just say is like to target these micro audiences, you can't just rely on AI. Right now, in my mind, a human is needed in the loop to make sure the content is actually really good. It depends on what your standard for content is. And so yes, you could hypothetically create hundreds of micro sites for hundreds of different accounts that you're directly targeting. But at least my view is you still need a human who's going to be checking over and kind of editing the copy and the content you're creating for all of them. And so I still think a human is the bottleneck there. And sure, at some point it will get good enough. I would just argue today it is not.
- [23:21]
Host
I don't know, do we think that's true? I want to have a debate for a second to see if that's true. Especially with Claude 4 opus and GPT 4.5. Like the writing is really good. And I guess my point is like, let's say I created a microsite for Distro or for one of your businesses. Right. For these companies. Right. And I had a used Manus or I used, you know, Skyward or one of these agents and I go do a full scrape of that site. I get a deep, detailed breakdown of their strategy. I completely map it to the features. I tell them exactly what they should do. I have that on a public facing page. I have that in outreach communications. That is way better than the average BDR is going to do today.
- [24:07]
Kieran
I agree with Alex that you need a human in the loop to check that stuff. But I will posit to you, Alex, the first version of this is going to be, you're going to buy services for me. Those services are going to be autonomous agents and you're going to buy an account manager and that account manager is going to look over and train those autonomous agents to get better each and every time. So you're right that there'll be a human in the loop, but that human in the loop will actually be an account manager for you. And so over time you'll be able to get much more back from those autonomous agents. But if you're saying like the microsite, I only need one full time person working each week to do that. Probably. Right?
- [24:39]
Alex Lieberman
Totally.
- [24:39]
Kieran
So the actual human capital is probably still not anywhere near what you would imagine or what it would have been in the past.
- [24:47]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, I agree with this. And I actually think maybe where, where I'm thinking about it differently or not necessarily the right way is like what goes through my head is like what is actually on this microsite?
- [24:58]
Host
Yeah.
- [24:58]
Alex Lieberman
Like, what is the actual content that is on it? If the microsite is literally just like, I don't know, product marketing or a case study for your business that is kind of custom to a specific company or prospect that you're selling to? Yeah, I buy that an agent who's like, scraped. All of your companies can create that. I think what's in my head is like, okay, if I wanted to create, let's just even say like an editorial newsletter or let's just say, like, that is truly the purpose is like, content is the product. The goal is not to drive a lead right now. I just think the almost like the more creative you get with the content, the less that I see that AI is good enough today. And I agree. And my best example for that is when I just think about the best content I've consumed on the Internet over the last month. And you ask me how much of that, what was the percentage that AI was involved versus Human? I think the more creative the content is, the more that Human is still involved.
- [25:52]
Kieran
100%.
- [25:52]
Host
I think the three of us can agree on this. And I'm going to restate what you said in a slightly different way.
- [25:57]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah.
- [25:57]
Host
That the further AI content gets away from the product buyer use cases and out to like, more broader ideas, the worse it is and the more humans need to be involved. Agreed. I think we all agree on that. There is some efficient part of that spectrum right now where I think you can deliver a lot of value with no. Or like Kieran's account manager, Human. Okay, I pulled up this image. I want to make sure we talk about this. This is a little bit more of like the before and after. You were talking about how like gated PDFs and lead magnets were kind of dead. Alex. It's like, I think we go from gated PDFs to like custom web apps. Like the analogy I used here. Like, imagine you were a landscaper. It's like, oh, cool. Well, here, download this guide on plantings for New England or oh, here's this thing. Upload a picture of your backyard and we'll mock up a design for you for free.
- [26:49]
Alex Lieberman
Yep.
- [26:49]
Host
Right. Like, that is the era that we are about to enter into that most people don't see yet. My take here is that more companies CAC are going to go to like, API calls to generate code or to generate outputs from AI than most people think right now. We used to obsess about, like our SEO checklists for publishing content, and now we're going to be like, hey, we're going to have these style guides that are going to train AI for the perfect output for whatever channel we're working on. We used to have these month long nurture campaigns and now it's like, how can I have these like really fast but deep interactions where I'm hitting you across multiple channels with ads with like a one to one AI generated message just for you? Yeah, I think it's going to be very different in terms of both the timing and the personalization of the message. And so I just think that we are moving into a completely new era of marketing. And I wanted to do this show today to start kicking that off for all of our viewers. Because if you're watching this and you're going to follow along over the next six to 12 months, you will be light years ahead of the rest of the world. We'll be right back. But I want to tell you about another podcast I love. The DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by HubSpot Media. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing and optimizing e commerce stores and direct to consumer brands. They talk with founders, marketers, platforms, creators and marketing and growth agencies to cover topics like brand building, social media, influencer marketing, website conversion, paid media, Facebook ads, consumer trends, email marketing, and much, much more. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. They just did an amazing show called Meta ad how top DTC brands spend 300k monthly profitably. You can listen to the DTC pod where wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:53]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah, a few things I'll say is I totally agree. I think the hardest thing like for a marketer who's listening to this or watching it is like, let's say they buy what we're saying. They're like, okay, how do I do it now? And actually this is kind of a meta thing. But this is where I think differentiation can happen with AI content right now is the more tactical you can get, the better because I think there's this huge gap people have in like excitement around AI versus application. You know, just to kind of give props to Kieran. I think that's what Kieran does really well is how do you make this stuff as actionable as possible? And one thing I think is important to share is like, why is it, why is it that like the custom web app now is going to be such a good form of lead gen for companies. My argument would be that 99% of human beings are not going to be getting into the weeds of LLMs or AI in the way that even say Kieran is with models and prompting right now. And so my views is like, if you basically have a smart prompt that you've taken time to develop, that is kind of all you need to add on top of an LLM to then make it valuable for people. And so just to give you the example of like, we haven't done this for story AR yet. I want to do it, but it's like, what if we just have a web app where any head of marketing at a company can go to this site we create. And it basically creates the content strategy, like 80% of the content strategy that we would deploy for them at Storyar, but gives it to them free. So basically comes up with who are the execs you should be interviewing for SME interviews that you turn into content on your site. If you had to create an editorial newsletter for your ICP or for specific Personas, what would potentially be a template for that newsletter? And like you just get that as an output by putting in maybe your company's URL and the LinkedIn profiles of your executives.
- [30:44]
Kieran
I always think that the value line continues to go up, which you're saying, I think you have to give away much more value to gain interest even in whatever you offer for free. Just a couple of quick points because I want to make sure marketers also leave with some positivity. Right.
- [30:58]
Host
And so there's tons of positivity going.
- [31:01]
Kieran
Back to the kind of side by side for Kip. You know, we should think about OpenAI's incentives here.
- [31:05]
Alex Lieberman
Right.
- [31:05]
Kieran
OpenAI are going to have a freemium tier that they already have. They're going to have to. They want to monetize that via ads. To monetize it via ads. I think they will have to start to really think about how they send traffic to publishers.
- [31:16]
Host
Yes.
- [31:17]
Kieran
I have seen them drastically change the way they're treating links in chat. I don't know if anyone else has, but they are starting to do much more explicit citation modals to show. Yeah. The websites to try to get you to click also. I suspect that's pretty great for their copyright infringement lawsuits coming up is that they can show they actually send in publishers.
- [31:34]
Alex Lieberman
Oh yeah.
- [31:34]
Kieran
And so we even see this internally. We've seen a big increase in traffic from LLMs over the past 5 months now. Will that ever be equivalent to Google? No. Is Google just Released AI mode, which is like, really difficult for marketers. Yes. It's beta now, will come out pretty soon. And so I know you're going to go through this, but, like, all of the value is accruing and how you convert more from less and how you be much more creative in the ideas you initially have. And I think, like, that's where you. If I was a marketer, I'm like, okay, well, I can be much more creative. I can be much faster, I can speed of execution goes up and I can convert way, way more. And I can kind of optimize for the LLMs in the hope that over time that traffic goes up. Because OpenAI are incentivized to give publishers some amount of traffic. Yeah.
- [32:14]
Alex Lieberman
So I'll just share something and we can talk about it this time or next time. But basically, as I'm hearing us talk about this, I'm trying to, like, think through the lens of a head of marketing or senior marketer at a company and, like, what questions are coming to mind for me? And it's like, basically there's three things that come to mind. It's like, one, the stuff we're talking about, like how kind of the marketing mix and what marketing looks like as it changes. How do you tactically do those things? The second is how does the design of my org change based on all this?
- [32:43]
Host
Yes, I get that question so much.
- [32:45]
Kieran
Yes.
- [32:45]
Alex Lieberman
And then the third piece of it is, as the design of my org potentially changes, how are the skills that I'm looking for and the people I hire changing?
- [32:53]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [32:53]
Host
All right, let's talk about those. Cause I got a pitch.
- [32:55]
Alex Lieberman
Okay.
- [32:56]
Host
I built this. I've gone back forth with Kieran a little bit. It's not perfect, but it's like a V point one. And it's like, whether you call this vibe marketing, whatever the heck we'll call it, we're going to call it something and we can debate that. But there's going to be a new era of marketing. And I think there's four steps to it. And I think that these steps operate in kind of a loop and you can apply it to anything. I think the first step is expression. And it's like one of the things these AI tools are remarkable at is helping you go from idea to. To an asset, like lightning fast. Right. And so to kind of go back to your questions, Alex, if I'm a marketing leader, I'm like, oh, I need to get my team the right tools. And so that's like OpenAI. Claude HubSpot Canva like the tool set that allows me to go from ideas to creation really, really fast. And I think there are going to be things like synthetic audiences where we use AI to basically say, hey, I've got this idea, I want you to run it through an AI audience to see if it would actually work the way I think it would work. And if it does, then I'll polish it up and I will make it awesome.
- [33:59]
Alex Lieberman
Yep.
- [33:59]
Host
Right. And so I think that's the first step that you're going to see. And then once you have these assets, the thing that I think, Kieran, you've learned a ton is that like the micro segments, the one to one personalization matters a ton. And so you have to tailor those assets in a way where an LLM can generate a bespoke email, bespoke landing page, website, whatever the asset is for your segment of customers. Right. So if I've got 200 manufacturers I'm trying to reach, I need 200 very unique emails that are going to go out to those folks. And I need marketers who have data skills. I need marketers who can train the LLMs that can do annotation, that can basically take a human in the loop to create a really good unsupervised, tailored message experience. And by the way, I think if I was a marketer, I would consider having my team potentially organized in these buckets or something of that. It's still early. And then you have like activate, distribute. I haven't decided what you would call it yet, but it's like, cool. Now I have all of this. I need to go work with influencers, I need to publish the content on the web. I need to put my ad campaigns live. I gotta go get it all out in the world. And then the last step is, hey, the one thing that we've talked about as a theme on today's show is speed and speed of learning. And so as soon as that stuff's out there, I gotta start getting data. And the great thing about AI is if something's working really well, I can lean into it, or if it's not working that well, I can fix it and just launch a new version or new iteration really quickly. And it's not gonna be these like set it and forget it campaigns of the old marketing world. It's gonna be like these very high speed, high evolution campaigns. That's my take. Kieran, anything you would add that I missed and you and I have back channeled on this some.
- [35:44]
Kieran
We got to spend some time in San Fran Last week going through this. Yeah, you and I, I think agree that the first of all, I think this is closer to VI market, much closer to VI marketing. You know, even if this was close to the vibe market, I just don't like the term for marketing. But that's a whole.
- [35:56]
Host
I'm not sure I do either, but.
- [35:57]
Kieran
I just haven't figured out that one yet. I think the one that is the hardest is the activate. Because I think there's a small subset of brands in B2B that community and influencers is applicable for. And there's about 80% of brands that are no offense to B2B born. And actually influencers and communities will not be applicable to. And I think you and I, when we riff to this like the activate one is the hardest one, right? Like the thing I posted today is 80% of all buyers in B2B start their journey with Google. And there's a reason, because it's a very like informationally researched thing. Right. And gartner predict by 2027, 95% start with an LLM. And actually if you look at the buyer journey in a little more detail, 70% of the B2B buyer journey today is done off site. I suspect that when you switch to 95% LLMs, it's 95% is done off site. That is problematic. And the average buyer committee is like seven people. So it's a really messy like way to purchase software. And so that activate thing, I think it's going to be the one that is going to really have to have some hard thinking in that how do you make it applicable for the average company selling like manufacturing equipment in middle America.
- [37:10]
Host
Right.
- [37:10]
Kieran
I think that's the one that is the hardest one.
- [37:12]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah. So one thing I'll say, and so I agree with this, I guess my only question is those four steps you outlined, Expression, personalization, activation, distribution, get data, learn and iterate with speed. I guess my question is like, how is that any different from how things have always been? Like, if you were to ask me what is the journey of putting things out on the Internet, I've always thought of it as five steps. Ideation, creation, refinement, distribution, and insights. And so I guess my question is I don't think anything's different. I guess the difficulty in the way you execute on each of those steps just changes.
- [37:53]
Host
The how is very different.
- [37:54]
Alex Lieberman
Yes, yes, I agree with that.
- [37:55]
Host
Which is what I think what we're trying to push on because it's like it's not personalization. Personalization's Dead. You have to have really great data and turn that data into highly one to one content. On this Taylor stage, expression has completely changed. The biggest thing that's happened here in Expression is you used to need an army of specialists.
- [38:15]
Alex Lieberman
Yep.
- [38:16]
Host
Right. Like, oh, I need my designer, I need my video editor, I need my videographer. I need all these people to get something out to the world where it's like, I can now do a lot of stuff. Just me as one generalist. I can make a lot of assets and 12 months from now, when the technology is way better, I'll be able to make almost everything.
- [38:33]
Alex Lieberman
Yep. Right.
- [38:34]
Host
And like that is massively, massively different. The channels for distribution activation have changed a lot. They're less changey to you because you live on the Internet and you're in the pulse of everything. To the average marketer who's just been doing SEO and email and like Facebook ads.
- [38:50]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah.
- [38:50]
Host
Wow. The how you activate and reach your audience has changed dramatically. And the pace at which all this has happened. Right. It used to be like, oh, I'll kind of look at the data. Oh, this is good. I'll show it to my boss and we'll move on. Now it's like I have to look at this data because I have to update the assets in this campaign in real time to actually get a good return on my time and effort. So I think that makes sense. I'm not sure I have it yet, but like, this is like my V1 pitch of like, oh, I do think things have changed a good bit.
- [39:23]
Alex Lieberman
How do you think that changes the composition of people in a marketing org? Or more specifically when you hire a marketer say two years from now versus two years ago. The skills you're looking for, how does that change things?
- [39:36]
Host
Kieran, what's your answer to the skills question? I'll let you take the first shot at this. This is a doozy. Well, it is. I've got some takes, but I. Yeah, okay.
- [39:44]
Kieran
I will say that one thing software has done is turn marketers into software admins.
- [39:48]
Host
Yes. The last 10 years have been terrible.
- [39:50]
Kieran
And so I could be kind of spicy and say like how this changes things. You actually have to do marketing.
- [39:55]
Host
I think that's true. I don't think that's spicy.
- [39:58]
Kieran
I actually think I get to spend way more time marketing because I can just execute and go much faster. Plus I'm way more self efficient. I actually don't need to ask a bunch of people for things. I think, to be honest with you, I actually did a poster on This, I think you have to be at the polar opposite of extremes. And if you're can do both things, you're really in a small group of people that will do really well. I think you have to be at the outer edges of creativity. Right. Great ideas are still going to shine through.
- [40:21]
Alex Lieberman
Yep.
- [40:21]
Kieran
You can still have better ideas than AI. The execution of those ideas really matter. And then the other opposite end of the spectrum, you have to be the most technical process systems thinker within that team, because AI needs to be integrated across all of your workflows. And you actually have to think much more like an engineer in how you actually think about how AI could be deployed across those workflows. And somewhere around that is curiosity.
- [40:42]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah.
- [40:42]
Kieran
So to me, it's like, move marketers back to the craft. If you're going to practice a craft, be the most creative person you can be, and to do that, you have to be in the game. You have to earn your stripes. Right. Because if you are creating content, if you are doing all of these things and you know that's better than anyone, you're an entrepreneur, you're a content creator. 90% of what you do in content fails. Like, and so you just have to earn your stripes. And then the other part is like, I think the people I see doing really well now are much more like engineers. Like, they are marketers, but they act much more like engineers. And so I think you're going to be polar opposites.
- [41:14]
Alex Lieberman
I'm going to say something spicy and I curious if you guys agree with this, but to me, more than ever before, like, if I'm hiring a marketer next year, the amount of marketing experience that the person has matters less to me than ever before. In the same way that when at Morning Brew we would hire someone to run Morning Brew's Twitter.
- [41:36]
Kieran
Right.
- [41:36]
Alex Lieberman
I actually could not have cared less how much social experience you have. I just cared about how creative are you and how much do you live on the Internet. And so to me, if, like, if basically everything you've just showed about this, like these diagrams of where marketing is going and then, Kieran, what you basically said is you want to live kind of on the barbell. Either have incredible technical chops or be highly creative. I just wonder why. Probably previous experience of how marketing has been done in a fundamentally different way than it's going to be done over the next 10 years. To me, by definition, the value of that experience goes down if that experience is not going to inform the tools we're going to be using over the next five to 10 years, right.
- [42:18]
Host
I think Alex, on what you were saying there though, if you look at the last like 10 to 15 years of marketing, right, what was rewarded was management. Can I manage people and can I manage software, right? Like can I be an admin? Can I know the ins and outs of this product? Or can I manage all of these humans and orchestrate them and organize them to do these really like complex manual tasks that I think from my experience what a lot of doing marketing and leading a marketing team was like over the last 10 to 15 years, to your point, that's changed dramatically. The only thing you actually need to manage now is AI and agents and they're in some ways a lot more self sufficient than at least traditional software and subscription software. Right. And so that is like a big, big shift. The second thing here is you're almost penalized in this new world for being too specialized. Everything's so new, everything is changing so much. The generalists are going to do well over the next five to seven years. Like the broader your skills, the broader your understanding of the world, your market, what people like, what people dislike, and your ability to translate that into stories and content and applications and agents for people is going to be incredibly valuable. I still think the foundational skills of storytelling, of being able to interpret data and get the right insights out, all of those things that are, have been core to marketing are that. But it's like if you're going out and hiring a marketer right now, are you going to go hire somebody who is like spent the last decade doing email marketing and deep, deep in the weeds of email marketing? Or you're going to hire a more generalist profile of person who can take on more and kind of be that account manager across agents and a portfolio of work. You're probably more likely to hire the latter than the former, correct?
- [44:06]
Alex Lieberman
Yeah. In my mind, being an exceptional coordinator who has curiosity and a desire to learn these tools at the deepest level, paired with the most creative people who can provide kind of creative and idea firepower to me is like what the balance looks like to Kieran's point.
- [44:23]
Host
Yeah, I think it's all about curiosity. I think the reason we want to do the show today is because I think the three of us talk a lot and marketing is changing far more and far faster than anybody actually realizes it. Like everybody's feeling it on the edges, but it is like existential and at its core the foundations are there, but everything else outside of those foundations is basically getting rebuilt, right?
- [44:47]
Alex Lieberman
100%. This is like a horrible analogy to use, but I'm just going to use it. Which is there's like the old story about. Is it like a frog? Like you put a frog in a boiling pot of water and like you just turn it up and it doesn't jump out because it's gradually getting.
- [45:02]
Host
Gradually getting warmer. If it's boiling to start, the frog jumps out, Right?
- [45:05]
Alex Lieberman
Exactly. And to me, that is kind of what's happening to most people right now.
- [45:09]
Host
I think so, too.
- [45:10]
Alex Lieberman
And so, yeah, I guess the moral of this episode is make sure people realize that the water's getting to boiling before it actually boils.
- [45:17]
Host
Yeah. I think that's what we're trying to say is that things are changing much faster than it feels like.
- [45:21]
Alex Lieberman
Yep.
- [45:22]
Host
And we tried to paint some perspective on the future. And if you were thinking about trying to be an early adopter in an early wave of that change, here's some ways you should think about it and some ways you could operate around that.
- [45:34]
Alex Lieberman
100%.
- [45:35]
Host
Love to hear in the comments questions, follow up ideas for future shows where the three of us talk more about this, please comment down below.
- [45:43]
Kieran
Alex, always my favorite guest. Thanks for coming on.
- [45:45]
Alex Lieberman
Great to see you, man.
- [45:46]
Kieran
Thanks very much, Alex.
- [45:47]
Host
Awesome to have you on, my friend. I hope you are well and we'll see you on the show again here soon.
- [45:52]
Alex Lieberman
Thanks so much for having me sat.